When Meta laid off Emily Pitcher in 2023, she felt like her world had collapsed. The 26-year-old content designer had tied much of her identity to working at a Big Tech company, and suddenly, that sense of purpose disappeared.
The layoff initially felt like a personal failure slowly turned into something else, the beginning of a completely different career. Today, the Los Angeles-based creator is working as an indie game developer, content creator, and voice actor. She is also preparing to launch her upcoming game, ‘Lily’s World XD’, with a publisher later this year.
‘I thought getting rehired was the only goal’
After losing her job, Pitcher said she desperately wanted another corporate role. “It was my identity, and without it, I lacked purpose,” she told Business Insider. As layoffs spread across the tech industry, she found herself competing against thousands of other candidates with similar resumes and Big Tech experience. Rejection after rejection left her emotionally drained. She said there were days when even getting out of bed felt difficult. “I acted out of fear, not joy,” she admitted to Business Insider. Eventually, she realised waiting for another opportunity was keeping her stuck.
Turning social media into income
Before the layoff, Pitcher already had a small social media following, but she had never worked with brands professionally. After losing her job, she made a spreadsheet of brands she dreamed of collaborating with and began emailing them directly.
That decision helped her land her first few brand deals and taught her practical business skills like negotiating rates, sending invoices, and managing partnerships. Today, brand collaborations are one of her main income sources. Her openness online also unexpectedly helped her career grow.
A TikTok video she posted about getting laid off reached millions of viewers, and many people still recognise her from it today. Later, she shared another emotional video about struggling with loneliness and uncertainty after the layoff.
“I woke up the next day to probably one hundred DMs from people saying they were in a similar situation,” she told Business Insider. One of those messages even led her into voice acting, another field she never imagined herself entering.
Learning skills she once avoided
Pitcher said she had never coded before starting work on her game. “When I started making ‘Lily’s World XD,’ I’d never coded in my life,” she told Business Insider. “I just always told myself my brain didn’t work that way.”
After the layoff, she decided to finally learn programming so she could build her own projects independently. A friend helped her learn the basics, while YouTube tutorials and online forums filled in the rest. She believes learning that skill completely changed the direction of her life.
One piece of advice transformed how Pitcher approached her projects is to stop waiting for perfection. Even before she fully knew how to program, she shared early mockups of her game idea online. At the time, she only had a few designs made in Figma, but the video quickly gained millions of views. The response gave her confidence that people genuinely connected with the idea. It also helped shape the project through audience feedback. “Start before you second-guess yourself,” she said.
For a long time, Pitcher believed working at Meta made people see her as successful and intelligent. But after speaking to someone who still worked at the company, her perspective shifted. The employee told her he wished he could work on projects he genuinely cared about instead of feeling “like a cog in the machine.” That conversation helped her see her journey differently. Instead of viewing the layoff as the end of something meaningful, she now sees it as the moment she finally started building a career she actually loves.