A quiet story about a long tech career, the time it takes from you, and what’s left when the job is gone
A friend of mine told me he was laid off the same way he’d tell you about a bug that finally made him give up.
No anger. No rant. Just a calm sentence over coffee:
“Yeah… my role ended a couple weeks ago.”
This was someone who’d spent over 30 years in tech. Built software back when learning meant books, not browser tabs. Shipped systems that actually mattered. Led teams. Mentored people who now outrank him. And somehow, this was the first time the treadmill stopped underneath him.
What surprised me wasn’t that it happened. Layoffs are basically part of the tech weather now. What surprised me was how he felt about it. Confused, sure. A little disoriented. But also… lighter. Almost relieved. Like someone who’d been running for so long they forgot what standing still felt like.
Over the next hour, he talked. Not like someone burned or bitter, but like someone finally saying things out loud that had been sitting in the back of his head for years. About the early days when learning felt infinite. About the money that kept getting better while the work quietly stopped meaning much. About long hours, global teams, and realizing your kids grow up faster than your backlog shrinks.
TL;DR:
This is a story about a friend who gave tech three decades of his life. About the anxiety that crept in quietly. The sacrifices that felt small until they weren’t. And the moment everything stopped leaving him standing at a crossroads, figuring out what comes next.
The kid who loved computers a little too much
My friend didn’t “get into tech” because it was lucrative or trendy. He got into it the same way a lot of us did back then by accident, driven by curiosity, and slightly unhealthy obsession.
He was messing with computers in high school. Not in a “future founder” way. More like staying up late building things that didn’t need to exist, breaking them, then rebuilding them just to understand why they broke. Writing code. Taking machines apart. Putting them back together and hoping there weren’t extra screws left over. The usual origin story.
By the time he hit college, tech wasn’t a subject anymore it was already work. Internships, small contracts, random gigs. Writing scripts. Shipping little Visual Basic apps that did exactly one thing but did it well enough that someone paid him for it. Nothing glamorous. Just useful.
After college, he went the consulting route. Digital agencies, client work, constantly changing stacks. Those years mattered. Consulting forced him to learn fast or drown. New languages, new frameworks, new constraints every few months. It was exhausting, but it was also intoxicating. The world felt wide open. Like there was always another tool, another pattern, another way to do things better.
He was one of those people you’d see in a bookstore flipping through thick technical books for fun. The kind that had animals on the cover and assumed you already knew what a compiler was. He took pride in being good at the craft. Not just productive, but correct. Clean abstractions. Solid mental models. Understanding how things worked all the way down.
For a while, that paid off in very tangible ways. Early in his career, companies would send him to hackathons on purpose. Not as a morale thing more like a weapon. And more often than not, his team would place near the top. It reinforced a dangerous but comforting belief: if you’re good enough, you’ll be fine.
At that stage, tech felt pure. You worked hard, learned constantly, and got better. The feedback loop made sense. Effort in, progress out. No invisible ceilings. No politics worth worrying about. Just skill, curiosity, and momentum.
Looking back, he’ll tell you that was the easy part.
When 2008 showed him the cracks
Up until that point, tech still felt like a meritocracy to him. Not perfect, but fair enough. If you were good, you were safe. If you worked hard, you’d land on your feet. That belief held up right until it didn’t.
Then 2008 happened.
The financial crisis didn’t just shake markets. It ripped through offices quietly and personally. People he respected engineers who were smarter than him, more experienced than him started disappearing from their desks. Not because they suddenly got bad at their jobs. Not because they stopped caring. Just… gone.
One of them was a mentor. Someone who had helped shape how he thought about software and work. She lost her job and broke down in tears, not in a meeting room, but in a hallway. Not over pride. Over fear. Bills. Family. The very real possibility that doing everything “right” still wasn’t enough.
That moment stuck.
It was the first time he really understood that skill doesn’t equal safety. That being valuable doesn’t mean being protected. Tech likes to sell the idea that talent is a shield. 2008 made it painfully clear that shields don’t work against spreadsheets.
Around that time, he stumbled onto the idea of financial independence. Not the flashy version. The boring, almost unsexy kind. Living below your means. Saving aggressively. Investing slowly. A book called Your Money or Your Life put language to something he’d felt but never articulated: every dollar came from time, and time was the one thing you never got back.
The idea of “life energy” hit harder than any career advice ever had. Work wasn’t just work. It was hours traded. Days traded. Weeks of your life converted into money. Once he saw it that way, he couldn’t unsee it.
So things changed. Quietly. No dramatic lifestyle overhaul. Just fewer upgrades. More saving. Less assuming that the good times would last forever. He didn’t stop caring about his career, but he stopped believing it would take care of him.
Looking back, he’ll say that 2008 didn’t scare him out of tech.
It taught him to stop trusting it.
When money stopped being the answer
The career kept moving forward.
Titles changed. Responsibilities grew. He went from being “the engineer” to leading engineers, then designing systems other engineers would build. Eventually, he landed in senior technical leadership the kind of role people quietly aim for when they say they want a “long career in tech.”
And the opportunities were real.
He worked on genuinely interesting problems. Learned cutting-edge tech before it showed up in blog posts. Traveled more than he ever expected to across North America, Europe, even India. He helped design platforms instead of just features. Filed patents. Sat in rooms where big decisions were made. On paper, it was a dream run.
The people helped too. Tech gets a bad reputation sometimes, but he’ll still tell you this: most of the people he worked with were smart, disciplined, and deeply collaborative. Builders. Problem-solvers. Folks who cared about doing things well. The camaraderie was real. You suffer together, you ship together, you joke through the stress together.
And yes the money was good.
For most of his career, he made a comfortable six-figure salary. Then, later on, it escalated. When he moved fully into big tech, compensation stopped feeling connected to reality. Base pay was solid. Bonuses stacked. And then there were stock grants restricted units that quietly turned into life-altering money over time.
It felt absurd. He knew it. Everyone did.
But here’s the thing: even when the numbers got ridiculous, his habits didn’t change much. He remembered 2008. He remembered the hallway breakdown. So he kept saving. Kept investing. Kept living below his means. Not because he was afraid, but because he’d learned not to confuse income with security.
From the outside, it looked like he’d won.
From the inside, something else had started to drift.
The cost no one puts in the offer letter
Tech is demanding when you’re young. It becomes something else entirely when you’re not.
As teams went global, his days stretched in both directions. Early calls with one region. Late calls with another. The workday stopped having edges. There was always one more meeting, one more doc, one more decision waiting in a different time zone.
The industry also didn’t slow down. New languages. New frameworks. New paradigms. Staying relevant meant staying curious but curiosity takes energy. And sometime in his forties, he noticed something subtle but unsettling: learning still worked, but it took longer. Concepts that would’ve clicked instantly years ago now needed repetition. Focus. Rest he didn’t always have.
He could still do the job. He did it well. But it wasn’t effortless anymore.
What bothered him more, though, was the work itself. Over time, it started to feel repetitive. Different companies. Different branding. Same problems. The same abstractions rebuilt with slightly different names. The same systems redesigned again and again, not because the world needed it, but because roadmaps demanded it.
And none of it felt like it made things better in any meaningful way.
That realization came with a heavier cost outside of work. For years, he had maybe an hour in the evenings with his kids. One hour to read, talk, tuck them in. The rest of the day disappeared into meetings, planning, commuting, context switching. Life happening in the margins around work.
He loved taking his son on outdoor trips camping, fishing, just being away from screens. And one day it hit him: his kid was already a teenager. There were only a few years left before those trips wouldn’t be automatic anymore. Before life pulled them in different directions.
That thought lingered.
Time, once spent, doesn’t care how much you were paid for it.
The moment work stopped feeling worth it
There was a stretch where he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. Not broken just misaligned. He was putting more time and energy into work than ever, but the returns felt thinner. The problems were smaller. The impact was fuzzier. The urgency felt manufactured.
Then a colleague of his let’s call him Jay collapsed under the weight of it all.
Jay was sharp. Reliable. The kind of engineer everyone trusted in a crisis. They were in the middle of a massive transformation project, pulling long nights, pushing hard toward an arbitrary deadline. Jay talked about how he couldn’t wait for the holidays, how he was finally going to get real time with his kid.
He never made it.
A heart issue. Hospital. Gone within a week.
The company did everything right on paper. Kind words. A moment of silence. Slack messages full of praise. And then, not long after, it was like Jay had never been there at all. His calendar vanished. His name faded from docs. Work moved on.
That was the moment my friend stopped lying to himself about how replaceable we all are.
When tomorrow stopped being guaranteed
Not long after that, life made the lesson impossible to ignore.
His wife had a serious health crisis. One that didn’t come with warning or a clean recovery. She survived, but not without lasting consequences. Watching someone you love lose parts of their independence changes the way you think about time fast.
Suddenly, “later” didn’t feel like a safe assumption anymore.
The future wasn’t a promise. It was a question mark. And spending most of his waking hours optimizing systems for a corporation started to feel… optional. Not wrong. Just not worth the trade.
These thoughts had been circling for years. The job. The hours. The cost. Now they landed.
Quietly, but firmly.
Choosing to step forward
By the time the next round of layoffs started circulating, none of this felt theoretical anymore.
The industry had shifted. Interest rates were up. Offshoring was accelerating. AI tools were getting good enough to change headcount math in ways no one wanted to say out loud. Big tech companies everywhere were trimming, then trimming again.
He heard through the usual channels that his name was on the list. Not singled out just included. One more line in a spreadsheet. What stuck with him was that some of the names below his were junior engineers. People earlier in their careers. People with fewer options.
He had a choice.
He could keep his head down and hope the math worked out in his favor. Or he could step forward and let the list reorder itself. He chose the second option. Quietly. Without announcements or speeches. He asked that his name be moved to the top.
That’s how his job ended.
There was no dramatic exit. No burning bridges. The company handled it decently advance notice, time to look, a fair severance. He’s grateful for that. He doesn’t speak badly about them. He just acknowledges what it was.
A long chapter closed, not with a bang, but with a deliberate step aside.
Standing in the open
Two weeks later, he told me it felt strange not having a plan.
For decades, there had always been a roadmap. A next role. A next project. A clearly marked path forward. Now that path was gone. In its place was something unfamiliar open space.
He wasn’t panicking. He wasn’t rushing. Mostly, he was thinking. About how to build a life that made sense without defaulting to another job just because it was there. About health. About time. About being present.
He started documenting his thoughts, not as advice, but as a record. For himself. Maybe for others who’d end up in the same place one day.
For the first time in a long while, nothing was decided.
And somehow, that didn’t feel like failure.
What this story says about tech careers
Watching my friend go through this changed how I think about the industry.
Tech likes to pretend careers are linear. Learn, grind, get promoted, repeat. But thirty years in, it’s clear that no amount of skill or loyalty guarantees a smooth ending. Money helps. Titles help. Neither buys back time.
Big tech can be a powerful chapter. It just shouldn’t be the whole book.
What stuck with me most wasn’t the layoff itself it was how calmly he accepted it. Like someone who finally noticed the treadmill had been moving faster than life around it.
If you’re in tech long enough, you’ll face a version of this moment too.
The only real question is whether you see it coming.
Helpful resources
- Your Money or Your Life: https://yourmoneyoryourlife.com/
- Hacker News layoffs threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/
- r/ExperiencedDevs: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/
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