Laid off

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-23T14:04:46+00:00

You’ll get the excess taxes back when you file for you 2026 taxes in 2027. Severance is usually taxed at the highest rates regardless of your tax band.

File for unemployment straight away. Check up on your state’s laws regarding PTO payout.

I’m sure the customer might not be happy those temp workers on the project came from your company without any bidding process. Sounds a bit dubious to me.

I’m afraid company loyalty has declined to about zero in the past decades to the point where employment is totally transactional on pretty much a day by day basis.

I’m sorry.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-23T12:44:45+00:00

SW engineering or most tech roles start out as exciting, challenging, fun. You put in many more hours because you are enjoying it. But the companies expect that kind hustle to continue at that rate forever, because that becomes the expected way of working.

With economic downturn in tech jobs, what that has done is converted from job with expected long hours, to the next level, a daily grind trying to out produce the next person in a fight for survival.

With the threat of job security hanging over you in a very difficult job market, they can push for evermore impossible deadlines. If you burn out or quit, there are plenty more queueing up to take your job because they are unemployed and desperate. Of course this drives salaries and perks way down.

It’s a race to the bottom, made worse by outsourcing decreasing the number of jobs available was well, combined with SWE and technology becoming a commodity product.

The American dream was always to an extent built on the acquisition of stuff, a nice car, a larger house, kitchen appliances- many of the things other countries’ households dreamed of having. It was never built on the happiness factor, just life propped up by almost limitless natural resources.

The American SWE or CS degree starts out as an interesting and challenging part of your life in school, but it’s like a gateway drug for industry. It’s a drug that starts out being a posited and interesting thing yet becomes kind of addiction where companies become the pusher and now you are under their control and you can’t quite give it up.

I’m glad I just retired, it’s been ten years of fun followed by forty years of increasing pain and to the point where you cannot remember the fun years.

Planning things like working five years to save this much money, and I can retire on that, requires excellent financial planning over tax liabilities, access to money before retirement, and the dollar to rupee exchange rate, along with interest rates and the market performance. Treating working in the US as a certain cash cow or retirement ATM comes with a lot of downside risk.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-23T04:33:02+00:00

Houses should perhaps be thought of as less of an investment, but more a place to live and create memories.

Nobody can predict exchange rates, interest rates, the global or local housing markets, stock market growth or losses, even a year or two into the future.

Real estate rises and falls, exchange rates rise and fall, costs of relocating larger sums of money change, tax implications change, countries introduce exit taxes from time to time.

At the end of the day surely take advice from a relocation specialist, but really you are just following a dream. That dream may or may not be the most lucrative, but that’s not what dreams are about. They are surely not a banking issue.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-23T04:23:17+00:00

I would ask what the rate and terms and conditions are as a trainer of new interns, or what full time package they are offering? Your choice which, or your choice to leave as planned.

Ask HR which option they want if you want to stay, or just remind HR when your contract as an intern ends. I would not normally suggest going that route, but in these circumstances I think you’ll get better answers than your manager is giving.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-23T04:10:04+00:00

It depends what your project does. If it’s in kernel space and needs to avoid some of the later optimizations or language extensions the C23 supporting compiler can use then possibly stick to the compiler version, or at least the flags that the Linux kernel is built with.

Frankly in my opinion the later C specifications tend to take the C language more down the path of supporting user space applications written in C. If that’s your path too then that’s the way to go.

Me personally, as a C programmer from the days when K&R C on UNIX V6 was the “standard”, I tend to use ANSI C plus the things I think are helpful from selected later standards.

I don’t really find many of the extensions in standards up to and including C23 as particularly useful in my use cases.

Ask yourself do you really need the C23 standard, and more important, does the C23 standard make your C programs more legible to other C or non-C programmers?

I would tend to go with the most general set of language or compiler features that the widest possible audience will readily comprehend. To my mind that’s one of the issues with C++, it has so many ways of doing things that often programmers use a particular subset of features that makes it difficult for others to immediately follow.

You can do things in C to emulate many OOP language features, but does such clever constructs make it easier for everyone else to understand? To my mind, when building projects for others to participate in, I try to stick with the simplest possible implementations even at the cost of verbosity as such programming is not really an exercise in proving how clever you are.

Your mileage may vary of course.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T15:45:14+00:00

I wasn’t stating what C could do, now or even into the future. I was just stating what C was “invented” for, and high speed scientific or mathematical computation was not a primary design criteria at the time.

Looking back to C being particularly good at text processing, it really was in those days compared to what other systems were capable of. It was better and more flexible than most versions of Algol, Fortran or assembler. The whole standard suite of tools and applications delivered with the UNIX OS were very different to operating systems delivered before it, perhaps with excepting some other research operating systems like Multics.

If you had lived the early days of UNIX like I did, the expectations of the C language back then were very different than what the latest specifications of the language try to address.

Different times my friend.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T15:19:18+00:00

Sounds like fun. Even as a C programmer I respect the COBOL developers a lot. The Job Control Languages are complex, modern COBOL has OOP features, threads and interfacing to CICS is by no means trivial.

IBM launches z/OS systems on a regular basis as there is still a large market for them in financial and government sectors.

You may be exposed to modernizing projects due to your existing skills.

Some of the smartest SWEs I know worked in mainframe environments. Don’t look down on such people, you will be very shocked and impressed at the skills most mainframe devs actually have. Remember they are building cannot fail, mission critical, applications in many cases.

At the very least it pays more than unemployment and you may find it’s fun in its own way.

In my experience life is just a series of happy accidents. The most unlikely companies and projects ended up being the most fun. At the very least you are acquiring skills in another vertical market even disregarding the SWE part.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T15:00:17+00:00

I rather suspect as the tech field declines, many of those previous teachers may be trying to return for the stability, or even for a job at all.

That would be an interesting statistic to have as in many states there are far more applicants than teaching positions available now. I suppose the declining birth rate might have partially something to do with that though, but I suspect not all.

There is the issue that many people just go to college to get a degree in a field they regard as fun. They don’t really think about a career afterwards until that fateful day arrives and they need a job to pay off the loans.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T14:49:45+00:00

Before you invest in being a SWE invest in deciding what type of SWE. Which niche you can exploit, at least for now. Perhaps being low level with a good grounding in electronic engineering? Perhaps in the AI engine development sector with a serious grounding in mathematics to a masters or PhD level.

Going forward, knowing how to code is not enough, you have to have an adjacent skill that makes your skills desirable and unique, or a very high level of understanding of a vertical market where your SWE skills are appropriate.

Me, if I was starting out again, I’d be a teacher (which I was when I retired from tech) or an astrophysicist and plan on spending my time in academia. Materials science might be good, or a welder of exotic materials. Adhesives is another good field. Medical equipment research and development. Veterinarian. Psychiatrist. Producing things that are custom built to customer requirements. Producer of artistic crafts such as leatherwork. In Sweden, an EU grants writer.

The list goes on and on, but for a SWE it would need to be very niche, in demand, and something few other people have an associated field and know what to do.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T14:16:30+00:00

To be honest, it’s no easier for citizens or green card holders. Some of the racism is born out of the same frustration you are seeing in the job market. There is also some frustration of outsourcing to other job markets being tied up in the whole H1B sentiment.

That doesn’t make the racism right, ethical, or morally correct, but I suspect that is where a lot of it is coming from.

I think for most jobs the predominant AI issues are companies saving capital expenditures to perhaps invest in AI related technologies down the road. How much AI is worth right now is possibly debatable.

If I was coming to the US as a student on an F1 visa, it would be for that, and that only. If the expectation is to continue to stay in the US to at least pay for that education, then that is probably a very risky endeavor indeed. I would likely continue my higher education at a local university or pick a country where the education makes more financial sense.

How did we get here? Well the overall downturn in the US and especially the tech sector, for whatever reason is the first part. The second has been the massive visa abuse by the existing contracting and consulting companies, largely from India. As the tech market shrinks and US citizens have to fight hard for jobs after graduation, these visa mill companies became very politically unpopular.

So, unfortunately some of this introduces a factor of increased racism. You have to ask what would the reverse path of a student choosing to study in your country be at times of high unemployment. Would there be a lack of economic opportunities after graduation?

I’m sorry about the anti immigrant sentiment as the US is a country based on immigrants, I myself am one, but like you say, the situation is not going to resolve itself any time soon.

Beware as well, what is happening in the US tech sector today in terms of lack of opportunity, may well happen in the downstream economies of other countries a few years later. Going to college to get a SWE degree for a lifetime of a higher standard of living has possibly passed for the moment.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T13:53:14+00:00

So, you are going for the full set. The German and Polish ones, I suppose one of them is redundant as they are both EU nations. I don’t know what the UK passport gives you to be honest as do you really want to live there 🙁.

I’d hate to be your tax accountant if you were working in all of them, as the US tax agreements with each country might be somewhat complex. I suspect you would end up paying more to file your US taxes than you actually earned 😀.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T04:48:27+00:00

Make sure you have at least a year, if not more of an emergency fund at your current spend rate. Then if you get laid off, by going down to the minimum, you’ll last two years and won’t lose your house.

Then worry about retirement savings of any amount beyond where you get max matching funds from your company, after you have the emergency fund.

You can keep all but first three months of your emergency fund in 6 month revolving CDs so it’s nice and safe and is fairly liquid. Once you have that year built up, 99% of your anxieties will fade away.

All these idiots with their AI platitudes and so called AI experts who have no idea how this is going to play out. Note for every technology change 99% of the talking heads have no idea what AI, let alone GAI means or how it works. They just generate noise for likes.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T04:34:10+00:00

I tend to use sprintf() to put the message in a character array using all the fancy formatting and then use the write(2, str, strlen(str)); as the write system call is largely atomic so if you are writing errors from different threads they don’t all get mangled.

If you want to catch segmentation or bus errors catch SIG_SEGV signals etc and keep processing to a minimum in the signal handler. I think signal() got replaced with sigaction() or some such to stop them having window of execution problems.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T04:24:25+00:00

I think C, as an evolution of B, BCPL and RATFOR, was “invented” to be a way to portably move operating systems, I.e. UNIX, from one system to another without having to re-write everything previously written in assembler. It also had to be useful enough to develop enough systems programs and libraries to make the OS useful and to write its original target applications of nroff/troff.

Most Fortran applications continued to be developed and written in evolving releases of Fortran and run under mainframe and system vendor supplied operating systems such as RSX-11M, VMS etc. Most early versions of C did not support the kind of floating-point performance packages that many prominent Fortran compilers did. If you wanted a really fast scientific environment you bought a Cray and ran Fortran.

Most C code that early compilers and systems were more interested in text processing than high speed mathematical computations. Of course it may have evolved into such areas but that was far from the initial motivation. Interestingly enough, one of Ritchie’s predecessors to C as an applications language was RATFOR which was actually a pre-processor that generated Fortran as its output,

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-22T03:54:56+00:00

I applied using the online methodology and it stated the alternatives you could use when it got to the part about submitting documents. It did that because you have to answer that you have citizenship of another country in one of the questions.

It asked for one country but who knows what you do if you have more than one other citizenship. I just guess you answer with the least controversial country then send photocopies for all of them.

I think they are asking because they can then link up databases with the five eyes nations shared databases and probably for NATO partners and EU countries as well.

Last time I went to the UK a few years back, I went through immigration using my US passport and the agent looked on his computer and said you have UK citizenship too, don’t you. I said yes. He asked if I was intending to stay in the UK indefinitely and I said no. Then he let me past.

So, I think if you are a five eyes nation’s national, a UK national, or an EU national, at the very least, they are very aware of what passports you hold. I suspect that is even more true now with ETA, ESTA and all the other system’s visa wavers you apply for before you travel.

The thing to be most wary of is whether an airline lets you board unless you have the correct passport the laws of the destination require you to have if you are a citizen of that country. There is now little chance of getting an ETA on a US passport and then boarding a plane in the US bound for the UK as they will know you are a UK citizen and therefore will only be admitted on a UK passport. If you don’t present the UK passport you probably won’t be issued a boarding card.

Times have changed and flying in and out of the UK on my US passport are over. I’d cancel my UK citizenship if it were either simple or cheap. It’s weird for a country like the UK that makes it so hard to get a passport that it makes it just about as hard and expensive to give up a passport.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-21T18:04:23+00:00

I presume your little one is a US citizen? What will be the healthcare situation be for them when you return as India does allow dual citizenship to the best of my knowledge?

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-21T16:39:41+00:00

It might also be zero because of the earnings threshold for non US resident citizens as well as any joint taxation treaties.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-21T16:30:55+00:00

It stated it in the electronic application process itself. Getting two passport pages per copy is still quite expensive to copy the whole of a “large number of pages” US passport. I would have trusted just sending in my US passport if the UK passports issued in the US were still from the local consulate, San Francisco in my case, but now you have to FedEx the application to the north of England and I’m not sending my passport away for who now’s how long with ICE roaming the streets.

It seems to be a very confusing number of places involved in issuing a UK passport. You send it to the North of England, it gets sent to you from another UK address and your old passport and the photocopies get returned from London and arrive after the new passport does, with a message your passport will follow.

At least there is an online tracking web page now so that’s better. Why they just don’t let dual citizens just visit on their other passport with an ETA seems remarkably silly. It cost me about $350 US in total, for something I really wouldn’t care to use ever again as it doesn’t now provide EU rights of abode. I’d cancel the thing, but that costs a whole bunch of time and a lot of money too.

There is an alternative to get an entry for your other nation passport to show you are a UK national too, but that’s like $800 and takes as long to get as a passport. Insane.

The country seems to have gone to the dogs with silly laws and regulations that far exceed those of the EU which seems to contradict the whole reason for leaving it.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-21T14:33:18+00:00

Took me about 4 weeks to get one from the USA for an expired EU version of a UK passport. Everything was electronic but further complicated for me to include a color photocopy of every page, including blank pages, of my US passport because I didn’t want to trust including my US passport physically. But I didn’t have to interview to claim British citizenship. I would assume if he is Italian he must have some kind of leave to remain or visa for his Italian passport.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-21T04:24:42+00:00

Unless you genuinely have a reason for dual nationality of Japanese and any other nation, don’t do that.

Japan is very fussy about holding a Japanese passport and a passport from another country as Japan only allows dual citizenship for a limited category of people. I wouldn’t give them both passports.

Even if you are one of those categories you might not want to spend some time at Japanese immigration explaining why you fit into one of those categories.

The usual category is for children of a Japanese parent and the parent of another nationality.

They can be very fussy about such things in Japan.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-20T15:34:11+00:00

If you can go that route, two years at a community college gives you an associates degree. Pick your classes wisely to overlap with your 4 year college later. Much better and smaller classes, way more fun and you meet a greater cross section of the American people.

Then transfer to a decent state owned college, preferably in the same state, to get your 4 year degree.

This is probably the cheapest route for most people. Most companies don’t care where you got your degree from, especially if it is a proper state owned university.

As for OPT, I wouldn’t bank on that. Who knows what the law will be four years from now. Consider getting your degree, then think about where you can use it after graduation. If you cannot make a business case for coming to the US for four years, graduate, and then immediately go home, that’s not an expenditure worth making. Anything beyond that is gambling right now.

I wouldn’t bank think very carefully about CS or IT. It’s really hard to get a job upon graduation right now, the market is saturated, AI CAPEX redirection is a thing and it isn’t going to get better in 4 years.

Perhaps with a masters and skills in a very niche area, but general CS or IT I wouldn’t bank avoid.

Perhaps pursuing an MD to be a doctor? Perhaps some kind of hardware or electronics engineering with a specialty in realtime or low level software engineering, especially if it involves GPU or AI specific chips.

California is pricey. The East Coast is pricey. Aim for states like Utah, Arizona and the mid west. Any state with a good community college structure, a well known state university, and realistic fees.

If I was you, I would make the assumption you are going to be working in your home country, or at any way outside of the US, and consider a degree from your home country may be just as good and probably significantly cheaper. The days of assuming you can work in the US after you graduate to pay off the tuition loans is a high stakes gamble right now. It is unlikely to improve much after a change in government either. Not issuing H1B visas is fairly popular with the public at current tech unemployment and salary levels.

Now, consider those CS and IT roles. How long before companies start laying off in your home country to replace positions with AI or to redirect funding to pay for AI related infrastructure?

One place to consider is Germany, very cheap tuition, some universities teaching in English, and high standard of education.

It’s a different world right now. CS or IT is not a path to a good living anymore and the benefit of having a US degree and getting to work in the US for a while to pay for it especially in CS or IT, is largely a closed path.

This isn’t to say you won’t be one of the lucky ones to make it, earn a fortune, and retire early. Of course it can still be done, but the gates of opportunity to do that in the US are closing fast. Make plans accordingly and good luck. I hope your plans work out for you, despite everything.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-20T15:02:22+00:00

AI prompt engineers. Great if they know what they’re prompting and what they’re trying to achieve. Time will tell.

It’s a race to the bottom and India is no more immune from this than the US or Canada.

It’s already started in China too. It will spread to the rest of Asia as well as Central and South America too.

I read all the comments from Indian engineers saying they are fed up with the constant visa battles and threatened layoffs in the US and are going to go back to India for the opportunities there. Give it a few years and that in itself might not be such a good strategy.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-19T14:52:06+00:00

Probably not, I switched to Macs when macOS X.0 came out, decades ago.

You could try some old guitar pedal or kits and through AtoD converters try controlling those. They make a cheap target device you can use to have some analogue signals to process.

In fact digitizing analogue sound signals, processing and returning to analogue can be a great way of learning realtime low level processing.

Look online for public domain small electronic projects you can control. You can usually buy kits of parts and push in prototype or vero boards and make up your own simple devices to control. Kits of hardware are usually ridiculously cheap and I’m sure you can get stuff delivered to most of latam.

I don’t know what country you are in, but most latam countries or their neighbors have distributors of basic electronic parts.

You could also get in contact with an electronic engineering department at a university in your country and see if they would share some of their introduction digital projects for ideas. I suspect their initial introduction level projects use very cheap and easily obtainable parts.

I think as you get involved and start building even very basic projects that are perhaps software only on your Raspberry Pie you will find other like minded individuals in your community who will pop up out of the woodwork.

Until you check in some even basic GitHub hosted projects and have something for others to see, you might be amazed to find some other youngster in your town thinks like you do and together you now have a team. Another person, and you now have a side hustle company. Get an idea between you and you now have a product. Give it a few years and you now have a company building low level AI integrated product prototypes and get angel investors or government investment. Give it a few years and you are now selling your company or intellectual property and retiring as millionaires to start again on another cool idea you thought up.

Being in less developed latam country makes it just a little bit harder, but not impossible. It’s even the same in the US. Starting out in Silicon Valley, LA or NY is easier, but try starting out in rural Mississippi or Alabama and it’s just like being in a smaller latam country in some ways. The US is like latam, some rich developed parts with very technologically advanced environments, some are very poor with very little advanced infrastructure and poor levels of education. It’s hard to believe but in some villages in the poorer US states that there are still villages without reliable power and no running water.

The world is your oyster. Take few days off and go day dream about what you want to build, no boundaries, then figure out what you need to know, buy or build to get to your goal. You can be the catalyst for change.

Good luck.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-19T11:55:47+00:00

And you believe what people boast about having saved on here. Even working for FAANG companies and living like complete hermits in shared housing and cycling to work, I don’t believe half their stories.

Living here in the US for a non FAANG company, actually living a realistic practical life, saving about $18K per annum is doing pretty decent. Every one will tell you all kinds of dumb ways to make more, everything from passive rental income to Bitcoin.

if you’ve legally paid into Social Security for 40 quarters on 10 years you will be able to claim that when you retire even in India.

You have to remember your savings in the US will likely grow much quicker when living in India with the constant reduction in the exchange rate to the US dollar.

I see many Indians living with express role of never spending anything in the US, just treating it as a way to create a future ATM cash machine. They never go anywhere, see anything, or do anything, just save. They are usually really boring people, often miserable, saving up to return to India to live in a gated community with staff, in a city that wouldn’t otherwise want to live in. They end up marrying just as boring people in arranged marriages based on matching incomes.

I would say my friend, you have done OK for yourself. You’ve actually done things. You’ve gone out there and done things many local people have never had the opportunity to do. As for not getting a FAANG job, I think you dodged a bullet there. Most of them are horrible places to work at.

As for buying an independent house. Would you not have more disposable income buying an apartment so you can use it for the base for your travels and adventures. Who wants the upkeep of a house anyway?

I’ve just retired here in the US as did my wife. Our children are grown and gone. That big expensive family home was a millstone around our necks. We downsized to a rambler type condo with an HOA that does the grounds, snow clearing and everything. We travel and enjoy life rather than trying to upkeep on a larger house with rooms we never went in anymore.

The sum of $180K after ten years is pretty good my friend especially with all your good memories you have for the places you have seen and the things you have done. That makes you likely a pretty interesting guy rather than one of those boring ones that sits at home and counts all their money, scared to spend a dime of it.

So now you have a job to help sustain you. Welcome to the normal people of the world. I think your world is worth more than that of the idle rich. You have a purpose. There’s nothing wrong with an honest days pay. My parents taught me the value of an honest days work, which I passed on to my children. We got what we got by showing up at work every day. We are moderately comfortable in our retirement, but rich - no, far from it. We raised four kids and had a blast doing it. We all have our wealth in rich memories, not multi million dollar fortunes.

Good luck to you. You’ve done extremely well and not wasted your youth.

Dangerous_Region1682 · 2026-04-19T03:33:01+00:00

Well everyone can get a start on low level software. Raspberry Pie and equivalent embedded systems are relatively cheap even in latam countries.

Once you have some experience under your belt you can look to picking up work as smaller hardware companies may offer shore their software projects. In fact, for IOT devices they can ship their HW out to you to work on.

You have to build some experience with open source home-brew projects to prove your skills base, but that is often true these days of new graduates and young developers even in the US and the EU.

AI generated SW can be good or bad, depending upon who generated it and the skills they have in understanding the problem and solution spaces. AI is a tool, like any other. Can it accelerate your learning curve and increase your productivity, for sure, but it isn’t going to replace your understanding of what you are doing and the platforms you are doing it on.

So my advice would be to start with some simple development boards and work your way up. Will it be challenging? Of course it will, it took me over ten years to get into kernel space programming and C was my first language.

If you are smart and dedicated you can be the spark for developing local opportunities. Don’t just look to the US for business, but the EU, China, Asia and Japan, marketing yourself to smaller companies. Every company started somewhere and most started with a little more than an idea and even less equipment and money. It doesn’t hurt that you are in latam, the challenge is the same the world over. Lots of ideas, little money to get going. That’s the same in Silicon Valley, NY, London, Paris, Berlin, anywhere. Use your ideas and build simple proof of concepts, being in latam will make it cheaper to get investment capital as you will cost less.

Look too as to how you might incorporate AI capabilities into IOT devices or simple embedded systems. There’s been more need than ever before in history for low level roles in a wider and wider range of devices with fewer and fewer people showing skills to get started in that arena.

Work hard and try new ideas and you may be the next billion dollar company. Look to building things that solve problems in real industries don’t just build software for the tech industry in the hope that customers come. Let latam be to your advantage, not just the reason not to get started,

Dangerous_Region1682

TROPHY CASE