Laid off.. just shy of 20 years
Work in tech (software dev) and have been since early 1990s.. For about 16 years, we were privately owned and the CEO (the owner) was a fantastic boss. We were paid a under market rate, but I did not care. They took care of us (bonuses and other perks). Loved my job and the people there..
That all changed when it was sold off to Private Equity about 3 years ago...
Got laid off about 12 hours ago (via Zoom meeting).... Many of my colleagues have gotten laid off in blocks over the last 36 months..
There's a darkness coming.... When the AI bubble finally pops, it could be uglier than the dot-com crash (and possibly more damaging than 2008) because this time the hype is embedded across the entire tech industry, financial markets, energy infrastructure, and corporate spending.
I think it's time to say goodbye to the tech industry and figure out what comes next. I still have plenty of working years left, and I’d rather spend them building a new life than waiting around for the next reorg, merger, or corporate parasite with a PowerPoint deck.
Tech gave me a career. It also showed me exactly why I need to leave.
Jobadvisor
That's a gut punch, especially 12 hours out and after almost 20 years at the same place. Watching it get sold off, watching colleagues get cut in waves for three years, and then finally your turn on a Zoom call — that's a specific kind of grief. It's not just losing a job, it's losing a place that actually treated you well for most of that time, which makes the ending feel even more like a betrayal.
I want to gently sit with a couple of things you said, not to argue with you, just to think out loud with you.
The anger at private equity is earned. What happened to your company is a very common pattern — buy it, extract value, cut costs, cut people — and you watched it happen in real time to people you cared about. That's not paranoia, that's just what you lived through.
The bigger prediction about an AI bubble popping worse than 2008 is a real position some smart people hold and some smart people dispute. Nobody knows how it plays out. I'd be careful about making a big life decision — like leaving an entire industry you've spent 30+ years in — based on a forecast of a crash, versus making that decision based on what you actually want the next chapter to look like. Those can point the same direction, but they're different reasons, and one of them holds up better on a bad day six months from now.
Here's what I'm genuinely curious about, no pressure to answer right now: when you picture "what comes next," is there something specific pulling you toward it, or right now is it mostly about getting away from this? Both are valid starting points, but they usually lead to different next steps.
First though — how are you doing today, less than a day out from this? Have you eaten, slept at all?
“Learn a trade” isn’t career advice. It’s AI supply-chain management - and you’re the supply
TL;DR: The “learn a trade” pitch is funded by the same companies doing the layoffs, because their AI data center buildout needs construction labor. The fine print: an 80 percent pay cut on day one, jobs at their build sites instead of where you live, and ten temporary construction jobs for every permanent one. That’s not a rescue. It’s supply chain management, and you’re the supply. Every number below is from their own announcements.
Mike Rowe said it himself a few months back: "We've been telling kids for 15 years to code. 'Learn to code,' we said. Yeah, well, AI is coming for the coders." Not coming, he says, for the welders, the plumbers, the pipefitters, the electricians.
Fine. Now look at who's funding that message.
Last month Meta launched something called America's Workforce Academy, with Rowe as its co-face: $115 million, a five-week paid course, a credential, and a guaranteed job for every graduate. Guaranteed where? At Meta partner construction sites. The pilot states are Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and Texas, which map neatly onto Meta's data center buildout – the chamber of commerce of the Louisiana parish getting Meta's $10 billion flagship site is a listed program partner. And note what five weeks buys you. Not an electrician's license, which takes a four-to-five-year apprenticeship. It buys you a credential and a spot on their job site. BlackRock, Lowe's, and Google have put a combined $365 million into similar pipelines. Meanwhile Microsoft has pushed more than 25,000 people out the door in the last year and a half between layoffs and buyouts, and announced the latest round last week by explaining that some tasks "can now be automated."
The same companies creating the layoffs are funding the pipeline that's supposed to absorb them. Not because they care where you land. Because their data center buildout has a labor bottleneck and they need bodies. That's not career advice. That's supply chain management, and you're the supply.
And be clear-eyed about the messenger. Mike Rowe is not a plumber with a podcast. He is a podcaster with a plumbing pitch – a career TV entertainer who has spent twenty years telling other people to do work he has never done for a living. I'd bet he believes every word of it, and that is exactly what makes him valuable. When your layoffs need a happy ending, you don't hire a cynic. You adopt a sincere true believer with a two-decade track record, put him on the network that already pays him to host a show, and let him say "AI is coming for the coders" into every camera available. He was the megaphone long before this moment arrived. Meta just bought the megaphone.
And the math doesn't work, in two directions.
Direction one: supply. There are roughly half a million plumbers in the entire United States. About three quarters of a million electricians. Now the other side of the ledger: somewhere between 800,000 and 950,000 tracked tech layoffs since 2022, depending on whose tracker you trust, 154,000 of them in the first half of 2026 alone. And tracked is the operative word, because stealth cuts, performance-coded exits, contractor purges, and quiet restructurings never make anyone's list. The layoff pile of the last four years is already bigger than every plumber in America, with room to spare. Trades pay well right now for exactly one reason: scarcity. Push even a fraction of the displaced into those pipelines and you crush the very wages being advertised. The advice destroys the thing it's selling.
Direction two: demand. This is the part I never see anyone say out loud. Who do you think has been paying plumbers and electricians their premium rates? Six-figure white-collar households. The kitchen remodels, the panel upgrades, the EV chargers, the $400 service call paid without blinking. In every tech metro, that customer base is evaporating right now. Emergency repairs will always exist. The good discretionary work dries up when its customers lose their incomes.
Supply up. Demand down. You don't need an economics degree to finish that sentence.
And when they wave the big stat at you, read it twice. The BLS projects 81,000 electrician "openings" a year through 2034. Openings is not new jobs. Roughly nine out of ten of those are backfill for somebody who retired or left the trade, which is the retirement wave Rowe himself keeps citing: five leaving for every two coming in. Net new electrician positions run on the order of eight thousand a year. The rest is dead men's shoes. The number is real. The way it's being sold to you is not.
Then there's the money itself, so let's itemize it, because the pitch runs on stories about six-figure tradesmen and plumbers with their own helicopters. Here's the ladder those stories skip. A first-year apprentice makes around $18 to $22 an hour. The apprenticeship runs four to five years before you see journeyman money, and the median electrician in America earns about $62K. The famous $280K data center electricians are boom-time travelers getting poached in a bidding war and working brutal overtime on temporary builds. And the millionaire plumber in every one of these stories is not a plumber. He's a business owner who employs plumbers, on the other side of a decade of licensing, trucks, insurance, and payroll. When a story says a welder is "generating $3 million a year," that's his company's revenue, not his wage. The wage is $62K. The wealth is owning the shop. And owning the shop is not a certificate program. Notice the symmetry trick while you're at it: white-collar work always gets represented by its failure case, the liberal arts grad making lattes. The trades get represented by their lottery winner. That's not labor economics. That's advertising.
I was clearing about $250K in total comp when I got cut. Maybe that was overpaid. Fine, separate argument – my mortgage, property taxes, and retirement math were all priced against the income I actually had. So the actual offer on the table for me is an 80 percent pay cut on day one, then five years of climbing back to a quarter of my old income, at an age where my body gets a vote. Yes, the top 10 percent of electricians clear about $105K, and a union journeyman in a coastal metro can eventually get there, after an apprenticeship you have to compete just to get into. Even the top tenth of the occupation lands under half my old comp. This is not a transition. It's a restart, sold as a rescue.
And you can watch the pitch escalate in real time. This week the same network pushing the plumber story was floating underwater welding, the oldest fantasy-job clickbait on the internet. It's perfect for the job: sounds like astronaut crossed with Navy SEAL, and it's rare enough that nobody watching knows the real economics. The numbers behind it: there are about 3,400 commercial divers in the entire United States, fewer people than a single mid-size layoff round. The industry's own career data puts the median around $68K. The famous $300K belongs to offshore saturation specialists most divers never become, on the far side of a $49K dive school and years spent tending topside before you ever burn rod. And federal studies put the job's death rate at roughly 40 times the average American worker's. When the pitch moves from fixing toilets to welding on the seafloor, that is not a jobs program maturing. That is a fantasy being escalated because the last one didn't sell.
Now look at where the real offer actually lives. The layoffs are concentrated in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Austin. The guaranteed jobs are at build sites in rural Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and Texas – towns selected because land and power are cheap, which is to say, selected because they are not where you live. So the full offer reads: sell the house, uproot a spouse's career and the kids' schools, move to a town priced for the wage you're about to earn, and take a construction job that ends. Because when the build finishes, the work doesn't stay put. It follows the capex map to the next site. This is not "become a plumber in your community." It's itinerant project labor, and that's a young single person's game. Meta's own president described the program's audience as "Uber drivers, waitresses, grocery store clerks" living paycheck to paycheck. A fine mission. Also an admission: it was never built for you. The narrative just sells it to you anyway.
And about those data centers. Meta's own announcement for its flagship Louisiana site does the math for you: more than 5,000 skilled trade workers at peak construction, just over 500 operational jobs once it's built. Ten builders for every one who stays. That's the site the academy's guaranteed jobs feed. Construction is project work by design: contractors staff up, build, and lay off, and the sector runs some of the highest layoff rates of any industry in the government's own data. Full-time until the project ends. You're being recruited into the 5,000 at the peak of a capex cycle and told it's a 30-year career. When the buildout cools, last in, first out.
None of this is a knock on the trades or the people in them. The work is real and they earn every dollar. The knock is on the people who caused the displacement now selling the displaced a map, while they own the toll road.
Jobadvisor
This is a well-argued piece, and the core insight is worth sitting with regardless of whether every number checks out: the "learn a trade" advice conveniently benefits the same companies doing the automating and the layoffs. That's a real structural observation, not just cynicism.
A few things stood out to me as genuinely solid points: the wage math (five years to journeyman pay, median $62K, the "millionaire plumber" almost always being a shop owner not a tradesman) is a fair correction to how these stories get told. The geographic mismatch — layoffs concentrated in expensive coastal tech metros, "guaranteed jobs" at rural data center construction sites — is also a real and under-discussed tension. And the observation that construction itself is boom-bust project work, not a permanent landing spot, is accurate to how that industry actually functions.
I'd hold a couple of the punchier numbers a little more loosely — things like "80% pay cut on day one" and some of the BLS interpretation are doing real rhetorical work to make the case land hard, and I haven't verified them independently. That doesn't mean they're wrong, just that this reads like advocacy journalism, and advocacy journalism picks the stats that make the sharpest point. Worth treating as "this direction is probably right" rather than "every figure is exact."
But here's what I actually want to ask you: why did you send me this? You've got 30 years in software, not zero. Nobody serious is telling you to go learn plumbing — that pitch is aimed at people with no tech background at all, or at people trying to reassure themselves the disruption has a soft landing. Your situation is different: you have deep, sellable expertise and you were already talking about intentionally choosing what's next rather than being pushed into it.
So — is this article fueling the "get out while I still can" feeling, or is it more that you're trying to make sure whatever you do next isn't just walking into a different version of the same trap?
if remote work is permanent, why are we still using sticky notes for WFH status?
been WFH for two years and my "do not disturb" system is literally a post-it stuck to my door. my partner still walks in during calls anyway.
I started using a small desktop divoom screen that shows my meeting status and it actually keeps people out.
is there a more normal way to handle homeoffice status or am i just stuck with screens and paper?
Jobadvisor
Honestly, you're not stuck—there's a whole spectrum between "sticky note" and "custom hardware," and most of it works better than either.
A few solid options, roughly in order of effort:
Software-only signals
- Slack/Teams status syncs with your calendar automatically ("In a meeting," red dot) — but this only works if your partner actually checks Slack, which they probably don't for a "hey don't walk in" signal.
- Smart calendar-to-light integrations (see below) solve the "physical person in physical house" problem better than anything app-based.
Smart lighting tied to your calendar This is the most common upgrade people land on. A cheap smart bulb or LED strip outside your office door, connected via IFTTT or Home Assistant to your Google/Outlook calendar, turns red during meetings and green otherwise. Philips Hue, Govee, and similar brands all support this. It's the "on air" sign model — dumb simple, works for anyone walking by, no app-checking required.
Dedicated "on air" signs There's a small market of literal light-up signs for this exact problem — USB-powered, some with motion/mic-based auto-detection, some manually toggled. Search "on air sign WFH" and you'll find plenty in the $20–40 range, less fiddly to set up than a Divoom since they don't need a calendar integration, just a switch.
Door-based physical signals Some people do a simple two-sided door hanger (like a hotel "do not disturb" sign) — same idea as your sticky note but more visible and harder to ignore. Doesn't solve the enforcement problem though, which sounds like it's really the core issue.
The honest underlying question: is this a signage problem or a "partner doesn't respect the signal" problem? A fancier light won't fix the second one — that's a conversation ("when the light's on, I'm on camera, please don't just walk in") more than a hardware upgrade. The Divoom clearly works because it's novel enough that they can't ignore it, but a $15 smart bulb + calendar sync would give you the same "impossible to miss" effect without needing a dedicated screen.
Aerospace or mechanical engineering?
I’m still in hs and I can’t decide wether to study mechanical engineering or aerospace engineering, I really love aviation so aerospace might look like the right choice but I feel like aerospace is too specific and mechanical is a “safe” choice for my future. Any advice for clearing my confusion would help thank you!
Jobadvisor
This is a really common fork, and honestly there's no wrong answer here — but a few things might help clear it up.
The core tradeoff you're sensing is real. Mechanical engineering is the broadest engineering degree that exists — it opens doors into automotive, energy, robotics, manufacturing, consumer products, HVAC, biomedical devices, aerospace itself, basically anything with moving parts or thermal/fluid systems. Aerospace is more specialized: aerodynamics, propulsion, orbital mechanics, structures for flight vehicles specifically. That specialization is a feature if you're certain you want aviation/space, and a limitation if your interests shift.
Here's the thing that usually resolves this for people, though: at most universities, ME and AE curricula overlap heavily in the first 2 years (calculus, physics, statics, dynamics, thermo, materials). The aerospace-specific classes (aerodynamics, propulsion, orbital mechanics, flight structures) mostly show up in years 3-4. That means:
- You don't have to fully decide now. Pick whichever program your target schools have, and if a school offers both, you can often start in one and switch without losing much time.
- A lot of people solve this exact dilemma by majoring in ME with an aerospace minor/concentration, or minoring in aerospace-adjacent coursework. This gets you into aviation/aerospace companies (Boeing, SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA contractors, etc. all hire MEs) while keeping the broader degree.
- Conversely, plenty of AE grads end up in aerospace-only careers by choice, not because they were locked in — because that's genuinely what they wanted.
A question worth sitting with: do you love aviation as in "I want to design things that fly, specifically," or do you love it as in "I love engineering and airplanes are the coolest application of it"? If it's the first, aerospace is the more direct path and the "specificity" is a feature, not a bug — employers in that industry like seeing it. If it's the second, ME gives you aerospace as one of many options rather than the only option.
One more practical note: check the specific schools you're considering. Some have excellent AE programs with strong industry pipelines (Purdue, Georgia Tech, Embry-Riddle, etc.) where "AE is too narrow" basically isn't true because the program is a direct feeder into the industry. Others have thin AE offerings where ME + electives would honestly serve you better. The strength of the specific program matters more than the abstract ME-vs-AE debate.
If you want, tell me what schools you're looking at and I can help you think through their specific programs.
I need a direction to push myself!
Hi! I'm an author. I got my AA ten years ago, did nothing with it. Got a cert in infosec during lockdown, did nothing with it and watched AI scoop up entry level infosec jobs. Lost interest, but made straight A's. Went back for science to see if taking several off years helped. Got an A in conceptual physics and a B in precalc (ALMOST made an A).
Tried trig. Got walled by trigonometric identities. Tried calculus. Got walled by quotient rule. ADHD made these kinds of problems extremely difficult for me to not just spend thirty minutes trying to solve and tangling it further trying to simplify it.
Currently working a part time office job in a grocery store for $18/hr for uh... full time hours, no benefits! Mentally draining, and physically difficult for my bursitis. Trying to figure out where to go next.
I like the natural sciences (ecology, chem, astronomy, physics, geography, geology, etc), but I'm unwilling to take ADHD medication to improve my potential in math higher than precalc. I know I'm meant to gravitate to the sciences somehow, however. But what specifically, I don't know. I like to know these things, and am comfortable working in academia. I have library experience, working in my high school library in senior year. Lately I've been learning to combat misinformation, as I see much of it everywhere in life. Cybersecurity gave me a 'bullshit radar' that I use all the time at work for antifraud and anti-moneylaundering. So I guess I can add that to my skills? I can see trickery coming a mile away and can strategize to thwart it? I've countered many fraudsters and use that to also help people not get conned at work. (Like when they try to buy $100 Apple gift cards for a Chinese pop star that needs a new laptop.)
So I have some direction. But I don't feel like I have enough to push myself into getting a loan for tuition and going back for a Bachelor's or even a Master's in something. I feel like I need a stronger idea of the end goal. I'm at the point where I'm looking at everything like "could this be a job I can do?" or "I wonder if the person that did this thing has a decent living."
I guess I'm just waiting to have the right thing said to me that helps me discover what I'm meant to do. Like I need to learn how to learn.
Jobadvisor
Good — that's actually the easiest one to test cheaply, because you don't need a degree to find out if this is real. You need to find out if you can (a) actually write compelling science content consistently, and (b) get someone to pay you or publish you for it, before you spend a dime on school.
Here's how I'd test it over the next few months, roughly in order:
1. Pick a lane and start publishing now, unpaid, in public. Not "science writing" broadly — something specific enough that your fraud/misinformation instinct is the hook. Given what you've told me, the natural angle is: debunking pseudoscience or misinformation in a specific science area (astronomy misinformation, "detox"/health scams, climate misinformation, geology conspiracy stuff, whatever genuinely irritates you). That's a real, in-demand niche and it's literally the intersection of everything you've described. Start a Substack, Medium, or even just a series of long-form posts. Aim for one piece every 1–2 weeks, not daily — sustainability matters more than volume.
2. Query a few outlets that pay for freelance science writing, even briefly. You don't need clips to start — many will take a pitch. Places worth looking at: The Skeptical Inquirer, Undark, Massive Science, Ars Technica (pitches), local/regional outlets for science-adjacent stories, or even trade publications on fraud/compliance (there's real overlap — "how misinformation enables financial scams" is a legitimate beat that draws on both your skill sets at once). A few rejected pitches will tell you more about whether this is viable than months of solo writing will.
3. Look for a specific, named credential — but don't commit to it yet. Once you've done #1 and #2 for a couple months, you'll know whether you like the actual work of this (not the idea of it). At that point look into things like a graduate certificate in science communication (many are 1-year, non-thesis, cheaper than a full master's — schools like UC Santa Cruz have a well-known one) rather than jumping straight to a full MA. That's a much smaller loan if you decide you want the credential for legitimacy or networking.
4. Keep the CFE/fraud thread as a parallel option, not a competitor. You don't have to choose between these right now. "Science writer who specializes in exposing fraud and misinformation" is a genuinely marketable identity, and your day job is quietly building the expertise for it. Nothing about testing the writing path costs you anything on that front.
Want me to help you actually draft a pitch or the first piece — something specific, so you have a real artifact to send out rather than a vague plan?