Toward the end of January, I walked into the office at Macro expecting a normal Tuesday. It was cold and bright, the kind of winter morning that barely registers while it is happening. People were settling in, opening laptops, easing into the day. I was carrying the same unfinished line of thought I had left with the night before.
The night before, I had been there until around 8 PM debugging code. I came in the next morning, unpacked my things, grabbed my laptop, and got asked to step into a conference room. I assumed we were about to talk about roadmap or priorities for the next stretch of work. Instead, I was told I was being let go.
What made it feel especially strange was how ordinary everything had seemed right before that. I had been at Macro for about a year and a half. Performance reviews were solid. We had recently shipped something important. From where I was sitting, I thought the next few months would look pretty familiar: more work, more iteration, more decisions about what to build next. The layoff itself was jarring, but what stayed with me even more was how quickly a normal rhythm could disappear.
At first, I thought the hardest part would be the obvious one: losing the job, losing the team, losing the project. That was real, but it was not really the center of it. What unsettled me more was the loss of continuity. I did not expect how restless I would feel without something to return to in the morning. I missed having a problem that still felt unfinished when I went to sleep. I missed the quiet rhythm of waking up, opening the laptop, and moving something forward a little more than it had been moved the day before.
I had been working on a project for months, and it had reached the point where it no longer felt like a ticket or a deliverable. I knew what still felt awkward about it, what I wanted to refine, what I thought should change next, and what it might become with another few iterations. That kind of attachment sneaks up on you. You spend enough time inside a thing and eventually it stops feeling like something you are merely assigned to. It starts feeling like something you are responsible for in a deeper way.
I think that was part of why the experience stayed with me. It was not only that I lost the job. It was that I got cut off from something unfinished that I still cared about. Once I had some distance from that feeling, I realized it was pointing at something useful. The first thing it clarified was what I value most in the work itself. The part of engineering I value most is not just solving a problem once. It is staying with something long enough to shape it, revise it, and watch it become better over time.
That is also why I keep coming back to directness. I do my best work when I am close enough to the product that the connection between the problem, the decision, and the thing that eventually ships is still visible. In some environments, engineering can feel more abstracted from the thing being built. The work may still matter, but the path from task to outcome can feel less immediate. What I realized is that I am most energized when that distance is smaller, when I can still feel the product changing because of the work.
I think it also changes what ownership means. In the kind of work I am drawn to, ownership is not just being responsible for a task until it ships. It is staying with something long enough to see what was right about your first instincts, what was wrong, what users actually respond to, and what still needs another pass. I like the part of engineering where shipping is not the end of the thought. It is the point where the work becomes real enough to refine.
That also connects to usefulness. A lot of engineering problems are interesting in isolation. What keeps me engaged over time is something more concrete than that. I want to work on things that solve real problems for real people. I want to be on teams that ship, iterate, and care about whether the product is actually getting better, not just whether the work is technically complete. When I think about the environments where I have felt most energized, that is usually the common thread. The work is moving, the feedback loop is shorter, and there is room to think practically, ship, learn from what happened, and keep shaping the thing instead of only handing off one small piece of it and stepping away.
The second thing it clarified was more personal. I do not think I tied my whole identity to work, at least not in some dramatic way. But I did realize how much of my steadiness came from momentum. There is something stabilizing about waking up every day and knowing what deserves your attention. When that disappears, you have to separate the loss of routine from the loss of self-worth. That was useful, even if it was not especially comfortable.
It also reminded me that what I miss most about engineering is not the external part of it. Not the title. Not the optics of having a job. What I missed most was the actual work. I missed building. I missed iterating. I missed caring about something long enough to make it better than it was the week before. Careers always involve some uncertainty, whether it arrives gradually or all at once. Being reminded of that did not make me feel like I had chosen wrong. If anything, it made me more certain about what I want next.
What I want next is clearer now. I want to work on something useful, stay close to the product, and have enough ownership to shape it over time. I want to be on a team that likes building, moves with some urgency, and cares about making the product better in ways users can actually feel. More than anything, I want to be back in the middle of something worth building.