• After almost 10 years in tech, Melody Koh wants to leave the industry.
• Her first few years in tech were marked by innovation and good rewards, she said.
• But Koh believes the industry is now in a downward spiral due to layoffs and efficiency pushes.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 28-year-old Melody Koh, a product designer from Germany. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I've worked in tech for just under 10 years. The first half of my career and the second half tell completely different stories.

I built a career as a product designer working for startups, but my career has dipped since 2021.

After being laid off in May 2025, I was unemployed for over two months. In August, I landed an opportunity to work as a contractor on product design for an e-commerce company.

It's tech-adjacent, but since the focus is more on retail, I'm hoping it can help me eventually pivot away from the tech industry.

I don't want to work in tech anymore. The industry has been moving in a downward spiral, with layoffs becoming common and companies being less generous.

I don't think that the tech job market is going to get better.

I built a career in tech, focused on design

I studied experience and product design at a polytechnic in Singapore.

I was learning to design spaces and furniture, but I grew interested in digital design, such as user experience (UX) design. My tech career began with freelance work for a few start-ups during my studies. I built up my portfolio designing for apps and websites, and went on to work at tech startups after finishing my diploma in 2017.

Digitalization was a big deal at the time. I felt there would be a lot of demand for my skills and a good industry to build my career.

Between 2018 and 2022, I worked for a few startups focused on crypto and blockchains, where I learned a lot about the technology behind those kinds of products. There were always interesting design problems to solve. In 2021, I relocated to Europe, where I live now, for a fintech role.

In 2022, I lost my job due to an insolvency. After that, I worked for a data company, a Danish fintech unicorn, and then pivoted to an EdTech company, but I was laid off from the EdTech in May 2025.

The tech industry is in a downward spiral

When I first started working in tech, there was a lot of innovation and discovery around products, and I was building a lot of new things.

Nowadays, many product playbooks are already made. There are also more resources designers can implement into their own work, but it feels like you're mimicking something that already exists.

Being a designer gets diluted when you're not creating anything new.

In my experience, founders were more generous with their funding than they are now. Hard work used to be well-rewarded, but now, I don't think startup employees see good rewards.

Earlier in my career, we'd always celebrate something good happening by going for team lunches or team trips. This has been less common for me recently.

It wasn't like we got everything we wanted, but there was a work-hard, play-hard environment.

When I moved from the unicorn I was working at to my last job at an EdTech company, I took a pay cut — partly because I wanted to make an impact in the education space.

Efficiency pushes are hurting employees

I don't think changes have happened because there's less money in the industry. I think it's because companies are trying to become more efficient. They're cutting fat, and employees are getting the short end of the stick.

My friends at corporate companies get job stability, a clear career progression, and corporate discounts. They may make less money than I do, but they can use their job stability to build wealth. Meanwhile, I've been in and out of employment during my career. Since finishing my diploma in 2017, I've worked for six tech startups.

Years ago, if you weren't happy with your pay, you could leave and find another job.

It was never easy to find a job in tech — you need technical knowledge — but nowadays, it feels like the amount of talent saturation makes it harder to land roles. It's switched from an employee's market to an employer's market.

Companies overhired during COVID. I lost my job to insolvency in 2022. The industry was never the most stable, but since 2022, I feel like layoffs have become so common that it's almost impossible not to get laid off.

I'm seriously considering leaving tech

I don't regret my career in tech. I've been challenged, and I've grown a lot as a designer.

After being laid off in May, I was job-searching for three months. I applied to around 60 jobs, but received a lot of rejections before landing my current role.

I've been working on multiple side projects, including writing on Medium and starting a product studio. I plan to continue working on these in conjunction with my new job.

I'm considering what I should do next. I would probably like to focus on designing physical products instead of digital ones.

It will be difficult to convince me to work for tech companies. I don't think it's worth it.

Do you have a story to share about working in tech? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• Shahad Ishraq was a systems development engineer at Amazon in Germany for just over three years.
• He quit at the end of May after the company implemented a five-day RTO.
• Ishraq said Andy Jassy's memo wasn't surprising, and he isn't concerned about his future career.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 30-year-old Shahad Ishraq, from Germany. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Reading Andy Jassy's new memo on generative AI, I'm not surprised by anything.

I worked at Amazon for nearly three and a half years and left in late May because of the 5-day RTO mandate. My commute took an hour and a half each way, so I wanted to move to another job where I could still see my career progressing and do interesting work.

The memo feels consistent with what I'd been hearing from management and Jassy while working at Amazon. I think Jassy's comments are to show shareholders he's invested in the technology.

I initially worried about AI when I wasn't as familiar with the products. However, using AI will give you a better understanding of what it's capable of and what skills you can develop to differentiate yourself.

At Amazon, there were some eager adopters of AI and some skeptics

I joined Amazon in 2022 as a systems development engineer, working in Leipzig, Germany. My day-to-day work involved designing and implementing software and performing operational tasks.

When AI tools first came out a few years ago, we were told we could use them, but we should be very careful and follow the company's policies on their usage.

Amazon is a huge company. Within it, I spotted and heard about different approaches to AI adoption. There seemed to be a bunch of excited early adopters who shared their findings with everyone. There were people like me who followed the first bunch and saw what went well. There were also some skeptics and a small number of engineers who were outright against using AI.

For me, the dawn of AI was a bit scary at first. Everyone was saying it would put me out of a job. Unless you test the technology yourself and see what it can do, you'll fear the unknown. AI wasn't part of my job until sometime in 2024.

There were also some barriers to using the technology. When I first joined Amazon, ChatGPT wasn't even available, but when it did come out in 2022 we couldn't use it that extensively because of data security issues that come with copying our code into those models. When Anthropic's Claude became available within Amazon Bedrock — the company's internal service for developing generative AI applications — we were able to make more use of AI.

In my last few months at Amazon, I started experimenting a lot with approved AI tools, doing extensive tests with them. They don't do everything for me, but I've integrated these tools into my workflow, such as by asking it to create a plan for my tasks or spot differences between documents.

I noticed it often fails, and I have to make changes, but overall, it has improved my speed and increased my throughput significantly.

AI won't eliminate software engineers anytime soon

Andy Jassy's memo feels very consistent with what I've been told internally before I left Amazon and what the company has communicated publicly.

News articles talking about the memo focus on Jassy saying that a lot of jobs will be taken by AI. However, in the same sentence, he also says jobs will be created.

I've tried creating production-level applications using AI, and it takes a lot of effort to get these products ready. A company like Amazon can't roll out an application that breaks and causes havoc. They have to have firewalls, checks, and tests.

I don't see people going out of jobs in huge numbers soon. Amazon went on a hiring spree during COVID. If we see more layoffs, I think it will be associated with cutting back after that spree, rather than the impacts of AI.

AI agents are helping out software engineers a lot, and the amount of work agents do will probably increase gradually. I'm able to get agents working on three different things, while I look into other tasks.

But AI hallucinates quite a lot. It does things it's not asked to do. I often have to correct an AI agent producing code. Humans will be required to build guardrails and act as guardrails themselves. Implementing these guardrails will take time, and I think this will slow down the AI agent hype.

There's nothing new in Jassy's memo

I think Jassy's comments about AI are to show shareholders he's invested in the technology. Memos have to come out. Jassy has to place a lot of optimism around AI; otherwise, shareholders will think they're not doing anything with AI.

My advice to Amazon employees is to start using AI as much as possible to overcome their fear of the unknown. I now work as a software engineer at a utilities company. The more I've been using AI, the more comfortable I feel about myself. I can see what skills I have that I can use to stay relevant.

In tech, languages and developments come really fast. My guess is that people will need to use AI to write code and increase their throughput, and pure software engineers will gradually be replaced by people who have both software engineering and AI skills.

I'm personally trying to learn these skills because I think they'll become more important.

A spokesperson for Amazon told Business Insider, "Amazon employees use internal generative AI tools every day to innovate on behalf of our customers. We have safeguards in place for employee use of these technologies, including restrictions on sharing confidential information with third-party generative AI services."

Do you have a story to share about the AI job market? Contact this reporter at [email protected].