2025 Year in Review
What happened in 2025?
Family
My Dad is still alive and doing well. My mother died December 8, 2024. The next 30 days were a complete blur, so one could consider all of 2025 the hangover. Dad has a girlfriend, is working every day, and continues his building projects on the 92-acre farm where I grew up. Yes, even at 73.
Personally, I hear half the things he does and at 47, I need a nap.
I lost my mind in January. Again, as I have periodically for 20+ years. I am self-destructive and I see that accelerating as I age.
I still have no relationship effectively with my eldest child, “Noir.” We’ve spoken over chat a few times in the past year. I haven’t seen them in person since 2018.
This has been the year of concerts, from Two-Step Inn in Georgetown in March, to 4 (!) K-Pop concerts, incluidng a spur-of-the-moment mini-vacation to Chicago for Whitney and Myself. Chicago is one of my favorite cities. It’s like NYC without the pretention.
Work
2025: It’s 2023 all over again. Let’s get into it.
I began the year as a Senior Software Engineer, with an apparent poor rating based on my stock grant. Amazon has a scale of 1 -> 5, with 5 being the best. Given my stock grant I was likely a 2, on the edge of a 1. Combined with my terrible rating (likely a 2 again) from 2023, I saw my compensation go down to 60% of what was in 2024.
The above is indicative I work at Amazon: It’s transactional. The company makes no illusions it cares about you, so it’s all about driving your career path, acollades, and TC (“Total Compensation”). At a level it’s disgusting, because it self-selects for people only after money. If you’re in sales or finance, that makes perfect sense. If you’re in Engineering, you drive away the top talent because the loud-talkers + self-promoters get the accolades.
Anyway….
So I started the year somewhat lost. I was on a team stuck with multiple hard, interesting problems to solve that had 0 measurable impact on customers. That’s not a great place to be. Then in February, I got the opportunity to work on our revamp of our customer service homepage portal (link), and at the same time become a manager again. I’d get to build my team and begin delivering customer-facing features again.
I was terrified. The last time didn’t go so well.
Honestly, it’s been great since March. I started off with 1 person on my team, and at one point I was managing 6 + 3 adjuct developers. As it stands now I have 7 on my team and I feel it’s a great team.
The overriding issue has been Layoffs. As AI/GenAI cam into the industry, Amazon has absorbed massive CapEx costs to build out our infrastructure. (This is all public information announced in our last quarterly statment). We’ve been working to reduce regular expense (read: Headcount). There was a cut in October, likely there will be another one this month. My organization had 2 smallish re-orgs in Q4 2025. A massive one will come along with layoff, or at least that’s what the rumor-mill says.
Open questions:
- How much longer can I keep doing this?
- How much longer will my job function (Software Engineering) exist?
Health
I’m increasingly unhealthy and sedentary. I get out of breath and dizzy easily. I have trouble concentrating.
Cars
We exited the year with the same stable of vehicles as we entered:
(Mileage noted in parentheses)
- 2016 Lexus GX 460 (130k)
- 2021 Lexus ES 300h (70k)
- 2021 Toyota Tundra (21k)
- 2023 Toytoa Corolla (21k)
Whitneys GX is now 10 model years old, though its tracked resale value remains stable. We have incurred a couple of costs keeping it up:
- New set of tires: ~$1200
- New Valley Plate: $1100, installed.
We’ve used dealer service exclusively, except for the last, where we used an independent shop in Pflugerville. It was a third the cost of dealer service, so I expect we’ll go that way again.
As a minor upgrade, I did replace all the interior lights on the GX with LEDs. That’s a fun, easy upgrade that improves quality-of-life, particulary if you need to read something at night.
I’ve delighted in the ES as a daily-driver, putting on 35k miles since we bought it in 2024. I barely drive the Tundra at all, but
House
The house maintenance continues anon. At the very beginning of the year, we did a full re-roof of our house and well-house.
From there, we had to do a re-cap of the chimney as it developed a leak.
As we ended the year, I redid the vent fans on 2 of the bathrooms.
We’ve had ongoing issues with our Spectrum internet, so we’re still paying to be Starlink customers. Somehow a constellation of satellites orbiting 400km in space is more reliable than a fiber optic cable.
Politics
It was a simply terrible year for politics in the united states. We’ve pissed off all our allies throughout the world, and divided ourselves at home.
Tech
As a manager, I don’t get to do as much coding as I want anymore.
I’m writing this on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM on the same 27" monitor I bought when we moved to Georgetown in 2017. This is the age of austerity. I upgraded to a Kinesis Freestyle Pro a few years ago and I use the mechanical switch version at home and the softer touch one at work.
My daily driver at work in a Macbook Pro M3 with 36GB of ram and a 14" screen. I’m running MacOS 26.x, whatever that’s called currently.
Given the amount of GenAI we use at work, we use a mix of proprietary tools at work and plugins for VS Code. It is the editor that seem to be eating the world.
Honestly, coming into 2026, given the prevalence of Generative AI and the expectation for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), it’s hard to see what our form of “Engineering” looks like going forward.