[HN Gopher] The great displacement is already well underway?
___________________________________________________________________
The great displacement is already well underway?
Author : JSLegendDev
Score : 265 points
Date : 2025-05-12 14:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (shawnfromportland.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (shawnfromportland.substack.com)
| adamc wrote:
| 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.
| hdaz0017 wrote:
| 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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| Arnt wrote:
| PHP is his only language, right? He's in the same situation as
| Perl-only developers a couple of decades ago.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| 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.
| bizzyskillet wrote:
| Damn, the last part of this comment was such an epiphany,
| thank you!
| ramity wrote:
| 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?
| peterdemin wrote:
| 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?
| mnky9800n wrote:
| 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
| turtleyacht wrote:
| 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...
| Arnt wrote:
| 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.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| s/PHP/PHP 7 or Hack\/HHVM/
| const_cast wrote:
| 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.
| Arnt wrote:
| 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?
| monooso wrote:
| 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)
| alternatex wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Don't forget that Facebook used PHP:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM
| conductr wrote:
| 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.
| joquarky wrote:
| 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.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| 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!)
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| i have a BACKGROUND in php in the caveman times, but i have
| been working fullstack typescript/GCP since 2017
| uberman wrote:
| 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.
| autumnstwilight wrote:
| 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.)
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| uberman wrote:
| 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.
| bb88 wrote:
| 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.
| tetris11 wrote:
| 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?
| rightbyte wrote:
| It's a little weird living in a small trailer when I'm a
| homeowner, in fact I own three houses
|
| He owns properties [edit: Missread the place]. I think he is
| fine.
| fvrghl wrote:
| 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"
| rightbyte wrote:
| Oh ye read the piece a bit too fast.
| reverius42 wrote:
| Maybe the solution is AirBnB.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| He's already doing AirBnB. It's in the article.
| 42lux wrote:
| Using hands for other things than typing...
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| 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.
| tjohns wrote:
| > 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.
| reverius42 wrote:
| 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.
| popularonion wrote:
| 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.
| goldchainposse wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| 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 $4000 in some asset. My absolute worst
| investments, I typically still exited them with 40% of my
| initial capital.
| reverius42 wrote:
| I think it's clear he considers the real estate to be
| actual investments, but the camping trips and crypto/stock
| to be "play money". Perhaps not a bad strategy.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| i was just describing the all around comfort level of my
| lifestyle. if you drive a couple states away for a camping
| trip for a week, get a couple motels maybe, eat out, etc,
| it can be 2k$ pretty easily
| panzagl wrote:
| And somehow thinks upstate NY is a better real estate
| investment market than California.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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
| smackeyacky wrote:
| > 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.
| monooso wrote:
| 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.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| 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.
| reverius42 wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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
| d0liver wrote:
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >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
| gruez wrote:
| >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?
| reverius42 wrote:
| They suffer even more discrimination in general.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| 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?
| Havoc wrote:
| 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
| perrygeo wrote:
| 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.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > 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.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The increased interest in using generative AI to replace
| high-paid workers may well have been caused by the end of
| ZIRP.
| awkward wrote:
| 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.
| cellis wrote:
| 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
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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+
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > 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.
| ourguile wrote:
| 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.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| 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.
| cebert wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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'
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| RainyDayTmrw wrote:
| 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.
| 1attice wrote:
| 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.
| Barbing wrote:
| Very obvious, but--you're good people.
|
| Thank you for these great questions.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| thanks
| Shorel wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| Padriac wrote:
| 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.
| teg4n_ wrote:
| Militaries don't normally enlist 42 year olds unfortunately.
| mbrameld wrote:
| The US military does. The branches all state an age limit,
| but it's easily and routinely waived.
| speedbird wrote:
| 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
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 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.
| lokar wrote:
| I've seen this described as "2 years of experience, 10 times"
| Shaddox wrote:
| 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.
| joquarky wrote:
| 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).
| dexterlagan wrote:
| 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...
| jihadjihad wrote:
| TBH I much prefer your linked post to the OP for its positive
| tone and outlook. Thanks for sharing.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944911 - May 2025 (5
| comments)
| hackingonempty wrote:
| 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.
| trenchgun wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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?
| collinvandyck76 wrote:
| 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.
| mserdarsanli wrote:
| Why would any parent name their child water with an extra L?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| cellis wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| m0llusk wrote:
| This is completely insane. Anyone filtering out qualified
| applicants based on their names is messing up.
| macintux wrote:
| http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/07/man-named-
| kim-a...
| hackingonempty wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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
| gscott wrote:
| Change name to an Indian one, problem solved!
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It's got a lot more to do with interest rates than AI.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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.
| sabellito wrote:
| 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| That ratio you mentioned vis a vis applications to hire is
| about normal for me and something I would consider tolerable
| sabellito wrote:
| 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.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| 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.
| tmaly wrote:
| As someone commented below, I think the end of ZIRP is the
| cause and not Trump.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The end of ZIRP was well before last year.
| johnea wrote:
| 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...
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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
| yardie wrote:
| 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.
| ponow wrote:
| 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?
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| 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.
| endemic wrote:
| What's your strategy for continuing education?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 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.
| harmmonica wrote:
| 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
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| 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.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 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.
| giobox wrote:
| 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.
| voidspark wrote:
| 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...
| harmmonica wrote:
| 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.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >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.
| harmmonica wrote:
| 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.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >" 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.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| harmmonica wrote:
| 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 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.
| keeda wrote:
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 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.
| jmye wrote:
| 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."
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| harmmonica wrote:
| 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).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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."
| bradgessler wrote:
| 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.
| teeray wrote:
| > 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?
| araes wrote:
| > 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".
| didibus wrote:
| > 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?
| bobsomers wrote:
| 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?
| squigz wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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."
| rr808 wrote:
| > 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This is a crazy assumption and really insulting to parents or
| non-parents and wrong on nearly every count.
| moregrist wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| You don't need side projects or to work at night to continue
| to learn new technologies. (I am a parent too)
| georgeecollins wrote:
| >> 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| That is my approach as well. It ends up being a lot less work
| than the machine gun approach.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| 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.
| windowshopping wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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.
| pupppet wrote:
| Everyone nitpicking OP's personal choices, is this because the
| job market is not in fact being gutted by AI?
| threatofrain wrote:
| 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?
| Amezarak wrote:
| 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
| nottorp wrote:
| Hey nice - the substack cookie dialog went into an infinite loop
| when i clicked 'only necessary' cookies.
| alborzb wrote:
| 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!
| nottorp wrote:
| Firefox and ublock origin.
|
| Are there any other browsers left? :)
| jspash wrote:
| I'm on safari mobile and ended up in an endless loop. I had
| to use reader mode to get out of it.
| srdjanr wrote:
| Well it does the same for "accept all"
| protipz wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| franktankbank wrote:
| 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.
| culebron21 wrote:
| 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.
| masterj wrote:
| 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.
| franktankbank wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| i got words of encouragement but no one had leads
| masterj wrote:
| 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
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 4 or 5 of them told me they were in the same situation,
| highly regarded people i never thought that could happen
| to
| brandall10 wrote:
| I guess you missed this part: "manually messaging EACH of my
| 250 linkedin contacts asking if they had any leads"
| culebron21 wrote:
| I did read it. What did I get wrong?
| brandall10 wrote:
| 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?
| culebron21 wrote:
| 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.
| brandall10 wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I guess you missed the 3rd sentence of the 3 sentence post.
| brandall10 wrote:
| 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.
| projectazorian wrote:
| 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.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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?
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > 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?
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| For the HN crowd it's coming up with the umpteenth JavaScript
| framework, I think.
| jere wrote:
| > 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.
| gscott wrote:
| The first thing I thought of was he would benefit from
| joining an open source project.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > 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.
| flerchin wrote:
| > 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.
| aorloff wrote:
| 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
| awkward wrote:
| Exhilarating on site work often doesn't line up with needing
| to be a full time caretaker for family, unfortunately.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| I said what I said. it still beats going into in an office
| squigz wrote:
| 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...
| hackable_sand wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| My impression from TFA is not about lack of opportunity,
| which I would understand. The author simply refuses to
| work in an office.
| starkparker wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| for sure it would be much easier if it was just me to
| consider in the picture
| awkward wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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
| mplanchard wrote:
| 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.
| camcil wrote:
| 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?
| leksak wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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.
| why-el wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| ive done this with chatgpt and claude
| l33tbro wrote:
| Constructive side-note: your lowercase typing may not
| endear you to many professionals. Ie, making an effort to
| appear low-effort usually comes across to others as
| inauthentic.
| leksak wrote:
| 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.
| kypro wrote:
| 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.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| didibus wrote:
| 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?
| kubb wrote:
| You'll become a servant for the people who have some wealth,
| and they'll feel thrilled to be able to order you around.
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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".
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| thank you.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > 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?
| mattlondon wrote:
| > 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| > 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.)
| dyauspitr wrote:
| 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.
| dracodoc wrote:
| 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.
| phatfish wrote:
| 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.
| yc-alt-17483 wrote:
| 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.
| crtified wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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.
| mizzack wrote:
| 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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.
| dgfitz wrote:
| 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.
| pseudosaid wrote:
| 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!"
| dyauspitr wrote:
| > 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I hope you make it. I believe there is some good advice in
| this thread.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| 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.
| 1attice wrote:
| 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.
| sadcodemonkey wrote:
| 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.
| cjbohlman wrote:
| 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.
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| > 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.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Seems curious you only started commenting a few years ago.
| What changed?
| bjclark wrote:
| As someone with an 18 yr old account here, this site turned
| into engineering LARPing much farther back than 2 years
| ago.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| shawnfrompdx wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Regardless of what people have said here my advice is simple:
|
| You've been fishing for a job. You need to hunt for one.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| 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.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| It's not the AI, the dude wants $150k for a simple engineering
| job in this economy.
| iLemming wrote:
| 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.
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