Lamb Saag, Layoffs, and the Bug That Broke Me

Hello, world.

I’m an unemployed ex–Big Tech software engineer with 25 years of experience, which in today’s economy apparently qualifies me for involuntary early retirement. One unexpected perk of this phase of life is that I now do a lot more cooking for my family. Today’s menu: Indian lamb saag. Slow, deliberate, and unforgiving if you miss a step, much like enterprise software.

As the lamb simmers, let me tell you a story from a darker, stranger time.

2009: The Corporate Hunger Games

The year was 2009. Layoffs were everywhere. Entire floors disappeared overnight. Companies weren’t trimming fat; they were amputating limbs.

I worked at a digital consulting agency that had already survived several rounds of bloodletting. By all logic, I should have been gone. Yet somehow, like a cockroach surviving a nuclear blast, I remained employed.

Most of our major clients had vanished. One of the few whales still alive was a massive publishing conglomerate. Let’s call them Big Corp.

Big Corp had just experienced a revelation that felt revolutionary at the time: What if people bought our newspapers and magazines… on the internet?

Unfortunately, they had no e-commerce platform, almost no technical capability, and about 90% of their internal IT staff had already been laid off. In their place stood a shimmering mosaic of offshore and onshore H-1B contractors from a massive IT services firm. We’ll call them Outsourced Consultancy Services, or OCS.

Naturally, my company won the pitch to build Big Corp’s e-commerce platform. And just like that, we dove headfirst into a corporate dumpster fire armed only with PowerPoint decks and unearned confidence.

An Org Chart Designed by a Madman

The project team was… unusual. Nearly half the people involved were VPs, directors, account executives, or some flavor of Extremely Important Person. There were almost more chiefs than Indians, which statistically should not be possible.

Leadership had clustered around this project like penguins in a blizzard, hoping proximity to billable hours might keep them alive.

I joined as a senior developer, and for the first time in my career, I became the tech lead of my own squad. It included Eddie, a brilliant engineer from New Jersey; Sam, an Australian project manager; Ravi, an OCS build master stuck in green card purgatory; and several junior developers.

On paper, I reported to Bharath, an enterprise architect from OCS who had never written a line of code. Bharath reported to Heinz, an East German tech director from my company, and Mega, an OCS director. They reported to Fred, the client-side chief architect, and finally to Mr. Burns, a senior VP who looked exactly like a South Asian version of the Simpsons character. Same stare. Same energy. Same ability to drop a room’s temperature by ten degrees.

If this sounds confusing, don’t worry. It was worse in real life.

Building the Beast

We were tasked with building a web-based e-commerce system that allowed customers to order custom bundles of newspapers and magazines. Today, this would be a two-day Shopify project. Back then, it took five months, tens of millions of dollars, and what felt like several ritual sacrifices.

Orders flowed through an enterprise service bus, were chopped into pieces, and fed into a horrifying backend fulfillment ecosystem composed of overlapping legacy systems, orphaned applications, and entire platforms built around employees who had been laid off years earlier.

These systems were maintained by offshore sysadmins who treated them like ancient temples: don’t touch, don’t ask questions, and pray.

There was exactly one client-side IT veteran who understood how it all worked. His name was Davey. He was gray-haired, exhausted, and spiritually done.

My team owned the middleware layer. “Simple,” they said.

PowerPoint Architects and Sausage Making

It quickly became clear that Bharath’s tools were PowerPoint, Word, and criticism. I did the actual design. I wrote the specs. I drew the diagrams. Bharath reviewed them and offered feedback like:

* “The font lacks authority.”

* “This box should feel more visionary.”

* “The verbiage needs architectural gravitas.”

Then he presented my work to leadership.

I smiled, nodded, and stroked his ego, because for the first time in my career, I had full ownership of an application. No micromanagement. No interference. Pure sausage-making freedom. Worth every ounce of frustration.

We worked late. We bonded. Eddie, despite a stutter that caused management to underestimate him, was a phenomenal engineer. Ravi worked endlessly, supporting his family while trapped in immigration limbo. Sam dreamed of retiring as a landlord back in Australia.

We ate together constantly, mostly Indian food. It’s strange how easy it is to form deep friendships when you’re young and suffering together.

The Open Source Mistake

At some point, a client executive who had never touched middleware decided that open source was better. Requirements be damned.

They chose an open source ESB product. Let’s call it Crazy Boss.

Consultants from the company behind Crazy Boss, Silly Hat, arrived. They gave a dazzling demo, proclaimed that open source meant fewer bugs, charged an ungodly amount of money, and vanished.

Here’s the lesson I learned too late:Open source does not mean bug-free. Sometimes it means you get to discover the bugs personally.

The Bug That Shouldn’t Exist

As go-live approached, late nights became routine. Then weekends. Then time stopped mattering altogether.

During system integration testing, an order entered the system and vanished. Not failed. Not errored. Gone.

I checked everything. Logs. Queues. Dead letter Queues. Every line of middleware code. The bug should not have been possible.

We couldn’t reproduce it.

Leadership shrugged. “Probably a fluke. Let’s go live.”

I did not shrug.

I spiraled.

I rebuilt environments. Simulated load. Obsessed. The stress followed me everywhere. When my girlfriend, now my wife, visited me before go-live, I was so anxious I couldn’t even be intimate.

Nothing kills romance like a missing async message.

Go Live Night

Orders flooded in. Systems broke. We fixed them. By 3 a.m., things stabilized.

Then the calls came.

Missing receipt emails. Missing orders.

The bug was real. My middleware was eating them.

Mr. Burns stared at me and said, “Someone really effed this up.”

Something inside me snapped.

I walked out to the parking lot and cried. Full breakdown. Full impostor syndrome. My career was over. I was a fraud.

Then Sam and Heinz followed me out.

“Be kinder to yourself,” Sam said.Heinz added, with peak East German nihilism: “It never gets better. It only gets worse. Then we die. So why worry?”

We went back inside.

The Fix

Davey saved the day.

He noticed the bug only happened after Crazy Boss ran for days under load. The solution?

A cron job that restarted the instances in a round-robin fashion.

No downtime. Just reboot and pray.

It worked. The launch was declared a success.

Months later, we learned the truth: a memory leak in Crazy Boss that only occurred under high concurrency on Citrix VMs.

Of course.

Aftermath and Curry Nightmares

That morning, I found Ravi sitting quietly. He told me his daughter’s daycare was teaching kids to throw away food, a grave sin in his culture. During go-live night, he decided to quit OCS and return to India.

“God will find a place for me,” he said.

Weeks later, Eddie suggested Indian food to celebrate surviving. At Curry Dreams, a local Indian buffet, I saw a cockroach the size of my thumb crawl up the wall… and fall directly into a vat of curry.

We left immediately.

From that day on, Curry Dreams became Curry Nightmares.

Epilogue

Now, years later, I’m stirring lamb saag in a quiet kitchen, unemployed but oddly at peace. That bug didn’t end my career. That breakdown didn’t define me. It was just another chapter in a long, messy story.

If you have a morbid curiosity to follow along on this strange life journey, you know where to find me.

Thanks for listening.Talk soon.

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