After 25 Years at Adobe, James Strawn Now Drives a School Bus

James Strawn spent a quarter century at Adobe. He was laid off in 2025. After more than a year searching for another tech job, he took a position driving a 40-foot school bus for Colorado District 38.

The math is simple and hard. Twenty-five years of institutional knowledge, product launches, and quality engineering work on tools like Premiere Pro and Photoshop ended with a layoff notice. Then came the job search. Strawn has said he applied to more than 100 roles and received only one interview. Recruiters ghosted him. Some employers never showed up for scheduled interviews. He has described the experience as demoralizing and said he faced discrimination from the high-tech industry.

I have seen this pattern before. Not the bus part. The part where a long tenure becomes a liability instead of an asset. In the early 2000s, telecom workers who had spent decades at companies like Lucent and Nortel found themselves priced out of the market after those firms collapsed. Their deep experience counted against them. Hiring managers assumed they would be expensive, set in their ways, or both. The same thing happened to newspaper veterans after 2008. Twenty years on the metro desk did not open doors at digital startups. It closed them.

Strawn’s story fits that mold, with one difference. He did not wait for the market to change its mind. He changed lanes. A friend mentioned that the local bus barn was hiring drivers. He signed up for training. Two months later he had a commercial driver’s permit, a commercial license, on-road hours, and student management coursework under his belt. He started driving in August 2026.

He has been open about the pay cut. The median annual wage for school bus drivers was $47,040 in May 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A senior software quality engineer at a company like Adobe would have earned several times that. Strawn has said the new job pays a lot less. He has also said the work is fun, the kids are good most of the time, and his co-workers are caring, kind, and down to earth. He called it his new and hopefully final career.

There is precedent for this kind of pivot, though it rarely gets told with this much clarity. During the 2008 financial crisis, former bankers and mortgage brokers became Uber drivers, real estate agents became bartenders, and construction foremen took warehouse jobs. The common thread was not shame. It was cash flow. You take the work that is there. You keep your family housed. You rebuild your sense of purpose from the ground up.

What breaks the pattern here is the visibility. Strawn posted about his decision on LinkedIn. The post spread. It touched something in people who have watched their own résumés gather dust after years of loyalty to one employer. It also touched people who have never worked in tech but recognize the feeling of being told you are too much of one thing and not enough of another.

Adobe has not commented publicly on Strawn’s case. The company, like many in the sector, has carried out layoffs in recent years as it reshapes its product lines and cost structure. That is not unusual. What is less discussed is what happens to the people who leave after long tenures. Their skills are specific. Their salaries are high. Their networks are deep inside one company. Outside that wall, they can feel like strangers.

I keep thinking about the training. Two months to go from debugging video software to managing thirty children on a moving vehicle. The skill sets do not overlap much. One demands patience with code. The other demands patience with people who have not yet learned to sit still. Both demand attention to detail. Both demand you show up on time, every time, no matter what.

There is a quiet lesson in the sequence. First, the layoff. Then the long search. Then the pivot to work that is available, even if it pays less and looks different from the outside. The lesson is not that everyone should become a bus driver. It is that dignity does not come from a job title. It comes from doing the work in front of you well.

Strawn has said he is looking forward to the work. He has said his co-workers are kind. He has said the kids are good, mostly. That last word matters. It leaves room for the hard days. It leaves room for the fact that no job is perfect. It also leaves room for the possibility that this turn, unexpected as it is, might be the one that holds.

The pattern says more people could follow this path. Not because bus driving is the answer. Because the answer is often the work that is hiring, not the work you planned. The pattern also says the tech sector will keep cycling through boom and bust. It will keep shedding experienced workers. Some will land on their feet in similar roles. Others will land in places that surprise them.

What comes next is not a prediction. It is a range of outcomes. Some will retrain and return to tech. Some will start businesses. Some will take jobs in trades, logistics, or public service. Some will do what Strawn did and find that the work they did not expect gives them something the old job did not. Time will tell which path holds for whom.

For now, the story ends where it began. With a man who spent twenty-five years at one company. With a layoff. With a year of searching. With a bus, a route, and a new kind of quiet at the end of the day.