I worked for a consulting company that was acquired by a much bigger fish. About a year and change after the acquisition was finalized, I was laid off. To be c

I worked for a consulting company that was acquired by a much bigger fish. About a year and change after the acquisition was finalized, I was laid off. To be completely fair to the company (not that they particularly deserve it) I was a very ripe target. I was working on a team which basically did POC development to help with sales - we'd do some initial legwork and demos on various ideas, some directly related to a potential client's project and some based on internal ideas. As a result the percentage of time I was billing to an actual client was very low (but this was by design). The net result for me was frankly fantastic. I got out of an unfavorable environment, got 6 weeks of severance with some extra money thrown in for COBRA (which I didn't end up needing, so that was just free cash). I had a job lined up almost immediately due to some lucky circumstances, and that was at a brand new consultancy that was still in the spin-up phase, so I essentially got a 6 week paid vacation during which I had no stress about finding the next gig. No illusions here from me that getting laid off is even close to always being a good thing, I can imagine a dozen ways in which it could have been horribly stressful and financially ruinous, but I look back on getting laid off very fondly :)