That's rough, and as my Grandma used to say "disasters always come in threes". I've been through too many rounds of layoffs, headcount reductions, down-sizing,

That's rough, and as my Grandma used to say "disasters always come in threes". I've been through too many rounds of layoffs, headcount reductions, down-sizing, strategic re-alignments or whatever you care to call them, and each of them sucked. The one thing to take away from it, is that these are just random chance events by and large and not a reflection on the performance of good engineers. Getting re-hired itself can be another random event - and again, not making it through interviews may be more a reflection of the kind of morons running the hiring pipeline in whatever company than you or your abilities. I'm in a pretty decent sized FAANG-adjacent tech company right now, and for example, the one team we have that's doing lots of hiring is run by the two biggest jerks in the place. Whether it's unconscious bias, or just straight-up discrimination, I've noticed that all the folks hired to this team all (mysteriously) happen to come from Texas and to have worked in a certain re-insurance company the jerks came from. So you come along and interview with that team, with a good background and abilities, and don't get that job, and some bozo with a geographic handicap gets it instead of you - that's what's going on. But all you see is another rejection.