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Change brings about many things, some bad, some good, some terrifying, but none mutually exclusive. I’m not pushing boundaries by stating that the world is certainly changing a lot now, in particular. So much has happened in such a short period of time, each year seems to outdo the last with surprises in politics, industry, and life in general. For me, personally, life has changed for the better in many ways. After two full years of school and internships/co-ops, I have finally moved in with my wife and we are planning our twice-delayed wedding ceremony. We are both employed and have moved to a small mobile home next to a creek in a little trailer community in Michigan. I ignore politics as much as I can these days, and that has served me well mentally. But the last piece - industry - is where things have fallen short for me. Needless to say - with the advancements of AI, the economic volatility of modern American capitalism, and the political shitscape to top it all off - I am struggling to find my groove as a recently-graduated computer engineer. What once appeared as anxiety and then burnout has finally revealed itself as grief. In this article, which I’m sure you can tell by now will be quite personal, I want to explore my grief in hopes of relieving my painfully complex emotional state, and maybe helping someone work through their own feelings.
By title I am a junior R&D software developer for a small A/V integrator company. The kind of work I do each day depends on what project has earned customer interest or what kind of tool my company currently needs. This work is slow, non-lucrative, and hardly the type of work I had envisioned myself doing during college, from which I graduated with a computer engineering degree in late 2025. That was one of the worst, if not the worst hiring cycle for computer engineers in history. Four months earlier, I had my heart broken by an electronics design and manufacturing company that I had been interning with for eight months. It had been sixteen months total since I had left for the first of two co-ops, sixteen long months that I spent away from my fiancee while we both white-knuckled less than ideal living situations. This was the most stressful time of my life, but it was something I had prepared for. It was one of many sacrifices I had made throughout a six-year journey through hell in the hopes of securing a job in the field that I had loved and was passionate about. Much to my dismay, fate would have it that only one position for an embedded software engineer would be open by the end, and I was competing with interns who had spent more time at that company than I had. With only four months to go before graduating, my supervisor informed me that I would not be receiving a full-time offer to return post-graduation. Needless to say, I was devastated, and I was scared.
This was the final and biggest bump in my very long, turbulent road through college. An early COVID-era high school graduate, most of my college experience was less than ideal to say the least, though no less expensive. Make no mistake, I would not trade said experience for anything. It rewarded me with the hardness of a working-man scorned, a wide network of treasured friends and colleagues, and the company of a woman I am lucky to call mine. But there were many times throughout that I came so close to throwing in the towel, considering instead trade school, or even returning home to attend a more affordable college closer to my support system. What kept me going was the itch. If you are a STEM academic or perfectionist, you know the itch well. The feeling of actively seeking the solution to a technical problem that had usually been solved thousands of times by thousands of people decades before you ever encountered it, with numerous solutions at your fingertips via the internet. Those predetermined solutions themselves cannot scratch the itch, as the itch is not so much solving the problem, but developing the solution yourself - to derive the method to do so using your own experience and learning.
For me, systems programming was the itch that kept coming back and the one that I could never resist scratching. One of the early computer science courses at MTU was called Programming at the Hardware/Software Interface (CS1142). It was one of the courses computing students took right after the Introduction to Programming courses. Where the intro courses taught programming basics in Java, CS1142 revisited those exact same basics in C. The abstractions of classes, memory safety, syntactic sugar, and extensive standard library modules all but disappeared. Instead, we were left with extensive documents on defined and undefined behavior, from-scratch implementation examples, and tightly-spec’d tasks. I was hooked. And so began my journey with systems programming and C in particular, as I began dedicating the vast majority of my free time (and, admittedly, some of my not-so-free time) to learning C to its fullest extent. I wrote custom allocators and Linux kernel device drivers, I participated in online discourse with the growing low-level community, and even gave presentations on C and why I believed it to be such a great language. The wonderful thing about C is that it is genuinely hard to make anything notable that actually works well without architecting your software - that is, being proactive in your design decisions as to not inconvenience future maintainers. Where the abstractions of other languages seek to relax the perfectionism within the engineer, the looseness of C rewards it. C, to me, was the perfect scratch for the itch.
This is where I believe I took the most steps forward and the most steps backward in my career. When perfectionism is rewarded by the systems you are engineering, it can easily turn to elitism. The philosophy of maintainable and performant software is just as subjective as any philosophy, and that philosophy is at direct odds with those that are valued by the software industry and the free market as a whole. In an environment as competitive and capitalist as this, speed of development will always be valued above maintainability and structure, and if the cutting edge hardware can run the product fast enough, then why care about performance at all? Assuming that other people care about such things, much less that they would agree if they did, was where I went wrong. My love for the art of software architecture and design, the learning I did, it was all the right decision. My attitude surrounding the opposition, my defiance to such, is where I failed - and to this failure I concede. I was wrong.
What I had built was an unreliable system of trust on top of another, more historically reliable one. An employer trusts me, a developer, to provide them with software that is hand-crafted with care down to each corner and edge case. In turn, I trust the employer to not only pay me for that work, but to continue valuing it and providing me with the clientele that need it. This high-trust system has collapsed under the perfect storm of an unpredictable economy, the advent of AI, and the degradation of any sort of guardrails for corporate accountability. There is little incentive for the employer to uphold their end of this bargain outside of goodness of heart - and the industry has all but optimized goodness of heart out of the recruitment and hiring process. Make no mistake - I am lucky to be employed. But I’ve got student loans to pay and a job that simply can’t keep up, and there are millions like me without any job at all.
In addition to this trust system, others are tested or destroyed in ways that compound the stress of the parties with their names on the social contract. On the subject of student loans, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has all but shattered any feasible student loan repayment or deferment options available to borrowers in situations like my own. If you are employed, you have to pay whatever plans are left, and those might not be covered by your income. If you are unemployed, well, you better find some sort of job whose wages the lender can garnish in the meantime. Or, you can return to school or join the military. You could argue that these cuts were necessary, that the trust systems themselves were wasteful at the expense of the taxpayer. With that being said, certainly we can agree that the stool should not have been kicked out from under those already standing on it.
Those of you still searching for work know well that one of the most vital systems in society, the employment system, is struggling tremendously. Entry-level roles seem to have disappeared, while poorly-disguised age discrimination has become the norm. Perfection of professionalism is demanded from each candidate, of which there are typically hundreds, but is hardly bestowed in return. How many times have you interviewed with an AI-powered chatbot for screening? How many of your applications received no response at all, let alone anything more than a rejection notice? Some of the most time-tested practices and traditions of job searching, like cold-calling or strong references, now have little effect whatsoever. I won’t pretend that job hunting was ever stress-free, it wasn’t, but now it feels particularly cold, impersonal, and one sided.
The final system, the system of finding purpose through career, has been reduced to a memory. This is the loss that pains me the most. Throughout my time at college or across the country in various co-ops, I trusted that caring about the field and the work I was doing would earn me a job that felt important and paid well. If you follow your hopes and your dreams, your passions, then the blood, sweat, and tears will pay off. Not only in a field as lucrative as mine once was, but in the impact you make as an independent contributor. You care about your work. You care about your stakeholders. You care about your role. I have since finished those internships and graduated college, and yet I am still chasing that dream. The difference is, the work I put in now does not truly get me any closer to finding purpose.
We grieve these systems because we accounted for them in the decisions we made for our career. Hell, I spent two years away from my partner out of the hopes of scoring a job from an extended internship, something that used to be a done deal. We followed the pipeline to a T because it’s basic systems theory. Provide an input, receive a deterministic output. In our case the input is expensive, mentally and physically taxing, and requires a complete rewiring of the mind and relationship with one’s self. The output was once a guaranteed career, a fruitful career, an impactful career. The death of this system at the very end of the process, right before input becomes output, is a devastating loss. This failure is nothing less than a tragedy, and to grieve a tragedy is human. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Neglected or improperly managed grief is at best unhealthy, at worst dangerous. I won’t pretend I have the answer, because I don’t. I am still struggling to get out of bed each day, still forgetting to eat when I should, and still yearning for things now lost. With that being said, it is important to share the grief and help each other manage it when possible. This is my attempt at doing so, and I’ve already shared the grief itself.
My personal struggle has been the emotion. I am angry with the failures of so many vital systems and those that are profiting from the failure. I am angry at the lies of the suits who promise change, and then advocate and legislate for its opposing forces. Above all else, I am just angry at my situation as a whole. At times, that anger turns to sadness, and that sadness typically back to anger but directed towards those who do not deserve it. This is because humans walk a fine line between enabling and bottling when it comes to emotions. On one hand, you don’t want to reinforce your lows. On the other hand, you don’t want to subject yourself and those around you to the ticking time bomb of excessive stoicism. As mourners, we must do our best to walk that line. Let yourself feel your feelings, and let those feelings pass. Don’t reinforce them with a dark environment, and don’t try to snuff them with an aggressively positive environment. Simply exist, and let the feelings come and go as they need.
When it comes to actually feeling better on the harder days, a few different strategies help in moderation. I’ve found that talking about my grief is a good way to get the emotions over with on particularly bad days. It sucks in the moment, but the long-term relief is worth it. Distracting yourself with projects, especially if those projects are related to the work you are grieving, is also incredibly helpful. For example, right now I am writing a custom 2D game engine in pure C and SDL3. It makes me very happy to work and make progress, and those moments of distracted joy give you breaks throughout the seemingly perpetual sadness. However, I must emphasize the importance of moderation. Sharing your feelings relentlessly during your downs is a form of self-enabling, and can also exhaust your support system. Putting too much time into distracting yourself is a form of toxic stoicism. Like I said before, it’s all about walking the line.
That is the million-dollar question we have all been asking for the last six years, I’m afraid. It certainly seems to be more pressing by the day, as the societal norms we have built continue to be tested under the stress of change. A couple of years ago, my elders told me to just hold on, that things will return to normal and get better, that they always do. Now, those same people themselves don’t seem the buy that narrative anymore. It truly looks as if nobody is confident in guessing what is coming next. This is a failure of yet another system of trust, but not one we have the luxury of grieving. If you are reading this, you are probably in survival mode like much of the middle and lower class right now - struggling to get by while the entire world is waiting to see what will happen. It is tantamount to torture, and you are not alone.