Cristina Estupiñán still remembers the exact date of her layoff: December 12, 2024. The San Francisco startup where she'd worked as a front-end engineer for two years was restructuring, and her entire team was cut.
At first, she approached her job search the way she always had — polishing her portfolio, reaching out to her network, applying to roles that matched her skill set. But something was different this time. "I'd go into interviews for front-end roles and suddenly they'd ask me about RAG pipelines, model fine-tuning, prompt engineering," she said. "Things that had nothing to do with the job description, but suddenly everyone wanted them."
She estimates she sent over 700 applications in six months. The feedback was consistent: not senior enough, or lacking the right AI credentials. "It felt like the ground was shifting under my feet," she said. "I spent years building my craft, and overnight it felt like none of it mattered."
The psychological toll was real. She withdrew from her tech friend group, embarrassed by her prolonged unemployment. She stopped going to the meetups she used to love. "You start questioning everything — your skills, your choices, whether you even belong in this industry anymore," she said.
Her breaking point came after a particularly brutal interview where she was asked to debug a machine learning pipeline for a role that was advertised as building customer-facing UI. She walked away and cried in her car for twenty minutes.
That night, she started researching nursing programs.
"I know it sounds like a huge jump," she said. "But I kept coming back to the same question: what can't be automated? And the answer was right there — care work. Human judgment. Empathy."
She enrolled in a community college in New Jersey, working part-time in retail to cover expenses while she completes her prerequisites. Her goal is Rutgers's accelerated psychiatric nurse practitioner program.
She's found that her tech background gives her an unexpected perspective. "I understand how these tools work," she said. "I know what AI can do and what it can't. And I know that when someone is in crisis, they don't want a chatbot. They want a person."
Her advice to other technologists feeling squeezed by AI is blunt: "Don't wait for the industry to come back to where you are. The ground isn't going to stop shifting. You have to find the place where you're irreplaceable."