In the middle of 2022, I felt the need to switch the team or the company. My then employer encouraged lateral moves. But since I was so sure about changing, I was exploring outside as well. Since around July 2022, tech companies started laying off in large numbers. It caused me to rethink. I gave as much importance to internal move as to external one.

In parallel timelines, I got both an internal offer to move to the team working on KubeVirt as well as an external offer from a SaaS-focussed database company. The former offered a measly 3% salary hike, while the latter offered more than 30% hike in fixed salary plus a great (to me) amount of stocks that would vest every year. But, according to balance sheet, that company was loss-making.

Before I could make up my mind, ChatGPT was announced on Nov 30, 2022. As if the series of layoffs that started n July 2022 wasn’t enough, the internet was flooded with doomsday predictions for software engineers’ job market. The combination of incessant layoffs and AI predictions made me panic. I chose to make a lateral move.

Don’t get me wrong, the work on KubeVirt was amazing. I loved every bit of it because no day was less than a challenge on the technical front. And I was working in a team of super smart individuals who knew Linux Virtualization extremely well. But the other role was a pure Go backend role with almost no Kubernetes—something I had been craving for at that point in time. My reasoning to the hiring team at Couchbase was consistent—I feared the aspect that the company was not profitable on the books, and staying at Red Hat felt “safer” as the sole breadwinner in the house. My friends who know the details, still make fun of me for leaving that offer. 😄

Four months later, in April 2023, Red Hat announced its first-ever round of layoffs. I wasn’t impacted, but it scared the hell out of me. I received a ping from one of the members of the hiring team at Couchbase asking how I felt about it. Obviously, I wasn’t feeling good. Anyway, I eventually moved to SUSE in April 2024, most importantly for financial reasons.

How’s all this relevant to AI journey? Maybe it’s not. I’m just establishing context! 😉

The Anxious Individual phase — late 2022 to early 2026 Link to heading

Since ChatGPT’s launch till a few months back, I have stayed very anxious and afraid of coding tools coming after my job. And in India, the labour laws aren’t how they are in the EU. Companies don’t need to give you a heads-up before reducing headcount. As numerous folks have shared their experience, you just wake up one day to find out you are no longer employed by means of not being able to log in to your company laptop. The oversimplification of this thing is scary!

The way the leaders of companies building frontier models keep claiming about how AI is going to make every job, and especially software development, obsolete is nothing short of fear inducing and mental health f**kery unputdownable in words. This caused me to stay at some distance from AI tools. I would still use it for my job, but I was never curious about AI itself. About any of its technicalities. The fear, anxiety, and stress kept increasing because I mainly read the headlines. For someone who claims to love books and reading, it was so wrong to just go by headlines that are meant to feed, cause, and grow mostly the negative emotions.

Before the end of 2025, I made a lateral move within SUSE and joined a team that’s doing some foundational work at the union of Linux & Kubernetes. Imagine working on Kubernetes Operators and Linux low-level things like initramfs, booting process, ignition, etc. at the same time. The work is interesting; every day is a challenge, I learn new stuff everyday, and there’s usually no precedent to follow. There’s novelty in how the end product should look, feel, and work.

The Absolutely Interested phase Link to heading

I now use AI tools to brainstorm now and then, to make it write code or tests (which I run & review first before opening a PR), and, most importantly, as an overall research buddy so that I don’t turn up in a meeting or PR review sounding completely dumb/naive! 😉

Of course, I see how fast these tools are progressing at doing my job faster and, sometimes, better. Sure, I see how they make me a better engineer and thinker sooner than I could have become without using them.

But by reading and listening to the conversations beyond just the headlines has helped me cope and come out of the uncomfortable cocoon I was earlier in. Since I am still surrounded by super smart individuals at work, I silently follow the conversations about their experiences with AI and their thoughts on fearmongering headlines. Some recent podcast episodes, like this one from Cal Newport and this one from Adam Gordon Bell, have filled me with hope.

I am starting to feel interested in conversations about technicalities of AI like tokens, base models, distillation, quantization, etc., and learn more about these topics. Heck, I even succeeded in running a couple of models—Qwen3 8B and Gemma4 4B—locally over the past weekend. While it’s probably a “meh” thing in 2026, it made me feel surprisingly good about doing and using it.

That’s it! Link to heading

In spite of the gradual change of my mental state, I’m still consciously aware that job safety is not guaranteed. The world of software, which felt like a safe haven when I entered the job market, is now anything but safe!

But I’m happy about the return of curiosity and energy that I seemed to have forgotten the feeling of in mind & body, and excited about the evolution of the larger AI journey which we are only in the beginning of! 😄