AsianDadEnergy's Substack Podcast
Another week passes and another wave of layoffs crashes through the technology industry like a tidal wave. At this point, the disappearance of thousands of highly experienced engineers has become so common that it barely shocks anyone anymore. Entire departments vanish overnight. Decades of institutional knowledge disappear behind a carefully worded email and a severance package. But there is another group of people affected by these layoffs that nobody really talks about. The survivors. The people who remain employed are often viewed as the lucky ones. They still have a paycheck. Their stock grants are still vesting. Their LinkedIn profiles still say they work at a prestigious company. From the outside, they appear safe. But inside many large technology companies, surviving layoffs can feel like becoming trapped inside a pressure cooker. The workload grows heavier while job security becomes thinner. Teams shrink while expectations expand. Critical systems still need to function, deadlines still need to be met, and billions of dollars still depend on software that was often stitched together over decades by engineers who no longer work there. The survivors inherit all of it. In the summer of 2023, I found myself inside exactly this kind of situation. After a brutal round of layoffs at my company, nearly half of my organization disappeared. Senior leaders were gone. Teams were forcibly merged together into a larger organization built from the wreckage of the previous one. I went from serving as a Chief Architect to functioning as a Senior Enterprise Architect again. Professionally, it felt like traveling backward in time. I was angry about it. But I stayed. Like many people in tech, I had financial reasons to endure it. My next round of RSUs had not vested yet, and walking away meant leaving a significant amount of money on the table. So I convinced myself to keep pushing forward. Then came the project that nearly broke me. Our company operated a massive legacy platform that handled relationships with partner companies. The system processed billions in annual revenue, but under the surface it was a digital Frankenstein monster. Over twenty five years, dozens of separate web applications had been piled on top of one another until the entire thing barely functioned. Different fonts. Different navigation systems. Different visual styles. Some pages looked like they belonged to completely different companies. Yet somehow this fragile structure continued to support an enormous stream of revenue. Executive leadership decided that our newly reorganized department would completely replace this legacy system with a modern enterprise CRM platform in a single release scheduled only four months away. It was the kind of decision that sounds bold in a PowerPoint presentation and terrifying to the engineers responsible for actually delivering it. The challenge was not merely technical. The layoffs had already gutted the teams that understood how the legacy platform worked. Much of the institutional knowledge had vanished. At the same time, the replacement CRM platform required specialized knowledge that very few people possessed. So every day became a race against time. I spent countless hours trying to understand both systems simultaneously while also coordinating teams spread across multiple continents. Meetings started at six in the morning and stretched late into the evening because our squads were distributed between North America and India. Then there was the commute. Our company enforced a hybrid return to office policy that required me to travel into New York City every other day. The round trip took roughly three hours by bus. By the end of each commute, I often felt physically nauseated from the constant swaying motion. At one point, I realized I was regularly working more than twelve hours a day while also sacrificing weekends to keep the project alive. That is when the burnout truly began. People often describe burnout as stress, but burnout feels different. Stress still contains energy. Burnout feels like the complete absence of it. I felt mentally foggy all the time. Concentration became difficult. Solving technical problems that once felt routine suddenly required enormous effort. I forgot details. I lost focus. Even after taking several days off during Labor Day weekend, I returned to work still feeling exhausted. Emotionally, something stranger happened. I stopped caring. Projects that once would have energized me now felt hollow and meaningless. I became detached from the work, detached from the teams, and in many ways detached from myself. Sunday evenings filled me with dread. Then the nightmares started. Over and over again, I dreamed that my coworkers and I had somehow become low wage restaurant workers. The product manager became the greeter. The Chief Architect became a busboy. The engineering manager became the dishwasher. I was always the waiter. And in every dream, disaster struck. A customer would die after eating spoiled food. The restaurant would catch fire. Chaos would erupt. Every single time I woke up drenched in sweat. Looking back now, I think my subconscious was trying to tell me something important. Burnout does not simply exhaust the body. It destabilizes your sense of identity and security. It transforms your career from a source of meaning into a source of survival anxiety. Eventually I realized that if I continued living this way, something inside me was going to break permanently. So I made changes. I forced myself to sleep consistently. I stopped scrolling through devices late at night and began prioritizing seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. I exercised every morning, even if only for thirty minutes on a treadmill. That small amount of movement changed my mental state far more than I expected. I intentionally reconnected with people outside of work including family, friends, church groups, and online gaming communities. These interactions reminded me that my existence extended beyond corporate deadlines and Jira tickets. Most importantly, I began enforcing boundaries. I stopped working weekends. I stopped responding to messages at all hours. On office commute days, I refused early morning and late night calls. At first, saying no felt uncomfortable. Then it felt liberating. Over several weeks, the nightmares stopped. The anxiety softened. My concentration improved. I became functional again. Not perfect. Not fully recovered. But functional enough to finish the project and survive the experience. The modern technology industry celebrates resilience almost obsessively. We glorify hustle culture, constant availability, and productivity at all costs. But there is a dangerous difference between resilience and self destruction. A human being is not a distributed system designed for infinite horizontal scaling. Eventually the system crashes. And increasingly, I think many engineers are approaching that point simultaneously. The layoffs may dominate the headlines, but the deeper story unfolding inside the industry is psychological exhaustion. Thousands of survivors are quietly carrying impossible workloads while trying to convince themselves they should feel grateful just to remain employed. That is not sustainability. That is survival mode. And survival mode comes with a cost. Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe [https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
33 episodios
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