At the beginning of May 2025, I returned from vacation — from a new rafting trip down the Colorado River. On the first working day after my break, on Monday, we held a team-wide call. After it ended, I noticed that my project manager had scheduled a one-on-one meeting with me for the following morning. That immediately raised a red flag: such “one-on-ones” are rarely random. I kept guessing what exactly he wanted to discuss, and a slight tension began to grow inside me.
The next morning we met. That was when he explained that the main stages of development were coming to an end: almost all the major milestones had been completed, and the only significant task left ahead was mine — the last major part of the work. I would have a couple of months to finish it, after which the project would enter a phase of refinements and maintenance, and the team would be reduced.
I informed my Resource Manager about this (in EPAM this is the person who is responsible for allocating employees to projects and helping them find new assignments once their current project ends). We had a good relationship, and he thanked me for the heads-up. But within a week — or perhaps two — I was told that my RM was changing: my old one had left the company. In his place came a new one — a dry, distant person who knew nothing about me beyond my profile in the internal system.
During those days I happened to stumble upon a popular science video on YouTube. The author spoke frankly: science still has blank spots, and not everything is as clear-cut as textbooks suggest. I liked that, and I left a comment: “Good man, at least someone admits it.”
The responses came quickly. A heated debate started — harsh, almost turning into insults. People calling themselves “scientific” tried to prove that I was a fool, a believer, that consciousness has nothing to do with quantum physics and everything can be explained by matter alone. I, in turn, cited research, pointed to the paradoxes within science itself, and at some point even brought up an example from the works of Rupert Sheldrake.
And that was when something strange happened. My comments started to disappear. I could see them under the video on my account, but as soon as I opened the page in incognito mode — they were simply gone. YouTube seemed to deny me the right to argue, refusing to let my position appear in the public space. I experienced firsthand what is called a “shadow ban.”
This was not just a glitch. It was a sign. A sign that digital form, the algorithm itself, was starting to interfere with the very fabric of meaning. It was not people blocking me — it was the system, hiding my words from others. I felt once again how form kills meaning in real time: you have a thought, you have an argument, but they vanish because the algorithm has decided they should not exist.
The Announcement of What Was Coming
Somewhere near the end of the second week of June — either on Thursday or already on Friday morning, the 13th — my Resource Manager contacted me. He said he wanted to talk separately and scheduled a meeting. Soon after, on Friday afternoon, the meeting took place: we went on a video call. That was when he told me the main point: if by July 7 I did not find a new project, no one would extend my visa. I immediately interrupted him: “So I will have to go home?” He calmly confirmed: “Yes.”
Inside me it sounded like a sentence. A wave of outrage rushed through: how? How is this even possible? Where is my conscientious work taken into account? I had not slacked off, I had not broken the rules, I had completed all tasks honestly. My current project was simply ending, and yet they were effectively pushing me out of the country. On top of that, he noted that my chances would be higher if I passed an English-language assessment to raise my level. I listened to this and could not believe my ears: was this why I had been carrying projects on my shoulders, working nights, taking on responsibilities?
At that moment I also told him: “I do not have a family here, I am alone.” I expected him to grasp the seriousness of my situation, to understand that if I had managed to hold out on my own, that meant I was not a nobody, that I was worth something. But instead he suddenly switched to a patronizing tone and said directly: “As your senior colleague, I want to give you some advice.” And then he began delivering his little speech: that this was not so terrible, that in life all sorts of things happen, that it is part of the journey, that I should take it philosophically.
Those words broke me completely. Inside, everything was boiling: who are you to tell me “this happens”? You are announcing my expulsion, a catastrophe, and you are talking as if this were some ordinary life episode.
I heard him while feeling anger intertwine with pain. It seemed insane even to explain how much effort I had invested, what I had learned, what trials I had endured. To get here, to America, I had walked a road unimaginable to those who had always had support behind them: two university degrees, a master’s degree, years of studying English, years of complete dedication to my work — and all this on top of having stood alone against circumstances. My whole path had always been a solitary road: so many times I had been betrayed — and each time I rose from the ashes, overcame the impossible, moved forward, without a family, without a safety net, relying only on myself. That was my real school, my true university of life.
And now this person, who had never known real hardship, decided he had the right to lecture me on life. He spoke to me in a didactic tone, as though he were a mentor allowed to explain what “part of the journey” means — at the very moment when for me it sounded like exile and a verdict.
I tried to keep myself under control and asked him directly: “Wait, but I have a PERM. Back in March they told me it was ready, that it is valid for six months. How is this possible?” He shrugged and replied with unexpected dryness: “I do not know anything about that.”
That phrase hit harder than the verdict itself. “I do not know” — that meant my entire fate, all my work, my life here in the country I had spent so long striving for was, to him, nothing more than a bureaucratic trifle. It meant nothing, was worth nothing, decided nothing.
Inside me something broke. It was like a doctor telling a patient: “Your test results? Oh, I do not know. I have not seen them.” But this was not about tests — it was about a document that determined my future. I felt as though I were being deliberately kept in the dark, as if everyone else had the keys to the door and I was being shown only the lock.
Right there on the call, I told him that I would write to the legal department. He nodded indifferently. After the conversation, I really did sit down and write the letter — I described the situation, reminded them about the PERM, asked for clarification. This was my appeal to the last instance.
There was no response. Not that day, not the next week, not in the weeks that followed. Complete silence. I kept checking my email again and again, replaying the wording of my letter in my head, wondering whether I had written it too harshly or, on the contrary, too softly. But it was all useless. Until the very moment of dismissal I never received a single line in reply.
That silence was the heaviest of all. It was not just the absence of information — it felt like the indifference of a system in which a person can dissolve, vanish, lose everything without explanation.
After that conversation with my RM, time began to run backward — I understood that the window was closing.
Around the sixteenth or seventeenth of the month, I had a new interview. I was telling them about myself: three years of work on a Google project, dozens of projects before that, twenty years of coding, twelve years in Java, experience leading teams and conducting interviews. One would think there was something to talk about: architecture, systems, real tasks. But instead, they began to test me with “school-level” questions: what methods does an object have in Java. The very questions that I used to ask junior developers were now being asked to me — with the look of people holding in their hands some kind of magical filter.
Then came a LeetCode problem — “reverse the digits.” Once upon a time I knew the solution by heart; even a year ago I would have written it out immediately. But I had not prepared, I had not expected that a serious conversation about technologies and systems would turn into a cheap guessing game. I tried to solve it step by step, through division remainder, but I became confused, lost track. Stress, nervousness — and that was it.
Next came SQL questions. Here I was answering confidently until we reached the Window function. I had never used it, I had always solved such problems in other ways, and always successfully. After the interview, within five minutes, I figured out how it worked. But in the moment — I could not.
And here was the result: after twenty years of work, dozens of projects, and a deep understanding of architecture, I received the feedback — “Not enough experience.” When I saw this, my indignation knew no bounds. Twenty years of code, dozens of projects, three years at Google — and all of that was crossed out with one formal “not enough experience.” Inside, everything was boiling. It felt as if I had been erased with the press of a key, as if my path and my knowledge amounted to nothing.
Then I sat down and wrote an article — “The Idiocy of IT Interviews.” In it I said everything. That the system no longer looks for specialists. That real experience is not valued. That the industry worships LeetCode as an idol. That thousands of engineers are thrown out not because they are incapable of working, but because they are filtered out by meaningless tests that have nothing to do with real tasks. I wrote that this is not only my pain — this is a global problem. And that the industry is collapsing precisely because of this: because ritual has replaced meaning.
I did not stop there. I wrote a letter to the interviewers and to my Resource Manager. I said directly: this is unacceptable. You are not hiring people, you are destroying human experience. You worship ritual instead of searching for real engineers. In that letter, I attached a link to my article — “The Idiocy of IT Interviews,” so they could read for themselves everything I thought about this system.
And then there was another step. I sent the second letter during the night from the eighteenth to the nineteenth of June, on my birthday, when I turned thirty-seven. I was sitting in America with a glass in my hand and with the feeling that the road home was already beginning to shine ahead. It was a special night: I dictated my thoughts to ChatGPT, and it arranged them into coherent sentences. Inside there was a feeling of impulse, of meaning, as if something greater was moving me.
In that letter I wrote that I would not stop. That if necessary, I would raise the issue to the level of the Chief Executive Officer. That I would create a YouTube channel, a Reddit community, any platforms in order to tell the truth about what is happening in the industry. That I would deliver this information and expose the system. Because one cannot close their eyes: people are being thrown away, their destinies are being broken, years of experience erased — all so that someone can “reverse digits.”
I understood that this was no longer only about me. This was about the fact that the industry itself is arranged wrongly. And if it is not exposed, it will continue to push out those who know how to create systems, and instead raise robots for meaningless little tasks.
On the twenty-third of June, on Monday, an employee from Human Resources contacted me and suggested discussing all of my letters. I was delighted: finally there was hope that I would be heard, that I would be able to explain my pain and tell about this misunderstanding. We scheduled a meeting for Tuesday.
On Tuesday we connected via video call and began the conversation. I said immediately that I was being evaluated in a completely inadequate way: my twenty years of experience were simply being erased. She asked: “And who exactly is evaluating you this way — people from Google or from EPAM?” I replied that it was specifically EPAM. They demanded solutions to LeetCode problems while ignoring all of my experience. I listed what I had worked on, what tasks I had solved, how much effort I had invested, how I had struggled and overcome difficulties. I explained that I am worth something and that for me it would be a catastrophe to be left without a project. In that case, I would have to return home, and that would be a personal tragedy.
I hoped that I would be heard. But at the same time, I felt that the conversation seemed more like an attempt to placate and calm me down, as is sometimes done with a dissatisfied client, rather than a true desire to understand. Nevertheless, she said that she had heard my problem. First, that I needed a project. Second, that perhaps interviews at EPAM were indeed being conducted inadequately.
I sent her again my article “The Idiocy of IT Interviews,” where I had laid out my position in detail: the system erases people with experience, replacing it with meaningless tests like bubble sort. I asked her to help me find a project. She jokingly said that on that particular project they would hardly take me now. I thought: fine, that is not the main thing. The main thing is that the problem itself should not remain unnoticed. Our conversation ended on that note.
The next day I was apparently added to some group in Microsoft Teams, where a certain Delivery Manager was looking for a lead for a project at Google. I sent him my resume, as he asked me to. That was the end of our communication. I remained in a waiting mode. Although there was still a hope that he might take me.
The next day, I was added to some group in Microsoft Teams. There, one delivery manager was looking for a leader for a project at Google. At his request, I immediately sent him my résumé. That was the end of our communication, and I remained in a waiting mode, although deep inside I still held on to the hope that this very project could become my chance.
However, the name of the project caught my attention — GO2-HOME. I tried not to attach any meaning to it, but an involuntary thought crept in: what if this is a sign, a hint that it is time for me to return home? I pushed these associations away from myself, trying to focus only on hope.
On Wednesday, I was scheduled to take an English language assessment. On that same day, my resource manager wrote to me: he said that we needed to talk. I replied that I could not get in touch at that moment, because I had to take the assessment.
When I tried to go through with it, it turned out that on that very day the platform was not working: some updates were taking place, and access to the test was blocked. This confused me and threw me completely off balance, since deadlines were pressing, and the possibility of completing the test was literally taken away from me.
After that, realizing that it was impossible to take the assessment, I nevertheless called my resource manager. The first thing I told him was: “Look, I am trying to take the test, but the system will not allow me.” He answered with a slight note of skepticism: “Well, this is exactly the sort of thing we have to deal with when we move on to new technologies. When it is no longer a living human being checking, but artificial intelligence — now things like this happen as well.”
After that, he stated that by sending my letters I had set him up. For me, this sounded strange and incomprehensible: I could not understand what exactly this so-called “set-up” was supposed to be.
I tried to explain to him my state of mind. The day before had been my birthday — the thirty-seventh. I had spent it in complete solitude. It was agonizing: on that day I was torn apart by the pain of realizing that there were no more chances, that there were no more projects left for me, and that meant I would have to go back home.
But my resource manager, it seemed, was not interested in this. He repeated once again: that I had set him up. That was the only thing that concerned him. He said that one must not threaten people, and that my words about “escalation” looked exactly like a threat. I answered: I was not intending to threaten anyone, I simply wanted to be heard. That was the only thing I was striving for.
Although, to be honest, I did feel a bit of regret about mentioning additional escalation. Perhaps it did play some role. But it is difficult to say for certain, because even before that he had informed me that if by the seventh day of the month — which was already very soon — I did not find a project, I would have to leave and go home. Therefore, it is unclear whether this influenced things in a decisive way or not. For me, it was rather a cry of pain, a last attempt to say: “Look at what you are doing, why are you acting this way?”
In the end, I said that I am an adult and I take full responsibility for everything I had said. And I apologized to my resource manager.
It was a little after three in the afternoon on Wednesday, June 25, when Sam, a colleague from my project, messaged me. There was some event happening at EPAM’s main office in San Jose. I had no real intention of going — it did not seem worth the effort. But Sam said, “Come on, the food’s free.” I glanced at the clock: twenty minutes until it started, and the GPS showed a ten-minute drive. I figured I could make it. I got ready and headed out.
When I arrived, I parked my Tesla in the lot and walked toward the building. The main entrance was unlocked — no security, no badges, just an open door. That surprised me a little. Inside it was quiet and cool, the kind of silence offices get when everyone is gathered somewhere else. I went up to the right floor, followed the faint noise of voices, and soon found the event in progress.
It was my first time visiting the main EPAM office. In the hall, rows of chairs faced a small stage. People were listening to presentations about company policy and the future of artificial intelligence. I spotted my project manager as soon as I entered. Our eyes met; I gave a small wave, and he returned it. I took a seat in the back, just watching.
Then something strange happened. In the middle of the presentation, my project manager suddenly stood up and left — the only person in the room to do so. The moment hit me sharply. It was clear he had not done it by accident. Something inside told me he was deliberately avoiding me.
It was not a thought — it was a feeling, a subtle shift in the air. Detachment. The word “ignoring” came to mind and fit too perfectly. I stayed until the end, but a heavy sense settled in — as if, in silence and small gestures, something important between us had finally been defined.
When it was over, tables at the back of the room were already set with food — pizza, drinks, and a few snacks. In the corner, a tiny balcony with two chairs and a table offered a quiet place to breathe for a moment. I walked around a bit, scanning the faces. None of my teammates were there. The only person I could have spoken to — my project manager — had left before anyone else.
I decided to look for Lizette, the head of Human Resources. I asked a few people, but they told me she was not at the event. A wave of disappointment rolled through me, and I knew it was time to go. There was nothing left for me there.
I walked out, got in the car, and sat for a while. My thoughts were heavy — it felt like my time at the company was quietly drawing to a close. Hope was still flickering somewhere deep inside, but to push back the dark mood a little, I stopped by Total Wine & More and bought a few beers. That was how that day ended.
My last working day was supposed to take place on the thirtieth of June, which was a Monday. But I did not want to leave quietly. On the night from Sunday to Monday, I sent a long letter to the general team chat. In it, I told them about myself: that I am a person with a difficult and unusual life story, an orphan, who has gone through many trials. And I added: if anyone is interested in learning more about me, here is my website, where there is a link to my book — download it, read it, study it.
Most of my team, as well as the project manager himself, were located in Poland, so their working day had already started, and they reacted immediately — mostly with words of gratitude for our joint work and with good wishes.
In the morning, I received the confirmation of the results of the English assessment: level B2 (Upper-Intermediate). I immediately reported this to the human resources manager and to the delivery manager, from whom I was waiting for the project.
