I am still not laid off.

The fear of being laid off without warning, without notice, without any of the small courtesies that used to come with a long career, is heavier than the actual layoff would be. I know this because I've been carrying it for months. I open my laptop in the morning and the first thing I do, before coffee, before anything, is check my email and Slack to see if today is the day. It usually isn't. But "usually isn't" is not the same as "isn't."

I am in my mid-thirties. I have been a software engineer for over eleven years. I have, by any reasonable measure, done everything you're supposed to do. I learned the craft. I shipped real things. I stayed late when projects needed it. I cared about my work in a way I'm not sure I'd repeat if I had the choice over again. None of it has stopped me from waking up at three in the morning thinking about the home loan EMI.

I am, in the language of these things, fortunate. My wife works. We share the expenses. We are not the family that gets ruined by a single layoff. But there's a question I can't quite stop asking myself: what happens if we are both let go? Not a hypothetical. Just a question. We don't have an inheritance. We don't have passive income. We don't have a private health insurance policy of our own. Both of us rely on the coverage our employers provide, and "rely on" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

I used to think these were the sorts of things you'd build up over time, the way one builds anything in a long career. Now I wonder whether I confused career with security, and whether the two were ever really the same thing.

The many faces of the same layoff

The companies have their reasons, and the reasons are not all the same. Some are using "we're becoming AI-native" as a respectable phrase for "we hired too many people during the pandemic and need to undo it now." Some are doing it to send a signal to the market, to make the stock rally on the news of cost discipline, to satisfy analysts who've grown impatient. Some, to be fair, are doing it because their revenue genuinely has been hollowed out by AI and they don't see another way through.

The reasons differ. The reasons might even be defensible, one by one. But the end is always the same. Some people lose their jobs. The rest of us learn, very quickly, what it feels like to be the people who didn't lose ours this time.

And the survivors carry something almost as heavy as the people who were let go. We carry the survivor's anxiety. We watch our friends pack up their lives in a single afternoon and wonder how long until our turn. We do our jobs with one eye on the door. We become less creative, more cautious, less willing to take the kinds of risks the company needs us to take. Nobody talks about it, but the productivity of a frightened team is not the productivity of a confident one. The numbers tell the leadership everything is fine until, suddenly, they don't.

Eleven years, and a strange feeling

Here is the part that's hardest to say out loud. After eleven years in this industry, I am starting to feel that the experience I built up is worth less than I assumed it would be. Not worthless. Just less.

If I were to be laid off tomorrow, the math of finding another job is unkind. The companies that might hire someone at my level have shrunk in number. The ones that remain often won't consider me because my compensation expectations don't fit their budget. The ones that would hire me at a lower number quietly suspect I'll jump ship the moment a better offer comes along, and they're not entirely wrong to suspect it. There is a narrow door I'd be trying to walk through, and the door keeps getting narrower.

I find myself thinking thoughts I never expected to think. That a government job would have been the sensible choice. More stability, less drama, predictable hours, a pension at the end of it. The compensation, between salary and what people quietly call "the rest of it," might even have been better. I'm not proud of these thoughts. I love coding. I chose this profession because I loved it. But love and stability are different things, and I'm starting to understand which one the world is willing to pay for in 2026.

What this post is

I don't have a clean ending for this. I don't have a five-point plan for navigating an uncertain industry. I don't have an inspiring framework for "future-proofing your career." I have, instead, a tired engineer in his mid-thirties writing late at night about how tired he is, in case any of the other tired engineers reading this needed to know they weren't alone.

The morale of the industry is low. That low morale is showing up in the work, whether the dashboards capture it or not. People who used to invent things are doing the minimum and going home. People who used to mentor are protecting their own positions. People who used to argue for the right thing are quietly going along with whatever ships fastest. The cost of this will show up later, when it's much harder to fix.

Maybe there's a turn coming. Maybe the layoff cycle exhausts itself, the over-hired ranks settle, and the industry remembers that engineers are humans who do their best work when they aren't afraid. Maybe AI's productivity story breaks down enough that real engineering expertise becomes valuable again. Maybe none of that happens, and the new normal is the one we're already in.

I don't know. Tonight, I am still not laid off. That has to be enough for now.