Tabby Toney spent years chasing the intellectual rush that technology promised. Then the layoffs started, and the industry that once felt limitless began to feel suffocating.
After losing her software engineering job last May, Toney did something most people in her position wouldn’t consider: she walked away entirely. No LinkedIn optimization, no desperate pivot to product management or startup life. Instead, she picked up welding equipment her family had lying around and discovered something she didn’t expect to find.
“I loved tech because of the intellectual stimulation and creative problem-solving it provided,” she told Business Insider. “I felt like that was being taken away as AI started reshaping the industry and job market.”
The anger was real. The uncertainty was worse.
When Stability Becomes the Illusion
Here’s the thing about high-paying business jobs in tech: they come with a quiet terror. Layoffs have become so routine that even employed engineers spend their days doom-scrolling through news about the next round of cuts. Toney watched colleagues with 20 years of experience suddenly become unemployed. Her own husband hadn’t worked since January.
That constant vigilance takes a toll. “In every job I had after my first tech layoff, all I could think about was how well the company was doing and whether it would perform layoffs,” she explained. Even when companies reported strong earnings, the anxiety remained.
She made $130,000 annually in her last remote role. Most people would fight to keep that. But Toney had spent her years of better fortune paying down debt and building a small cushion. When the severance ran out and unemployment stretched into months, she wasn’t scrambling to get back into the panic cycle. She was ready to step off the treadmill.
The Practical Pivot
This is where the story gets interesting because Toney didn’t treat this like a gap-year epiphany. She enrolled in a fast-tracked welding program—40 hours per week for five months—and approached it with the same rigor she’d brought to code. The program cost around $3,000 originally, but scholarships and corporate donations for non-traditional students knocked that down significantly.
By mid-December, she’d finished. By January, she was hired directly by a company that had recruited from her school.
Now she works 12-hour shifts, three days a week, adding attachments to utility poles. Her starting salary is roughly $52,000 annually. On paper, that’s a dramatic pay cut. In practice, it’s more complicated.
The difference between anxiety and peace is sometimes worth more than the extra zeros on a paycheck.
What Actually Matters
There are trade-offs. She misses air conditioning in the Oklahoma heat and cold. She lost the intellectual puzzle-solving that made tech exciting. But something shifted when she could physically see the work pile arriving each day instead of refreshing Hacker News wondering which company would announce the next bloodbath.
“I’m so glad I got out of the industry when I did,” she said.
This isn’t a triumphant underdog narrative where everyone should quit their tech job tomorrow. Toney had advantages: no dependents, a spouse’s income (however intermittent), the luxury of months without work, and years spent paying off debt. Most people don’t have that runway.
But her story points to something worth examining. How many talented people are trapped in industries not because the work itself is wrong, but because the psychological cost of staying has become unsustainable? And what would happen if more of them admitted it?
The tech industry built its mythology on disruption and reinvention. Toney just applied that logic to her own life instead of waiting for the industry to do it for her.
