I am the author of this piece, and i didn't share it to HN, I don't hang out here. I just gotta say wow, tough crowd. i wrote this piece from an emotionally low point after another fruitless day of applying to jobs. I didn't have a particular agenda in mind. I was voicing what i've been through and some of what I was experiencing with no expectations.
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.
I thought this piece really spoke to the landscape of software engineering in the present/future. Unfortunately discussions on this site are subject to a truly baffling mix of confirmation biases and messianic complexes.
Wishing you well and best of luck with your search.
> Unfortunately discussions on this site are subject to a truly baffling mix of confirmation biases and messianic complexes.
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.
Any thread about hiring (here, reddit cscareerquestions, blind, whatever) is full of cunts waiting to put people down because they absolutely love telling people they aren't good enough for minor reasons despite proven records of competency.
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.
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.
i have spent the last couple days responding to hundreds of comments on the substack piece. no new pieces of advice came up on this thread which were not already covered on the substack comments. advice which i have acknowledged. i was already about to do most of the pieces of advice anyways on my own as the next step, such as applying with a normie pseudonym. you don't know me. im not a victim and i don't have victim mindset. i am survivor.
I haven’t read most of the comments here and none on substack, but looking at your resume, I’d spend some time making it look slightly warmer, throw some color in there.
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.
ignore those addicted to negativity. for most people, their life is just reducing awareness to fit into their adlib structured arguments to assuage their insecurities. “Im so smart, i can ignore possibilities and unknowns and frame a thought construct that boosts my sense of ego and importance!”
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.
thank you for taking the time. If i was petty i could share the past 5 versions of my website and resume i created in the last year which precisely followed most of what you recommended here. I had a completely vanilla narrative resume by version 3, and was getting nowhere. analytics and my own vibe check was making me think that all of that was too verbose and it wasn't being read. I was feeling unseen and began retargeting things to create an impression in 2 seconds, enough to hopefully hook someone to want to talk to me to learn more.
the latest strategy was to try to emphasize within 2 seconds the point that im all about ai coding, while having a conventional cs/agency background at the same time.
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.
It might be good to expand on your data architecture work more in your CV. Write a paragraph about the data architecture work you did at your last company. You could remove some of the older jobs to free up space.
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 am heeding and already doing all of the advice that has come up here and on the original thread, with the exception of 'move to where there are in-office jobs and try to get an in-office job' because that's not really feasible at this time
I read the post knowing it would likely remind me about all the times I read the handwriting on the wall and decided it was a message for someone else.
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.
As I mentioned in my previous comment on this post, my overall sense is that HN commenters often struggle with fear. It's a scary time to be a professional in this industry, and to be a human on Earth more generally. Sometimes, one of the ways people here try to manage their fear is through skepticism of, and/or hostility toward, accounts where someone has suffered through no fault of their own, which I believe is your case.
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.
I’m not trying to be unsympathetic in this comment so please do not read it that way, and I’m aware having spent most of my career in cloud infrastructure that I am usually in high demand regardless of market forces - but this just does not make sense to me. If I ever got to the point where i was even in high dozens of applications without any hits, I’d take a serious look at my approach. Trying the same thing hundreds of times without any movement feels insane to me. I believe accounts like this, because why make it up? as other commenters have noted there may be other factors at play.
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.
It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons:
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.
> It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet
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"
> general sense ..., but we don't really know ... the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up
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".
The impact of AI already goes further than just delaying hiring - at least in fields adjacent to engineering, such as technical writing. Anecdotally:
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.
> 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"
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 am 61, and have been working for almost 40 years. I don't really have a lot of personal connections, because I am on the autistic spectrum. Yes, I have many former co-workers linked on LinkedIn, but to most of those people, I'm just an old acquaintance, not someone they are going to phone up with a hot new job opportunity.
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.
Pure speculation, but I wonder if it's not so much AI as tech companies realizing they actually can do more with less. And, again, I have no evidence to back this up other than "feels," but I swear when Elon bought Twitter and cut so much of the workforce that's when sentiment seemed to shift materially. I wonder if that wasn't a bit of an "aha" moment for mega tech and tech in general. It's like all the major companies said maybe we don't need as many people as we have. Of course people are going to debate whether the changes at Twitter had a monumentally-negative impact (they may very well have in terms of revenue, but I'm not so sure in terms of absolute or even relative profit).
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)...
A huge amount of staffing cuts were to teams working on things like moderation or combating bots, which are areas Elon doesn't care about continuing development on. He's not so much doing more with less but rather doing less with less. We can debate about whether or not the projects he cut were worthwhile, but given the company's disastrous finances I wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt.
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.
Good point. I shouldn't have said more with less. I should've said Twitter lost 80% of its employees and somehow still exists (I thought it was "only" 50%). 80% is nuts. That said, if 100% of those reductions were outside of engineering (they weren't, I realize) then I'd mostly agree with your point. But I do think that even in that case it would cause every other company to ask some hard questions about staffing that could lead to layoffs and/or have implications for hiring.
All feels on my part just to hopefully add to the dialogue. Nothing scientific here.
I'm sure some CEOs followed the Twitter lead, but I also think the entire industry was already shifting with regards to headcount. A lot of companies were hiring excessively going into that period and middle management bloat was a well-known phenomenon.
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.
This all rings true to me. I would take it a step further and say that during normal times throughout the history of corporate America, and especially in boom times, management will let fiefdoms grow fairly unchecked. Then an external trigger causes them to re-evaluate and that's when they're like "holy shit we don't need nearly this many people."
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).
Yes, that was the turning point. You have to remember, in addition to the end of ZIRP this also happened after a few years of an extremely strong employee's market. Jobseekers were asking for and getting some pretty wild packages.
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.
It goes beyond Elon. PE was (are?) pressuring Google to lay off more employees because their pay was so high. And the Fed said that worker pay was "too high," in the context of inflation.
Basically, the ownership class was pissy that some people were able to actually get away from exchanging time for money.
Do people see Elon's takeover of Twitter as a success? I think he leveraged Twitter as a social media platform to make himself wealthy, but as far as I can tell, the actual company has been losing a ton of money.
I was trying to stay away from the debate about the success of it by making that comment about it not failing even with a fraction of the former employees. My sarcastic reply to your question, though, is it depends on which side of the aisle you sit on. More seriously, there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living. I can guarantee you every major tech company took note of that reality and so I have to believe it begged some questions about headcounts.
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.
>there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living.
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.
Are we disagreeing here? I'm not sure how you took my comment, but it seems like what you're arguing here doesn't really rebut what I was saying. Or at least is not directly related. FWIW I agree with everything you're saying, except for the tone, which, to be honest, I don't love.
>" Maybe the answer actually was they didn't/don't.
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.
Ignoring the financial aspects, I agree to some extent with OPs opinion this trend of doing more with less engineers really took off following Elon reducing Twitters headcount.
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.
We don't know if it is losing money. It's a private company.
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.
I'm sure companies are realizing this - and tech unemployment is still on the rise - but if this trend was as pervasive as people seem to suggest, it doesn't really explain why tech unemployment is still significantly lower than the national unemployment rate. Maybe it going from 1.5% to 3.4% or whatever is what people are feeling, but it doesn't seem like that should result in massive amounts of people spamming resumes with no response. I'm sure some jobs/careers are gone forever now, but it can't seriously be that many.
Meta is probably the better example, here - dropped 20% of it's headcount (11% in Nov-22 and another ~9% subsequently, plus whatever's happened since Jan-24) and then 7x'd it's stock price. You can probably argue about decommitting from the "metaverse" fever dream idiocy, but a lot of companies looked at the deep cuts to headcount and certainly thought "AI or no AI, a lot of these people aren't adding value and Meta (and possibly Twitter, depending on what you believe) prove(s) it."
>> 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.
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.
Overall I'd agree with your sentiment, but it depends on the 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.
It's hard to say for sure without knowing his whole situation, but I will agree with you that when I hear someone say they've submitted 750 applications, my first thought is that they're taking a machine gun approach, applying to a lot of jobs in a short time. I was always taught that you tailor your resume to the position you're applying for, and apply only after doing a lot of research on the company to know whether you are suitable for their position. I'm older than the author of this post, and applied for my most recent job at about his age—though it was a few years ago, before AI was really a consideration. In my entire life, I've probably applied to ~25 positions, made it to the final round 8 times, and been hired 6 times.
Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.
> I come from poverty. my father was a drug addict who is dead. my mother is disabled and i’m helping support her. my grandparents are dead. my friends are on the west coast, dealing with similar financial hardships and they are already living with their parents and on couches. I’m not above asking for help, but there is no one to ask.
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 think nepotism is what we're talking about here.
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?
Could it be that your particular position required more ongoing learning, and that has kept you better prepared for a changing world?
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?
This has slowed down as I've gained experience but basically I am always volunteering to work on stuff I only have a shaky understanding of or never have done before. If I'm not doing new things on a job for ~1 year or more I get extremely uncomfortable, or start learning on my own. People call it "resume building" but I usually work for small skeleton teams where there's a ton of work available for someone that just volunteers to do it. That was basically how I crawled into my terraform/IAC niche, I was on a team where that was needed, they weren't going to hire, and no one else volunteered to take it on.
if you are in computer engineering and you are not doing "ongoing learning", you deserve to be left behind. While the company should provide some opportunities for learning, ultimately, it is your responsibility.
i get where you are coming from. i tried 5 versions of my resume in the last year. talking to recruiters. shotgunning resumes. hand crafting one-off cover letters. I have tried many approaches. you can guage my resume for yourself. the current strategy is to pander to people who are mainly looking for ai-dev skills
https://shawnfromportland.com/Shawn_K_Resume_2025-4.pdf
If you're up for some unsolicited feedback from someone who has read a lot of resumes:
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.
Honestly, his power-wash business is likely his redemption.
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."
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.
Perhaps in years 3-20 they relied solely on skills and knowledge they acquired in years 1 and 2. So even if the work still needs to be done, it can be done at 10x productivity using AI, requiring fewer people.
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 am very much a generalist and this comment checks a lot of boxes for me. If you find yourself pigeonholed into some niche (which can be super profitable), and that niche disappears, you're not really left with much to work with other than a complete career change.
this is a factor for me. I've always had to pick up new languages frameworks and skills on-the-job. but today hirers are seeking only really niched down specific experts, and i suspect i am filtered out automatically by not matching that, with no regard to the fact that it's not that big of a deal for an experienced engineer to pick up something new
As a generalist "master of none" who also graduated from the same era, this is really reassuring. I use a lot of technologies but not enough to consider myself an expert in any of them. At the end of the day I can pipeline them into a useful tool or product.
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.
Last year I applied for a single job, out of a vague interest, and immediately had multiple calls from recruiters from different companies trying to talk to me.
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.
The effects could take a while, I assume many companies had a ton of runway that’s now dwindling. There seems to have been a strong belief for some time that ZIRP will return too.
> I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant.
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.
As someone who has kids and actively participates in their lives (homework, hobbies, etc), I think I can safely say: the need to keep learning and growing never stops.
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 have heard from doctors and lawyers that there comes a time in your career when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. 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.
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.
> when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. 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.
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.
> 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.
Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.
> 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.
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.
It's not even that you necessarily have a ceiling, some people work for twenty years and are lucky with success, some are unlucky. You can be 45 and not have reached your ceiling. But the perception is there and you have to think about ways to re-invent yourself. It's really hard when you have family obligations and can't take a lot of risks.
I have a friend in a similar situation to the poster and tbh I don't have great advice.
just for reference about my amassed 'wealth', the combined cost of my mortgages is less than a studio apartment's rent in the bay area. i left the west coast for precisely this reason
if you read the original article i talked about how i got into this position. I originally had renters at both properties covering almost all the costs. they left shortly before losing my job.
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.
I will probably begin doing this but i will say-- in the past it was not a hurdle at all, and i got many interviews and a few jobs with this name. I have had about 10 interviews in the last year, going to 4th rounds, and nobody suggested it was a problem. my ratio of landing interviews per applications i put in parallels what I am hearing/reading from all other developers on the job market now. I don't strongly suspect my one-letter last name is a huge culprit here, but after a year on the job search and willing to try anything, i may begin applying with a pseudonym
More importantly, why don't adults give up names that clearly put them at an economic disadvantage? The same reason people don't sell houses when they are almost always a bad investment; pride, sunk-costs, sentimentalism or other reasons for their subjectivity.
I'm a Collin with two l's. Not as uncommon as Gregg but it's never been a burden. I also don't bother correcting people unless it's happening a lot with the same person and someone I expect to interact with a lot.
Ideally the process is blind to avoid bias but that isn't how most people operate. In this case rejection is based upon his perceived behavior, because abbreviating a last name to a single letter to avoid identification is a lot more common than single letter last names.
I took a look at your resume to see if I would have relevant work for you but doesn't seem like 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.
thanks. this is the fifth iteration of my resume in this last year's search. im clearly trying to push for ai-coding, as i think i was often overlooked for being too 'trad'. in reality im all-in on ai.
I understand that and from the rest of your writing on your site that very much shows. I use AI professionally to great avail. Personally, I wouldn't put something similar in tone on my resume and when I review resumes this language is not something I'm looking for either.
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.
I am not sure if this will help you, but have an extended, deep conversation with ChatGPT about your resume. Tell it who you are, what you excel at, and list projects and technologies. Then, paste a couple of the job postings that did not work for you.
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.
This is an interesting perspective. I've sort of intentionally pushed towards working where AI isn't so useful (physical workflows that are heavily dependent on inputs from humans—scientists in particular) but my experience nonetheless has been discovering how useless AI is in so many ways I envisioned it replacing people by now. It's extremely useful in very narrow bands of application, and outside of that, it's often more of a distraction than an advantage.
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.
> I even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work
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.
Yup. The trust issues around overemployment or straight up fraudulent candidates have made remote work rare and have lead to companies offering a premium for hybrid or fully in person roles. I don't think WFH only is line you can afford to draw anymore if you're on the ropes and leveraged.
ive had tons of in-office dev jobs, but have primarily been working online since like 2012. not only has it been way better for my health and sanity but my productivity is way way higher. the thought of going back to an office is PTSD inducing, a big step back
I worry about this, having moved away from a tech center for a better QoL. My current fallback plan if I can't find remote work on the next search is to look for hybrid jobs in NYC, which is a long-but-less-than-a-day's train ride from here, and to try to negotiate being in the office for either just a couple days a week or doing like a week on and a week off or whatever. It'd eat into salary to have to pay for somewhere to stay in the city for sure, but it'd be better than nothing.
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.
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.
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
Opinion: the end of ZIRP has a much greater influence on the job market than AI. No more free money means an entirely different incentive structure. There's a fair bit of "oops we overbuilt in the past assuming we'd have free money to hire more engineers". The interest rate thus mediates how and what we build (Conway's Law strikes again!).
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.
> 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.
The end of ZIRP coincided with some reorganizing of the tax code that wasn't favorable to developers, as well. Both hit after a year or two of windfall profits and massive hiring due to covid.
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.
Not just end of ZIRP, not just Agentic AI / Vibe Coding being effective [1], but also:
"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.
my parent corp let go many, maybe 20% of each of their various dev teams in early 2024, right after everyones productivity was starting to go 3-10x. instead of keeping everyone and dreaming way way bigger, it was more like 'get the same amount of stuff done with way less people.' now i have more experience and skills than ever before, but the ratio of applications to even getting a response much less an interview is lower than ever in the past. anecdotally, in my job searches in 2018 and 2020, roles that would say they had ~20 applicants within the first day of posting, now have like 1000+
This has to be a location based problem, or maybe the types of companies they are applying to? I can easily get another job doing something in software in the greater Milwaukee area. I typically look at companies that are not software companies, but who still need some software work in their IT dept to make their company work and keep them relevant.
I live in syracuse, I found a job this year after being laid off in 2 months. It was a stressful time. Instead or 5-6 hours a week hed be better off studying C,C++ and Java and applying to places locally. Syracuse does not have a ton of web work, but there is a big defense industry here (Saab, SRC, Lockheed, AFRL) so there are things. Cornell, SU, UofR, I imagine are hiring fewer software engineers now though with the potus changes.
i applied at a web dev role at SU, in-office, making less than what i made in like 2009, with skills that are frankly below me. custom written cover letter. job been posted for months. they just hit me with the 'no thanks'
Your resume might need to be rewritten then. Schools do pay very poorly, thats an undisputable fact, but their benefit of free tuition for you and your kids is pretty good.
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.
Lockheed can be an excellent place to work. While I’m not particularly fond of building war machines either, I had the opportunity to work on Space Situational Awareness. My role involved developing software to track the movements of space debris and alert operators to potential collisions. This project has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my entire career.
There are also quite a number of medical device and pharmaceutical companies on the east coast (based in upstate NY here), along with defense industry contractors. So, there are some more options.
medical devices i am slightly more sympathetic to, as a user of a DMD. pharmaceutical companies, only slightly higher than "defense" companies. they exist in practice so that few may benefit from the misery of many.
I think it's interesting to ask ourselves if there are still jobs for everyone that pay well, and where people can get the training to do.
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?
I feel for all who feel obsolete and unneeded. The only solution I found for myself was to switch from implementing other people’s ideas to implementing mine. It’s a luxury some cannot afford, but I honestly think it’ll be necessary for many to think long and hard about an idea they can monetize. I wrote about it here:
https://www.cleverthinkingsoftware.com/programmers-will-be-r...
I think a lot of folks are missing the forest for the trees, here. OP is (presumably) a competent professional who has fallen on hard times despite record growth of the private enterprise and their immense profits. Their story is not unique, and Microsoft is adding another seven thousand bodies to the pile alone this week.
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”.
> Workers [...] will continue to resort to more desperate means over time [...] This is an inevitability [...] that we are rapidly approaching
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?
I obviously can’t win over someone as receptive to the idea of change as yourself, but on the off chance a passerby sees this and actually is interested in different perspectives or growing their knowledge, here’s what you can do to not be as blindingly trolling as this commenter here:
* 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.
I feel terrible for this guy, but he really has stacked the deck against himself by moving to a rural area and refusing (or being unable) to work "on-site". He is up against every new grad and every laid off FAANG programmer clinging to the notion that they should be able to work remotely. To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of remote work but I recognize that many power dynamics have shifted in the last few years.
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.
It feels like we're living two separate lives when it comes
to remote work. If my office was a 5-10 minute walk then in-office could be fine. I used to longboard to the office and I didn't have too many complaints. But after getting 2+ hours of my day back every day, an extra hour of sleep, gas money, not having to meal prep or get take-out, and work among my at-home comforts not under wight fluorescent light and an oppressive HVAC it's really hard to imagine an in-office job getting preference over basically any remote job.
I did the hour commute thing, I hated it even when it was the norm.
I hear you for sure. I personally have the luxury of working remotely on a semi-regular basis when I'm not on site at a client's location and I love it. I have worked remotely on and off for 20 years and it is not all gravy though. It does get kind of lonely sometimes. On the flip side, in my early career, I worked with a one way daily commute of 90 minutes or 3 hours a day! That was sure a kick in the crotch.
If the people who used to hire you would sell your work to clients for $2000 per day, then instead start freelancing your own work and selling it for $1000 per day.
It saddens me that tech people have become so intrinsically beholden to a lifetime association with some rich paying Company.
I have seen people in similar circumstances that have enormous personal blind spots for issues that show up in interviews and with past colleagues. It's much easier to blame AI rather than admit or address those. If you have 20 years of experience and no one wants to work with you again, that is telling.
I've worked primarily with offshore devs. I can't say that's been great for a network and if I'd known how bad of an impact it would have on my professional development due to effectively zero network, I'd have avoided it entirely. Healthcare IT is dominated by offshore so beware.
Many people only look at LinkedIn when they're on the job market themselves. Or do so infrequently enough that they only see the message weeks/months later, at which point it feels awkward to respond.
What if you're not the type to maintain relationships w/ former coworkers?
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.
It's brutal out there. I'm currently 36 years years old. I got laid off in March last year from an outsourcing shop because no work was coming, mostly working with PHP, with some Javascript and python sprinkled in there. I thank the Lord for not having a wife and children, because it would have been so painful watching them suffer because of me, and I thank my parents for helping me float through the tough times.
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.
I've been looking for 18 months and the scams are starting to infest everything, especially in the past 3-4 months.
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).
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.
20+ years in the industry without significant leadership of one kind or another (either being a tech lead/staff engineer or manager) makes someone very hard to hire.
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.
I saw the same things you did and thought the same things you did. I made it to more than his salary in 1/3rd the time - from 2013 til 2019 is what it took me to get to $225k on almost purely frontend work despite being fired twice - and I've been vacation for three years now. I anticipate when I look for a job again I'll have no trouble. But I don't insist on remote, I didn't change my name to something edgy and impractical (if he was born to that name I apologize but that seems very unlikely, I've never seen or heard of an inherited single-letter last name in any culture), I have updated my skills as time has passed, and I'm not just building projects to look like I'm keeping up - I'm building real things I'm passionate about and which people use.
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.
while i have a BACKGROUND in php, i have not been seeking php work and havent been working fulltime in php since like 2017. Since then i've been fullstack in typescript. i've been seeking typescript roles in apps & vr.
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.
PHP is a fine language for a lot of cases. It's been a long time since it made sense to pay someone $150K to use it. Anonymous Indians is the AI he's been up against for a long time. Not to be racist of course, just pointing out there's massive labor arbitrage opportunities especially once you allow Remote work. You could hire an entire team of people for the same cost. He's making himself compete with the world with no significant advantage and he's expecting top dollar. American salaries only make sense when they require onsite work or are specialized/cutting-edge in some way, PHP is the most commoditized skill set there is.
Yeah i feel like this guy posts a lot of doomer stuff and it isn't as introspective as it could be. i also feel like posting doomer stuff is popular and so he is trying to monetize the doomer mentality. That leads me to kind of think what he says has less value because i just see any kind of monetization scheme like that as a somewhat implicit bias to whatever is being said. you can't be anti-doomer if you make money on your substack talking about doomer ideas. but also, i feel bad for the guy he lost his job that had a nice salary and didn't find a new one. that must suck. But then I wonder, is that exactly what he is trying to capitalize on? And then you must think, is this what the world has become now that everything is commoditized and we are all part of the Attention economy? Is everyone trying to make money on everything and thus no one is really to be believed about anything? That's one reason why i deleted most social media. It all became a grift and none of it had anything to do with being social.
I've been off socials and on forums for 8+ years now for the same reason. I share similar sentiment as Bizzy's sibling reply. I say these things because lately I've been thinking about lot about dead internet theory and how strongly some believe it.
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?
It used to be that you wouldn't be aware of what is going on in RU-net [1] or PTT [2] because you simply were not a Russian speaker or you weren't someone living in Taiwan speaking Chinese (yes modern Taiwanese people use a CLI app to login to a BBS in 2025, you can also do this with a web browser but where is the fun in that). So you simply were unaware that they even existed probably or if you do, you are like me and can only kind of speak Russian and get some of the memes, or you simply know about PTT because your Taiwanese friend told you about it.
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.
> ...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_.
I worked with PHP back in 2014 and nobody was building anything in PHP that could be called advanced by today's standards. That language barely had decent backend framework options and we're talking just 10 years ago.
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.
by 'advanced', i simply meant complex web apps that are more than CRUD / more than wordpress. to take one that comes to mind, i built this server job that synced with an old school phone center CRM for a home security corp, and it coordinated all these events and updates to happen at scheduled times for customers getting home security systems installed
Perl also destroyed itself by growing an arrogant community that would eagerly race to be the first to shout "RTFM" at a modest inquiry by someone new to the language.
That was not my experience (at least with perlmonks) back when I used Perl, but maybe I'm mis-remembering things.
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!)
Yeah, modern PHP is very different from the old ugh. Still not my favourite language, but it's decent now. Just another day at the office.
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?
Have made an alt to comment in case my dev reads this
----
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.
Articles like this terrify me, and recently they are plenty. I have had a lifelong interest and participant in development, doing freelance at times, always utilizing it in my career when approved, and contributing to opensource. I finished out my BS:CS while working full-time and although my general-IT career has been pretty successful, I have always planned on trying to pivot into a proper development team full-time from the public sector.
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?
How does your experience jive with the massive shortage of SWEs we have in the US. We've been inviting an additional ~150k foreign workers each year because there are no Americans applying for the long list of tech positions.
There is a mismatch between employer expectations and employee expectations. Employees expect things like WFH and pay comparable with previous years. Employers expect to do more with less. Inviting the additional foreign workers reduces pressure on employers to engage.
There is no shortage. Offshore consulting firms and HR collude to create impossible reqs that can only be filled by liars. HR gets a kickback, offshore consulting firm gets a cut, and some useless loser gets a shitty pointless job.
We've somehow built extremely fragile systems. Technological, yes, but not only technological. Also social, economical, and structural. Somehow, our systems can no longer absorb even slight shocks.
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.
I don't know what the situation is in the United States but down here in Australia trained members of the military are very well paid with excellent conditions and they are recruiting cyber and technical roles.
Agree. I think all the AI stuff need to be removed. Are you seeing lots of open positions asking for people use AI to code?
And if you are applying for VR, make resume VR oriented.
If applying for web development, make resume focus on for web development.
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.
My 2 cents. It was light on detail. Not a big enough word count to hit all the recruiter keywords and nothing to back up the claims made.
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.
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.
We need a solution to stuff like this. Unfortunately, right now we seem to be cutting everything in sight to help the rich, so... I don't see that help or hope on the horizon.
Some of the solution(s) have already been played out a few times, we humans use our imagination(s). Everything that has been built with computers was just an idea a few decades 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.
The guy owns three properties. No, we don’t need “a solution” for landlords who overextended on credit during ZIRP and are now underwater; they need to sell the fucking properties.
"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"
I don't want to argue the validity of AI taking jobs, but I really miss the tech job market in mid 00s to early 10s so much.
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 even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work, which is an absolute red line for me.
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.
It’s really important to build and maintain your network, especially as you get older. It’s nearly mandatory to know someone to get your foot in the door today. Especially today where we have a saturated market and dim prospects for future demand picking up like it was in the 2012-2022 era. Seriously, go through your contacts and just say hi every now and then. A career has to be groomed and managed today.
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.
It's so fucking heartbreaking, relatable and scary. I'm an immigrant, but before you readers start unsheathing your pitchforks, let me tell y'all - I've lived in the States for almost two decades, paying taxes and being a law abiding resident and later citizen — perhaps, contributing to the well-being of this nation more than I got back in return. Also, I've been here legally from day one.
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.
Somehow it's ironic that this post is about AI replacing jobs and yet when I click the "accept all" option for cookies, the page reloads and shows the banner again :)
Where are the all knowing AI bots who are going to fix this?
I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with AI, other than making it harder to get an interview. He seems to get a few of those. I think the real problem he has is... well, the meaning of life, i.e. 42.
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.
> He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta be joking.
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.
Someone who's 42 needs to be a "TL" (tech lead?). Not everyone can be a leader (like you say, not that many openings available) -- and leading is often a totally different job and skill set from developing software. So what do you call it when everyone above a certain age is automatically shunted into a smaller pool of openings for a different role? I would call that ageism.
> I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with AI, other than making it harder to get an interview.
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.
just to offer a minor correction, the ratio was more like 800 applications for multi round interviews with ~10 companies (so maybe about 25 interviews). probably 25% of applications received a "no" response, while the rest ghosted
I wonder if he should consider taking his mother with him and moving somewhere with a better local job market. Similarly, parents move and take their kids with them when the job market demands it.
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 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.
lumping in a camping trip with investments is odd. A camping trip might cost very nearly zero dollars, depending on distance and what I have available. We'll be generous here and assume $100 was spent for some reason. That $100 is expended, you don't get it back.
A stock investment might "cost" $4000, but I would hope to have nearly $4000 in some asset. My absolute worst investments, I typically still exited them with 40% of my initial capital.
I think it's clear he considers the real estate to be actual investments, but the camping trips and crypto/stock to be "play money". Perhaps not a bad strategy.
i was just describing the all around comfort level of my lifestyle. if you drive a couple states away for a camping trip for a week, get a couple motels maybe, eat out, etc, it can be 2k$ pretty easily
I was just trying to become a homeowner. my first house in new york was about 1/4th to 1/5th the cost of a "starter home" anywhere in california. I was never going to be able to afford that
If you look at the increase in total market cap of tech businesses over the last thirty years, it makes a lot of sense that there just wouldn't have been nearly as many people starting their careers in tech thirty years ago as there are today. Also, people tend to go into management as they age because managers are generally better paid (for whatever reason). When people decide to not go into management they often stay on the projects that they helped to build, so you have whole teams of older engineers. I saw this when I worked at AT&T - almost everyone was older.
Eh, back when I got my first software engineer job at $BIGCORP 20 years ago, I was almost always the only one in the room younger than 40. Not being a web dev was the key, of course.
That might be true some places but not everywhere. If you're a programmer with 25(or more!!!) years of experience in video games companies will fight each other to hire you. And that's if you did only C/C++ your entire life and never learnt any other technologies.
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
I am the author of this piece, and i didn't share it to HN, I don't hang out here. I just gotta say wow, tough crowd. i wrote this piece from an emotionally low point after another fruitless day of applying to jobs. I didn't have a particular agenda in mind. I was voicing what i've been through and some of what I was experiencing with no expectations.
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.
I thought this piece really spoke to the landscape of software engineering in the present/future. Unfortunately discussions on this site are subject to a truly baffling mix of confirmation biases and messianic complexes.
Wishing you well and best of luck with your search.
> Unfortunately discussions on this site are subject to a truly baffling mix of confirmation biases and messianic complexes.
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.
As someone with an 18 yr old account here, this site turned into engineering LARPing much farther back than 2 years ago.
Seems curious you only started commenting a few years ago. What changed?
Any thread about hiring (here, reddit cscareerquestions, blind, whatever) is full of cunts waiting to put people down because they absolutely love telling people they aren't good enough for minor reasons despite proven records of competency.
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.
Hey Shawn
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 thought most of these comments have actionable if not tough to hear advice.
Perhaps offering an opportunity for more humility and introspection. Instead you’re here doubling down on the victim mindset.
Wishing you the best.
i have spent the last couple days responding to hundreds of comments on the substack piece. no new pieces of advice came up on this thread which were not already covered on the substack comments. advice which i have acknowledged. i was already about to do most of the pieces of advice anyways on my own as the next step, such as applying with a normie pseudonym. you don't know me. im not a victim and i don't have victim mindset. i am survivor.
I haven’t read most of the comments here and none on substack, but looking at your resume, I’d spend some time making it look slightly warmer, throw some color in there.
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.
ignore those addicted to negativity. for most people, their life is just reducing awareness to fit into their adlib structured arguments to assuage their insecurities. “Im so smart, i can ignore possibilities and unknowns and frame a thought construct that boosts my sense of ego and importance!”
> the population of substackistan is much less FUCKING CYNICAL AND NEGATIVE than you guys,
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.
thank you for taking the time. If i was petty i could share the past 5 versions of my website and resume i created in the last year which precisely followed most of what you recommended here. I had a completely vanilla narrative resume by version 3, and was getting nowhere. analytics and my own vibe check was making me think that all of that was too verbose and it wasn't being read. I was feeling unseen and began retargeting things to create an impression in 2 seconds, enough to hopefully hook someone to want to talk to me to learn more. the latest strategy was to try to emphasize within 2 seconds the point that im all about ai coding, while having a conventional cs/agency background at the same time.
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.
It might be good to expand on your data architecture work more in your CV. Write a paragraph about the data architecture work you did at your last company. You could remove some of the older jobs to free up space.
Well, for what it's worth, I recognize a lot of what you're going through.
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.
Regardless of what people have said here my advice is simple:
You’ve been fishing for a job. You need to hunt for one.
And I’ll expand on this:
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 will even put a false last name on an updated resume for you guys.
You’re doing no one a favor except yourself. What I mostly saw was constructive criticism and some comments about trying something different.
I am heeding and already doing all of the advice that has come up here and on the original thread, with the exception of 'move to where there are in-office jobs and try to get an in-office job' because that's not really feasible at this time
I hope you make it. I believe there is some good advice in this thread.
I read the post knowing it would likely remind me about all the times I read the handwriting on the wall and decided it was a message for someone else.
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.
thank you, i appreciate it
As I mentioned in my previous comment on this post, my overall sense is that HN commenters often struggle with fear. It's a scary time to be a professional in this industry, and to be a human on Earth more generally. Sometimes, one of the ways people here try to manage their fear is through skepticism of, and/or hostility toward, accounts where someone has suffered through no fault of their own, which I believe is your case.
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.
Thank you for writing this, and for your previous comment too.
You are the rare type of HN user I look for whenever I read the comments, which is not very often these days.
I’m not trying to be unsympathetic in this comment so please do not read it that way, and I’m aware having spent most of my career in cloud infrastructure that I am usually in high demand regardless of market forces - but this just does not make sense to me. If I ever got to the point where i was even in high dozens of applications without any hits, I’d take a serious look at my approach. Trying the same thing hundreds of times without any movement feels insane to me. I believe accounts like this, because why make it up? as other commenters have noted there may be other factors at play.
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.
It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons:
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.
> It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet
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:
> general sense ..., but we don't really know ... the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten upWe'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".
The impact of AI already goes further than just delaying hiring - at least in fields adjacent to engineering, such as technical writing. Anecdotally:
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.
> 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"
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 am 61, and have been working for almost 40 years. I don't really have a lot of personal connections, because I am on the autistic spectrum. Yes, I have many former co-workers linked on LinkedIn, but to most of those people, I'm just an old acquaintance, not someone they are going to phone up with a hot new job opportunity.
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.
Pure speculation, but I wonder if it's not so much AI as tech companies realizing they actually can do more with less. And, again, I have no evidence to back this up other than "feels," but I swear when Elon bought Twitter and cut so much of the workforce that's when sentiment seemed to shift materially. I wonder if that wasn't a bit of an "aha" moment for mega tech and tech in general. It's like all the major companies said maybe we don't need as many people as we have. Of course people are going to debate whether the changes at Twitter had a monumentally-negative impact (they may very well have in terms of revenue, but I'm not so sure in terms of absolute or even relative profit).
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
A huge amount of staffing cuts were to teams working on things like moderation or combating bots, which are areas Elon doesn't care about continuing development on. He's not so much doing more with less but rather doing less with less. We can debate about whether or not the projects he cut were worthwhile, but given the company's disastrous finances I wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt.
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.
Good point. I shouldn't have said more with less. I should've said Twitter lost 80% of its employees and somehow still exists (I thought it was "only" 50%). 80% is nuts. That said, if 100% of those reductions were outside of engineering (they weren't, I realize) then I'd mostly agree with your point. But I do think that even in that case it would cause every other company to ask some hard questions about staffing that could lead to layoffs and/or have implications for hiring.
All feels on my part just to hopefully add to the dialogue. Nothing scientific here.
I'm sure some CEOs followed the Twitter lead, but I also think the entire industry was already shifting with regards to headcount. A lot of companies were hiring excessively going into that period and middle management bloat was a well-known phenomenon.
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.
This all rings true to me. I would take it a step further and say that during normal times throughout the history of corporate America, and especially in boom times, management will let fiefdoms grow fairly unchecked. Then an external trigger causes them to re-evaluate and that's when they're like "holy shit we don't need nearly this many people."
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).
Yes, that was the turning point. You have to remember, in addition to the end of ZIRP this also happened after a few years of an extremely strong employee's market. Jobseekers were asking for and getting some pretty wild packages.
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.
It goes beyond Elon. PE was (are?) pressuring Google to lay off more employees because their pay was so high. And the Fed said that worker pay was "too high," in the context of inflation.
Basically, the ownership class was pissy that some people were able to actually get away from exchanging time for money.
Do people see Elon's takeover of Twitter as a success? I think he leveraged Twitter as a social media platform to make himself wealthy, but as far as I can tell, the actual company has been losing a ton of money.
I was trying to stay away from the debate about the success of it by making that comment about it not failing even with a fraction of the former employees. My sarcastic reply to your question, though, is it depends on which side of the aisle you sit on. More seriously, there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living. I can guarantee you every major tech company took note of that reality and so I have to believe it begged some questions about headcounts.
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.
>there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living.
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.
Are we disagreeing here? I'm not sure how you took my comment, but it seems like what you're arguing here doesn't really rebut what I was saying. Or at least is not directly related. FWIW I agree with everything you're saying, except for the tone, which, to be honest, I don't love.
>" Maybe the answer actually was they didn't/don't.
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.
Ignoring the financial aspects, I agree to some extent with OPs opinion this trend of doing more with less engineers really took off following Elon reducing Twitters headcount.
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.
For every engineer who sees things not working on the site and going unfixed, there's a manager who sees how many people still use it.
We don't know if it is losing money. It's a private company.
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...
I'm sure companies are realizing this - and tech unemployment is still on the rise - but if this trend was as pervasive as people seem to suggest, it doesn't really explain why tech unemployment is still significantly lower than the national unemployment rate. Maybe it going from 1.5% to 3.4% or whatever is what people are feeling, but it doesn't seem like that should result in massive amounts of people spamming resumes with no response. I'm sure some jobs/careers are gone forever now, but it can't seriously be that many.
Meta is probably the better example, here - dropped 20% of it's headcount (11% in Nov-22 and another ~9% subsequently, plus whatever's happened since Jan-24) and then 7x'd it's stock price. You can probably argue about decommitting from the "metaverse" fever dream idiocy, but a lot of companies looked at the deep cuts to headcount and certainly thought "AI or no AI, a lot of these people aren't adding value and Meta (and possibly Twitter, depending on what you believe) prove(s) it."
>> 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.
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.
Overall I'd agree with your sentiment, but it depends on the 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.
That ratio you mentioned vis a vis applications to hire is about normal for me and something I would consider tolerable
I'm sure it varies quite a bit depending on role.
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.
It's hard to say for sure without knowing his whole situation, but I will agree with you that when I hear someone say they've submitted 750 applications, my first thought is that they're taking a machine gun approach, applying to a lot of jobs in a short time. I was always taught that you tailor your resume to the position you're applying for, and apply only after doing a lot of research on the company to know whether you are suitable for their position. I'm older than the author of this post, and applied for my most recent job at about his age—though it was a few years ago, before AI was really a consideration. In my entire life, I've probably applied to ~25 positions, made it to the final round 8 times, and been hired 6 times.
Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.
That is my approach as well. It ends up being a lot less work than the machine gun approach.
> I come from poverty. my father was a drug addict who is dead. my mother is disabled and i’m helping support her. my grandparents are dead. my friends are on the west coast, dealing with similar financial hardships and they are already living with their parents and on couches. I’m not above asking for help, but there is no one to ask.
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 think nepotism is what we're talking about here.
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?
I don't think GP was talking about TFA - and thus not a professional network - with regards to nepotism, but rather being able to depend on family.
In any case, networks can be hard to build and maintain, and they can easily fall apart if you fall into a rut.
I suspect it's not AI.
> 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."
Could it be that your particular position required more ongoing learning, and that has kept you better prepared for a changing world?
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?
This has slowed down as I've gained experience but basically I am always volunteering to work on stuff I only have a shaky understanding of or never have done before. If I'm not doing new things on a job for ~1 year or more I get extremely uncomfortable, or start learning on my own. People call it "resume building" but I usually work for small skeleton teams where there's a ton of work available for someone that just volunteers to do it. That was basically how I crawled into my terraform/IAC niche, I was on a team where that was needed, they weren't going to hire, and no one else volunteered to take it on.
if you are in computer engineering and you are not doing "ongoing learning", you deserve to be left behind. While the company should provide some opportunities for learning, ultimately, it is your responsibility.
What's your strategy for continuing education?
i get where you are coming from. i tried 5 versions of my resume in the last year. talking to recruiters. shotgunning resumes. hand crafting one-off cover letters. I have tried many approaches. you can guage my resume for yourself. the current strategy is to pander to people who are mainly looking for ai-dev skills https://shawnfromportland.com/Shawn_K_Resume_2025-4.pdf
If you're up for some unsolicited feedback from someone who has read a lot of resumes:
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.
Honestly, his power-wash business is likely his redemption.
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."
Your mileage may vary.
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...
You made me login to reply :) , thanks.
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 am very much a generalist and this comment checks a lot of boxes for me. If you find yourself pigeonholed into some niche (which can be super profitable), and that niche disappears, you're not really left with much to work with other than a complete career change.
this is a factor for me. I've always had to pick up new languages frameworks and skills on-the-job. but today hirers are seeking only really niched down specific experts, and i suspect i am filtered out automatically by not matching that, with no regard to the fact that it's not that big of a deal for an experienced engineer to pick up something new
As a generalist "master of none" who also graduated from the same era, this is really reassuring. I use a lot of technologies but not enough to consider myself an expert in any of them. At the end of the day I can pipeline them into a useful tool or product.
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.
Last year I applied for a single job, out of a vague interest, and immediately had multiple calls from recruiters from different companies trying to talk to me.
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.
As someone commented below, I think the end of ZIRP is the cause and not Trump.
The end of ZIRP was well before last year.
The effects could take a while, I assume many companies had a ton of runway that’s now dwindling. There seems to have been a strong belief for some time that ZIRP will return too.
> I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant.
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.
As someone who has kids and actively participates in their lives (homework, hobbies, etc), I think I can safely say: the need to keep learning and growing never stops.
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.
This is a crazy assumption and really insulting to parents or non-parents and wrong on nearly every count.
You don’t need side projects or to work at night to continue to learn new technologies. (I am a parent too)
I have heard from doctors and lawyers that there comes a time in your career when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. 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.
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.
> when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. 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.
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.
> 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.
Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.
The first thing I thought of was he would benefit from joining an open source project.
> 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.
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.
It's not even that you necessarily have a ceiling, some people work for twenty years and are lucky with success, some are unlucky. You can be 45 and not have reached your ceiling. But the perception is there and you have to think about ways to re-invent yourself. It's really hard when you have family obligations and can't take a lot of risks.
I have a friend in a similar situation to the poster and tbh I don't have great advice.
> 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
Unpack this for me: what constitutes significant contributions to peers or the field?
For the HN crowd it's coming up with the umpteenth JavaScript framework, I think.
just for reference about my amassed 'wealth', the combined cost of my mortgages is less than a studio apartment's rent in the bay area. i left the west coast for precisely this reason
property values are wealth. mortgage payments are costs. one doesn't imply anything about the other.
Are the properties underwater on the mortgage?
Can you rent out the vacant units?
if you read the original article i talked about how i got into this position. I originally had renters at both properties covering almost all the costs. they left shortly before losing my job.
I think your name is unduly handicapping you. Since it is only a single letter people reading your resume think you are being coy and trashing it.
On you resume, change your name to "Shawn Kay." Wait until you're doing HR paperwork to use your legal name.
Yep.
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.
I will probably begin doing this but i will say-- in the past it was not a hurdle at all, and i got many interviews and a few jobs with this name. I have had about 10 interviews in the last year, going to 4th rounds, and nobody suggested it was a problem. my ratio of landing interviews per applications i put in parallels what I am hearing/reading from all other developers on the job market now. I don't strongly suspect my one-letter last name is a huge culprit here, but after a year on the job search and willing to try anything, i may begin applying with a pseudonym
Long ago I knew a person named Gregg. He constantly had to correct peoples' spelling of his name.
Why would parents burden their kid like this?
More importantly, why don't adults give up names that clearly put them at an economic disadvantage? The same reason people don't sell houses when they are almost always a bad investment; pride, sunk-costs, sentimentalism or other reasons for their subjectivity.
https://www.reddit.com/r/namenerds/comments/10hssp8/why_do_p...
I'm a Collin with two l's. Not as uncommon as Gregg but it's never been a burden. I also don't bother correcting people unless it's happening a lot with the same person and someone I expect to interact with a lot.
Why would any parent name their child water with an extra L?
It really shouldnt be a problem, and in the case of simple corrections, it isnt.
I think it does become a problem where formal systems are inflexible and unable to accommodate or be corrected.
Change name to an Indian one, problem solved!
This is completely insane. Anyone filtering out qualified applicants based on their names is messing up.
Ideally the process is blind to avoid bias but that isn't how most people operate. In this case rejection is based upon his perceived behavior, because abbreviating a last name to a single letter to avoid identification is a lot more common than single letter last names.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/07/man-named-kim-a...
I took a look at your resume to see if I would have relevant work for you but doesn't seem like 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.
thanks. this is the fifth iteration of my resume in this last year's search. im clearly trying to push for ai-coding, as i think i was often overlooked for being too 'trad'. in reality im all-in on ai.
I understand that and from the rest of your writing on your site that very much shows. I use AI professionally to great avail. Personally, I wouldn't put something similar in tone on my resume and when I review resumes this language is not something I'm looking for either.
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.
I am not sure if this will help you, but have an extended, deep conversation with ChatGPT about your resume. Tell it who you are, what you excel at, and list projects and technologies. Then, paste a couple of the job postings that did not work for you.
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.
ive done this with chatgpt and claude
This is an interesting perspective. I've sort of intentionally pushed towards working where AI isn't so useful (physical workflows that are heavily dependent on inputs from humans—scientists in particular) but my experience nonetheless has been discovering how useless AI is in so many ways I envisioned it replacing people by now. It's extremely useful in very narrow bands of application, and outside of that, it's often more of a distraction than an advantage.
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.
> I even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work
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.
I'm sure if he wasn't also a caretaker, losing control of his ability to schedule around being a caretaker wouldn't be "rock bottom".
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.
for sure it would be much easier if it was just me to consider in the picture
Yup. The trust issues around overemployment or straight up fraudulent candidates have made remote work rare and have lead to companies offering a premium for hybrid or fully in person roles. I don't think WFH only is line you can afford to draw anymore if you're on the ropes and leveraged.
ive had tons of in-office dev jobs, but have primarily been working online since like 2012. not only has it been way better for my health and sanity but my productivity is way way higher. the thought of going back to an office is PTSD inducing, a big step back
I worry about this, having moved away from a tech center for a better QoL. My current fallback plan if I can't find remote work on the next search is to look for hybrid jobs in NYC, which is a long-but-less-than-a-day's train ride from here, and to try to negotiate being in the office for either just a couple days a week or doing like a week on and a week off or whatever. It'd eat into salary to have to pay for somewhere to stay in the city for sure, but it'd be better than nothing.
I stumbled upon this line as well.
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
Exhilarating on site work often doesn't line up with needing to be a full time caretaker for family, unfortunately.
I said what I said. it still beats going into in an office
You think doing gig work for pennies and slowly losing your dignity is better than just going into an office?
I'm sorry but the absolute privilege of the author here, goodness...
You sure about that?
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.
My impression from TFA is not about lack of opportunity, which I would understand. The author simply refuses to work in an office.
Not the greatest word choice, those words have a lot of racist history.
Tough reading this sort of thing. :(
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
Opinion: the end of ZIRP has a much greater influence on the job market than AI. No more free money means an entirely different incentive structure. There's a fair bit of "oops we overbuilt in the past assuming we'd have free money to hire more engineers". The interest rate thus mediates how and what we build (Conway's Law strikes again!).
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.
> 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.
The end of ZIRP coincided with some reorganizing of the tax code that wasn't favorable to developers, as well. Both hit after a year or two of windfall profits and massive hiring due to covid.
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.
The increased interest in using generative AI to replace high-paid workers may well have been caused by the end of ZIRP.
Not just end of ZIRP, not just Agentic AI / Vibe Coding being effective [1], but also:
"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
my parent corp let go many, maybe 20% of each of their various dev teams in early 2024, right after everyones productivity was starting to go 3-10x. instead of keeping everyone and dreaming way way bigger, it was more like 'get the same amount of stuff done with way less people.' now i have more experience and skills than ever before, but the ratio of applications to even getting a response much less an interview is lower than ever in the past. anecdotally, in my job searches in 2018 and 2020, roles that would say they had ~20 applicants within the first day of posting, now have like 1000+
This has to be a location based problem, or maybe the types of companies they are applying to? I can easily get another job doing something in software in the greater Milwaukee area. I typically look at companies that are not software companies, but who still need some software work in their IT dept to make their company work and keep them relevant.
I live in syracuse, I found a job this year after being laid off in 2 months. It was a stressful time. Instead or 5-6 hours a week hed be better off studying C,C++ and Java and applying to places locally. Syracuse does not have a ton of web work, but there is a big defense industry here (Saab, SRC, Lockheed, AFRL) so there are things. Cornell, SU, UofR, I imagine are hiring fewer software engineers now though with the potus changes.
i applied at a web dev role at SU, in-office, making less than what i made in like 2009, with skills that are frankly below me. custom written cover letter. job been posted for months. they just hit me with the 'no thanks'
Your resume might need to be rewritten then. Schools do pay very poorly, thats an undisputable fact, but their benefit of free tuition for you and your kids is pretty good.
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.
> but there is a big defense industry here (Saab, SRC, Lockheed, AFRL)
i hope things don't get so bad that my options are destitution or the defense industry, but i'm used to eating ramen.
Lockheed can be an excellent place to work. While I’m not particularly fond of building war machines either, I had the opportunity to work on Space Situational Awareness. My role involved developing software to track the movements of space debris and alert operators to potential collisions. This project has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my entire career.
There are also quite a number of medical device and pharmaceutical companies on the east coast (based in upstate NY here), along with defense industry contractors. So, there are some more options.
medical devices i am slightly more sympathetic to, as a user of a DMD. pharmaceutical companies, only slightly higher than "defense" companies. they exist in practice so that few may benefit from the misery of many.
Hey nice - the substack cookie dialog went into an infinite loop when i clicked 'only necessary' cookies.
Are you in Firefox? I just had the same loop of click allow all cookies over and over again until only necessary made it disappear!
I’m on safari mobile and ended up in an endless loop. I had to use reader mode to get out of it.
Firefox and ublock origin.
Are there any other browsers left? :)
Well it does the same for "accept all"
I think it's interesting to ask ourselves if there are still jobs for everyone that pay well, and where people can get the training to do.
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?
You'll become a servant for the people who have some wealth, and they'll feel thrilled to be able to order you around.
I feel for all who feel obsolete and unneeded. The only solution I found for myself was to switch from implementing other people’s ideas to implementing mine. It’s a luxury some cannot afford, but I honestly think it’ll be necessary for many to think long and hard about an idea they can monetize. I wrote about it here: https://www.cleverthinkingsoftware.com/programmers-will-be-r...
TBH I much prefer your linked post to the OP for its positive tone and outlook. Thanks for sharing.
I think a lot of folks are missing the forest for the trees, here. OP is (presumably) a competent professional who has fallen on hard times despite record growth of the private enterprise and their immense profits. Their story is not unique, and Microsoft is adding another seven thousand bodies to the pile alone this week.
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”.
> Workers [...] will continue to resort to more desperate means over time [...] This is an inevitability [...] that we are rapidly approaching
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?
I obviously can’t win over someone as receptive to the idea of change as yourself, but on the off chance a passerby sees this and actually is interested in different perspectives or growing their knowledge, here’s what you can do to not be as blindingly trolling as this commenter here:
* 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.
thank you.
I feel terrible for this guy, but he really has stacked the deck against himself by moving to a rural area and refusing (or being unable) to work "on-site". He is up against every new grad and every laid off FAANG programmer clinging to the notion that they should be able to work remotely. To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of remote work but I recognize that many power dynamics have shifted in the last few years.
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.
Am I a bad person for laughing when I realized he ranked "Wordpress theme developer" above the "rock-bottom" of applying for a non-remote job?
(Typing this from an office.)
A co-worker in NJ had a 4 hour commute one-way because of the I-80 potholes.
This is just so he could sit in an office while all of his teammates were remote in other locations.
It feels like we're living two separate lives when it comes to remote work. If my office was a 5-10 minute walk then in-office could be fine. I used to longboard to the office and I didn't have too many complaints. But after getting 2+ hours of my day back every day, an extra hour of sleep, gas money, not having to meal prep or get take-out, and work among my at-home comforts not under wight fluorescent light and an oppressive HVAC it's really hard to imagine an in-office job getting preference over basically any remote job.
I did the hour commute thing, I hated it even when it was the norm.
I hear you for sure. I personally have the luxury of working remotely on a semi-regular basis when I'm not on site at a client's location and I love it. I have worked remotely on and off for 20 years and it is not all gravy though. It does get kind of lonely sometimes. On the flip side, in my early career, I worked with a one way daily commute of 90 minutes or 3 hours a day! That was sure a kick in the crotch.
If the people who used to hire you would sell your work to clients for $2000 per day, then instead start freelancing your own work and selling it for $1000 per day.
It saddens me that tech people have become so intrinsically beholden to a lifetime association with some rich paying Company.
It's no wonder that applications don't work. I can confirm this, but I just quit wasting time on them, went via contacts network.
What surprised me is that the OP had no reaction for personal messages.
I have seen people in similar circumstances that have enormous personal blind spots for issues that show up in interviews and with past colleagues. It's much easier to blame AI rather than admit or address those. If you have 20 years of experience and no one wants to work with you again, that is telling.
I've worked primarily with offshore devs. I can't say that's been great for a network and if I'd known how bad of an impact it would have on my professional development due to effectively zero network, I'd have avoided it entirely. Healthcare IT is dominated by offshore so beware.
i got words of encouragement but no one had leads
Consider that that is what most people tell past co-workers who they don't want to refer
You likely need blunt feedback from someone you can trust in the industry
4 or 5 of them told me they were in the same situation, highly regarded people i never thought that could happen to
Many people only look at LinkedIn when they're on the job market themselves. Or do so infrequently enough that they only see the message weeks/months later, at which point it feels awkward to respond.
I guess you missed this part: "manually messaging EACH of my 250 linkedin contacts asking if they had any leads"
I did read it. What did I get wrong?
You said you went via contacts network. Is this not his contacts network?
Did you mean something else, as in LI itself is fruitless and to reach out directly to past colleagues?
Yes, correct. I went to my contacts, not only in LI. And he writes he PMed all of his ones, and it didn't work, which is surprising to me.
What if you're not the type to maintain relationships w/ former coworkers?
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.
I guess you missed the 3rd sentence of the 3 sentence post.
I saw it. "no reaction for personal messages" - presumably, reaching out to contacts means sending personal messages.
Please explain to me like I'm five what point I'm missing here.
It's brutal out there. I'm currently 36 years years old. I got laid off in March last year from an outsourcing shop because no work was coming, mostly working with PHP, with some Javascript and python sprinkled in there. I thank the Lord for not having a wife and children, because it would have been so painful watching them suffer because of me, and I thank my parents for helping me float through the tough times.
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.
I've been looking for 18 months and the scams are starting to infest everything, especially in the past 3-4 months.
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).
OP, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
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
20+ years in the industry without significant leadership of one kind or another (either being a tech lead/staff engineer or manager) makes someone very hard to hire.
I’ve seen this described as “2 years of experience, 10 times”
It's not AI's fault that this website can't save cookie preferences.
I believe other factors are also involved, such as having the necessary skills for software development.
Ok so it isn't just my browser then. I thought it was weird that no matter how many times I click "only necessary" the popup keeps coming back.
Full remote PHP Single letter name
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.
I saw the same things you did and thought the same things you did. I made it to more than his salary in 1/3rd the time - from 2013 til 2019 is what it took me to get to $225k on almost purely frontend work despite being fired twice - and I've been vacation for three years now. I anticipate when I look for a job again I'll have no trouble. But I don't insist on remote, I didn't change my name to something edgy and impractical (if he was born to that name I apologize but that seems very unlikely, I've never seen or heard of an inherited single-letter last name in any culture), I have updated my skills as time has passed, and I'm not just building projects to look like I'm keeping up - I'm building real things I'm passionate about and which people use.
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.
while i have a BACKGROUND in php, i have not been seeking php work and havent been working fulltime in php since like 2017. Since then i've been fullstack in typescript. i've been seeking typescript roles in apps & vr.
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.
PHP is his only language, right? He's in the same situation as Perl-only developers a couple of decades ago.
PHP is a fine language for a lot of cases. It's been a long time since it made sense to pay someone $150K to use it. Anonymous Indians is the AI he's been up against for a long time. Not to be racist of course, just pointing out there's massive labor arbitrage opportunities especially once you allow Remote work. You could hire an entire team of people for the same cost. He's making himself compete with the world with no significant advantage and he's expecting top dollar. American salaries only make sense when they require onsite work or are specialized/cutting-edge in some way, PHP is the most commoditized skill set there is.
Yeah i feel like this guy posts a lot of doomer stuff and it isn't as introspective as it could be. i also feel like posting doomer stuff is popular and so he is trying to monetize the doomer mentality. That leads me to kind of think what he says has less value because i just see any kind of monetization scheme like that as a somewhat implicit bias to whatever is being said. you can't be anti-doomer if you make money on your substack talking about doomer ideas. but also, i feel bad for the guy he lost his job that had a nice salary and didn't find a new one. that must suck. But then I wonder, is that exactly what he is trying to capitalize on? And then you must think, is this what the world has become now that everything is commoditized and we are all part of the Attention economy? Is everyone trying to make money on everything and thus no one is really to be believed about anything? That's one reason why i deleted most social media. It all became a grift and none of it had anything to do with being social.
I've been off socials and on forums for 8+ years now for the same reason. I share similar sentiment as Bizzy's sibling reply. I say these things because lately I've been thinking about lot about dead internet theory and how strongly some believe it.
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?
This is beautiful. One thing I'd like to add to the list is:
How many AI cheaters do you need to catch on the technical phone screening interview to incorporate a habit of doing IRL CAPTCHA challenges?
It used to be that you wouldn't be aware of what is going on in RU-net [1] or PTT [2] because you simply were not a Russian speaker or you weren't someone living in Taiwan speaking Chinese (yes modern Taiwanese people use a CLI app to login to a BBS in 2025, you can also do this with a web browser but where is the fun in that). So you simply were unaware that they even existed probably or if you do, you are like me and can only kind of speak Russian and get some of the memes, or you simply know about PTT because your Taiwanese friend told you about it.
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
Damn, the last part of this comment was such an epiphany, thank you!
Doesn't sound like it, no.
> ...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)
I worked with PHP back in 2014 and nobody was building anything in PHP that could be called advanced by today's standards. That language barely had decent backend framework options and we're talking just 10 years ago.
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.
Don't forget that Facebook used PHP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM
by 'advanced', i simply meant complex web apps that are more than CRUD / more than wordpress. to take one that comes to mind, i built this server job that synced with an old school phone center CRM for a home security corp, and it coordinated all these events and updates to happen at scheduled times for customers getting home security systems installed
Perl also destroyed itself by growing an arrogant community that would eagerly race to be the first to shout "RTFM" at a modest inquiry by someone new to the language.
That was not my experience (at least with perlmonks) back when I used Perl, but maybe I'm mis-remembering things.
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!)
i have a BACKGROUND in php in the caveman times, but i have been working fullstack typescript/GCP since 2017
Not only PHP: "modern technologies I've gone on to learn and be experienced with in more recent years."
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...
PHP isn't terrible any more. Necessarily, anyway. I wrote a PR for Symfony last year, it was quite a nice experience.
But if the only language he posts about is PHP, I think the source if his hiring problems is clear.
PHP is now good enough that I think you can trivially learn another language if you know PHP.
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.
Yeah, modern PHP is very different from the old ugh. Still not my favourite language, but it's decent now. Just another day at the office.
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?
s/PHP/PHP 7 or Hack\/HHVM/
Have made an alt to comment in case my dev reads this
----
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.
Articles like this terrify me, and recently they are plenty. I have had a lifelong interest and participant in development, doing freelance at times, always utilizing it in my career when approved, and contributing to opensource. I finished out my BS:CS while working full-time and although my general-IT career has been pretty successful, I have always planned on trying to pivot into a proper development team full-time from the public sector.
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?
> I even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work, which is an absolute red line for me.
Yeah; no more chillin' out in your camper upstate in the middle of nowhere.
Bummer!
(Writing from on-site office chair here.)
Everyone nitpicking OP's personal choices, is this because the job market is not in fact being gutted by AI?
It's being gutted by a focus on AI investments which translates to more AI jobs, but that's not the same thing as AI itself automating your job away.
I'm using Claude everyday for my work. Am I just missing out on how awesome the things have gotten in this space?
It’s being glutted by an oversupply of labor. We have too many new grads and then H1bs on top of that.
There was a huge hiring spike circa 2022 that apparently misled a lot of people.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
How does your experience jive with the massive shortage of SWEs we have in the US. We've been inviting an additional ~150k foreign workers each year because there are no Americans applying for the long list of tech positions.
There is a mismatch between employer expectations and employee expectations. Employees expect things like WFH and pay comparable with previous years. Employers expect to do more with less. Inviting the additional foreign workers reduces pressure on employers to engage.
There is no shortage. Offshore consulting firms and HR collude to create impossible reqs that can only be filled by liars. HR gets a kickback, offshore consulting firm gets a cut, and some useless loser gets a shitty pointless job.
We've somehow built extremely fragile systems. Technological, yes, but not only technological. Also social, economical, and structural. Somehow, our systems can no longer absorb even slight shocks.
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.
I don't know what the situation is in the United States but down here in Australia trained members of the military are very well paid with excellent conditions and they are recruiting cyber and technical roles.
Militaries don’t normally enlist 42 year olds unfortunately.
The US military does. The branches all state an age limit, but it's easily and routinely waived.
It’s got a lot more to do with interest rates than AI.
I looked at your resume and here are my thoughts as a hiring manager for what it’s worth.
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.
Agree. I think all the AI stuff need to be removed. Are you seeing lots of open positions asking for people use AI to code? And if you are applying for VR, make resume VR oriented. If applying for web development, make resume focus on for web development.
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.
My 2 cents. It was light on detail. Not a big enough word count to hit all the recruiter keywords and nothing to back up the claims made.
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.
It's not the AI, the dude wants $150k for a simple engineering job in this economy.
This was a good, albeit sobering, read.
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.
Very obvious, but--you're good people.
Thank you for these great questions.
thanks
We need a solution to stuff like this. Unfortunately, right now we seem to be cutting everything in sight to help the rich, so... I don't see that help or hope on the horizon.
Stuff of nightmares.
Some of the solution(s) have already been played out a few times, we humans use our imagination(s). Everything that has been built with computers was just an idea a few decades 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.
The guy owns three properties. No, we don’t need “a solution” for landlords who overextended on credit during ZIRP and are now underwater; they need to sell the fucking properties.
what exactly are we transitioning to, economy wise? If it's techno-feudalism, what do the peasant's actually do when they're not needed?
Not NY, NY:
"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"
Maybe the solution is AirBnB.
He's already doing AirBnB. It's in the article.
Oh ye read the piece a bit too fast.
Using hands for other things than typing...
I don't want to argue the validity of AI taking jobs, but I really miss the tech job market in mid 00s to early 10s so much.
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 even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work, which is an absolute red line for me.
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.
It’s really important to build and maintain your network, especially as you get older. It’s nearly mandatory to know someone to get your foot in the door today. Especially today where we have a saturated market and dim prospects for future demand picking up like it was in the 2012-2022 era. Seriously, go through your contacts and just say hi every now and then. A career has to be groomed and managed today.
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.
It's so fucking heartbreaking, relatable and scary. I'm an immigrant, but before you readers start unsheathing your pitchforks, let me tell y'all - I've lived in the States for almost two decades, paying taxes and being a law abiding resident and later citizen — perhaps, contributing to the well-being of this nation more than I got back in return. Also, I've been here legally from day one.
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.
Recent and related:
The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944911 - May 2025 (5 comments)
Somehow it's ironic that this post is about AI replacing jobs and yet when I click the "accept all" option for cookies, the page reloads and shows the banner again :)
Where are the all knowing AI bots who are going to fix this?
I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with AI, other than making it harder to get an interview. He seems to get a few of those. I think the real problem he has is... well, the meaning of life, i.e. 42.
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.
> He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta be joking.
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.
Someone who's 42 needs to be a "TL" (tech lead?). Not everyone can be a leader (like you say, not that many openings available) -- and leading is often a totally different job and skill set from developing software. So what do you call it when everyone above a certain age is automatically shunted into a smaller pool of openings for a different role? I would call that ageism.
> I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with AI, other than making it harder to get an interview.
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.
just to offer a minor correction, the ratio was more like 800 applications for multi round interviews with ~10 companies (so maybe about 25 interviews). probably 25% of applications received a "no" response, while the rest ghosted
The author makes it clear that he can't simply "move closer to where office based jobs are" because he cares for his disabled mother.
I get that, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. He won’t be much use to his disabled mother if he can’t cover the bills.
I wonder if he should consider taking his mother with him and moving somewhere with a better local job market. Similarly, parents move and take their kids with them when the job market demands it.
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.
Some quotes stood out to me
> ...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.
lumping in a camping trip with investments is odd. A camping trip might cost very nearly zero dollars, depending on distance and what I have available. We'll be generous here and assume $100 was spent for some reason. That $100 is expended, you don't get it back.
A stock investment might "cost" $4000, but I would hope to have nearly $4000 in some asset. My absolute worst investments, I typically still exited them with 40% of my initial capital.
I think it's clear he considers the real estate to be actual investments, but the camping trips and crypto/stock to be "play money". Perhaps not a bad strategy.
i was just describing the all around comfort level of my lifestyle. if you drive a couple states away for a camping trip for a week, get a couple motels maybe, eat out, etc, it can be 2k$ pretty easily
And somehow thinks upstate NY is a better real estate investment market than California.
I was just trying to become a homeowner. my first house in new york was about 1/4th to 1/5th the cost of a "starter home" anywhere in california. I was never going to be able to afford that
If you look at the increase in total market cap of tech businesses over the last thirty years, it makes a lot of sense that there just wouldn't have been nearly as many people starting their careers in tech thirty years ago as there are today. Also, people tend to go into management as they age because managers are generally better paid (for whatever reason). When people decide to not go into management they often stay on the projects that they helped to build, so you have whole teams of older engineers. I saw this when I worked at AT&T - almost everyone was older.
Eh, back when I got my first software engineer job at $BIGCORP 20 years ago, I was almost always the only one in the room younger than 40. Not being a web dev was the key, of course.
That might be true some places but not everywhere. If you're a programmer with 25(or more!!!) years of experience in video games companies will fight each other to hire you. And that's if you did only C/C++ your entire life and never learnt any other technologies.
>That's the industry.
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
>P.S. Look on the bright side: at least you're not a 42 year old woman looking for software jobs. Hah
They suffer even more age discrimination?
They suffer even more discrimination in general.