One of the most profound realizations I've had lately is that the perception of the medium of communication itself is a well that can be poisoned with artificial interactions. Major empahsis on perception. The meer presence of artifical can immediately taint real interactions; you don't need a majority to poison the well.
How many spam calls does it take for you to presume spam? How many linkedin autoreply ai comments does it take to presume all comments are ai? How many emails before you immediately presume phishing? How many rage baiting social posts do you need to see before you believe the entire site is composed of synthetic engagement? How many tinder bots do you need to interact with before you feel the entire app is dead? How many autodeny job application responses until you assume the next one is a ghost job posting? How many interactions with greedy people does it take to presume that it's human nature?
How many AI cheaters do you need to catch on the technical phone screening interview to incorporate a habit of doing IRL CAPTCHA challenges?
But now, everything is bifurcated within languages because there is orders of magnitude more content being generated and that content is algorithmically delivered to your eyes and ears based on your interactions with whatever platform you use (e.g., instagram, reddit) and maybe even across multiple platforms. So you likely don't see anything related to Kim Kardashian because you aren't flipping channels anymore through what is essentially "static" content. Instead you are scrolling a feed designed for you and you have never indicated you wanted to keep up with the Kardashians based on what you like and dislike in your feed.
And so I think this bifurcation is combined with this kind of oily, artificial interactions you are talking about, and that makes the internet feel dead. Because the second you have a live experience, like going to a jazz bar without your phone and just hanging out and listening, everything feels so alive and real and amazing.
This all reminds me of these series of commercials by AT&T that were called like, the "You will" commercials or something like that and they were narrated by Tom Selleck [3]. The commercials show all these ways to use technology, that AT&T promised to deliver to you, to connect with both information and each other. Jenna Elfman sees her baby on a video phone, some kid sits in an online lecture and talks to his teacher, some dude sends a fax from the beach. All these things are of course possible today, but most of the time it really doesn't make you feel connected. I want to hold my baby not see it on video phone. I want to interact with my students in class not respond to their comments on some internet forum the university pays for. I want to discuss with my colleagues and build cool stuff together not sit in my office while they hang out at the beach. Everything promised in the AT&T "You will" commercials now exists. But none of it fulfills the promise that AT&T was making, that this would all make us feel more connected.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ-667CEdo
Although, there's a Lisp-inspired PHP called Phel: https://phel-lang.org/
And PHP typing with version 7.4.0: https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.ph...
But if the only language he posts about is PHP, I think the source if his hiring problems is clear.
That's not really the case with Perl. And I love Perl, I really do. But it's just too wacky, too wild-west, too out there.
PHP is basically C# at this point with a bit more runtime bugs.
But what do you think — was the blogger we're discussing was on the forefront of the PHP change (rewriting the old ugh code at his last job), or is his idea of PHP the old style? Just based on the way he writes, what do you guess?
> ...when they learn I was developing advanced php web apps when they were in diapers. As if that has any negative relevance towards _the modern technologies i’ve gone on to learn and be experienced with in more recent years_.
(Emphasis mine)
If this person has been working for 20 years, they were definitely working at the time when MD5 hashing was considered security in the PHP community and the best technology that community could muster at the time was the horrifying architecture of WordPress.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this fella is a good engineer but you could not convince me that back in the day PHP had anything going on for it except for low barrier of entry.
I think part of Perl's downfall was that TMTOWTDI became too many ways to do one thing, and it was too easy to create terse, unreadable code. Basically, the opposite direction of modern concepts like "idiomatic Go".
I'm sad that Perl is dying while people are still writing fucking bash scripts in production code. (Perl is still better than that!)
Shell scripts are forever. So far.
I could offer a number of critiques about things but instead, I'll encourage him to go back and un-delete his AI vlog content as even if he feels the ground has moved, I would likely find his interest in this topic as a positive thing. I would also recommend he move his tech vlogs to someplace where the topic was the focus rather than blending it into other important parts of his life.
(Typing this from an office.)
I did the hour commute thing, I hated it even when it was the norm.
This is just so he could sit in an office while all of his teammates were remote in other locations.
It’s a little weird living in a small trailer when I’m a homeowner, in fact I own three houses
"in fact I own three houses: A fixer-upper starter home in a rust belt upstate New York university city, and a patch of beautiful remote rural land with 2 pretty humble and simple cabins on it an hour from the city house"
He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta be joking. He says he can't clear the 25-year old Steve-Jobs complex SV bro mini-boss. Well, duh.
That's the industry. It sucks you up and it spits you out. It vampires the best years of your life and then you're on your own.
Sorry that the author had to find out, but I think I've seen that coming from the day I was first employed as a junior engineer. I just averaged up the ages of my colleagues and it was blindingly obvious how things turn out in the long run.
Nor "AI" as in "Artificial Intelligence", but "AI" as in "Ageist Industry".
P.S. Look on the bright side: at least you're not a 42 year old woman looking for software jobs. Hah.
This is such an odd take. I see lots of older folks around me - and 42 isn't that old.
That said, it's undeniably true that expectations are raised the further along in your career you are. Interviewers will accept mistakes from a fresh college grad that they won't accept from an engineer with 20 years of industry experience who should know better (and is paid more). Not to mention there's just statistically fewer openings for TL positions. All of that definitely makes interviews harder as you're further along in your career.
> ...in fact I own three houses
> ...I left behind everything and everyone i know and love on the west coast to come to New York specifically for this opportunity of helping care for my family and growing long term equity with real estate
> With my full time engineering job bringing in around $150k, a salary that I clawed my way slowly and steadily for 20 years, I could just about manage covering all the expenses, maintenance, and planned improvements for the long-term vision of the properties, maintain my 16-year-old daily driver car, and maybe even have four or five thousand dollars left over each year to take one little camping trip and make a couple stock and crypto investments.
Rather than building a career as a software engineer, he spent most of his time as a small-time real estate and crypto(!) investor subsidized by his software engineering side hustle.
A stock investment might "cost" $4000, but I would hope to have nearly $4000 in some asset. My absolute worst investments, I typically still exited them with 40% of my initial capital.
The industry is ageist, but not "900 applications and 3 interviews" ageist. The big problem here is the concentration on remote work. I'm quite a bit older than this guy, quit a job earlier this year and went looking for work again only to find that "ooh, dream job, remote, nice little pay bump" were the jobs that got swamped with 1000 applicants.
He's simply going to have to move closer to where office based jobs are, suck up the commute for a while and when they have more confidence they'll let him work remote after a while.
Most of the jobs are likely getting swamped by AI generated applications, by overseas candidates and by every chancer who hates their current job.
In the current job market, there is absolutely no substitute for leaning on your personal network. It's the only real way to compete against AI and foreign workers. So that means, to give yourself options in a job you don't like, maintaining that personal network is absolutely essential. Instead of wasting the effort on 900 job applications after you quit or get fired, concentrate on reinforcing those connections whether you need them or not.
edit: I had my choice of jobs after a small wait, purely through people I know personally.
There is a separate conversation to be had about whether this is a good thing -- should we allow the job market to force people to move away from their homes/families/friends/connections? -- but it's already a fact of life for a lot of people.
I think this is complete nonsense to be honest. If you're 42 with 20 years of experience you can walk into any random municipal office in a reasonably large town and find a software or at least IT admin job that people will throw at you, because chances are the youngest person there is 55.
The only ageist part of the software industry is the whole web and startup sector, your average post office, hospital, government and education software job is full of middle aged people. If you're unemployed just take a job there
They suffer even more age discrimination?
Where are the all knowing AI bots who are going to fix this?
I don’t quite see the link to AI though?
The CV bot hellhole yes, but not how it replaced him? Is he saying nobody is hiring php devs anymore because of cursor & co? Presumably with 20 years experience he isn’t coding simple stuff so that doesn’t seem super likely
> something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years.
End of ZIRP. For a lot of companies, especially in the early stage world the math stopped mathing without free money
Regardless overall the message does seem directionally correct - society is going to need a solution pretty soon for people struggling to compete, AI or otherwise
Generative AI is a novelty that makes us crazy productive at certain tasks. But it doesn't yet seem to fundamentally change what we build or why. We just do it faster and sloppier with AI. It's a tactical tool to help you win, whereas interest rates define the rules of the game.
We're building some stuff that actively uses it—not (just) using it to write code, but integrating it into business processes.
This is both:
1) A far, far more valuable use of it than as a replacement for e.g. macros in your editor, assuming it worked as one might hope it would.
2) In practice so incredibly brittle, tightly-coupled, expensive, and slow to develop (not to mention some of the most boring work I've ever done in my 25 year career) relative to other options that the business could have embraced at any time in the last 15 years (but didn't because it took the hype of "AI" to gain activation energy for the project) all with no evident path toward any of that meaningfully improving, that I'm looking for an exit to another project that's ideally non-AI-related for when this one turns into a nightmare before eventually imploding and staining everyone involved's reputation, if not getting them fired. I reckon the nightmare phase is about six months out, for this one, and the implosion 12-18 out.
I expect similar stories are playing out all over the place.
AI is a very convenient way to tell that story as being about an ascendant new technology, rather than a post covid decline for the tech sector.
"Software development is now considered a Section 174 R&D expenditure. This means it must be capitalized and amortized over 5 years (15 years for foreign software development)."
If any one of these were the case you'd have tens of thousands of previously gainfully employed swes out of work. But ALL of them became the case and pretty much in the last 3 years.
[1] - Let's just say I'm a believer
i hope things don't get so bad that my options are destitution or the defense industry, but i'm used to eating ramen.
I would reiterate that most jobs in syracuse are basically C, C++ or Java. The only real web shop is TCG Player, I think theyre C# and god sold to ebay so its the same high competititon. Equitable might have some stuff, not sure how things are going there but they are a java shop. Out to rochester you get a few more web places. But most of the web jobs even are corpro enterprise jobs, they probably dont have a ton of need for php or javascript front end really. Theres plenty of cloud out in Rome. Rochester has more than syracuse, from syracuse its doable, I know people that did that commute.
Then, when the job market contracts by what would otherwise be 5 or 10 percent, all hell breaks loose, and there's an enormous chain reaction.
Advice to other commenters here on HN. Before clicking 'add comment', ask yourself:
- If I post from a non-empathetic stance, to what extent is my lack of empathy a strategy to avoid experiencing discomfort?
- If I post from a contradicting or fact-checking stance, to what extent is my skepticism motivated by a desire to feel safer in the world?
- If I post from a relativising or contextualizing stance, to what extent is my reframing driven by the fear that it could happen to me?
You don't have to ask yourself any of these things; but they are hard-won tools I've gained through a lot of work on myself, and they have been of benefit to me. May they be of benefit to you as well.
Thank you for these great questions.
I believe other factors are also involved, such as having the necessary skills for software development.
Stop being so different and try to match what companies are looking for.
Remote only.
Single letter surname.
This constraint, that constraint, you’re getting the answer you are telling the market to give you.
Yes there are now significant barriers you face: x months not in a relevant role, laid off, 20 years in the industry without a management role.
If you’re pitching yourself against people who have 3-5 years experience, will work 50-60 hour weeks coz early in career and lifestyle unencumbered, it’s not going to go your way.
That means you have to go the extra mile to fit what is wanted.
And yes, that likely means significant drop in salary / attractiveness of role / commute etc.
Maybe there just isn’t the work where you are and you will need to move, maybe your mother too.
Talk to people in the industry you know and trust about this, not HN.
I’ve been in similar situations, currently in a very tech role at 62, but that’s not usual.
Wish you the best
I got a small leyline around September with a part-time job doing Wordpress stuff for a former client. No days off, zero security, just barely surviving month after the other. Fortunately, things are turning around for me! I'm starting a new full-time job next month. It's pretty well paid too, hybrid role, so I will be able to rebuild my savings, contribute to my pension fund, keep up with my balooning mortgage, etc.
The Lord is indeed merciful! I really hope I can make it work, because I get maybe an interview every few months or so.
I think the most brutal part that no one talks about is just how many scams are out there that target unemployed people. I tried doing freelancing for a while, but I never got paid even once. Contracts don't even matter because I don't have the muscle to enforce them. I almost fell for a bunch of scam job interviews/offers as well. I think I broke into tears after an interview that seemingly went well, then I got forwarded some forms to fill, one of them asking for my credit card information for payment.
It's beyond my powers to help him, but I hope things turn around for the OP as well.
It's getting to where I just bail out of any application that asks for something unusual like the name of my high school or what kind of people I'm attracted to (and I've seen the latter multiple times now).
The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944911 - May 2025 (5 comments)
On you resume, change your name to "Shawn Kay." Wait until you're doing HR paperwork to use your legal name.
Some context from the blog post: > I turned to service apps this winter: doordash, instacart, uber eats. Their signup systems were incompatible with my full, legal, one-letter last name, and it took about 50 hours on the phone with doordash support in Malaysia and the background check provider in India to eventually get cleared to drive them. I was not able to get through on the other apps.
For sure the impact is not just limited to service apps.
Why would parents burden their kid like this?
I think it does become a problem where formal systems are inflexible and unable to accommodate or be corrected.
https://www.reddit.com/r/namenerds/comments/10hssp8/why_do_p...
I just wholly disagree with the conclusion that this is a common situation brought by AI. AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.
I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant. I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on, because something tells me it’d provide insight to whatever is going on here.
again not trying to be dismissive, but even with my fairly unimpressive resume I can get at least 1st round calls fairly easily, and my colleagues that write actual software all report similar. companies definitely are being more picky, but if your issue is that you’re not even being contacted, I’d seriously question your approach. They kind of get at the problem a little by stating they “wont use a ton of AI buzzwords.” Like, ok? But you can also be smart about knowing how these screeners work and play the game a little. Or you can do doordash. personally I’d prefer the former to the latter.
Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.
AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.
I only know personally of one counter example to your message. In my career, I've reviewed, interviewed, and hired a few hundred people for somewhat known companies and startups. I also helped many friends find jobs in the past, before the market became what it is today, without any issues. So I like to think I understand what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for.
End of last year, a friend with 12 years of relevant experience started looking for a job. I reviewed his CV (which he tweaked for some of the applications) and cover letters (he wrote one for each company). Everything was as good as it can be for the position he was applying for.
Out of ~20 applications he got a total of 4 replies: 3 generic rejections and one screening that led him to being hired. He killed it during the interviews, but just getting his foot in the door was so hard. Maybe in some parts of the world we're back to 2015-2020 levels of recruiter "harassment", but in others it's super dry, even for senior positions.
Before the market change, for senior engineering and eng management positions, the ratio was 1:1 if the person so wished. My whole career was exactly that: 1 application, 1 offer, always.
I'm not sure the relationship is strict enough that the formerly 5% hit rate engineer is now going to see 1.25%, but my guess would be that they'll at least find things a lot more difficult.
This year I'm actually looking, applied for multiple jobs, and had silence.
Might be a Trump effect but it's not the same just now. Reminds me of 2008.
I know a number of very experienced engineers that went through hundreds of application over more than a year before finally finding employment.
Often there would be several rounds of interviews, sometimes 6!, with several leading to c-suite interviewers saying "you'll be receiving an offer", and then nothing. Ghosted.
These are people with decades of experience, big corps, successful startups, extensive contact networks.
The DOGE breed of 20 something darlings are in for a rude awakening down the road.
I'm very very glad I'm at the tail end of my 40 year career. If I were looking at university enrollment in the present, I don't think I'd choose engineering. The tech industry is just not the employment growth opportunity that it was.
I'd choose being an electrician before being an electrical engineer in the current conditions...
Back in the early 2000s when I was finishing my Software Engineer BSc degree I saw the choice of becoming a "generalist" vs becoming a "specialist". I actually liked EVERYTHING technology wise: From Neural Networks to Game development (graphics with OpenGL) to algorithms, Web development, to Java JNI, assembler and whatnot. I couldn't see myself focusing in one thing.
Fast forward to 2025, I'm 44 years old and have been 24 years in the industry. In the last 5 years I've had 3 jobs: One, helping a startup move form a non-scalable monolith system (ruby) to a very scalable microservices one. I was CTO of a crypto-exchange company, building ECS/nodejs based microservices and then an App (React Native). And right now I am helping some young guys in a startup doing AI based Tax reconciliation (helping exporting companies recover their VAT).
In my opinion, right now is the BEST moment to be a developer. Coding with Cursor is magic. Implementing an API in python with FastAPI is so freaking easy and quick. I don't have to worry about recalling a lot of details, but mainly think on problem solving.
I have the hypothesis that the people that are struggling are the "specialists". Suddenly with AI it doesn't matter that you know the in and outs of Java, Hybernate and the whole stack. There's more value in solving problems. I am happy that I chose the "generalist" path. I think AI will reduce the demand the "specialist" skillset.
I also recognize when AI is getting the answers wrong. LLMs are great at giving you general, well documented answers. For the moment it doesn't have the foresight to tackle complex systems. And that is where a specialist can really shine. But the world doesn't need a lot of answers to complex problems when most of the time a general one will do.
What fraction of positions require that ongoing learning, or at least to that degree?
Also, consider many other jobs, are they doing their job, and the doing of their job itself provides the experience that makes you a more valuable worker? Or is the doing of the job basically a necessary distraction from the actual task of preparing yourself for a future job? What fraction of humanity actually takes on two jobs, the paying job and the preparing-for-the-next-job? Might doing the latter get you fired from the former? Most importantly, is doing that latter job getting more important over time, that is, are our jobs less secure? If so, is this what is an improving economy, rising, as it were, with GDP?
Of course, as a sibling comment, I think, said it could be the end of ZIRP. But maybe the truth is it's end of ZIRP, seeing a "peer" shed employees en masse and not fail outright, and AI.
Twitter deal in 2022. Headcount by year for a few (not suggesting this data supports my theory; just sharing to reality check)...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
Edit: grammar
It's worth remembering Twitter was a buggy mess before Elon bought it. Sure it's still a buggy mess today, but the staffing costs are dramatically lower.
Losing a ton of money was something Twitter was also pretty good at even before Elon too - only profitable 2 years out of the 8 leading up to the acquisition while it was still a public company etc.
He reduced the headcount to roughly what it was in 2017. At the time of the acquisition, many of the employees were in non technical roles, contributing nothing of value, posting videos about their empty work day on TikTok. Jack Dorsey admitted that he made a mistake by over hiring - more than doubled the headcount from 2017 to 2021.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
It brings you back to that old HN saw "why do these companies need so many people to do that?" Maybe the answer actually was they didn't/don't.
this seems a gross misunderstanding of how software companies work at scale. Twitter doesn't hire engineers to run a monitoring system cause they need it to stay alive (there are alternatives to building and running their own!), they chose to do it to save money or increase revenue.
Twitter doesn't need an ad network, they can use Google, or build their own and take more profit. They might know that for every 3 engineers they hire on their ad network, they increase their click rate and thus revenue.
The same can be said for any infra team. You don't need to build much infra, but companies do it because sometimes it's a way to save hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud costs or licensing fees.
I'm disputing the claim that the above statement was ever in question. FAANG doesn't employ people because they mistakenly thought they needed that many, they do it because adding more employees has either lowered their infra costs or increased their revenue.
I just don’t understand how it’s possible. I admit I was one of the skeptics predicting Twitter’s immediate demise after laying off so many. Everywhere I have ever worked had at least 3X more work to do than staff to do it. You can’t get rid of even one person without feeling the pain. I just can’t fathom working for a company that can get rid of so many people and not struggle! My current company wouldn’t be able to even keep the lights on in the offices if it lost 80% of its staff.
The bull case is that he sacrificed Twitter capital in exchange for political capital, which I think is pretty sound. But that doesn't really apply to most CEOs running most businesses.
All feels on my part just to hopefully add to the dialogue. Nothing scientific here.
Elon's actions were a clear signal to the industry and investors that it's time to "fight back" and show the labor market who's really in charge.
Basically, the ownership class was pissy that some people were able to actually get away from exchanging time for money.
The overstaffing problem was painfully obvious at many of the companies I spoke too as a consultant during that time. They'd have bizarre situations where they'd have dozens of product managers, project managers, program managers, UX designers, and every other title but barely a handful of engineers. It was just a big gridlock of managers holding meetings all day.
One friend resigned from Twitter prior to anything Elon related, specifically citing the fact that it paid well but it was impossible to get anything done. Not all of Twitter was like this, but he was outside of engineering where he was one of scores of people with his same title all competing to work on tiny features for the site or app.
The pendulum seems to be swinging to the other direction, where companies are trying to do too much with too few people. I still see a lot of growing (or shrinking) pains where companies are cutting in the wrong places, like laying off engineers to the point of having more people with {product,project,program}-manager titles combined than engineers. I hope we settle out somewhere more reasonable soon.
For those of us who have been around the block (i.e., are old), the only times I've personally seen companies aggressively cut personnel is during economic shocks (dotcom bubble and housing crisis as two examples) and only then were the companies running lean (I wouldn't even say they were running bare bones; it's the only time I've seen headcount actually optimized for the work being produced).
I think the Twitter purge was actually an example of a major trigger. Not on par with the previous two I mentioned (obviously), but it was so high profile that anyone in tech took note of it, which is why I made the original comment. I've never seen so much discussion around a layoff for a company that was not imminently imploding (some may say Twitter was about to implode, but if you said that at the time I think you were wrong regardless of the state of its financials).
If I was running into the kind of wall he was trying to get a coding job [1], I think I, like him, would be looking at a career change.
When I was in the Bay Area, living on a street of white-collar professionals, the one "blue collar" guy on the block had a house painting business. It's probably no surprise he began as a painter himself, working for someone else. He was smart enough to know how to bail and go into business for himself. That eventually lead to him hiring others. He's the boss now.
When I retired and left the neighborhood, his day appeared to begin with going out to the various job sites that day and see that his crew were on task, knew the plan. He played golf most of the middle of the day. By the afternoon he went around the sites to see how his guys had done. In the evening with the garage door open, he would be at a small desk doing books, whatever.
Have pickup truck will travel.
[1] The jobs are going to come from knowing people already employed that can say, "Hey, we have an opening — I'll send your resume to my boss."
1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring.
2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people"
3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground.
4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money.
It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we don't really know until it plays out. If you believe history rhymes, humans will figure out what AI does well and doesn't do so well. Once that's worked out, the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up around the new norm.
That is almost certainly happening. What needs to play out for the pendulum to swing the other way is all of these companies realizing that their codebase has become a bunch of AI-generated slop that nobody can work on effectively (including the AIs). Whether that plays out or not is an open question: how much slop can the AI generate before it falls over?
I learned a word cruising Reddit the other day that summarizes that issue quite well - "liminal". At the time, it was in the context of malls, and the collapse of American storefront consumerism, yet the issues are similar:
"relating to the transitional stage of a process", or "the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage"
We're stuck in that in-between land where your 2) seems like it's often the response to most suggestions. We'll, we don't really want to take a risk ... cause tomorrow AI may make that choice irrelevant. We don't really want to invest ... cause tomorrow AI may make our investment worthless. We don't really want to hire more people ... cause tomorrow AI may do their jobs easily. And there's always that number 3) sensation somewhere "your team can do more, you're just not leveraging tools enough".
For the past 10 years, one of my best friends has been the senior copy editor for [Fortune 500 company's] sprawling website, managing more than a dozen writers. It's a great job, full time, mostly remote, with fantastic benefits (including unlimited PTO, a concept that I can't even fathom as a freelancer). The website comprises thousands of pages of product descriptions, use cases, and impenetrable technical jargon aimed at selling "solutions" to whatever Fortune 500 executives make those kinds of mammoth IT decisions.
Recently, he was telling me how AI was impacting his job. He said he and his writers started using GPT a couple years ago to speed things up.
"But now I have to use it. I wouldn't be able to work without it," he said, "because in the last year they laid off all but two of the writers. The workload's the same, but they put it all on me and the two who are left. Mostly just to clean up GPT's output."
I said, "I don't know who ever read that crap anyway. The companies you're selling to probably use GPT to summarize those pages for them, too." He agreed and said it was mostly now about getting AIs to write things for other AIs to read, and this required paying fewer and fewer employees.
So while AI may be a nice productivity booster, it's not like there's unlimited demand for more productivity. Companies only need so much work done. If your employees are made 4x more productive by a new tool, you can lay off 75% of them. And forget about hiring, because the tools are just getting better.
Coders like me don't want to believe this is coming for us, but I think it is. I'm lucky to have carved out a niche for myself where I actually own a lot of proprietary code and manage a lot of data-keeping that companies rely on, which effectively constitutes technical debt for them and which would be extremely onerous to transition away from even if they could get an AI to reverse engineer my software perfectly (which I think is still at least a few years off). But humans are going to be an ever-shrinking slice of the information workforce going forward, and staying ahead of those layoffs is not just a matter of knowing a lot about the latest AI tech or having a better resume. I think the smart play at this point is to prepare for more layoffs, consider what it would take to be the last person doing your entire team's job, and then wedge yourself into that position. Make sure you have the only knowledge of how the pipeline works, so it would be too expensive to get rid of you.
Many companies are also way overstaffed, IME (thinking non-software/"tech" F500s here)
Having worked as a consultant with various F500 companies over the last few years, there's loads of people that do very little work, and much of the work is low value--myself included; I make no claims I'm above any of this.
I've encountered countless project managers that do nothing other than move Jira tickets around.
Me: "Hey I'm blocked, can you get me in contact with $TEAM that owns this stuff"
PM: "Uh no, ask $PERSON"
How many of this person does any company need?
Even developers--I've worked with loads that take a week to set up some Angular project or cloud resources, and the even darker part of all of that is the whole project is destined to fail, cause the sales org sold em on some "modernization" thing that'll never get off the ground, that they don't have the staff to maintain, and they don't have the organizational will or discipline to integrate.
I've been on countless projects like this, there's piles of excess people doing low value (or no) work at all, saved only from unemployment by the sheer complexity of byzantine, bureaucratic organizations.
I wonder how much this factors in. We know from statistic this situation tends to lead to worse outcomes.
Basically those connections you are talking about, are some form of nepotism and a kind of privilege. Should it be this way?
I don't come from poverty, I come from a firmly middle class background. We were a single income household where my dad was a public attorney. Nobody in my immediate or extended family worked in tech. Over the course of my ~15 year career, I've built up a fairly extensive network of former coworkers, many of who I'm sure would try to hire me or get me referrals at their companies if they found out I was on the market. None of this was built through nepotism, as I literally had no connections in tech when I started out.
So, that's the question. The author claims they have had a 20 year career. What happened to all those connections? Do they have a bunch of connections, but no prior coworkers would want to work with them again?
In any case, networks can be hard to build and maintain, and they can easily fall apart if you fall into a rut.
This is one of the more chaotic and difficult to parse resumes I've seen. Can I suggest you try returning to a standard resume format where you simply list jobs in chronological order with short bullet points underneath each one?
You lead your Professional Summary with a point about using AI coding tools and the #1 skill you list in the skills box is "Vibecoding". It's good to keep up with AI-assisted tools, but putting "Vibecoding" in your resume is an instant turn off for most people. Vibecoding is associated with poor software quality, not professional development. I'd remove that word from your resume and never put it back.
Your job duty bullet points are very wordy but convey little at the same time. You have 3 jobs in a row where you "Built award-winning state of the art web experiences" but I have no idea what technologies you used, what your role was on the team, what the websites actually did, how many users were served, or any other useful information. At minimum you need to list some technologies.
Your entire personal brand is "shawnfromportland" but you apparently live on the other side of the country? I understand the attachment to your username, but you have far more "Portland" on your resume than "New York". If you're applying to any local jobs, the Portland branding is an obstacle for anyone scanning 100s of resumes who doesn't have time to consume every little detail and resolve ambiguities.
Using 1/5th of the page for context-less name dropping of skills isn't helpful. Delete that box and list specific skills in specific jobs. With 20 years of experience it's impossible to know if each skill you list is something you read a Wikipedia page about or used at 5 of your jobs.
> dismissing me when they find out my dinosaur age of 42
I gave up, after encountering this (at 55). It's been a thing for quite some time (more than the 2.5 years he mentions).
What's annoying, is that the very people doing the dismissing, are ones that will soon be in those shoes.
I believe ol' Bill Shakey called it "Hoist by your own petard."
Sounds like you dont have kids to help look after or a parent to care for, and you're still in the desirable age to hire from. Wait another ten years after you help kids with their homework or sports in the evening and dont have energy to work on a side projects.
You have to balance it with other needs.
But this industry doesn’t stand still, and as a part of it, I can’t either.
I had the same impression. Anyone reading this who is younger: at some point in your life your employment will probably mostly depend on the connections you make to your successful peers, the companies you start, or the products/ technologies you are associated with. When you are starting, strangers will hire you off of your resume. At some point this effectively stops and if people aren't familiar with you or your work they will not consider you. This has been true long before LLMs existed.
Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.
The exception is one college friend who did help me get multiple jobs at startups, but he retired several years ago.
Establishing and maintaining relationships is hard, and many of us are simply not good at it.
Now I did make sure to stay in touch with a couple ex-managers who I knew would be good references. One of them even helped me get an interview. But even when I had a connection on the inside of a company, all that really does is move me to the head of the line, past the HR screen. I still have to interview, something I still suck at despite decades of practice.
I assure you the problem here is not “AI” The problem is that the world has changed and some of your prior assumptions are no longer valid (full remote is very challenging right now, property is the path to generational wealth with notable exceptions which you are experiencing, weird names are cool and hip among cool and hip people but that might not be who you find yourself among). You’ve painted yourself into a corner, change some self-imposed boundaries and the corner goes away.
I can’t help but wonder if there’s a word for doing something repeatedly and being baffled at a negative response when the problem is so blindingly obvious to an outsider.
Maybe the word is just stuck. Many of the self-imposed problems seem intractable, but are not.
Maybe a step back is in order. What has been tried is obviously not working. There are ~10 items in play and solving for all ~10 is impossible. Stack rank the items desired and start checking them off?
I suppose I’d start by getting a job come hell or high water. go by a reasonable sounding name (reserve legal name for paperwork) 50% of initial screening is rejecting the name (your hell with onboarding proved that nobody’s name parsing gets it without help, in job interviews you get dropped silently). There is zero overlap between hip companies who appreciate a cool name and php.
Focus resume detail on current languages and frameworks (see above re php)
Start applying for in-person in palatable places. Land and negotiate enough remote to stay sane.
Sell cabin (need cash, and it’s not cashflow positive) You didn’t mention where your mom is living but you have equity somewhere. Cash it out to move forward with the free capital.
Finish remodel or sell (needs cash to be cash flow positive)
You haven’t been displaced you’ve experienced a change of the state of the world and you’ve failed to adapt…
I’m going to leave the next line as an exercise for the reader. A hint though: adaptation is necessary for survival.
Moreover, after 3 years of work from 2019 I had saved enough to quit and go on vacation indefinitely. I haven't looked for work since and am on my second multi-month trip to Europe. It's not that hard. People are just absolutely trash with money. I didn't inherit anything and nobody is helping me pay for anything, not a penny. People are just bad with money, and in my opinion the situation this guy has described in the post gives off every conceivable red flag of someone who's terrible at both financial planning and career planning.
i have not been trying the same thing over and over. I have been continually trying something new every month or two of the search, seeing what works.
I have landed some interviews which was hard as hell, making it as far as fourth rounds, but no offers. I think you did not read the article but its ok.
I'm using Claude everyday for my work. Am I just missing out on how awesome the things have gotten in this space?
There was a huge hiring spike circa 2022 that apparently misled a lot of people.
Are there any other browsers left? :)
What surprised me is that the OP had no reaction for personal messages.
You likely need blunt feedback from someone you can trust in the industry
Did you mean something else, as in LI itself is fruitless and to reach out directly to past colleagues?
Anyone I once had the personal contact info of - which could now be stale - is also a contact on LI. It just seems like a less weird venue to hit up someone you haven't spoken to since you last worked some position. That's also been largely the case when old coworkers reach out to me.
The key thing is he did hit up what could be defined as his network and got nothing.
Please explain to me like I'm five what point I'm missing here.
Yes, and culebron21 read that in the article and found it surprising that they did that with no success.
To be frank, I do too. I think my network could shake out a few jobs.
It sucks that this perception attaches to people at this point in their career. Many become managers at this point because that's an easy way to have broader impact and show career growth when you don't _really_ care about engineering.
If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field, everyone knows where your priorities are. It's okay that you aren't that interested in engineering. It does mean that it's harder to get a job than someone who really is, especially in tight markets. You're also not going to find employment below your level because they know you're going to jump ship when the market shifts. It does mean lowering your standards on certain things, like the "100% remote" requirement.
For the last 20 years, there has been tremendous demand for software engineers that has allowed people to coast. That demand is cooling down for a variety of reasons, AI being one of them (but IMO not anywhere near the most significant). That cool-down really started in ~2021-2022 and really hasn't picked back up. When the market cools down, the unremarkable old-timers are sadly the first ones to be shown the door.
Are the properties underwater on the mortgage?
Can you rent out the vacant units?
I have a friend in a similar situation to the poster and tbh I don't have great advice.
I have to emphasize this a lot to mid-career developers that I've mentored. In the past decade it was really easy to find a comfy job and coast, or to job-hop every year to get incrementally higher salary.
Juniors are mostly a blank slate. Once someone has 10-20 years you should be able to see a trajectory in their career and skills. I've seen so many resumes from people who either did junior-level work for a decade, or who job hopped so excessively that they have 1 year of experience 10 times, almost resetting at every new company.
It's hard to communicate this to juniors who are getting advice from Reddit and peers to job hop everywhere and do dumb things like burn bridges on their way out (via being overemployed by not quitting the old job until they're fired, or by quitting with 0 days notice, or just telling them off as you leave). A lot of people are having a sudden realization about the importance of leaving a good impression and building healthy relationships in your network now that organic job offers are hard to find.
Unpack this for me: what constitutes significant contributions to peers or the field?
Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.
It makes me wonder if we're in a the early stages of some kind of economic depression or recession.
> In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.
Yes, this is something that is poorly understood. (And something that I fear, given that I'm middle-aged.) It's easier to take a risk on someone who charges less, than to take a risk on someone who charges more. Often budgets just won't allow for an expensive software engineer, especially when an overseas engineer is cheaper.
This to me is likely the issue. I suspect if he was willing to move and work on-site, he'd have been back in the saddle quite quickly. My forced career moves also all involved a nationwide job search, and corresponding move.
Still, I believe the struggle, and worry that we'll all be there in the next few years.
And then I realized that he started with just getting home after driving 6 hours of uber to make $200, which didn't really square with on-site work being rock bottom.
On site work is exhilarating at the right place
I'm sorry but the absolute privilege of the author here, goodness...
I also can't find in-office work here because there just aren't as many opportunities locally, so I work full time for minimum wage to scrape my bills. Then I code on the weekend.
No dignity lost, but certainly lost my faith in software leadership.
His life would be much "easier" if he didn't have to be his mother's caretaker. But this is America, so he has to, so he's fucked.
I don’t think it’s really trust issues. Even If a candidate was fully honest that he’s planning to work two full time jobs, employers would still be against it. Even if the candidate was fully honest AND could somehow guarantee that his output would be 100% and he’d never miss a meeting, employers would STILL be against it. Full time white collar employers just feel entitled to exclusivity, that other kinds of employers just don’t seem to care about.
Now that the structure of my organization, benefits, and even my job existing is on thin-ice (again, public sector), I have been dropping my name in the hat to open positions. My numbers are much better OP’s (landing at least a 1st round with ~10% of apps), but the closer I get to potential offers with some [great] companies, I can’t seem but to get even more worried about the stability or if this is the right choice for me and my family. My physiological and safety needs are met (i.e. Maslows), for now, but I have a longing for the rest of the hierarchy.
Is the industry forecast as bad as these outlooks paint it?
Maybe having vibecoding listed as a skill on your resume is a problem?
Alarm bells also go off when I see "Github (advanced)"
While you are powerless to change it I would also be concerned reviewing this resume as with the sole exception of your consultancy your longest tenure anywhere is just two years.
This might sound silly to you, but it absolutely works, because it will distill your experience better, ask you to re-arrange and generalize, and more importantly, it is far superior to us in finding unique key word combinations that work.
I'll point out that what is your reality in your job market might be far different from mine. I'm in Europe.
I try to screen out people who come across as zealots or dogmatic about just about anything. Everything could have it's time and place - PHP included ;)
I look for people who are pragmatic and doubt I represent the "people who are hiring pool" to a great extent. But I am hiring and I can just tell you what I see here and how I see it.
It was genuinely such an exciting time back then. People were still optimistic about the web and new platform like mobile. There was so much to build, yet relativity few people working in tech. And those of us who were weird enough to work in tech loved it. It felt like almost every week there was some new startup asking around for tech talent and they'd take almost anyone they could get. And when you joined you built cool things that had never been built before.
Today tech feel so stale. People who work in tech are not techies, but just see it as a career. There's so few novel things to build that SWE has basically become a profession of plumbing already built libraries and SaaS tools together. Even startups feel so much more mature from the get go. Back then startups were often bootstrapped projects by a dude in his bedroom. Today before a single line of code is written startups already have CEOs, CTOs, CFOs and several million dollars of investment.
Perhaps this guy should have kept up with trends, but 20 years ago the dude would have had a job at a company where he was respected greatly for being the dude who could throw together an e-commerce store in a few days or something. He probably would have been building genuinely new stuff with a team of other people who loved tech.
I have a hard time believing it's making people that much more productive. It certainly helps me here and there with very specific low-level implementations, but the really important, higher-level work I do? The way I decide which low-level work to do in the first place? Not really, no. I have to interface with very non-technical people who need bespoke solutions to their problems. I need to tie implementations for them together with existing systems that are not standardized, not well-known, and often poorly documented. I need to consider how the life cycle of these solutions can integrate with that of others, how it fits into the workflow and capacity of myself and people I work with, etc.
AI can't do any of that properly right now, and I don't expect that it will any time soon. If I tried to get it to work, I'd likely spend as much time fighting Claude as I'd save. I don't know... What are people doing that they can actually be replaced? Or that companies could decide they actually need fewer people?
My suspicion is that with money being more expensive to borrow, teams are staying lean because we were absurdly inefficient as an industry for the better part of a decade. That's not an AI thing, but a staying closer to actual means thing.
Like the article mentions, the cornerstone of US based society is that everyone needs to do something that provides value to others. Yet we constantly seek to scale and automate, to lower our dependence on others.
There must come a day where, you don't need others, but they need you. Then what?
The fundamental problem is, as the OP gets at towards the end, what happens when a society built upon the trade of time and labor for income to provide for one’s needs, meets innovations that threaten to wholesale eliminate vast swaths of labor, permanently. A society that demands labor for survival, against corporations that demand growth at all costs, inevitably creates a zero-sum conflict between the working class and the Capitalist classes.
Workers, desperate to survive in a society hostile to the under or unemployed (and increasingly hostile to the presently employed), will continue to resort to more desperate means over time and as their numbers grow. This is an inevitability bore out through history time and time again, OP is just joining the chorus of voices warning that we are rapidly approaching such an inflection point if we continue soldiering onward “as-is”.
And how does one prepare for this inevitable inflection point? Buy a plot of land and hide from civilization? Prepper stuff? Buy lots of guns? Learn to barter?
* Read more books about systems and history. Understand that the times we’re in now aren’t as novel or unique as we’re lead to believe, and that we’ve solved worse problems before.
* Join local community-based organizations. Donate your time and expertise to those who need but cannot afford it.
* Learn different perspectives and backgrounds from others outside your immediate social circles or class. Spend more time with people who work more than you do, for less than you earn. This will teach you that many of your plights are shared, and that you have lots of allies already.
* Study systems. No single solution will fix all problems, no innovation will lift all boats. Changes reverberate, having unintended consequences. Failure to understand systems is failing to remedy or maintain them.
* Accept you cannot fix these issues alone. It will take time, it will take collaborative effort, and it will take compromise.
Not diminish your analysis. I just hope it adds a bit of perspective.
With respect, that is a red flag for me and would indicate a bit of an "attitude problem" if I was interviewing or reviewing applications and this was mentioned. If going to the office - something absolutely normal and expected of any desk worker - is a "red line" for you and you let potential employers know that, then frankly I am not surprised people are not biting. Yes we all had a good ride over COVID but the trend (whether people like it or not) is for the bosses to want everyone back in the office.
I would respectfully suggest you suck it up, don't make a deal of it in your resume/CV or interview, and accept that you'll be badging through the turn-style 5 days a week along with everyone else and don't expect special treatment.
Good luck.
Yeah; no more chillin' out in your camper upstate in the middle of nowhere.
Bummer!
(Writing from on-site office chair here.)
Get rid of the generative AI, VR, LLM augmented stuff from the top of the resume.
Make your typescript experience more prominent. Talk more about your experience with popular stacks and technologies in general.
Come up with a last name, the resume doesn’t have to be your legal name.
No need trying to show everything you know and every experience which could be overwhelming and the HR probably will not feel you are a good match to their narrow definition.
Obviously a resume can be too long, but i think you need some (well chosen) technical specifics on paper. Intro and current role should be most of the first page, everything else on page two. Two pages is fine.
----
Wanted to chime in as someone very minorly on the hiring side. Run a business, used a remote contract developer for a decade. They were reasonably productive, but with a communications lag due to timezones and back and forth communication. Their rate also rose in the past couple of years.
We have completely eliminated their role and I took over the dev work using ai. I learned some programming a decade ago which helps oversee the ai.
In doing so I was able to see their code wasn't up to spec. Outdated php with deprecated functions, some very inefficient functions which added multiple seconds to pageload. Refactored everything and our site is up to date and substantially faster.
I doubt this is a common case, most clients likely aren't personally replacing their developers. But at the low end of codework it's certainly possible to replace a dev with ai. Compared to our developer ai provided:
* instant feedback * Technically up to date code * More efficient methods when prompted how to approach a problem
Crucially our developer didn't want to use ai and preferred handcrafting code. Also didn't use it if they found something I wrote unclear, which could add 12-24 hours to a communications cycle.
I presume they're still doing work for their other clients. But from my perspective the opportunity cost of using them rose tremendously when they refused to try new tools.
Thinking through code architecture has tremendous value. Physically crafting the actually expression of those thoughts in lines of boilerplate code has definitely declined in utility. Don't know how many programming jobs this describes but ai is definitely nibbling at the lower end of the market.
It saddens me that tech people have become so intrinsically beholden to a lifetime association with some rich paying Company.
you'll notice in the comments section that the population of substackistan is much less FUCKING CYNICAL AND NEGATIVE than you guys, with many commenters saying they are in the same position. I heard from writers, designers, engineers, going through similar times.
my portfolio site is https://shawnfromportland.com, you can find my resume there. if you have leads that you think I might match with you can definitely send them my way, I will even put a false last name on an updated resume for you guys.
for those who are wondering, I legally changed my name to K long ago because my dad's last name starts with K, but I didn't like identifying with his family name everywhere i went because he was not in my life and didnt contribute to shaping me. I thought hard about what other name I could choose but nothing resonated with me. I had already been using Shawn K for years before legally changing it and it was the only thing that felt right.
Perhaps offering an opportunity for more humility and introspection. Instead you’re here doubling down on the victim mindset.
Wishing you the best.
I’d also consider re-working your job history, it “looks like a lot of bouncing around” which shouldn’t be a bad thing, but it can be if framed poorly.
Finally, I’d spend a few weeks with c++/java and slap it on the resume as a competency. Can’t hurt, and you’re just learning some syntax at this point.
Best of luck to you. Market is tough, and there are a lot of sw folks looking around right now.
You’re doing no one a favor except yourself. What I mostly saw was constructive criticism and some comments about trying something different.
They know that hiring is just as volatile as the rest of us. If any of their project requirements or job duties changed as much as hiring has, they'd think the company/PM were incompetent.
Without anger or judgment, I think our industry's culture has room to grow.
I wonder what happens now to workers, who never really thought of themselves as workers, discover themselves as such. 'Individual Contributor' just means _worker_. It's like calling the barista a Customer Happiness Officer.
When we remember how to be on each other's side, this will change; but for now, I'm afraid, we self-perceive, as Cory Doctorow put it, as 'temporarily embarrassed founders'. And we act accordingly.
You are the rare type of HN user I look for whenever I read the comments, which is not very often these days.
Wishing you well and best of luck with your search.
HN is about 2 years ahead of where reddit was before reddit really fell off - and at the current rate of HN's decay I wouldn't be super surprised if more posts start appearing here soon that are pro-fascism, pro-"masculinity" and anti-vaxx.
I was _really_ surprised to see my login has existed here for 15 years because coincidentally that's about the same timeline as when my first reddit username was created and when I started moving my surfing away from reddit due to the decay of my fav communities there.
Hoping HN can turn it around because it's a great grab bag of intriguing links.
Tough times. You’re doing everything right (except perhaps reading too many of the comments which is probably not great for your mental health) - your break will come. The night is darkest before the dawn and all that.
Peace & love.
I took some time to offer some resume review tips here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43978225
This is a really difficult topic to address because it appears you're interesting in venting and commiseration, but it's mixed with pleas for job placement and opportunities. If you want some honest advice:
- Your resume still needs a lot of work. See my other comment with more details. After reading your Substack I see why you're keyword stuffing words like "Vibecoding" as your #1 skill, but I don't think you realize how much this is hurting you.
- I've read your resume and I clicked the link to go to your website. I still don't really understand what you specialize in or what kind of job you're trying to get. In a market like this one, you need to have a resume that tells a story of why you're a great fit for the job, not someone who has a couple years of experience 10 different times at 10 different things. There's a lot of vague claims about "award-winning state-of-the-art web experiences" but then you have everything from AI and Vibecoding to VR apps to teaching classes on your resume. Broad experience can be good, but I think you need to start writing different resumes tailored to different jobs because I can't make heads or tails of your career goals from the way it's all presented.
- I'd separate the Substack from your resume, personal website, and job search as much as possible. To be blunt, the tone is alarmingly cynical in ways that any hiring manager would want to keep away from their team. Phrases like "Generally, it’s the fresh-faced bay area 25 year old with a Steve Jobs complex" ooze a sort of anger with the world that people just do not want to bring into their company. Blaming everything on AI and "the great displacement" falls very flat for anyone who has just read your resume and seen "Vibecoding" as your top skill while trying to figure out what, exactly, you did at your past jobs.
- Consider sprucing up your portfolio a bit. It's a little jarring to read a resume about "award winning state of the art web experiences" and then encounter some centered yellow text on a black background in a quirky font that slowly fades into view. I would also recommend that you include screenshots of your specific work on each site and a short description of what you did for each. Random links and screenshots aren't helpful. Hiring managers aren't going to watch YouTube videos at this point of scanning your resume, either. Try to view your website like a hiring manager who wants to know what they're getting into. Seeing "21 years of experience" and then having the first large link on your website being a link to University of Oregon because that's where you got your degree doesn't make sense.
- To be more blunt: There are some major red flags that you need to clean up. Your portfolio links to the live nike.com/running website, but your resume says you last worked on a Nike website over a decade ago. This is the kind of thing I expect to see from fake applicants, not a real person. I would go so far as to suggest leaving your portfolio off of your resume until it can be cleaned up and modernized with specific information about your work. Use a template if you have to, but the site clashes with your headline claim of being an award winning web developer.
- Finally: Try to create a cohesive narrative in your resume and application process. If you're applying for full-stack web-dev jobs, your resume should show a career trajectory of starting with small websites and working up to more and more complex projects. Right now the top job entry lists "tens of thousands of MRR" as an achievement but a decade ago you were working on Nike.com. You need to find a way to tell the opposite story, that you've been working your way up. Unfortunately the substack article makes this even worse with talk of being a Doordasher now. It's okay to vent on Substack, but don't cross the streams with your application process.
Because you have taken the time to review this stuff and make these same recommendations that everyone else has here, i am going to refactor the site and resume yet again according to these recommendations.
I would love it if my career arc had one through-line narrative that made sense, but I'm afraid it doesnt necessarily. I started as a data architect and backend developer for the first many years, never touching front-end. I had to expand to tackle front-end to meet the changing market demands. in later years, the distinction of what were primarily front end vs back end tasks or roles has become a lot more fuzzy, as things have turned into "all-js-all-ts-everything-everywhere!" I've adapted, and been working full stack ts roles.
I often feel my data architecture / problem-solving skills are overlooked when my last few roles show that i've been developing with a vue ecosystem, pigeonholing me as a front-end dev, something i have never identified with.
You’ve been fishing for a job. You need to hunt for one.
Fishing is sending out applications all over the place. This is casting your reel. Changing your CV over and over is changing your bait. Reaching out to your network without a specific request to recommend you for a specific job is fishing.
Work backwards a bit. Find a job at a company you want. Look up the recruiters and hiring managers. Send them a note. Look up people in your network, or people connected to your network, and ask them to recommend you for the specific role. Companies incentivize this. They’ll want spend 2 minutes to possibly win a few thousand dollars by getting you in. Incentives align.
Lastly there’s a lot of independent head hunters out there. Hire them like you’d a trail guide.
I barely thought I was going to make it through this time, but finally somehow managed to at least land another SW job; we'll see how far that goes.
HN is to large extents a bunch of spoiled, transhumanist AI fanatics, don't let them get to you.
Initiated a connect on LN, but wasn't allowed to send a note since I'm not a premium member.
I hope you find a good place to land. I know it has been a while for you but you are still motivated and focused on the right outcomes. You will find a niche, maybe not the one you expected but you will drop into a groove and realize that things are looking up for you and your Mom.
I understand the whole home ownership angle where you could liquidate an asset but would have to absorb a loss in the process since the place needs some work and you can't afford to do it yet. Hang on to the houses, all of them. They can be your landing zone or safe spot.
We have a home that we have leased out for around 30 years. It has always been the best in the neighborhood because I did the work of maintaining and upgrading it myself, along with my wife and part of my family. I would sell it now but it needs siding and the bids for that are way out of my price range so that is one of the next DIY projects for me. I just need to get a tenant into it ASAP and that will allow me to make it happen. The materials to do it cost under $10k but like your property, we have had years where we made money on the house and years where we barely covered or lost money due to maintenance items or other ownership costs.
Leverage any opportunity to work with local contractors swinging a hammer bending nails or using a saw to shorten boards. That can be a path to obtaining scrap materials or unusable items that would go to a dumpster. Contractors have to pay disposal fees so anything that allows them to reduce the size of the load saves them money when the job is done. Warped or curled dimensional lumber can be straightened at home. Half sheets of plywood or siding nail up as tightly as full sheets. There is a place for all that if you examine your needs and keep an eye out for things that can be made to work.
My grandfather built a business as a home-builder by first building a home for himself and my grandmother to move into as soon as they married. He got the materials by asking around with locals who were working on their own places and inquiring about whether he could have the scraps and cutoffs. He ended up needing to buy nails and a few other small items but he built a house with materials that cost him the labor to clean up building sites. Once he finished the house a local man who had been watching the process offered to buy it from him. He sold that house and took the money and built a new house with new materials and moved in with my grandmother to a much larger, much nicer place than they would've had. Others who knew him and watched the process approached him about building things for them and in no time he was building houses, church buildings, sheds, etc all over the region. He built custom homes until he passed away about 60-65 years later.
Since it appears you may be up around Syracuse, Ft. Drum is right down the road. One of my brothers got the money to start his own business by driving for Pizza Hut. If you can get established as the pizza guy on a base like that you're on your way up. Soldiers tip well. Pizza is a huge seller. You do need a base pass but I think the pizza outfit sets you up. He would always bake the order and then bake several extra pizzas and carry it all onto base. By the time he had dropped off the pizza that had actually been ordered he had a line of soldiers hoping to get one of the extras. Pizza is great food option. Many of those guys became regular customers. He made great tips and sold lots of pizzas that otherwise wouldn't have been ordered. After a couple years of pie-hawking during which he was also mowing yards and trimming trees with a friend who had a local tree service, he took money he had earned and bought himself a new mower and chainsaw. That was 10 years ago now and he grossed $300k last year with one employee doing nothing but tree service. He has a bro-dozer truck with large dump trailer to handle the wood and debris and he rents other equipment as he needs it.
Pressure washing can be a real winner too. That's one thing my brother has mentioned branching into. Staining fences and decks. Cleaning gutters. Washing windows. Caulking siding and painting.
There are lots of services that people need that don't take much investment. Door hang flyers with contact info and let people know you are available. Visit a t-shirt printer or embroidery place and have them make a few shirts with a reasonably memorable logo or slogan and your name and contact info. Wear them to the grocery store and home improvement store and let people call you.
I have several gardens I built to help manage food costs. It is unbelievably easy and satisfying to be able to open my door and select a few herbs from my pizza garden while my pizza stone warms up. We have a wide selection of all the things we enjoy eating and some we want to try. Fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs, berries. So many things are easy to grow. That can help you manage your food costs and improve the quality of your food at the same time.
Good luck to you. I don't think you need it though. Your heart is in the right place. All the other things will fall in line behind it.
Keep your head up. These are interesting times. Things will get back to normal at some point.
1. First line is "Using Cursor, Claude 3.7, and OpenAI every day". You can't win with this. You don't take weekends off? Red flag. You do take weekends off? Then the first line of your resume is a lie and I wonder what else isn't honest.
2. #1 skill is Vibecoding? Red flag. Your resume would look better without the left column of skills. None of your experience backs up those skills.
3. The experiences listed are all 1-2 years, with the longest one being your self-employed one. Why are they all so short?
Try sending your CV directly to recruiters. If you find a job you’re a great fit try and find a recruiter on LinkedIn for the company and send them a note. Easier when company isn’t huge.
This works on hiring managers too. Be aggressive in how you send your CV out - direct to the stand holders. Show initiative.
Likewise if you see a job check your network to see if anyone works there. Send them a note. Even if you’re not that close they will recommend you in holes of getting the recruiting bonus.
I don't have a portfolio of projects (all of the interesting work I've done is for private companies), I have not written any books or even noteworthy articles, I have never presented any talks at conferences.
Last year I lost my job, then I joined a startup where only after three months (most of which were in holiday season) the company decided to decommission the only project they'd hired me for and once again I had to start looking for something new.
I just couldn't figure out the bureaucracy of unemployment bullcrap. When we were in California, that shit was relatively simple, despite it all happening during COVID. Yep, my company tried to get those PPP loans and for that they had to lay off the entire team, and of course, ostracizing the most expensive workers of the San Francisco team made more sense — remote workers in other states kept their jobs. For California unemployment, I just had to update my status every two weeks (or every week, I don't remember anymore). In Texas, the bureaucracy felt debilitating. I just never figured out how to get that meager money. Between having stress, depression and dealing with interviews that was too much.
It took me seven months to find a job. I've been working since I was fourteen. I traveled and worked in different countries, for various industries, etc. Never in my life had I stayed without a job for that long. My typical job search back in 2015-2018 would take me no more than three days. This time was very different. I eventually found a new gig, but I had to settle for much less money than I made before. I am getting paid less today than when I was a junior developer - 10-12 years ago. Despite all my experience, knowledge and skills.
I don't know what happens next, and I have no prospects for retirement — I don't have enough savings to retire. I just want to keep doing what I love to do. I do love to code, solve problems and build solutions. I love to follow the data and build pipelines and visualize it and analyze it — slice it, dice it, group it, etc., and I'm good at that. I'm just hoping there will be something for me to do after all. Yet I don't think I ever again will get compensated adequately for the work I do. And it's not just the stark reality of capitalism, it's not because money no longer is what it used to be. The world has changed, and whenever that happens some social tiers do usually suffer.
Let's try to remain kinder to one another in this rapidly changing world, as all indications suggest it will only become more challenging.
adamc•1d ago
Stuff of nightmares.
hdaz0017•1d ago
In the 80's there were a few slices of thoughts, why are you interested in computers? They won't go very far... or we don't know how to make money from them...
IT, Computing, the Internet has for the last 25-30 years been stuck thinking about shopping and billing.
The brute force statistical copy and paste we see today, it may or may not replace a large part of the internet systems, but there were always many other aspects of computing or the world that computers could be used for that have hardly been touched.
To any social media platform's (if any of them can really be called this) that are saying they can not or will not police their own platform's of dangerous content, really you will be held responsible!
Just because the big IT corp's might become blinded they will live in fear of being on the brink of extinction, if they replace the creative people or their customer's. To the CEO's and management sucking billion's/trillion's of dollars out of the market(s) this can't continue.
There has to be change(s) because we have boxed ourselves into weird position(s), i.e always chasing the cash cows.
We are not even at the start of what's possible, what "people" will/could create in the next 50 years, with the right levels of education and inspiration the computing world will most likely not be stopping or slowing down any time soon.
Analemma_•5h ago
quesera•35m ago