From Amazon to eggs: How six chicks turned one Hyderabad woman’s layoff into a poultry business

There are career pivots, and then there is this one.

One day, Maria Harshitha was working at Amazon and thinking about her next role in product management. A few months later, she was looking at a very different kind of product: eggs.

The Hyderabad-based former Amazon employee has gone viral on LinkedIn after sharing how a layoff in March 2026 eventually led her to start a small chicken farm. The twist? The first six chicks she and her husband bought were all roosters.

Yes. All six.

But that slightly unfortunate beginning did not stop the experiment. It just made the story considerably more entertaining.

According to Harshitha's LinkedIn post, repeated job applications and rejections eventually pushed her to consider doing something of her own. What began with a backyard coop and a handful of chicks gradually turned into a small poultry business selling fresh eggs.

What happened after Maria Harshitha was laid off from Amazon?

Harshitha said she was laid off from Amazon in March 2026.

Initially, she assumed finding another job would not be particularly difficult. She reached out for referrals, applied elsewhere and tried to continue along the career path she had already built.

Instead, she encountered rejection after rejection.

That was when her husband, Khanishka David, encouraged her to stop thinking only about the next corporate job and consider building something of her own, according to her account.

It was advice that eventually took her somewhere neither of them could probably have predicted.

The backyard.

How did six chicks become the beginning of a chicken farm?

The first step was surprisingly small.

Harshitha and her husband built a chicken coop and bought six chicks while she continued looking for work.

Then came the first plot twist.

All six chicks turned out to be roosters.

Instead of abandoning the idea, Harshitha pushed for hens. She said one motivation was wanting her children to have access to what she considered fresh eggs rather than store-bought ones.

The family expanded the coop, brought in more chickens and eventually started getting eggs.

And then Harshitha did something that transformed a family experiment into a business.

She started selling them.

When did the chickens become a business?

This is where Harshitha's story takes its most amusing turn.

She had spent her professional career working with products. Now she had one of her own — except this one came from a chicken coop rather than a corporate office.

As she put it in her LinkedIn post, she had a product, a demand and a supply to manage.

In other words, she was doing product management again.

Just with eggs.

She also said she had begun using Power BI — a business analytics tool — to work with data from her new venture, something she never imagined she would be doing with a poultry business.

Why has the Amazon-to-poultry story gone viral?

Because it is almost comically far removed from the standard tech-career comeback story.

There is no glamorous startup office. No funding announcement. No pitch deck.

There is a chicken coop.

And there is something deeply relatable about the uncertainty behind the pivot. Harshitha expected her Amazon experience to help her quickly land another job. Instead, she found herself confronting a very different question: what if the next opportunity wasn't another corporate role?

Her LinkedIn post struck a chord with users, with commenters sharing their own experiences of layoffs, career uncertainty and unexpected career changes. Some praised her decision to build something around an existing interest rather than waiting indefinitely for another job offer.

Did she really go from six chicks to a poultry farm?

Yes — but there is an important distinction.

Harshitha describes it as starting her own chicken farm, but the available reporting does not suggest that this is a large commercial poultry operation. Her own account describes a venture that grew from a household chicken coop into selling eggs to meet demand.

So the viral version of the story is less "former Amazon employee builds a giant poultry empire" and more interestingly, "former Amazon employee starts small, finds a market and discovers she can build her own product."

That is a much more grounded story.

What does Maria Harshitha say she learned from the pivot?

For Harshitha, the story is not simply about chickens.

It is about redirection.

She connected the experience to her previous interest in product management and described the eggs as her new product. She also ended her post by expressing gratitude for what she saw as an unexpected change in direction.

There is also a nice irony to the whole thing.

She spent years learning how to manage products.

Then, after losing her job, she made one herself.

It just happened to come with feathers, wings and a rather noisy supply chain.

And somewhere between six accidental roosters, a bigger coop and a growing pile of eggs, Maria Harshitha found a new answer to the question every laid-off worker eventually faces:

What next?

For her, apparently, the answer was poultry.