Layoff

I seldom discussed my career transition in this blog, as most of them were initiated by myself: I either disagreed the leadership’s vision, or I failed to challenge the status quo so bailed out. This time was different, I was laid off, and the layoff caught off my guard.

On March 24, 2026 6:30am PST, I walked Coco as usual, saw a meeting request popped up, with the title, Layoff Next Step. This did not sound right, so I checked my inbox, found a email titled Layoffs Today - Your role is impacted. WTF?

Epic Games laid off 830 employees in 2023, I heard from some back channel that our CEO Tim Sweeney loathed the layoff, and would try his best not to push the nuclear button. As a Principal Engineer, I was working on a highly visible project on the COO’s short list, also my past performance reviews were impeccable. How would could this happen to me?

In the meeting, more concretely a webinar, the CEO announced the layoff. It was quite massive, 1000 employees were let go, roughly 20% work force. The root cause was the Fortnite revenue tumbled so the company could no longer sponsor some long-term bets. Tim also said the layoff was not merit-based, — so it was compensation-based, I assume? Other senior leadership were present, speechless.

My slack access was revoked, email was read-only, — I could not even send a farewell letter to my colleagues 🥺. I managed to join the team stand up, everyone was so shocked that I was let go. My manager was also left in the dark. He just lost one FTE due to the parental leave, another two in this layoff amid we were understaffed. The team would face quite a bit challenges in the next two quarters.

In the next couple hours, I read the Tim Sweeny’s memo, Today’s Layoff, browsed the LinkedIn and found many senior engineers were impacted. What criteria were used, seniority, compensation, or the token usage? I had no clue.

Retrospect

Several days later, when I sat in the Bellevue library and wrote this blog post, I was already in the acceptance stage. But I still wanted to get to the bottom, what just happened?

Boiling frog

I had a great time in the Distribution team. I was given lots of autonomy to pick what interested me. Besides the high-impact project pushed from the leadership, I could also detour a day or two for investigation, prototyping; then make a proposal to the team for what we should work on. This was also recognized by my peers as lead by example.

On the other side, the scope of the Distribution team is limited. We just distribute bits for Epic Games Store and Fortnite; which is hard to justify the need for a Principal Engineer. I was aware of this, and considered to transition to Fortnite team to mitigate the risk. But I never took action as there were always some high-impact projects that excited me.😅

Signal lost

There were many signs that the company might suffer from revenue drops. For example, the recent quarterly bonus was paid out much less compared to same period of last year despite I had a great performance review. The CDN dashboard should clearly show the DAU trend, but I chose to ignore the signals because I was so comfortable in the tepid water.

Generalist vs Specialist

I considered myself a generalist. I wore many hats and programmed in Java, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, HCL, Swift, and MiniZinc in my previous role. But probably from the senior leadership’s perspective, I was a specialist laser focused on the Distribution only. The cross-function, aka XFN, capability was highly appreciated in the organization. I should spend more time with our stakeholders to push forward this conversation instead of sticking to the status quo.