Rahul Rangnekar
Blog / Life

Farewell, Lattice

Reflecting on over 5 years with the company.

February 17, 2025

In September 2019, I joined Lattice as a Software Engineer. My last day with Lattice was last month, in January 2025. I’ve had the contents of this post in the back of my mind for almost two months now, and so it’s time to finally get it all out.

Here’s some fun statistics during my time at Lattice

So much life has happened.

In the almost five and half years I’d been at Lattice, I lived so much in my personal life. Any one of these could be its own post, but in quick roughly chronological summary:

  1. The pandemic started around six months in, so I briefly experienced daily in-person work before going remote for the rest of my tenure. At times, work felt like a respite when it seemed like we couldn’t really do anything else.
  2. Kimi and I, dating for a bit over two years at that point, moved in together.
  3. We got a beautiful shiba inu puppy, Tofu.
  4. We lost Tofu in a tragic and traumatic accident just five months later. It left a hole in my heart that’ll never completely heal, and continues to shape my world view to this day.
  5. Kimi and I got engaged.
  6. Both my remaining grandparents passed away.
  7. Kimi and I got married, in a small ceremony with immediate family and an intimate reception with extended family & friends.
  8. Kimi and I traveled quite a lot — we’d been to New York several times, Portland quite a few times, and visited many countries new to us.

It took privilege, luck, and risk aversion to have worked at a single employer for this entire time.

The tech (and world) economy has undergone significant changes in the past 5+ years. The pandemic hit, and so did layoffs from market uncertainty. Lattice let go of a small number (~5% = <15) of employees. Then the market exploded and virtually every tech company “hyperscaled”. Lattice grew from around 175 employees to over 700. This was the first time I considered switching companies for a potentially more lucrative role, but I honestly loved the work I was doing and the people I was doing it with, so I didn’t really pursue new opportunities.

When the market inevitably course corrected, almost every company that hyperscaled conducted layoffs, and so did Lattice — around 15% of employees were laid off in January 2023.

I remember that day vividly. At the time, I was leading our Total Compensation project. In my mind, Carta was the closest competitor for the product. The day before Lattice’s layoffs, Carta laid off 10% of its employees. When I read about it, I reflected on how good Lattice was doing and how much trust I had in its leadership. Unfortunately, that trust was misplaced and also never truly recovered, but through the survivor’s guilt, I learned a lot from that experience.

Over the remainder of the 2023, I had my frustrations with Lattice, but my perception of the market dissuaded me from considering “greener” pastures. Throughout 2024 (and continuing into 2025), several markets, companies, (and even our federal government 🙄), laid off employees under the guise of replacing them with Artificial Intelligence “resources”.

So, I consider myself:

I don’t regret my decision to remain at Lattice for as long as I did. In fact…

I have tons of gratitude for having a stable income and work-life flexibility to do all I’ve done.

Through the good and bad, Lattice and its people were kind towards me, and I consider myself lucky for that, because not everyone had that same experience. Working at Lattice supported my lifestyle — Kimi and I were able to get engaged and married, travel domestically frequently and internationally at least once a year. We were able to live comfortably, grow our incomes and savings, and only feel as much financial stress as we put on ourselves. While other parts of life were stressful, Lattice and work remained relatively not.

I learned so much professionally