Cole McElwain
- Cole McElwain relocated to California for a job at Blizzard in October.
- After just four months, he was laid off after the gaming company made a big round of job cuts.
- McElwain says he doesn't regret moving to California, but the city's cost of living worries him.
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Cole McElwain. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I applied for roles at Blizzard for almost two years before landing a job there.
At the time, I'd been working as an office assistant at Activision in Minnesota, but the Blizzard job was based in California.
I was ecstatic when I first got the news. I'd been keen to move out of the cold and over to Blizzard for a while.
I needed to move fairly quickly after accepting the offer and had about a month to figure out how to do everything. The company didn't offer relocation, so I donated most of what I owned, packed the rest in the back of my car, and drove to California.
Just four months later, I was laid off.
Dream job
Before landing the Blizzard job, I was eyeing a range of roles in the gaming industry and networking.
When I finally got through the lengthy interview process for the Blizzard job, I originally missed out.
Luckily, a month later, the hiring team reached out to say the original candidate couldn't take the role and offered it to me instead.
I started in October, and the job was so much fun. I loved the team — everyone was incredibly talented — and I couldn't have been more excited to just get to work.
The scale of the layoffs was a shock
On the morning of the layoffs in January, I saw the media reports before I checked my emails.
I immediately knew that I would probably be on the list because I was the new guy.
While we knew that some layoffs would happen after the Microsoft acquisition, the scale of the cuts — about was still a shock. I think it came as a surprise to most people. During my layoff call, my director was already nearly in tears.
The most frustrating thing was that I felt like I hadn't got my teeth into anything yet — it felt as if I wasn't even done onboarding.
I was still getting access to various things, and the team had at least three in the pipeline we planned to create. Out of our team of 10 people, four were cut.
The Microsoft acquisition was in the back of my head while I was applying, and while I know the people who hired me weren't aware of what was coming, the timeline is still hard to understand.
I think it's unfair Blizzard asked me to move out here just to lay me off four months later.
After the layoffs, I just wanted to get a beer with my friends, but I hadn't had time to make any in California. My close friends were all back in Minnesota and I would have loved to just hang out with them after everything.
Luckily, I still had gaming, so I could get online and speak to them that way.
I'm happy I moved to California — but I wouldn't relocate for a job again
Despite everything, I'm happy I moved to California.
I live with my wife, who works in California and can get by on my severance package for a while. I just don't want to get to comfortable because it could probably run out pretty fast.
It's much more expensive than Minnesota. The day I got laid off, I immediately started applying for jobs because my cost of living was so high — my rent basically doubled when I moved here.
Finding a new job is tough because everybody in the gaming industry is laying people off. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to stay in the industry going forward because all the laid-off workers are applying for a few competitive roles.
I'm still new to the industry, so I don't know if I have the experience to land one of these roles. It worries me that I might be unable to stay in a sector I worked so hard to break into.
Even if I were offered another gaming job, I wouldn't relocate for a role again — I'm too worried about getting burned twice.
Were you laid off after moving for a dream job? Get in touch: bnolan@businessinsider.com