Big Tech Laid Him Off. He Realized He Didn’t Need a Job. — Asian Dad Energy

0:00I made a V-log about this. It was the project where I broke down and cried in a parking lot because it was so stressful. There was this bug with an open source framework that we were forced to use that I couldn't figure out.

0:17Welcome to the Data Engineering Central Podcast. I'm Dan Beach, your host. Today we have AsianDadEnergy with us of YouTube fame and Substack fame. How's it going today? Hey there, Daniel. Thanks so much for having me on your podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. awesome it's a friday and i would say like well you don't longer work for big tech so like you're just like every day is a friday for you right that's right so if people don't know who you are for some reason can you just give them like super high level who you are why you're here you know yeah sure thing daniel so uh i was actually um a a software engineer within big tech and i was recently laid off.

0:55I was laid off in December of last year. And so over the course of the last nine months or so, I sort of been on this journey of kind of almost like getting over the layoff and then almost rediscovering myself. And as part of a kind of self-therapy, I documented my own thoughts along the way through these vlogs that I've created and uploaded to YouTube at the Substack. Yeah, my wife on a Saturday, she's like, who is that guy? What are you watching? what's he talking about i'm like this is the best come sit down this is like my alter ego over here talking about thank you that's awesome so can you take us back to like early you so i obviously want to talk about like the layoff and big tech ai everything that's happening in the world today but i'm super curious people's background did you were you like a geeky kid did you grow up like one of those sometimes i talk to people like oh i've been programming basics since i was three are you one of those people oh my god you kind of like almost read my mind i was scared of telepathy yes a hundred percent so i uh grew up in pennsylvania and uh yeah i was that geeky kid growing up and uh my parents my dad he got me this i-86 like in the 90s you know those those computers that ran on dos and yes my first programming language was basic and my first program that I wrote as a kid was a hello world program implemented in basic where it's like you know like prince hello world and like that kind of program so so you did you started young then um did you like it's kind of jumps forward but like so I did you go to school like you went to high school and then you're like oh I'm gonna go study computer science did you get a classical engineering degree computer yeah it's it's a very uh funny question that you asked that because you know, when you're young, your mind don't think perhaps in the most logical way.

2:50When it was time for me to go to school, I had this idea that I wanted to learn archaeology just because it was something that was super interesting to me at the time, right? And my dad sort of sat me down and he's like, all right, so we're going to search for the highest paying profession that you can obtain through a college major. And then you're going to pick one of the top five in this list. So I think he went on to, I don't know whether that was Yahoo or AOL, whatever was the search engine of the time in the 90s, and he found one. And I looked through that list and it was like, wait, a heart surgeon, you know, a lawyer, a computer program.

3:30Oh, hey, I kind of like computer programming. I don't despise it. So let's go with that. And that's sort of how it was steered towards computer science. And I pursued computer science in college undergrad. right and that that's sort of how i got into this career track sure that's funny yeah pretty sure if you looked at the bottom five list it probably would have said like history major archaeology down at the bottom i love history too i you know totally you go i could have totally done that too um so you did uh like circa what year were you in college here then this is like 99 yeah it's it's like the late 90s early 2000s um crunch of uh college years yeah you're pretty close to me let's see i graduated college in like i graduated high school in 03 college in 07 so it was like i kind of grew up in like the lamp stack era when that was big you know like pearl you know apache servers kind of all that was taking off it's roughly in the same time period I might be a few years ahead of you in this case, right?

4:35Like I remember LAM stack. I remember like at the time Java sort of became almost like a dominant language for the enterprise. But at that time, like if you were in industry, right, you could still find a fair share of like old school mainframe programs, like stuff being written in COBOL and stuff like that. One of my earliest projects was actually to reverse engineer something that was written in COBOL. it was it was it was hairy man it was crazy there's still cobalt programmers out there man they're still still clinking around hidden away here and there that was like i don't know sometimes i look back on those years like my so i kind of got same as you i had family that got me to computer super early young middle school high school and like i mean sometimes i just like sit back and i think back to like playing doom on my computer or playing mist and just like the good old days of like yahoo pool aol chat you know msn messenger i'm just like man it's it's the best it's the open internet right like if i were to remember back those days that the thing that i remember the most about the internet is how how completely free and unstructured unregulated regulated was going and surfing the netscape browser it was like an adventure like you have no idea what you're gonna land upon and it could be something that's funny it could be profound it could be totally not safe for work there was no control whatsoever i loved it yeah it's uh yeah just i remember finding some old like some chat groups way back for like lord of the rings you know and the small games were being made jackson everybody's just here was it was free it was a crazy time so computer science in college what did they teach you just like see do you remember you so so back in the day right they started us with uh with java i remember java was the language that they started me with with intro to computer science and things like data structures and algorithms and things like that and then eventually when we started working with things like compilers and stuff then there was a bit of c and so principally those were the two languages i had my undergrad education on java and c poor guy i can't imagine that memory allocation man memory allocations directly it's uh it's it's fun it's interesting yeah thank you thank you at all i did like different kind of engineering i didn't do i always like work i always program my way through objective c through college and a lot of php and my sequel stuff like that but luckily i don't know if i would have still loved it the way i do today i don't know if i had to sit through classes and stuff but what was your first um how did you like so after school did you just like go to some big corporation like sit in a cubicle somewhere like all the space it's like writing oh how how did how did my my entry into the career tech career work so it's actually a funny story there.

7:44When I sort of was looking for jobs, right, there was a different time back then, right? It was before the financial crisis of 2008. And so it was much easier if you went to a pretty good school to get a job, way easier, in fact, in my opinion. And so I sort of had options. And my first option being in the New York City area was, hey, let me get into one of the investment banks, mainly because I heard that they paid crap tons of money, right? Like a go or something, you know? Yeah, so I took this internship, and it was a summer internship, and it was the most dystopian, soul-crushing experience that you can imagine.

8:28Just like imagine working 12 hours a day in this almost concentration camp-like environment and being browbeaten constantly. And so I went away with a bad taste in my mouth for the finance industry in general. And at the time, there was actually this really nice lady. She was an HR recruiter who, you know, she was young, like she was in her 20s, right? But she essentially convinced me of the wonders of tech consulting, of joining a consulting company. And so that's how I end up joining a consulting company for my first job out of college. and it was one of the giant consulting companies out there there's only a handful of them so i'm not even going to mention the names but i think you can guess and that's how i sort of got it and consulting is a it's a interesting industry right you teams are formed on a per project basis you jump onto a client project you get plugged into a team you design you build you ship maybe maintain a little bit but you ship out you get blamed for everything don't forget that part yeah and of course you're you're to blame right and if something is successful then you weren't really there in the first place what were the uh the internship and this some of those consulting gigs were they like what kind of stuff generally were you work on were you more close to the front end the back end what kind of tools technology that's actually a great question so so the first couple of projects out of college that i worked with principally it was back end stuff right so So think like back-end plumbing for content management sites, back-end integration.

10:10There's this one project. It was a really funny one. Basically, you know how IBM, there was this name frame that was created way back called the IBM 360, right? And it ran Cobalt. So one of the earliest projects that I had out of college, right as I started working, is this basically creating a middleware wrapper around this legacy IBM 360 and interfacing with this COBOL code to, I think it was essentially to pull data to support a kind of government program. It was a government client. Yeah, I had one of my first job, first job, same thing, internship, went into like manufacturing engineering.

10:53but i was always the tech guy so i know how to program and yeah the same all the manufacturing plants are running those ibm mainframes like the whole plants yes manufacturing place probably still to this day it's the same thing you know the analysts be like enough their little green screen like putting off reams of paper trying to pull data out put it in microsoft access right so it's that that's right and the economics of it sort of makes sense too at least for a while right Because why change the software that's mission critical when you can just put a little bit of marginal money and keep upgrading your mainframes decade after decade?

11:29So I expect that niche, the occasional mainframe developer, to kind of be with us maybe for the foreseeable future. Yeah, for sure. And some people don't know, it's been in the Midwest. It's like the insurance capital of the world, like close to where I live. and yeah there's still a lot of like cold like a lot of that finance you know that's still running they still have their own server farms they're running cobalt mainframes they still got football programmers down there probably there's some there's probably some angry cobalt programmer programmer like 10 miles away from me right that was up all night oh yeah and and and generally right what what i kind of lived through in those early years right out of college was this sort of transition in technology stack, right?

12:12There are still mainframes spread here and there. There was a lot of this architecture called client server architecture. Not sure if anybody remembers that, but it's basically you have a program, right? That's running on the server side. Then you have essentially an app that runs at the operating system level of the desktop terminals. And it's usually written in something like Visual Basic or something like that. And it communicates. And all of those two paradigms was in the process of being replaced by essentially web-based platforms, right? So where you have centralized on-prem data centers, and then you have something in the form of a web interface like a website.

12:54And that's how the mode of operations work. I did a lot of that. And then most of it in those early years were Java, like based on the back end. And then on the front end, occasionally you get like a Pearl-based LAMP stack site here and there thrown in. The most of it was Java, at least in my experience. And then on the front end, right, it was just a pure chaos because it was going through the Web 2.0 revolution, right, where they were adding JavaScript into everything. And I was like, but how should we organize this JavaScript? Oh, I know. Let's make something called jQuery, which to me just seemed like this mountain of spaghetti all connected together.

13:34But you know, that's sort of the front end kind of revolution that was happening in the web 2.0 era. Yeah, I totally remember that time. I mean, I worked at a bank for a little bit. It's like an analyst and like the data warehousing side. And it was like, you're right. There's this transition in the data stack where it's like Oracle SQL server, right? People are getting off the mainframes. I'd DB2, you know, going shipping, you know, MySQL and Postgres were a big deal back then if you were doing that. and then you're right it was like the shift towards a lot of visual basic a lot of i remember at the time it was a lot of like microsoft like just the microsoft thing was big c-sharp was big microsoft.net 2000 do you remember that stuff it's like working man those are some grumpy programmers for sure and i know i don't i know why it's terrible do you do you remember uh eat enterprise java beans oh yeah sure because it's like it's like the awkward teenager of like data hydration frameworks where nothing quite worked and it's all janky all the time but it's supposed to be the enterprise standard of that day yeah i know it's interesting that too because right at the above that time is when you started to see like some of like the big data tools i think it was kind of like the cloud started that was yes really starting like aws gcp at like microsoft So it's like moving things to the cloud all of a sudden was like, oh, we need to do this digital transformation to the cloud.

14:59We have big data tools, you know, like Hive and HDFS. It was just like an interesting time, right? Everything. It was sort of like a period of transformation or even metamorphosis, right? Where people were still doing on-prem data centers, right? And then in looming the distance, there was the cloud. And then by this, I was talking like the mid to late 2000s, right before the great financial crisis. And you would hear like, oh, AWS, they have all these computers in a warehouse. And I still remember this one project. Okay. And I made a vlog about this. It was the project where I broke down and cried in a parking lot because it was so stressful.

15:39There was this bug with an open source framework that we were forced to use that I couldn't figure out. But on this project, right, there was an entire team dedicated to hosting. We were building essentially e-commerce site. Okay. It was for this big publishing company. But today you could just have this commerce site configure enough running 10 minutes if you use Shopify. But back then it was like six months and a team with dozens of people. There was a dedicated team to essentially reproduce all the databases and application servers and the load balancers, the high availability and disaster recovery zones.

16:13on-prem in their physical premises. And I remember at the time talking to our leadership. It's like, hey, did you know that there's this thing called AWS and you can move? And I was sort of at the time, right? I was a tech lead. I think this was my first position as a tech lead of a squad. I was sort of just brushed off like, oh, you're being silly. That's nonsense. Who would have thought of that? And this was pretty late. It was like 2009 at the time. so yeah i remember that period yeah it's a it's an interesting time and sometimes i do think back and like i can still see like in my mind i can still remember like sitting in the cubicle running a like either an update or delete command on sql server getting the classic you have updated a million rows and like starting to sweat and i remember because i remember like everybody knew where the dba set for the on-prem servers right sql yes that were like in a closet like 10 feet away from me going to that angry dba i mean why are they always angry have you noticed that like the sys admins the dbas and the build master they don't even remember build they're always grumpy it's like on call all the time yeah yeah do you think we've deprived yeah this question kind of jumps away forward but like i think about this a lot as someone who grew up in that time period right like stack overflow getting you know you had to go there because where else were you going to go and now we live in this age of agentic ai you just did it boom and like i'm curious like thinking about young people coming into software engineering and who knows the future but it's like maybe every old person maybe the people who wrote assembly and then basic came along and c came along and they're like you guys suck you'll never understand what i had to go through but i feel like i'm having that feeling of like people anymore they don't have to solve it they don't have to like cry in the i feel like crying is like part of growing up as a programmer like not being able to figure out a problem for days and then just finding like one semicolon or two lines after like seven days of they don't go through that is there something that's being lost i i feel a little bit of both in this case right in the sense that there is a nature of reasoning and problem solving that software engineers get from figuring out those hard problems and that to a degree is essentially moved away by agentic AI.

18:55And that I think is a loss that's going to cause some medium term problems in the IT and tech labor market. I'm almost certain of it, right? Because all the big companies are cutting way back on their junior hires. I think that's going to come back to bite them later. But the moment is not now. And I don't think the C-suite is worrying about, say, five years from now, right now. But at the same time, right, there's also the aspect of If you treat AI not as like a machine god, right, but as essentially a tool that can generate boilerplate work, in that respect, it can greatly increase efficiency.

19:33If used properly, if you set up the right workflows, if you set up the right guardrails, right, have the right skills and MCPs in place. So both could be true. The challenge for young guys, I think, is how do you balance these competing pressures, right? The pressure to learn the craft versus the pressure to produce and to be effective and do it all in such a way that you can still survive this transitional period with a job. I think that's really the challenge. Yeah. And it's still early days because I have a lot of programmer friends and some of them are like, you know, I think it depends a lot where you work too.

20:10Because we can be in a bubble where we're like, well, everyone's using Claude to do everything and not touching the code. And then I talked to like some friends and one is like a rust consultant and he never touches AI, you know, his low level rust stuff. And just like the world really hasn't changed for him. Maybe it never will. I've got, you know, another guy for that's working in like a test, you know, some big corporation in the test group. And they're sort of like using AI the way I did like three years ago, you know, like kind of touching it, kind of not, you know, a little skeptical. And then it's a it's a process, right?

20:44sectors would adopt AI based on their own internal processes and workflows, and also based on the state of training data and also the state of reinforcement learning that's happening. Because if you just look at an AI that's been trained off of publicly scrapable data, that AI really isn't that powerful, right? Most of the efficiency gains that you see in things like software engineering, it came from all of these reinforcement learning post-training stages that happens, right? And also by the addition of having an agentic harness that you can plug these AI models into, those harnesses also greatly enhance the effectiveness of it.

21:28So I think only time will tell how AI would impact the entire economy, but different sectors are going to kind of deal with it at different times and in different ways, in my opinion. Yeah, I totally agree. So jumping back, so tell me, you did the consulting thing. When did you get into what would people call classically big tech? Like how hard was it? Yeah. Well, let me tell you that story. So in consulting, right, I spent the bulk of my career in consulting and I went through the normal traditional kind of tech engineer roadmap. I joined as a junior engineer, became a senior, and then I eventually became a tech lead, cried in a parking lot on one project as a tech lead, then upgraded myself to an architect.

22:13And there's different types of architects. They're like application architect. Then you sort of have the higher level enterprise or solution architect. And then at that point, then I decided to then become a director level in consulting. And there is essentially a step change where I worked, where when you become sort of senior leadership, your responsibility changes from designing applications and kind of like overseeing the work on building out those applications to within consulting, at least a much more of a people focused role. And so practically what it became is I would go and pitch digital transformation to various C-suite leaders across many Fortune 500 companies.

23:02I would serve as essentially a sounding board for their internal development roadmap and also for various investment venture capital pitches that are given to these corporations on a daily basis, like Y Combinator or Anderson Horowitz. They're constantly coming up with startups that they want these big clients to invest in. I would be the guy saying, hey, would that really work? I'd be that guy in the room. And so I did that for a few years. And I was actually pretty good at it. They kept promoting me. At one point, right before I left consulting, I was essentially at the level of a group director.

23:43So sort of like managing the technical work of a bunch of accounts under a single vertical, in which case - Very, very stressful. Because dealing with people is fundamentally different from dealing with things. And it's not better or not worse, but it's different. And people have certain preferences, right? My preference, I'm just sort of an introverted guy. I like playing with things. If you want me to deal with people, I can do it. I could do a good job, but it's very draining on me. So I sort of had it after a couple of years. Oh, by the way, there was a lot of travel. There was traveling. Like every week I had to fly somewhere or take the train somewhere.

24:24And I have a family and I don't have time with my family and all of that. And so what happened was, this is about seven years ago, a colleague of mine and a good friend, he found a big leadership job at the big tech company. and he'd say, hey, man, we need a chief architect there for one of their business units. Why don't you come along? And I'm like, all right, you know what? Let's do it. So that switch to big tech allowed me to get away from a position that dealt with people to more of an individual contributor role. As a chief architect, my job was essentially to oversee dozens of applications within a technical stack, a technical ecosystem.

25:08them um for most of my years at the big tech company it was sort of like the marketing technology stack and then also sort of like some of the partner kind of relationship management systems back yeah um don't you think that i'm just curious your thoughts on this don't you think that one thing i've noticed like with the rise of it agentic ai coding so like in the past right we a lot of whether we liked it or not we were judged a lot of software engineers judged themselves and other people judge them on even though we knew we shouldn't like on the quality of code on their you know knowledge of some programming language um it was just a like about becoming the best at that craft which is writing code and like software is classically programmers classically have this view you know what movies or whatever and it comes from the truth of like you know we like you said we don't like talking to people or just that angry programmer in the corner you know and it seems like now the light the playing field has been leveled sort of not totally but sort of like more than it was before right because now cloud can do a lot of what the junior programs to do right so it's like sort of short in the playing field i know there's a lot of stuff that goes into it but it seems like now that those human skills as a software engineer are now like now they're very important like your ability to talk to the product manager and like I think, I think, uh, I agree, Daniel.

26:39I think the human skills are the soft skills. It was always important for a, a software engineer to essentially rise in the ranks in an organization and take on more responsibilities and grow their capabilities. But now it's like almost important just for them to survive in their role. Right. They've gone from kind of like a growth requirement to being like a survival requirement in my opinion yeah i was curious who thought so next i totally have that feeling too of like you know when i think about a junior engineer is it's like you know if you have a bad attitude if you don't you're not a big team player if you don't follow directions well it's like yeah they're just going to replace you with an eight you know it's like a hundred percent and the ai will likely be more productive than you do a better job and it won't talk back and it'll actually do what it's told and yeah so on and so forth so how long did you spend in big quote unquote big tech um yeah so basically i work there for the rest of my career up to my layoff last year so about seven years is how long i spent there and you know big tech has its own can of worms in terms of like internal issues and dysfunction but there's also good things about it as well right like quality of life in terms of the type of work i'm working on especially compensation the compensation is bockers yeah it's um i still think even today it seems like i mean if you look around i mean i grew up in the midwest like a lot of farmers and teachers and you know just as far as i still think today like tech i don't think tech workers and i get especially software people and i've been guilty of this myself we don't realize how good we've had it for the last how many decades, like very well compensated.

28:30I mean, some people have to, teachers have to work their whole life and never make half or quarter, you know. I don't know. It's just like we've always been very well compensated, especially in big tech, but just any programmer really, you know, I don't know if that changed or it still seems like today though, the salaries are better than, I don't know. I don't know if people should. I would agree. I think historically, right, a software engineer or somebody working in tech makes more than double what the median full-time worker makes, right? And that's like entry level. If you got to be an experienced and higher level technologist, you're making triple, quadruple.

29:12If you get into big tech, you're making six times as much, eight times, ten times as much as the average person. And so it's a huge privilege, if you will, right? It's almost like, in a way, it's almost like winning the lotto, even though I know there's a lot of hard work and craft involved in getting into this industry. But it still remains the fact that if you have a job in tech or hopefully big tech, you have a huge advantage in earning power over almost everybody else in society, aside from a small handful of other high-earning professions. Yeah, I want to talk about this because you talk about this a lot in your YouTube and sub-stack.

29:52And so people, there's a ton of, we can talk about all the layoffs for the last couple of years. You have probably a lot of software engineers today who are losing their jobs or scared about losing their jobs. And we live in America and it's such a consumeristic. Everybody's got a big house. Keep up with the Joneses. You got cars and kids and, you know, you raise your lifestyle to meet that income that you have. how do how did you deal with losing a job and how should people be smarter about their finances and thinking about their expenses and incomes and you know because layoffs happen and we who knows right software's changing a lot of life yeah we're losing their jobs and are scared yeah totally Daniel so I mean for me I I think the the kind of impetus started way earlier than my layoff What happened was me and my wife, we lived through the 2008 financial crisis, right?

30:52And for people who are younger, right, there was this block of time from like 2013, a block of time, five years, where it really, the economy crashed and took a long time to recover. For me, my personal experience was I was working at a consulting company. one day building security showed up, half the people were shown the door. And there's people that I respect, people who were my mentors, people with decades of seniority who were just excellent at their craft, and they were all just wiped out. And for years afterwards, it was very hard to actually get a job in tech. Now, tech is one of those sectors that I think bounce back the fastest from it.

31:39Forget all the other sectors like manufacturing or something else. Like tech was supposed to be one of the winners of this. And it was hard for a couple of years afterwards. And so that experience kind of led me and led us, my family into sort of adopting after reading some books, like we read like Your Money or Your Life. There was this book called The Little Book of Common Sense Investing into sort of reading these personal finance books about like, how should we live in a way where a crisis like this wouldn't just destroy everything and like wreck our family. And that then led us towards this idea of like, hey, let's be frugal a bit, right?

32:23And let's put away a good portion of our income that we can save and then put it towards sound investments, right? Investments where your chances of losing your principal is very low and your chances of getting a decent ROI return on investment is very high. So we sort of figured that out after the financial crisis in 2008, 2009. And at the time we had a huge amount of school debt that then I had to work like a madman for a couple of years to help pay it all off. And then we took that extra income every month while continuing to live relatively frugally. and we started saving that money and investing.

33:06So by the time 2025 rolled around and I was finally laid off for the first time in my career, the savings and the investments have become essentially self-sustaining, meaning the returns on those investments more than paid for our living expenses. And that's sort of how after I was laid off, I did, by the way, go through this really messed up phase where I was like in shock and I was really upset. And I did panic apply to a bunch of jobs right after my layoff. But after a while, this was like a month or so, I sort of sat down, looked at the numbers. Like, hey, wait a second. I don't really need to do this.

33:48This may not be necessary for me. And so that's sort of the story of our preparations for layoffs. Yeah, isn't it amazing? And like, I don't know if it's just our Western culture, but we know of all the stuff we get taught college and high school and whatever no one no one ever says the word like an emergency fund is a good idea you know just simple or like it's almost like they don't want us to know for some reason maybe it's the creditor companies it's like yeah what is like living just the so like the one like one sentence like live below your means what does that mean to live below your means to have a margin in your life and i was kind of the same way me my wife got i lived through the 2007 2008 stuff and we kind of discovered david ramsey at the time went through the whole thing same as you like ton of loans paid everything off paid off the cars and yeah i feel like it's so obvious after the fact but you know you just grow up and no one ever tells you i mean it's not like it's that big of an excuse i mean we should all i don't know whatever but no one says anything right you just don't think about it and you're just told your whole life they always just go work someplace and you just live there forever because that's where parents did or someplace work somewhere 30 years you know see you know the thing is yeah like like my parents for example they never taught me any of this stuff like like growing up we're we're an immigrant family right my family more or less lived paycheck to paycheck like in the sense that they'll pay into like their pensions right or they'll pay into their 401ks But that's never part of their paychecks.

35:27It was already deducted ahead of time. And so for me, up until the 2008 financial crisis, I lived in a similar way. I just spent the money I made. But here's the thing. What works for our parents' generation doesn't work for us. And it as hell will not work for the next generation, right? If you take my parents, for example, just doing what they did, they were able to pay off their house, have good pensions and have 401ks. And so, so if you add that with social security without doing any sort of advanced financial preparation, it could be a very good and comfortable. Whereas like we live in a different world now, right?

36:11It's like, and if you're in tech, like, like you said, it's not the same thing. Like, it's just, I don't know if it'll change or settle down, but it feels like everyone and everything is like on edge you know it's just like you could wake up tomorrow thousands of people like yourself just one day it's all poof into the air um but i guess some of the bright side of this new world we're living in is that like for me and you we both create content and you can obviously make money on that and we still live in a digital world and it's like what was your journey and Would you tell people that is it too late now if they want to like, oh, I want to make some side income on YouTube or sub stack or maybe write an ebook or I don't know.

36:57Do you feel like it's too late or should people consider this as like part of their career to maybe, you know, branch out a little bit, multiple streams of income? I think it's absolutely not too late to develop streams of side income. In fact, you know, in my V-logs, I kind of encourage people to get off their bums and do so. Because the reason is because like right now, right, the technology, the environment has sort of destabilized our economy. The economic paradigm that our parents follow just doesn't work right now. Right. But the same set of technologies, right, think AI, think agentic, think social media, even it has actually unlocked these channels for income.

37:43Right. It's never been easier to create content. It's never been easier to create software. Never been easier to take your content and software and products and get it to the market that they need to go to. Never been easier to monetize. All of these are also facts of life, right? If you were to tell myself, my younger self in 2009 that, hey, Asian Dan Energy, today with 10 minutes of work, you can build a SaaS platform and monetize it, my head would explode at the time. it will be like going it will be like a you know a person building a rocket and going to the moon in their backyard but it's possible today and so i encourage everybody to take advantage of that and build additional streams of income for yourself yeah i totally agree um yeah i did the same thing and you know as an engineer myself i'm not like it's not like i was bent towards being an entrepreneur or whatever it's like you said it's just takes a little extra work just like in your career right if you want to be the best at rust or whatever right you just you got to put a little extra time in you know you just got 100 percent some books just learn a little maybe as engineers you don't learn about marketing pick up a marketing book you know i know it's about learning and growing that applies to every part of our life if you just sit there doing the same thing you've always done especially in the world we live in today that's probably not the best idea right you should be a hundred percent agree with that and especially i feel like for the younger guys out there like you know people in their 20s and teenagers like my son's a teenager right i have to keep kind of reiterating this point yes sort of like in a way the environment is stacked against them right but it doesn't absolve them from doing their best to build themselves up like you have to do that anyway no matter what happens yeah mentioned i wanted to ask you um tell me more about like that idea of getting laid off at like the first time you're like towards the like you're at the arc of your career and you get laid off that had to be like personally i want to talk about this idea of whether it's some guy in their 20s just got their first engineering job and now claude's doing everything or it's you you're the peak of your career basically the top you get laid off it's almost i don't know it feels personal right like this our identity is tied up especially the software engineers i don't know it's just maybe it's something with i suppose it applies to every sector but i still i feel especially for software engineers you know we have this pride in what we do and the languages we learn we get it connected to certain tools and like it becomes part of our identity you know we buy t-shirts and we talk about it that must have been hard to like separate yourself from like it was brutal it was brutal daniel like the thing is my layoff has has been actually a bit been a very good experience from the perspective of the average layoff right talking to people on my channel and sub stack It sounds like a lot of layoffs are very kind of like transactional, like very rough affairs.

40:55My layoff was in comparison, extremely, extremely denying, right? I was essentially given advanced warning weeks ahead of time from my leadership. Like, hey, man, this is happening. Your name on a list. And it got to the point where like people were apologizing to me, like, we're sorry, this has to happen, right? There's nothing I can do. And then it got to the point where I was able to get knowledge of like, hey, there's other people on the list more junior than me. And I was able to sort of like work it in such a way that like they get saved. They get to keep their jobs for a little bit longer.

41:31Right. And putting myself to the front of that list. And at the end of that entire process, the big tech company that I work for gave me a very decent severance. So it was comparatively a really great experience. But even then, I came off of it with a really, really bad mental sort of headspace, right? There's the emotion of shock and disbelief. Like you build, as you say, you build your personality into your craft and your career. What does it mean if it's gone all of a sudden? That's shock. It's like absolute shock, right? And then afterwards, for me, there was essentially the dual sense of one despair and just sadness and just incredible depression.

42:19And then on the second hand, and maybe part of my upbringing as part of an Asian family, this deep sense of shame. Like somehow I'm less of a man if I'm not in a technical leadership role at a big tech company. Like my manhood is being questioned because of it. so it was really bad it was really really bad and it takes time and it takes effort and and really soul searching to sort of mentally navigate a way out of it and that that was my experience of that layout yeah i feel like it's important especially in tech just to like be healthy right burnout's a thing we just need to be healthy people need to have hobbies they need to read books, they need to go outside, be healthy, work in here, enjoy mowing your grass.

43:06A hundred percent. It's just like find things in the real world that aren't digital, that, you know, have meaning and purpose and you can find enjoyment. And then there's lots of stuff. Go ride a bike, go walk, go for a hike, go fishing. I don't know. It's like, there's a whole world out there and life is more than digital. I cannot agree more with you, Daniel. life is way more than the stuff you do in front of a computer screen yeah because there's always like i mean this ai revolution has proved there's before ai came there was always somebody younger and smarter than you coming along i'm sure you saw that i felt the same like there's always someone who's going to work harder than you write better code than you have more energy than you have more time than you to like outcode you and now it's like then 10x right now ai can do that And that was always the case.

43:55You know, we can't put our identity in how well I write breast code or something. There's always going to be somebody better. It was always going to happen, right? It's 100 % true. And there's this, in my opinion, very human tendency for some guys and myself included to sort of fight the effects of aging, right? Because even as I was getting older, I think I'm a couple of years older than you. I notice, hey, I'm slowing down. I can't learn a new framework. I can't learn this crap that quickly anymore. Right. And still I try, like I would like burn the midnight oil trying to learn and keep up and show that I can code just as good as the younger guys.

44:34But at some point, you know, a man needs to just accept the fact that like, hey, aging is a natural process and there's always going to be some guy that's faster and smarter. And maybe he's not even a guy. He's just a piece of code running on a server somewhere. Right. You just got to find your different cycles of life. And you have kids, just like I have a couple of kids and you just got to enjoy the moment, like be thankful that you're here alive, you're with your family, just enjoy, enjoy your life for what it is for today. You know, it's a blessing to be here. Just go outside, enjoy the sunshine or rain or whatever you're in.

45:08It's like a hundred percent agree with that. It's like your, your life, your existence, your family, your loved one, that that's more important in the grand scheme of things than any title that you got working for a company somewhere in my opinion yeah i wanted to before we run out of time i wanted to ask you about like your because i create content you obviously i'll leave links to all your stuff in the show notes wherever you're listening or watching this is going um was that like what do you think about content creation in the age of iai were you doing did you just like dive in headfirst and kind of you had to learn everything really quickly or were you kind of like doing sort of because some people have been writing blogs for years and what's or was this kind of like content new to you did you get to learn new skills.

45:52Yeah, this is entirely new to me. I've actually never done vlogs in my life. The reason, as I mentioned earlier, why I started the YouTube channel is because I needed a place to vent. I was in a state of depression and my therapist at the time, she just recommended like, hey, why don't you journal it all down? And vlogging was easier than writing paragraphs and paragraphs of my thoughts. And so with that, though, once it my very first V-log at the time went viral, then I started researching like, hey, how do you how do you produce content better? Right. Things like lighting and like video editing and putting like little animations and stuff, things like using automations to be able to take the content and splicing and dicing it to be more appropriate for different platforms and so on.

46:42but it's been a fun journey because there's a technical aspect of it that's pretty cool and i would highly encourage people to consider journaling in either written or video form as a therapeutic kind of outlet and if it makes money all the better because you can always get a little bit more money that's always fun you learn new skills right you learn you're either written or you know video whatever you have to learn right if you're talking about something And you really have to internalize what you're talking about, what you're learning. It makes you think. And again, like you said, like we mentioned before, you learn new skills.

47:19You start to think about, oh, like whether it's new technology, right? How do I take this piece of content and split it up? Or how do I learn? That's right. It's just fun. Like it's fun to figure these things out. For sure. Anything else you want to leave? Any like words of wisdom for, you know, young tech people out there today from a financial or life perspective if they're worried about what's going to happen to me? Any words of wisdom for them? Yeah, just a couple of things, right? One, for work, stay flexible. Stay flexible. Be open to different things. That's how you maximize your chance of essentially doing well in your career.

47:59Okay? In terms of living your life, live below your means, but know what makes your life comfortable and good, right? Don't become a miser. Just live below your means while still maintaining a happy and decent life. Take the difference, invest it in things that can preserve your principle and have a good, decent return on investment, but not on a speculation. And if you do all of that, I think you're gonna do just fine. AI or no AI. Yeah. Humans are amazingly resilient, right? The human spirit's amazing. We can go through a lot of things, more than we think we can. You're proof of that. Yeah, there's hope for the future.

48:42It's a lot about attitude, right? There's always hope for the future. That's right. It's all about attitude. You know, even with AI coming to take us all away, we'll smile as it takes us away, right? No, I think we might be able to drop a little poison bomb in there and cause the entire neural network to collapse. that will be the topic of a future vlog i think there you go that's awesome well i appreciate your time today it's fun talking great it's a pleasure daniel yeah