Hiral Nagda

My heart goes out to people at Pinterest and Amazon who were let go today! I am sharing my learning from the process I have gone through so far! 1. First of all, the good news is that this is the right time to get hired again! The market is up, and I have seen a surge in hiring as it's the first quarter, and a lot of companies are building new teams, especially for AI/ML, backend, and Infra! 2. If you are on h1b visa there is nothing to panic about at this moment. Amazon gives 3 months, and Pinterest has given at least 2 months before your clock starts. i.e., your last date of employment is still far, so you have a total of 120 to 150 days to find other employment. 3. If you are on visa It is important to check your latest I-94 records and verify the validity of it. Your clock period will be based on the validity of your I-94 expiration date. 4. Companies are supporting h1b transfers as long as you have enough time left on your h1b (2 years ) or you have an approved I-140. 5. If you are on f1 Opt , you will get 90 days after your last date of employment. If you are on STEM OPT, you will have an additional 60 days plus your unused OPT unemployment days (60+90) on top of your last date of employment. 6. Make sure to have a session with the immigration attorney of your company before you leave and ask them when the company will revoke your H1b visa! This plays an essential role in ensuring your legal status. 7. Figure out options for alternative visas. H4 is the best option if you have it, followed by the B2 extension and f1. 8. If you are targeting F1, you should target summer or late spring enrollment. You have an option for premium processing for f1 and H4. 9. You should try to file for alternative visas after your last date of employment as early as possible and do not wait until the last minute. 10. Finding internal position is the best and fastest resource if the company has allowed you to find another role within the teams. This often will be the case if the layoffs are not performance-based. I am going to share a list of companies i got the chance to interview and that are actively hiring! To people in my network, You have been amazing support to me through my tough times, and I am willing to help as much as I can with my experience so far in the journey. (Edit) --- Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this post are entirely my own and are based on my personal experiences, learnings, and observations. They are not intended to target or represent any specific company, organization, group, or individual. This content is shared purely for informational and supportive purposes and should not be considered legal, immigration, or professional advice. Please consult qualified professionals for guidance specific to your situation. #layoffs #pinterest #amazon #linkedin #meta #ups #network

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When I first moved from IC to manager at Amazon, the hardest thing was letting go of doing everything myself, especially when I took over manager role in the same team where I was operating as individual contributor. As ICs, we get rewarded for solving problems directly. As managers, success depends on enabling others to solve them. That shift feels unnatural at first. As manager you are doing everything backstage to setup your team for success. Your success depends on your ability to force mulitply yourself consistently and repeatedly. Navigating It: • One path is micro-managing: you still feel “in control,” but your team loses trust and creativity. • Another is disappearing: you stop diving in, but your team feels abandoned. • The sweet spot is being a coach—close enough to guide, distant enough to let them own outcomes. Pros/Cons of Approaches: • Micro-manage → ✅ quick results, ❌ long-term team frustration • Hands-off completely → ✅ team feels trusted, ❌ risk of chaos • Coach → ✅ sustainable growth, ❌ requires patience and conscious effort Actionable Tips: • In your next 1:1, ask: “What decisions do you feel comfortable owning without me?” • When tempted to jump in, pause and ask: “Is this a growth moment for them, or a rescue mission for me?” 👉 What was your biggest struggle in “letting go”? Share in comments—and tag a friend stepping into management!

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Approximately 16,000 people were impacted in today's Amazon layoff. Tech careers have become increasingly uncertain post 2022. Seems like layoffs have become a recurring theme in the tech world. They show up on timelines, group chats, and in quiet 1-1 conversations where people are trying to read signals and prepare for the worst. Seeing all of this, I wanted to share a few thoughts that have been on my mind, especially for those carrying this pressure silently. [1] Do not make your job your entire life, especially in uncertain times I once saw a colleague cancel a trip he had been planning for months because an upcoming project felt too important to miss. A job can demand commitment, but it should not demand the rest of your life. When work becomes your only source of identity, layoffs do not just affect your income, they destabilize your sense of self. Anyone can be sent home with a mouse click. Careers are long. Companies will always optimize for business outcomes. Your life outside work is what keeps you grounded when things shake. [2] A layoff feels personal, but it usually isn’t Being laid off can make you question your ability, your decisions, and your worth, even if you have consistently done good work. The truth is that most layoffs are driven by strategy shifts, cost structures, and forecasts that have very little to do with individual performance. When you are inside the company, it is hard not to internalize it, but zooming out helps. Good engineers get laid off every cycle, and many of them go on to do excellent work elsewhere. The pain is real, but the story your mind tells you in that moment is often harsher than reality. [3] If you worked at Amazon, you already proved something important Cracking a high-bar environment like Amazon is not an accident or a stroke of luck. It takes learning, discipline, and the ability to operate under pressure. You learned how to work with ambiguity, deal with on-call stress, write design docs, navigate trade-offs, ship and maintain complex systems. Those skills do not disappear just because one chapter ends. When fear creeps in, remind yourself that you were capable enough to get in and survive there, which means you are capable of adapting again. [4] Fear narrows your thinking, preparation widens it When layoffs dominate your thoughts, everything starts to feel urgent and catastrophic. The best way to counter that is not panic, but preparation. Keep your skills sharp, stay connected with people outside your immediate team, and maintain a sense of perspective about where you are in a long career. You are not powerless, even when the situation feels out of your control. Layoffs are a big shake-up, and it is okay to feel unsettled by them. Just do not let fear convince you that your entire future depends on one company or one decision. If you have built skills and shown up honestly in your work, you can find your footing again, even if the path looks unclear right now.

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At 3 AM on a Wednesday, Amazon needed me. I wasn’t even on that team anymore. Back when I was an SDE at Amazon, a Sev-2 had hit one of our services. Many customers were impacted. The team had been chasing it for hours. Still, they called me. I rolled out of bed, opened my laptop, and joined the bridge. The tricky part was that the fault started a week earlier. A code change had shipped behind a flag, traffic ramped slowly, and the failure signature was noisy. Logs were chatty in all the wrong places and silent where we needed them most.Dashboards showed errors, but no clear line to the root. We did unglamorous things. We wrote a minute-by-minute timeline. We diffed deployments, configs, and flags across regions. We checked queue backlogs and retry storms. We sampled logs with new filters. We bisected the traffic ramp. We rolled back the smallest safe thing first. Then we added one log, in one hot path, and the picture snapped into focus. By sunrise, we had the root cause and a fix. The impact was contained. Customers recovered. What stayed with me was not the fix. It was why they called. They did not call because I am smarter. They called because, over months, I had done the boring work. I wrote runbooks when no one asked. I paired with juniors on their first on-call. I shared context so others could make decisions without me. I showed up when it was not my ticket. Trust is not built in one night. It is built in all the small days that come before it. Ownership is simple. If it affects your customer, it is your problem. Org charts are for payroll, not for 3 AM. If you are early in your career, remember this: → Document the weird corners when you discover them. → Add one useful log where it hurts, not twenty where it is easy. → Keep a living checklist for rollback, not a static wiki page. → Teach one person the thing you just learned. → Read your dashboards when things are calm, not only when they are red. At 3 AM, you will not rise to the occasion. You will fall to the level of your habits. Build the right ones while the house is quiet. That’s how you earn trust that lasts beyond teams and ownership that outlives org charts. A few days later, this moment turned into an accolade from the team..  a reminder that trust is built long before it’s tested :)

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After 19 years at Google, I experienced a layoff that initially felt shocking but has since brought a sense of relief upon reflection. I had reached a point of complacency, feeling neither energized nor hungry for new challenges. Over the years, I've witnessed a significant shift at Google, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. What was once a vibrant hub of innovation driven by engineers and visionaries has increasingly become focused on business decisions and safe bets. In my view, Susan Wojcicki represented the last empathetic stand against corporate greed and maintained integrity in leadership. Unfortunately, large corporations often become myopic, prioritizing numbers over their impact on users. Google's intense focus on AI could potentially undermine its ads business in search, jeopardizing its credibility and income stream. Meanwhile, YouTube appears uncertain about the role of AI on its platform, with executives seemingly unconcerned about the long-term implications. Ultimately, the relentless pursuit of quarterly profit margins is detrimental to our country, its citizens, and the competition posed by smaller companies. So far, no executive I've spoken with has articulated a financial plan addressing AI, unemployment, and its effects on our consumer-driven economy. The bubble is real.

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Watching the recent Amazon layoffs unfold reminded me that even the strongest performers aren't immune to company restructuring. If you're one of the folks affected, here's what helped me/others I know in the past: 1. This is not a reflection of your skills or worth. Companies make decisions based on many factors beyond individual contributions. 2. Take some time to get your head in the right space. It could be a day, a week or more if you can swing it. Go for walks, spend time with family, binge on shows - whatever helps. The best decisions are made with a clear mind. 3. Start hitting up your network. The market is tough but opportunities are out there. Let people know you're looking. Recruiters are looking to hire fast, and a referral is faster than sifting through job resumes. 4. Update your LinkedIn profile and resume. Make sure your headline reflects what you want to do next, not just your last title. Highlight your achievements and the impact you've made in your roles. 5. Start a side project or contribute to open source. It keeps your skills sharp and shows potential employers your passion and initiative. That idea you've been sitting on? Now's the time to build it. 6. Find your community. Whether it's tech meetups, online forums, or Discord servers - being around other builders and job seekers helps. You're not alone in this. 7. Don't give up. Statistically, people who have been laid off often find better opportunities than their previous roles. Stay positive and persistent. That's it for now. If you have any questions, or just want to chat, feel free to reach out. Good luck out there! #SoftwareEngineering #CareerAdvice #JobSearch #Layoffs #TechCommunity

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Just heard Amazon Prime laid off so many employees, Because they shipped faster and automated things with AI. And this just scares me but at the same time I feel there’s huge gap between how managerial side is thinking about AI v/s the Reality of AI: Because: 1. AI writes the code but fails at quality, I need to spend time to get good final version 2. Doing LLDs with AI is too hectic, it skips what it doesn’t understand or comes up with solution which isn’t optimised 3. HLDs aren’t even AIs cup of tea yet This just about coding part, there’s lot of more that we do as engineers. So, is it managers illusion which is taking away job ? But whatever it is someone needs to wake these companies to reality and show how important engineers are for the company. Done with listening AI can replace engineers.

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I just went through DoorDash's latest update on their new AI-Native engineering loop. After seeing the scaling pains at Microsoft and PhonePe, this feels like a long-overdue reality check for 2026. We've reached a point where GPT-5 zero-shots LeetCode Hards in seconds. The signal-to-noise ratio of traditional coding rounds has hit absolute zero. The Orchestrator's take on DoorDash's shift: 1. Reading > Writing: Interviews now focus on inheriting messy codebases. In high-scale systems, you spend 90% of your time reading. If you can't navigate unfamiliar context quickly, you aren't an architect; you're a syntax generator. 2. AI as a Teammate, not a "Cheat": They now require tools like Cursor or Claude Code. The test isn't "Can you remember this algorithm?" but "Can you orchestrate the tool to handle a 10x spike without it hallucinating a race condition?" 3. The "Why" over the "How": Shifting from "Shortest Path" puzzles to building "Order Dispatch Simulations." It forces you to defend your mental model and architectural trade-offs. The Bottom Line: Many EMs fear AI makes hiring "too easy." They're missing the point. It actually raises the bar. It strips away the memorization and leaves only pure architectural logic. If you can't explain the why behind a system boundary, no LLM will save your production environment on a Friday night. We are finally moving from the era of Competitive Programmers to the era of System Architects. Visibility is for those who like to talk code. Respect is for those who architect the systems that write it. Is LeetCode officially dead, or are we just rebranding the "puzzle-solving" trap? Link : https://lnkd.in/gchJqvTt #SystemDesign #EngineeringLeadership #Tech2026 #SoftwareArchitecture #DoorDash

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