A software engineer was laid off from Oracle on March 31, 2026. Rather than panic-apply to everything, he spent one to two hours every day studying AI engineering — transformers, attention mechanisms, the architecture behind modern LLMs. He used Claude as a study partner.
He applied to ten to fifteen roles daily, targeting companies actively building AI products. He practised coding problems and system design on a schedule. Forty-five days later, he had three competing offers and accepted an AI engineer position.
His advice to other laid-off engineers: "Don't scatter. Pick the highest-demand niche adjacent to what you already know, go deep, and treat the search like a full-time job. The market rewards specialisation — even in a downturn."