Mine was completely out of the blue, but I also wasn’t surprised as it was happening. I finished a project I wrote myself to replace an old system their other developers didn’t want to work on. They rewarded me by keeping me on for a couple months of post-launch support and then rewarded me by laying me off as a thanks, providing the bare minimum required payments as required by law and tried to get me to sign my rights away, and they refused. They likely replaced me with someone cheaper, which is impressive considering I was already underpaid for my level. I ended up getting a job paying 30% higher (which is actually what happened with that job prior too lol, there is a bit of a pattern tbh that started from my first dev job making barely above min wage), but I honestly think I was still a little bit surprised when I proved I knew the old and new tech. They said they would provide a reference but when I asked my manager for a letter of recommendation, I never heard back from him. What a dickhead lmao

Realistically, that manager replaced me and some other developers with his friends, it was a cheap company rampant with nepotism especially on certain teams, but it was still a company with hundreds of employees so it was a bit surprising to see that.