He was laid off after 25 years as an Adobe engineer, applied for a year, then gave up on tech to drive a school bus

He was laid off after 25 years as an Adobe engineer, applied for a year, then gave up on tech to drive a school bus

AnnaMarie Houlis

Mon, August 17, 2026 at 5:30 PM GMT+3 4 min read

After spending roughly a quarter-century working in technology, James Strawn never expected his next career move would involve getting behind the wheel of a 40-foot school bus.

Strawn, a Colorado resident who spent most of his career in tech, worked at Adobe for 25 years, including as a senior software quality engineer. But after he was laid off in 2025, he found himself facing a job search that proved far more difficult than he had anticipated.

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"To the potential employers and recruiters who blindly filtered out my applications, ghosted me on direct inquiries or never even bothered to show up for interviews: I hope this industry can find its way back to treating people better," he wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.

An enduring job hunt — and a new beginning

Strawn wrote that he spent more than a year looking for jobs after losing his position. Eventually, he decided he was done waiting for another tech job.

In August 2026, he began a new chapter as a school bus driver for his local Colorado school district.

"After a long, difficult year-plus of looking for work and being demoralized and discriminated against by the high-tech industry, I'm glad to share that my next chapter has begun," he wrote. "Next week I start my new — and hopefully final — career as a school bus driver for my local school district."

The job comes with a major pay cut compared to his previous career, but Strawn says he has found something he wasn't getting from the tech world: a sense of community. He described the students as "mostly" good, while praising his new coworkers as caring, kind and down to earth.

"To those at my previous employer who passed me over, brought me down, and ultimately laid me off: thank you as well, but only because you showed me the door to a better future," he continued. "It's people like you who make me glad I'll be driving a 40-foot bus instead of a computer."

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Tech is still hiring, but the industry has evolved

Strawn's forced career change is an example of what can happen when an experienced tech worker finds himself on the wrong side of an industry-wide shift. Technology companies continue to slash jobs while pouring unprecedented amounts of money into artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

U.S. tech companies cut more than 140,000 jobs during the first half of 2026, according to an analysis by the Financial Times, with the sector accounting for more than one-third of all announced U.S. layoffs. Companies including Amazon, Oracle, Meta and Microsoft accounted for nearly 50,000 of those cuts.

The cuts don't necessarily mean technology itself is disappearing as a career field. In fact, the broader market for technology occupations remains relatively strong. CompTIA's analysis of June 2026 employment data found that employment in technology increased by 47,000 workers that month, while the unemployment rate for tech occupations fell to 2.9%, compared with 4.2% nationally.

"June's employment data suggests that employers are ramping up their technology investments and hiring the talent needed to support them," Seth Robinson, Vice President of Industry Research at CompTIA, said in a statement.

But companies are still largely restructuring and eliminating redundant roles. The result is a job market in which highly experienced workers can find themselves competing for fewer senior-level openings.

Strawn's story is a reminder that, in today's job market, even decades of experience and open roles aren't necessarily guarantees of job security. And, sometimes, starting over means taking a road that looks nothing like the one you originally envisioned.

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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: He was laid off after 25 years as an Adobe engineer, applied for a year, then gave up on tech to drive a school bus

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