AsianDadEnergy's Substack Podcast

Over the Fourth of July weekend, my dad, my son, and I went on one of our annual boys club fishing trips. Between catching countless panfish, my dad brought up a topic that instantly transported me back to my teenage years. He told me that I needed to do everything possible to get my son into a prestigious Ivy League university. To him, this was obvious. To me, it was deeply unsettling. I spent mo...

When I got laid off from my Big Tech job late last year, I thought I knew what came next. Shock. Anger. Shame. Sadness. If you’ve ever been laid off, you probably know the feeling. It is as if someone has ripped away not just your paycheck, but your identity. After spending twenty five years in the technology industry, I suddenly found myself unemployed. Meanwhile, every week seemed to bring anoth...

Every once in a while, I experience a feeling that I’m not particularly proud of. It’s the feeling that everybody else is rich. They all seem to have more money than I do. Bigger houses. Newer cars. Better vacations. Better lives. And somehow, despite everything I’ve accomplished, I feel like I’m falling behind. These days it doesn’t happen very often, but every now and then it sneaks up on me. Ma...

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a debate that has been making the rounds in software engineering circles. The spark came from Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic and the creator of Claude Code, arguably the most influential AI Agentic Coding harness in the world today. During a podcast appearance, Boris made a statement that immediately grabbed my attention: Coding is largely a solved proble...

A few days ago, my wife received a credit card in the mail from a company we had never used. Apparently, someone had opened an account in her name. Naturally, I assumed identity theft and immediately called the credit card company to shut the account down and find out what information had been used to create it. After spending twenty minutes navigating an infuriating AI phone system, I finally rea...

A recent experience with Claude 5 Fable left me both impressed and deeply unsettled. Hello world. I am an unemployed former Big Tech software engineer with twenty five years of experience building software systems. Over the past week, I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole that I did not expect to be quite so deep. That rabbit hole was Claude 5 Fable. Fable is widely described as a consumer-fa...

Six months ago, I lost my job. At the time, it felt like a catastrophe. After spending twenty-five years working in technology, employment had become such a constant in my life that I could barely imagine an existence without it. Work was the backdrop against which everything else happened. It structured my days, determined where I lived, influenced my relationships, and shaped my identity. When t...

Every few weeks, a new headline appears claiming that AI is becoming unsustainably expensive. Companies are reportedly burning through millions of dollars a month on AI subscriptions. Some organizations are discovering that employees can consume astonishing quantities of tokens when every workflow becomes an AI workflow. There are even stories circulating of teams whose AI bills now exceed the cos...

Every once in a while, I make the mistake of opening LinkedIn. I know I should not. For an unemployed former Big Tech engineer, LinkedIn often feels like an abusive relationship. I log in knowing there is a good chance I will encounter some combination of layoffs, humblebrags, AI hype, and carefully curated success stories that leave me questioning every major life decision I have ever made. And y...

Hello world, One strange side effect of unemployment is that it gives you something modern life rarely provides anymore. Time. For twenty five years I worked in tech. Like many engineers, I spent most of my adult life sprinting from deadline to deadline, project to project, quarter to quarter. There was always another problem to solve and another fire to put out. Then one day the treadmill stopped...

The Future That Quietly Keeps Me Up at Night Hello world, For the first time in more than two decades, I suddenly found myself with something I hadn’t had in years: Time. After spending 25 years as a software engineer in big tech, I entered what I jokingly call my “involuntary early retirement.” And when your daily rhythms disappear, your mind starts wandering into strange places. Mine wandered in...

Another week passes and another wave of layoffs crashes through the technology industry like a tidal wave. At this point, the disappearance of thousands of highly experienced engineers has become so common that it barely shocks anyone anymore. Entire departments vanish overnight. Decades of institutional knowledge disappear behind a carefully worded email and a severance package. But there is anot...

Mother’s Day weekend took us to Pennsylvania to visit my parents. At some point during dinner at a fancy Chinese restaurant, an amusing but strangely revealing family intervention unfolded across the table. Two of the three most important women in my life joined forces against the third. My mother and my wife began criticizing the way I raise my eight-year-old daughter. According to my mother, I’m...

Hello world. I’m an unemployed ex–Big Tech software engineer, watching from the outside as the industry I helped build pours billions into its next obsession: quantum computing . Some say it’s the next trillion-dollar industry. Others say it will dwarf the current AI boom. And having briefly stepped into that world myself… I understand the excitement. I also understand the madness. The Promise: A...

Reflections from an unemployed ex–Big Tech engineer navigating a changing world Hello world. For the first time in more than two decades, I find myself standing outside the system I once helped build. After 25 years in the tech industry, I am now an unemployed former software engineer. A title I never imagined I would carry. And yet, every week, that story becomes less unusual. The headlines keep...

There was a moment at a small, crowded Chinese restaurant in Queens that I haven’t been able to shake. I’ve been on an unexpected pause in life lately, an ex–big tech software engineer with 25 years behind the keyboard, now suddenly finding himself with more time than he ever asked for. Time, as it turns out, is a strange thing when it stops being rationed by meetings and deadlines. It starts reve...

Hello world, There’s something oddly clarifying about involuntary stillness. After 25 years in big tech, I didn’t expect “early retirement” to be the thing that finally gave me perspective but here we are. When the noise of deadlines, stand-ups, and quarterly targets fades, you start to notice the infrastructure of your own life. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. We’ve outsourced more than...

Hello world, I’m an unemployed ex–big tech software engineer with 25 years in the industry. That sentence tends to land somewhere between confession and credibility, depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Lately, I’ve been watching the rise of something… strange. Not AI itself, that part makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the explosion of AI Doomerism . Everywhere you look, there are hea...

After 25 years in the tech industry, I never expected to be here—unemployed, months removed from Big Tech, and living what can only be described as an involuntary early retirement . And yet, something surprising happened. Despite losing a high income, my family of four is living comfortably on under $5,000 a month , in a high-cost area near New York City. Let that sink in. The Anatomy of a “Modest...

It’s been over 100 days since I was laid off from Big Tech after a 25+ year career in the tech industry. What followed wasn’t panic or fear, but something far more complex: a complete rewiring of how I think about work, identity, and purpose. The Shock of Losing More Than a Job At first, the layoff felt surreal. There was a brief period of disorientation like a system crash without an error messag...

It’s another week, another wave of layoffs, and once again the same question bubbles to the surface: who or what is really responsible? For many American software engineers, the H-1B visa program has become an easy target. A symbol of job insecurity. A quiet, persistent threat. But after 25 years in the industry, I’ve come to believe something more uncomfortable: The problem isn’t the people. It’s...

I didn’t expect to find it in my home office, finishing up a quick side project. But there it was, a realization that hit harder than any production outage I’ve ever debugged: What used to take a startup, millions in funding, and months of work… now takes one person a few days. And that changes everything. The Assumption That Built an Empire For the past 30 years, our economy has quietly revolved...

These days, in my unexpected post–Big Tech era, I spend a fair amount of time cooking for my family. There are worse fates. On this particular day, I was making stir-fried pork and turnips, which felt appropriate somehow: humble ingredients, a little heat, a little patience, and the faint possibility that if you look away for too long, everything burns. Which, now that I think about it, is also a...

The other day, I was standing at a gas pump, watching the numbers climb beside my aging Honda CR-V, when something felt… off. Gas prices had jumped nearly 40% in a single week. That kind of movement doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not random. It’s not seasonal. It’s a signal. And right now, that signal is pointing straight at a rapidly escalating conflict in the Persian Gulf. War as a Terrible In...

Hello world. Not long ago, I was a senior software engineer in Big Tech, part of an industry that once felt like the unstoppable engine of the modern economy. For more than 25 years, my days were structured around product launches, sprint cycles, code reviews, and the comforting illusion that there would always be another project waiting on Monday morning. Then came an unexpected change in employm...