Laid Off After 25 Years in Tech: The Anxiety, Sacrifice, and Reality No One Talks About

Hello world. I'm a software engineer technologist in my mid-40s working for Big Tech, or rather I was one. I was laid off from Big Tech just about two weeks ago. This layoff has led me to feel very confused, disoriented, a little bit excited as well. It's my first layoff in 25 years of working in the technology business. So where do we begin with all of this? I had started working with technology, you know, writing code, building computers, doing these sort of things really early in high school. And by the time I was in college, I already started working, right, as not only in internships but also in little contracts or gigs, writing little scripts and visual basic applications and these sort of things. So coming out of college, I worked as a consultant for various digital agencies and those were some very awesome years, right, because I had the chance of learning new programming languages and frameworks and the world seemed limitless, right. Like I was one of those guys that you find in bookstores reading like an O'Reilly technical book, learning all of this code, frameworks, platforms. And I worked really, really hard at Minecraft and tried my absolute best to apply myself, right, trying to learn as much as possible and try to do the very best job that I can. For a time, I became very good at software. I felt like I was very, very strong at it and it felt like I could build everything, anything I put my mind to. I got so strong at software development that at the time, early in my career, my company would send me specifically to hackathons and in almost every hackathon, myself or the team that I was part of would come out in the top three, almost consistently. And that was pretty wonderful. I dove into technology, into learning languages, frameworks, design patterns, understanding the infrastructure of computing and all the wonderful details that's involved in it. Now, one of the biggest shocks of my early career is the 2008 financial crisis. During that crisis, I saw that many of my older colleagues, well, many of my older colleagues lost their jobs. And it was very hard and very much a shock to me to see that happening, right? There's people that, you know, I respect, a mentor of mine that literally was broken down in tears because she couldn't provide for her family, right? She lost her position at work and that's very hard for someone to take. At that juncture in 2008, 2009, I discovered this whole concept of financial independence, right? There's this book called Your Money or Your Life and that book essentially taught people, or at least taught me, that there is this concept of life energy, right? Where you're essentially trading your life for money. And those concepts kind of got my mindset into one where you want to live frugally, you want to live more sort of below your means, and then from that you're able to save more, to save more money from your job, from your work, and then to put that towards investments. And the end result is that essentially you're using your frugality and your savings to buy your freedom, the freedom of your time from working for corporations. So that kind of like was a kind of a pivotal moment and it changed my family's behavior. We got way more frugal and we did sort of live below our means. So over time my career progressed, it sort of blossomed, right? I went from being a developer to being a tech lead of a squad of developers to being a software or enterprise architect that is designing higher level software platforms. And eventually that career trajectory led me to becoming a leader within the organization that I worked in. And I did change jobs a few times, right, over this 25-year span of time. But eventually I became senior technical leadership at the company that I worked for. And this career in tech gave me a lot of opportunities as well. So I was able to learn all of these things. I was able to work with cutting-edge technologies. It gave me the opportunity to travel around the world. I traveled throughout North America. I went to Europe. I went to India. And that was an amazing experience. This career allowed me to be innovative. I have patents to my name. And probably the most wonderful thing about tech in general is the people. I can't say enough good things about the people that I worked with over these decades. For the most part, the vast majority of folks that I've worked with have been incredibly smart, talented, disciplined, and the camaraderie and the willingness to work together on a common goal and to build things and make magic happen, that I've seen that almost throughout my entire career. Sure, there's a few, there's always a few bad apples anywhere you go. But for the most part, the people was one of the best things about working as an engineer and as a technologist. Oh, yeah. And one other thing, the money in technology is good, right? So for most of my career, the vast majority of my career, I earned a six figure salary. And that's a decent, comfortable salary. About seven years ago, I switched from consulting to a big tech company. And that switch essentially like opened up this massive money faucet where I was getting paid absolutely insane amounts of money. This whole concept of like, hey, you can get these restricted stock units that then you can you can sort of vest and then convert into even more money. It's absolutely absurd how much money I was getting paid. And I tried to learn from the lessons of 2008 and 2009. So throughout all that, I never stopped saving and investing. I always tried my best to live below our means. Now, over the years, there have been definite downsides of working in tech for me. It is a very hard business. I was working very long hours. And because of the globalized, geographically distributed nature of this business, teams began to be distributed across the world in different countries. And that led to not only long working hours, but also very odd working hours, right, where you're up super early in the morning and then you're working super late at night. Tech is a business that moves fast. There's constantly new languages, new frameworks, new paradigms that are coming out. And to be relevant in this industry, you have to constantly be learning. And that constant learning came easy to me early on in my career. But certainly within the last five years or so, I've noticed that I'm getting slower. It's harder to learn when you're in your mid 40s. It just takes a while to learn new things. It takes longer. I can still do it, but it's taking me longer now. So all of this time being spent on this work. And yet, over the years, I realized that what I was building didn't really make much sense. It felt like we were solving the same problem over and over again. And the solution that I was helping to create, it never really benefited anything. These solutions that I was building, it didn't solve the big problems of the world. It didn't make the world a better place to live in. So it's sort of like you spend all of this time and you spend all of this effort, all this heart to build things, and it doesn't make a difference. That is a real downside of this business. So now we spent all this time, right? I spent all of this time working. That's time then that's taken away from other aspects of my life, like my family, my wife, my children. For a matter of years, I had maybe like an hour every weeknight with my kids. Just an hour to hang out with them, to read to my children, to tuck them into bed. And all the rest is spent working, planning, taking calls, commuting, and so on. My son and I, one of the activities that we really enjoy together is going out on these outdoorsy trips. Sometimes we'll go camping. Sometimes we're going to go fishing in different places. And I was thinking to myself that, gosh, my boy will be a man pretty soon. He's a teenager. I only have a couple of years before he's fully grown and then he may not want to hang out with me anymore. It's really kind of rough when you think about that, right? That this precious time with your family is actually being spent to build things that in the grand scheme of things may not matter. Speaking of time, there was this really good colleague of mine. This is from a couple of years ago. The man was smart as a whip, an excellent engineer. He worked hard too. And it was around this time of the year, right before Christmas, there was this huge digital transformation initiative that we were both working on. And this colleague, let's call him Jay, Jay told me that he has a child and he was looking forward to hanging out with his kid. That finally during Christmas break, he was going to get some time, quality time with his kid. And you know what happened? We were working super, super hard, pulling late nighters. And Jay, he got sick. It was some sort of a heart issue. This is a man in his late 40s. And one day, he didn't show up for work. We heard that he went to the hospital. And then a week later, Jay passed away. Now, the company I was working with treated him really well. Leadership spoke well of him. We had a moment of silence for him. And it was all good. But then I realized about a month after this happened, it's almost as if the man didn't exist. He was entirely forgotten in the workplace. It's as if he had never been. So that's pretty rough. Something that really troubled me in this area happened earlier this year. My wife had a health crisis. And from it, she became disabled, or partially disabled. In this crisis and the aftermath of it, I just realized that tomorrow isn't promised to us, that we're not guaranteed to have these good days and good years ahead of us. And so with sort of like the limited amount of time that we have, it just seems almost not worth it to spend that kind of time with big tech. So yeah, over the years, these kind of thoughts were swirling in my head, certainly in the recent couple of years. But aside from these sort of intrinsic factors, there are practical extrinsic factors as well. In my industry, there has been these macro factors like interest rate changes, like the availability of offshore resources, the emergence of AI tools, these sort of things dramatically reduces the incentive for big tech companies to keep their US employees dramatically. So naturally, in the entire sector, there has been layoffs, mass layoffs, one after the other. And my former employer is no different. There were several rounds of layoffs. And in this last one, I learned through the grapevines that I was on the list. But there were others that are on the list too. I had an opportunity of saving the jobs of several of my more junior colleagues. And that's what I decided to do. I put myself to the top of that list. And that's how I got laid off. That's how I got laid off. Now, my employer is a very good company. They gave us an adequate warning period, while we were still technically employed, but I could look for jobs outside. And they gave a very decent severance. So all of that, I have to be thankful to my former employer. And there's no question about it. So that leads me to where we are now. Basically, I was on a journey with a known destination. And now I'm off of that track. It feels as if I've been dropped into this sort of wilderness, no man's land, where there are many different trails and paths forward. But nothing is decided. Nothing is concrete. So I've been sitting here. It's been two weeks since I was laid off. I was thinking about, how do I move forward? What should I do? Because this is a real inflection point in my life, right? I need to figure out how do I structure a life that is productive, mentally and physically healthy, and wholesome and rich after this event. And that's pretty much why I'm vlogging myself. I just want to document my own internal thoughts and rants for the future. And maybe I can sort of document this journey for others who may be in the same boat as me. The future is the undiscovered country. It's unwritten. I gotta figure out and write that story. Anyway, thanks a lot for watching. Talk soon. Bye.