14 Years in Tech, 7 Years with One Company: Notes from the Edge of Impermanence
After 14 years in tech — including 7 years at my current company — this isn't a celebration post. It's a reflection.
A career this long doesn’t just give you experience. It gives you patterns. You start noticing what stays, what fades, and what was never real to begin with.
This post isn’t about growth charts, anniversaries, or achievements. It’s a reality check. Especially for those who entered the workforce with dreams shaped by college lectures, parental expectations, or HR onboarding decks.
Bookmark it. Revisit it. Especially when the winds change.
Jobs Are Forever — The Myth We Bought
We were told a job is a destination. Land one, and you’re safe. Study hard, get placed, follow the system, and one day retire in peace. That illusion didn’t survive its first encounter with real-world volatility. For many of us, it collapsed not in our first job, but in the uncertainty of the second or third, where layoffs weren’t just newspaper headlines — they were personal. I vividly remember 2012 — hearing the word layoff not in a company-wide announcement, but in hushed conversations. Someone had run a SQL script to revoke access for 2,000 employees. That one line of code unraveled years of effort in milliseconds.
Like Abhimanyu in the Mahabharata’s chakra vyuha — we were trained to enter the maze, but never taught how to exit with dignity or direction.
Trainings Will Save You — Another False Promise
Every new tool promises salvation. There's always a 10-hour video, a certification badge, or a learning week calendar invite. But knowledge ≠ transformation. You can’t train your way out of stagnation if you never practice. I’ve seen folks with "12 years of experience" who’ve actually repeated the same year twelve times.
Meanwhile, younger teammates with fewer years and sharper instincts bulldoze ahead because they build, break, and ship things. That edge doesn’t come from upskilling videos — it comes from showing up, making calls, failing fast, and bouncing back faster.
Hold Virtual Ownership — But Don’t Drown in It
"Take ownership" is on every job description and manager’s checklist. But what does it actually mean in a workplace where ownership is distributed so thinly that no one has true decision power? We all know how “too many cooks” ends. At some point, everyone owns everything and yet nothing gets done. Developer productivity becomes a metric sport, while the product itself has no paying users. Market validation? Not my department. We just sprint. It feels like a rush-hour metro ride — packed, sweaty, and no one is willing to adjust for the person next to them. Everyone's pushing, no one knows where the train is heading.
Virtual ownership without real influence breeds burnout. Masked as initiative, rewarded with more tasks. And if your work isn’t directly influencing product adoption or revenue? Better believe someone’s already rewriting your goodbye message.
Your Worth = A Number
Whether you’re a fresher or a VP, you are a number in a dashboard:
- CGPA
- Leetcode percentile
- Story points delivered
- Uptime maintained
- Revenue influenced
- Cost avoided
If your work can’t be quantified, it’s sidelined. Worse — you start internalizing the idea that you’re not contributing enough, even if you’re the glue holding teams together. I learned this late: Emotional intelligence, long-term thinking, culture-building — these don’t show up in slides. But the system demands that even these be justified with metrics. If not, you risk being seen as "nice to have" when it's time to downsize.
Layoffs Are Normalised — And That’s Not Going Away
Layoffs are no longer the stuff of boardroom whispers. They're livestream events. Scripted, staged, and delivered over Zoom.
From Big Tech to startups, workforce cuts are no longer a reaction — they're a strategy.
- It’s not personal.
- It’s not fair.
- It’s just business.
At the time of writing this post, TCS a prestigious Indian company where several employees stayed loyal to Tata Group where put on the line called "first ever 2% workforce reduction". Illustrating the fact, no company is layoff proof. You are only as secure as the revenue forecast or funding runway. You could be the highest performer and still be asked to go because your role didn’t “align with priorities.”
Every job now feels like a stock pick. You invest time, hope, and weekends into a bet that may or may not pay off. You rise and fall with the market mood.
AI: The Elephant in Every Meeting Room
AI is the most discussed guest in the room — invited to every conversation, understood by very few.
In meetings, “Let’s bring in AI” is thrown around like a magical fix. But when asked what exactly it should do, silence follows. Truth is, AI is today what cloud was in 2012 — full of promise, stuck in pitch decks. By 2030, AI will face its own audit. The novelty will wear off. Leaders will stop using it for press releases and start using it for results. And developers will stop fearing AI — not because it’s weak, but because they'll finally understand what it can and can't do.
Mental Health Is a Joke
It’s easy to preach balance when you’re a spiritual leader with a lake-view campus and loyal donors. But when you’re an employee living month-to-month, “balance” sounds like a luxury. When townhall invites trigger dread. When one reorg wipes out months of planning. When even good work ends with a “however” in the appraisal form. No wellness app will fix the anxiety of seeing colleagues disappear from Slack and payroll overnight.
Today, every employee has at least two AI tools watching their work, recording patterns, nudging suggestions — training to replace them more than to support them. It’s no longer fiction to imagine a future where brain-implanted AI boosts “efficiency.” Because hey, it’s more important to track keyboard strokes than to turn off the energy-guzzling TVs still looping yesterday’s metrics in an empty office bay.
Final Thought
Work is no longer a straight line. It’s a loop.
Learn → Build → Make money → Exit → Repeat
14 years in tech. 7 years in one company. This milestone isn’t a victory lap. It’s a checkpoint. A reminder to stay adaptable, humble, and detached. Because in this industry, one truth reigns above all:
Impermanence isn’t a bug — it’s the default setting.