Henry Chen, 38, lost his Meta job May 20 after 13 years, a path from DJ to tech lead. He's brushing up on system design with a coach before returning to the job market.
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Henry Chen, 38, was laid off from Meta on May 20, ending a run of more than 13 years that started with a contract job inspecting conference rooms and ended with a tech lead title. Chen said the layoffs were not entirely surprising; Meta had confirmed cuts were coming. He was still surprised to be affected, and he felt more uneasy about this round than the previous ones.
Chen's path to Meta was not a straight line. He left San Jose State University before earning a degree, planning to go into education and become a teacher. He left school for personal reasons, then worked as a DJ for a few years, and eventually found an AV engineering contract inspecting conference rooms at Facebook in 2012. His background with audio and video equipment made him a good fit. He didn't think it would become a career; he saw it as a way to earn money while figuring out what to do next.
Facebook grew quickly, and Chen's role grew with it. Within a few years he moved from inspecting conference rooms to building them out, then landed a full-time operations engineer role in 2015 managing collaboration technologies. Around 2017, the number of conference rooms accelerated, and Chen started experimenting with Python despite having very little coding experience. He wrote a script that made it much faster to update conference room technology, and it changed the direction of his career. Over the next several years he transitioned into a software engineering role and eventually became a tech lead.
The company's major layoffs in late 2022 and early 2023 changed the feel of the work. Before then, Chen said, teams had the resources to build ambitious projects. After the layoffs, the focus shifted toward doing more with less. About a year and a half later, the focus shifted again, toward building. Between leadership changes and shifting priorities, it became harder to know where his team was headed and what to prioritize.
Chen was on paternity leave from August 2025 through near the end of the year. When he returned, the company was using AI much more extensively, and there had been team and leadership shifts. "After being away for four months, it felt like the whole company had changed," he said. It took him time to get reacclimated.
He had started looking for new roles in the weeks before the layoff. He was feeling more anxious about the possibility of losing his job and had been doing some introspection, thinking it might be time for a new chapter.
The severance changed his approach. Meta provided a package that reflected his roughly 10 years as a full-time employee. The financial cushion, combined with the start of his kids' summer break, made it feel like the right time to take a break. He spent time with his family, tried to relax, and planned to resume his job search after about a month.
When he resumed in June, he found himself split between two main paths: collaboration technology roles, where he had spent much of his career, and software engineering, where he could build on a decade of coding. He is also considering broader IT roles at smaller companies. He hadn't interviewed for a job in 10 years, which is a long time in the tech industry. So before diving into applications, he decided to brush up on software engineering interview topics and identify gaps in his skill set.
Many of the tools and systems Chen worked on at Meta were unique to the company. To prepare for his next role, he is strengthening his understanding of industry-standard system design by designing and building a software system from the ground up, with help from a coach who prepares people for software engineering interviews. After about a month of preparation, he started actively searching LinkedIn and applying for jobs. He also reached out to his network.
For anyone going through a layoff or job search, Chen's advice is to think carefully about what comes next. If you have the financial flexibility, don't feel pressured to take the first offer that comes along. He said he is grateful to have that flexibility to try to find a role where he will continue to learn and grow.
His own lesson from the career arc: "Every challenge I took on became a stepping stone to the next opportunity." That, he said, is what helped him grow from a DJ to a conference room technician to a tech lead.
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