I've been thinking about job searching lately, maybe a bit too much. I'm employed, so it is not any immediate concern for me, but one has to think ahead.
Between age discrimination that starts after 50, and how difficult the job search seemingly is...some people will have to work at least until they're 70. That's a solid 15-20 years more, after the job hunting is an uphill battle.
If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Me and my partner are doing everything we can to achieve some minimum level of FIRE, just in case.
I've also accepted that sooner or later, probably the next 10-15 years or so, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm going to end up in a lifer position. If FIRE can't save my ass, I simply can't afford to hop around.
This is one of my main concerns. A lot of countries are talking about raising their retirement age, and I just think to myself, which tech company is going to hire a 68-year-old? Sure, I could transition into management, but my company just laid off a number of middle-managers and the ones left are expected to do more than just manage (code, design, etc.). So I'm not sure that's all that safe either.
I like learning new things, and I hope to continue that into my 60s (and beyond), but I have to imagine picking up new skills will get harder as I age.
It was always my understanding that software careers are shorter than other technical careers, and the higher wages compensate for this. More than compensate, if you invest early.
If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.
HAHAHA. I have so much more "fu" money now, it really takes a lot of pressure off. Something goes wrong? I can solve it with money. Stranded somewhere? Just pay. Friend in trouble? Help out.
I wouldn't say that at all. When I think back to all the store I set by ephemeral status things like worrying what was cool or if girls liked me in my twenties .. life is definitely a lot easier now I get to just be myself.
"Sometimes the best way to search is… not to search." Last line of the article and man... it hits! All while applying and going through multiple interview processes, I was taking a break: traveling, fishing, and reading.
I was in the job search after leaving the GOV for about 3-4 months. I had received offers but they were all less pay or less flexibility than before and I wasn't willing to compromise. All the "big and sexy" start-ups required 3+ interviews, most I had was 7, and they still ended up deciding I wasn't a fit.
I reflected often that I was in the wrong line of work... not being able to get what I had wanted. With some rationalization and imposter syndrome gone, it ended up being LinkedIn and my connections that had saved me. Living proof that network and connections out last technical prowess unless you're the best-of-the-best at something.
This essay just makes me feel so hopeless about our society. I don’t feel it’s right that employment has such weight in people’s lives that the search causes psychological damage.
I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.
At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.
These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.
Most people don't have the financial resources to be out of work for a month or two, much less indefinitely. For most people it has nothing to do with the factors you listed.
I've been laid off twice in the past and each time I was fortunate to have enough savings to take several months off of work to relax and unwind. I'd quite happily do it forever if I could afford it. I loved being able to set my own routine, tell myself what to do, and find my own social context and sense of belonging while doing activities that I enjoyed, usually having nothing to do with work, like biking, skiing, creating open source projects, etc.
But watching your bank accounts slowly tick downwards is incredibly stressful, even when you have a long runway, and each time I ended up job hunting sooner than I had planned.
Agreed. I have can think of about a dozen things I'd love to do if I didn't have a full-time job. Unfortunately, most cost at least some amount of money (not to mention food, a roof over my head, etc.).
What are you talking about? That's not the issue for most people. For most people the issue is that if you don't have a job for long enough, the government will send people to throw you out on the streets to suffer and die.
I have tried various forms of non-work (including unemployment while unqualified for government aid), and the by far most mentally devastating thing I've done was to take an extended sabbatical where I really just did nothing but sit on my ass, play video games, watch netflix, and scroll social media for 8 months. Took me years to get my brain sorted again.
It's tough to watch the change when not too long ago a software developer with decent skills could literally submit 5 resumes and end up with 3 good offers.
The only way for anybody to have any good jobs at all is for millions to have none, and/or have nothing resembling formerly respectable pay.
And it's got to last years or there will be no recovery for shareholders from what they've already suffered with a stagnant economy.
In the 1970's it ended up 10x this bad or worse, in most technical fields at the time as well as non-tech.
There was nothing else that could be done except recognize it was a crap shoot.
There will be plenty of millions who do not lose their jobs, some will not even lose much momentum. There will be nowhere else for the "new normal" to coalesce around, after nothing else resembles the old normal for so long.
As before, only the relatively unscathed will write the economic history of these years, and many less-fortunate millions are slated to be forgotten.
The only other alternative is for everybody to take a steep pay cut, and all upwardly-mobile climbers to halt all momentum. What are the odds that could happen this time?
And that still wouldn't allow hiring as many early-career professionals as there will be available for quite some time to come.
Don't worry, employment is not where all the negative outcomes will affect future generations . . .
There is something fundamentally broken about this entire user journey and industry. There are lots of jobs to fill. But hiring managers don't find people reading through resumes submitted in a form. People don't get jobs by submitting resumes into a form.
The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.
In the recent UAP hearing, whistleblower Borland talked about how financial ruin is the real fear holding whistleblowers back:
> Are you scared for your safety?
> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.
It's just an abstracted and bureaucratic repackaging of the difficulty with searching for prey and forage during a succession of harsh seasons that some of our unluckier ancestors experienced, such as those who lived at the time of the Pleistocene Toba eruption.
To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.
I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.
I mean, if it's so cruel, then why wouldn't you just commit suicide?
The reason why it's not cruel (IMO) is that there's hope for a better future, if you don't have kids, you will never be able to know. That's choosing to just not play the game, total darkness. There isn't an alternative universe to choose from.
Agreed, but I would say talking to someone isn't a magical fix here.
OP, I would be interested in knowing if that's the case, why are you posting here on HN, getting up in the morning, doing the things you do etc?
Are you depressed (if so) in a physiological or psychological kind of way (because of something external?)
I will say I am not doing too well, but still, if I look at things objectively right now, I'd still rather wait and see what happens in this world rather than choosing nothingness. My rock bottom is someone's heaven
> "You’ve spent several months sending out scores of carefully tailored resumes and cover letters for jobs you know you are fully qualified for and would excel at."
People should not do this. It is causing so much suffering. In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site. It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere. It seems like many people are suffering from thousands of applications, and it makes me sad.
As other posters have said, this only really works if you have a network. Zeroth-order referrals (i.e. they call you) work best, first-order referrals (i.e. you know someone at the company) work decently well, and second-order referrals (you know someone who knows someone to refer you) are a guided shot in the dark.
People who have networks all know this. The issue is that a shocking number of people don't have any network at all. These tend to be the sorts of people who are either actively antisocial at work (the "coworkers aren't your friends" type) or job hop so frequently that they don't spend enough time at any single job to develop any meaningful professional, let alone personal connections.
And juniors. I’m in a masters program right now and everyone’s got a network, it just happens to be filled with poor starving grad students instead of FAANG super stars :)
Give it time. Networks are a garden that grow over time, and moreso if you cater to them. Some of those starving grad students will be VPs in 10 years.
Unless you are a hermit, everyone has a network, even if it's small. Everyone has a few friends, a brother/sister/dad/mom/cousin, a few people in their town they know. All of those people know someone else, and that's your initial pool of job opportunities to look at.
This might not get you into your dream company. But it can get you a next job to grow from.
For one of my jobs I had no contacts in the industry so I emailed someone at the company who went to my school, mentioned we both went there, and could they meet for coffee. I then drove 2 hours to meet him. We discussed what was happening at his company, are there opportunities, and he referred me.
I job hop frequently, and have a large zeroth-order network because I did good work at each one.
When I am in a hiring role, I am not flipping through memories of good times with former coworkers that I had deep and meaningful time with -- I'm thinking back to who was the verb who got ish done and will make my project a success.
I got my dream job by applying on their website. As a hiring manager, also interviewed many people who got theirs at other companies' websites. Networking is better but website applications used to work alright. This could have changed with AI resumes.
I know this is just anecdotal but just want to say I got my current job just applying to a job from a linkedin email. I admit I was surprised how easily and smoothly it all went actually...
Referrals by hiring managers who I have previously worked with and want to hire me aren’t even getting me a phone screen from their recruiters.
The majority of employment in tech is with large, corporate firms, and unless you are in the executive tier they all have implemented a massive amount of process to prevent bias in hiring which means that even networking has low impact on getting a job, beyond letting you know the positions even exist
> It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
Just be careful contacting recruiters directly. I know of at least one F100 that will blacklist you for pestering their recruiters. If you think ai-generated resumes are overwhelming recruiters, you should see their LinkedIn inboxes.
This might work if you already have a network, but otherwise good luck getting through to people on the phone.
HR will answer the generic questions, but tell you to apply online. Cold "calling" people on LinkedIn is a shot in the dark. Some people don't mind you doing it, most will ignore you.
You can start building a network by reaching out to alumni, former colleagues, open-source contributors for projects you're contributing to [1], etc.
Hardly ideal, but it's a start.
[1] And if you're not contributing to an open-source project, please do it, it's a great way to learn stuff, improve your CV, network and of course give back.
If you just graduated college or have no network, you can reach out to alumni and mention that connection. Or, you can ask personal friends/family for contacts (will probably be local companies, which may be a first step job).
Or you can reach out over social media. "Hi there, I follow you on X and am just getting started in the industry. Do you mind if I ask a few research questions?" A friend of mine just used this technique to land a role in an industry where he had no contacts.
If the situation is "good luck getting through to people on the phone", then that probably means this person is not a real friend of yours, they are a stranger, and you shouldn't try. You should be reaching out to people who actually know your name, or you have a mutual friend.
Use the paths available to you to get a job. Exhaust them all. If you know someone that works there and THEY track you down, yes this is good advice, great way to get a job.
> You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
Unless you're lucky, this is no longer going to happen. Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
No form is going to extend a job offer autonomously. At some point in the chain, there will be a boss, a person, who talks to you and thinks, "I want to work with this person", and decides to make the offer.
So the goal is to figure out how to get in touch with that hiring manager as the first step. Even if the form or HR "rejects" you, this person can step in say, "that's silly, I want to work with them. Send them through"
I think this charade of sending in resumes to forms is causing people so much pain. It feels like rejection and is not moving them closer to a job.
> No form is going to extend a job offer autonomously.
Just wait... some time-pressed startup is going to find a killer LLM prompt that filters in exactly the people they want, and then post something on the benefits of "vibe hiring". Complete with large, well-spaced text, colored with one accent color, and several graphs of hiring spending vs. income or something.
> Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
That's not a new thing. It's how it's always been.
> Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
Getting a starring role in a movie has a lot to do with abilities, not just luck and who you know.
Many companies are looking for strong mission alignment, because when it's a buyer's job market, why not select someone who has intrinsic motivation for what you are doing? Are you passionate about the problem? That is a lot like auditioning for a starring role: do you understand the character you might be playing? Many jobs - especially desirable ones - use this sort of "mission alignment" as selection criterion.
The thing that's different in software is that because the equipment needed to demonstrate technical skills is so cheap (just a computer) and trust in representations of technical experience is so low, they can test for technical skills in a way that other industries can't.
I don't think that anyone asks a civil engineer to design a bridge or a surgeon to remove an appendix to get a job.
My first job in the industry was in a startup that went belly down. Most of us didn't get much opportunity to network.
Thankfully, I happened to contribute to two open-source projects. One of them was a (then) obscure language called Rust and another one was Firefox. Both contributions eventually turned into career-defining moments for which I'm still reaping benefits 15 years later.
Had I contributed to Vlang and Camino instead, my career would probably have been much less satisfying.
I've gotten several jobs this way, including the best jobs of my career. It's insufferable the way so many commenters here assume their experience is representative of or applicable to others. It's like if main character syndrome was a web site comments section.
Sometimes you just need to look locally. Chances are there are positions available close enough to your home that its worth the following effort. I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me. I show interest, they show interest (generally, and even if they are not hiring). This has lead to much improved chances of getting an interview over just filling an application or email through a network. People like to see and get a feel for the people they might end up hiring. Face to face puts you ahead of the pack. This technique is critically underutilized. Obviously, if your only interested in remote positions, this won't work very well. If the org is big enough, you can try to locate a nearby satellite branch or office to find a person who can tap you in.
> I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me.
This is surprising to me. Unless you last tried this long enough ago that the manager said, "I like the cut of your jib, young man, you've got grit" in a transatlantic accent.
I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. Forget that, they even refused to maintain good relationships with decision makers (and I did this too, but only once in my carrier), left jobs in bad ways, focused on chasing salary increases every 6 months.
And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
> you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)
So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.
But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.
> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.
Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.
It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. [If you’ve been] working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.
> the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too
I agree.
But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.
The pool of young kids that can challenge the technical ability of someone with 20 years more experience is small enough that I don't mind competing with them for employment.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills.
Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.
>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.
A kid twenty years younger than me is in their early twenties and they would have to be some kind of Wunderkind to have spent decades learning operating systems, networking, programming languages, business and law to the degree I have.
When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.
Would you say, broadly, concepts you disagree with or find uncomfortable should be banned? Do you think that's sufficient, or should they be criminalized as well?
I think the benefit of the “weird path” need not be monetary but instead a way to stay afloat of the burnout and find motivation to keep going. While I agree with many things in the article, I found in my experience that these feelings are not responsive to rational arguments, and rest doesn’t help after 6+ months when recruiters’ first questions to you are “what have you been doing since your last position?” That’s why I think the “weird” route can be a good way to answer by keeping up with new projects, etc.
Throw into the mix any immigration concerns and you have a perfect cocktail for stress :)
Something seems really off about this system. At least in tech, I see a lot of open recs and hiring. Im even seeing some teams struggle to fill open recs. It should be possible to build a system that matches workers to jobs without going through this dumb and stressful process.
How do you reconcile your experience with the common narrative that there is a huge shortage of tech workers in the US and, hence, the H1B/H4 programs?
I don't think there's actually a shortage of tech workers in the US. I think there is probably a shortage of tech workers in the US that are willing to work for the wages that companies want to pay.
One of the "problems" companies have is that it's hard to find skilled workers in the US with good experience who are not demanding SF wages. And recent graduates aren't that useful so while they might technically be "tech workers" in the sense they would like to fill open roles, companies don't really want them.
So for most companies if you want to hire the most experienced and qualified for the role, and do that at a reasonable cost, you'll need to consider the H1B route.
So for an (employed) developer like me, who is dreading the next job search, what's a "hot" profession I could train myself on so my experience in the job market over the next 15 years could be like it was in the salad days of 1996-2022?
(I'm making a pass at "learning AI" but don't feel 100% certain that demand for that will be sustainable at a high level over the next decade ...)
Well, I'm currently having a hard time finding a good electrician, and the ones who I have employed in the past earn pretty generous hourly rates.
(I say this half-joking, but also I know a DBA who retrained as an electrician and was happier than ever. It's the fact he retired - early - which has put me in my current predicament.)
Jobs are aggregated into gigantic boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, and the market is national or international. You can choose among thousands of companies, but you're also just one potential applicant among millions. The cost of applying tends to zero -> number of applications increases. The only way to succeed is by sending out an absurd number of CVs. Numbers that would have seemed inconceivable a generation ago before everything moved online and globalized. It's normal to send out hundreds or thousands before getting hired.
Economists look at this and see only an improvement in market efficiency, but they're ignoring the emotional toll. Reject, reject, reject, reject, drip drip drip every day like water torture. It's the same thing on dating apps. No wonder people give up.
That’s before getting into the jobs that are functionally not real, even if the employer in question believes they are honestly looking.
Seeing bog standard senior engineer positions still advertising for the places that ghosted me 5 months ago means the job posting is fake for one of the n-teen reasons companies paste fake postings or the company has gotten unreasonably picky with how much labor is on the market
What nonsense. Does he really think his friends are sharing the full extent of their difficulties? There is an exquisite feeling of shame, guilt, fear, and anger that goes with being jobless for the first time and making zero progress with the job search. When your savings is gone, when your credit cards are maxed and in collections, when you're selling your stuff to pay for food and electricity, when you're about to be evicted (and have no idea what to do with your stuff because you can't afford storage) - and you have to keep trying. Keep a smile on your face, act confident and happy because no-one wants to hire you if you're a drag. You revise your resume, you apply to tangential jobs - but you don't get any response, no interviews and no offers. The one you do get is a disinterested indian guy at a bank who is clearly not even hiring right now.
Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started.
Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump.
There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
Hate to say the obvious, but it's all about supply and demand. The field I was working in 30 years ago was "hot" and the hourly wage has dropped at least 5x since then.
Sure, in the last 20 years I did "development" work which was related but more advanced (24 hours a day stuff, it's always in your head) - but once those efforts were complete, so were the jobs.
My field was laboratory science and I still take solace in the fact that 200 years ago, only the rich (or minimally subsidized) ever got a chance to to touch this stuff. But solace doesn't pay the bills.
Maybe take on volunteer work? Once you get involved, it leads to stories and sharing and new perspectives. I've done a few thousand hours over the past 15 years. It feels good. You chose to do it. You see results and have new ideas. Maybe even a new business.
or a dual income household. My wife and I have taken turns on who has the jobs with the benefits. Maybe you're right, maybe we're an exception. But I know educated guys around here whose wives work, and stay home with the kids, run volunteer .org in their spare time.
There are no jobs. I'm being stalked and fucked with in San Francisco. Constantly. Everyone here is insane and most people are sick. Life is pointless. I'm just waking up and doing something and then going to sleep in a shelter again.
They give me sick to their kids as some sort of sick joke and wait for me to die. I had someone put fentanyl in the coffee they served at de haro church while I was lugging fifty pound bags of potatoes to give to the poor. Cool way to fuck up someone's back. Because they're insane and murderous. It's like that shit everywhere unless you have money and can hire private security or a group of you and your friends have a secret way to poison people.
I've asked construction workers if I can do shift labor for cash and they always say no. Fucking bonkers. I hurt all over more or less all of the time. There are people that have had their entire bodies melt from disease from being exposed to weaponized sick here.
There's absolutely no point in giving a shit about anything anymore. I'm just waiting to die truth be told.
No offense, but maybe they're narcan-ing you because you because you're nodding out in public?
I am not doubting you have been fucked with -- I once got into a 2v1 brawl on the Mission and 16th BART that only ended because I sent one flying into a pillar and told the other if he kept coming, he was going onto the fucking tracks.These guys kept going over to a homeless guy who was just... sitting there... trying to get a rise, hoping for an excuse to "defend" themselves. And when I told them to quit being bullies, they tried to jump me.
So trust me, I believe you, and I get that trauma can have an impact on your life.
But if you are using narcotics, it will impact your search.
If you want help getting clean, I could send some resources to the email on your profile -- on the technical side you sound like a better coder than me and if you had that part locked down I suspect you'd quickly find work.
I've been thinking about job searching lately, maybe a bit too much. I'm employed, so it is not any immediate concern for me, but one has to think ahead.
Between age discrimination that starts after 50, and how difficult the job search seemingly is...some people will have to work at least until they're 70. That's a solid 15-20 years more, after the job hunting is an uphill battle.
If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Me and my partner are doing everything we can to achieve some minimum level of FIRE, just in case.
I've also accepted that sooner or later, probably the next 10-15 years or so, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm going to end up in a lifer position. If FIRE can't save my ass, I simply can't afford to hop around.
This is one of my main concerns. A lot of countries are talking about raising their retirement age, and I just think to myself, which tech company is going to hire a 68-year-old? Sure, I could transition into management, but my company just laid off a number of middle-managers and the ones left are expected to do more than just manage (code, design, etc.). So I'm not sure that's all that safe either.
I like learning new things, and I hope to continue that into my 60s (and beyond), but I have to imagine picking up new skills will get harder as I age.
It was always my understanding that software careers are shorter than other technical careers, and the higher wages compensate for this. More than compensate, if you invest early.
If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.
It's been such an obvious self-own for tech workers not to capitalize on any of the multiple booms they've seen, and unionize.
> If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Life never gets easier with age. I guess that's just something we all have to come to terms with eventually.
> Life never gets easier with age.
HAHAHA. I have so much more "fu" money now, it really takes a lot of pressure off. Something goes wrong? I can solve it with money. Stranded somewhere? Just pay. Friend in trouble? Help out.
I wouldn't say that at all. When I think back to all the store I set by ephemeral status things like worrying what was cool or if girls liked me in my twenties .. life is definitely a lot easier now I get to just be myself.
I don't mean to rain on your parade...just want to say enjoy it now, and remember it later. Good luck.
"Sometimes the best way to search is… not to search." Last line of the article and man... it hits! All while applying and going through multiple interview processes, I was taking a break: traveling, fishing, and reading.
I was in the job search after leaving the GOV for about 3-4 months. I had received offers but they were all less pay or less flexibility than before and I wasn't willing to compromise. All the "big and sexy" start-ups required 3+ interviews, most I had was 7, and they still ended up deciding I wasn't a fit.
I reflected often that I was in the wrong line of work... not being able to get what I had wanted. With some rationalization and imposter syndrome gone, it ended up being LinkedIn and my connections that had saved me. Living proof that network and connections out last technical prowess unless you're the best-of-the-best at something.
It's all fun when you have money... otherwise it's a recipe for disaster
This essay just makes me feel so hopeless about our society. I don’t feel it’s right that employment has such weight in people’s lives that the search causes psychological damage.
I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.
At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.
These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.
That's a little out of touch.
Most people don't have the financial resources to be out of work for a month or two, much less indefinitely. For most people it has nothing to do with the factors you listed.
I've been laid off twice in the past and each time I was fortunate to have enough savings to take several months off of work to relax and unwind. I'd quite happily do it forever if I could afford it. I loved being able to set my own routine, tell myself what to do, and find my own social context and sense of belonging while doing activities that I enjoyed, usually having nothing to do with work, like biking, skiing, creating open source projects, etc.
But watching your bank accounts slowly tick downwards is incredibly stressful, even when you have a long runway, and each time I ended up job hunting sooner than I had planned.
> I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
I would be perfectly happy without a job. It's the income I'm concerned about.
Agreed. I have can think of about a dozen things I'd love to do if I didn't have a full-time job. Unfortunately, most cost at least some amount of money (not to mention food, a roof over my head, etc.).
As a friend of mine put it, "I don't know if UBI would take people out of the workforce, but it would probably take me out of the workforce."
What are you talking about? That's not the issue for most people. For most people the issue is that if you don't have a job for long enough, the government will send people to throw you out on the streets to suffer and die.
I have tried various forms of non-work (including unemployment while unqualified for government aid), and the by far most mentally devastating thing I've done was to take an extended sabbatical where I really just did nothing but sit on my ass, play video games, watch netflix, and scroll social media for 8 months. Took me years to get my brain sorted again.
It's tough to watch the change when not too long ago a software developer with decent skills could literally submit 5 resumes and end up with 3 good offers.
The only way for anybody to have any good jobs at all is for millions to have none, and/or have nothing resembling formerly respectable pay.
And it's got to last years or there will be no recovery for shareholders from what they've already suffered with a stagnant economy.
In the 1970's it ended up 10x this bad or worse, in most technical fields at the time as well as non-tech.
There was nothing else that could be done except recognize it was a crap shoot.
There will be plenty of millions who do not lose their jobs, some will not even lose much momentum. There will be nowhere else for the "new normal" to coalesce around, after nothing else resembles the old normal for so long.
As before, only the relatively unscathed will write the economic history of these years, and many less-fortunate millions are slated to be forgotten.
The only other alternative is for everybody to take a steep pay cut, and all upwardly-mobile climbers to halt all momentum. What are the odds that could happen this time?
And that still wouldn't allow hiring as many early-career professionals as there will be available for quite some time to come.
Don't worry, employment is not where all the negative outcomes will affect future generations . . .
There is something fundamentally broken about this entire user journey and industry. There are lots of jobs to fill. But hiring managers don't find people reading through resumes submitted in a form. People don't get jobs by submitting resumes into a form.
The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.
In the recent UAP hearing, whistleblower Borland talked about how financial ruin is the real fear holding whistleblowers back:
> Are you scared for your safety?
> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/house-uap-whistleblower-hear...
It's just an abstracted and bureaucratic repackaging of the difficulty with searching for prey and forage during a succession of harsh seasons that some of our unluckier ancestors experienced, such as those who lived at the time of the Pleistocene Toba eruption.
To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.
It's less the employment and more the eating and shelter that the employment provides.
Life used to be even worse than this, though.
I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.
You might like Ajit Varki's 2013 book which is entirely devoted to using evolutionary biology in answering that question.
I mean, if it's so cruel, then why wouldn't you just commit suicide?
The reason why it's not cruel (IMO) is that there's hope for a better future, if you don't have kids, you will never be able to know. That's choosing to just not play the game, total darkness. There isn't an alternative universe to choose from.
> then why wouldn't you just commit suicide?
I'm trying not to upset the people around me.
Please, and I say this with love, seek psychological help. If that's the only thing from stopping you, you need to talk to someone.
Agreed, but I would say talking to someone isn't a magical fix here.
OP, I would be interested in knowing if that's the case, why are you posting here on HN, getting up in the morning, doing the things you do etc?
Are you depressed (if so) in a physiological or psychological kind of way (because of something external?)
I will say I am not doing too well, but still, if I look at things objectively right now, I'd still rather wait and see what happens in this world rather than choosing nothingness. My rock bottom is someone's heaven
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> "You’ve spent several months sending out scores of carefully tailored resumes and cover letters for jobs you know you are fully qualified for and would excel at."
People should not do this. It is causing so much suffering. In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site. It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere. It seems like many people are suffering from thousands of applications, and it makes me sad.
As other posters have said, this only really works if you have a network. Zeroth-order referrals (i.e. they call you) work best, first-order referrals (i.e. you know someone at the company) work decently well, and second-order referrals (you know someone who knows someone to refer you) are a guided shot in the dark.
People who have networks all know this. The issue is that a shocking number of people don't have any network at all. These tend to be the sorts of people who are either actively antisocial at work (the "coworkers aren't your friends" type) or job hop so frequently that they don't spend enough time at any single job to develop any meaningful professional, let alone personal connections.
And juniors. I’m in a masters program right now and everyone’s got a network, it just happens to be filled with poor starving grad students instead of FAANG super stars :)
Give it time. Networks are a garden that grow over time, and moreso if you cater to them. Some of those starving grad students will be VPs in 10 years.
That doesn't help them get a job this decade.
Unless you are a hermit, everyone has a network, even if it's small. Everyone has a few friends, a brother/sister/dad/mom/cousin, a few people in their town they know. All of those people know someone else, and that's your initial pool of job opportunities to look at.
This might not get you into your dream company. But it can get you a next job to grow from.
For one of my jobs I had no contacts in the industry so I emailed someone at the company who went to my school, mentioned we both went there, and could they meet for coffee. I then drove 2 hours to meet him. We discussed what was happening at his company, are there opportunities, and he referred me.
I job hop frequently, and have a large zeroth-order network because I did good work at each one.
When I am in a hiring role, I am not flipping through memories of good times with former coworkers that I had deep and meaningful time with -- I'm thinking back to who was the verb who got ish done and will make my project a success.
I got my dream job by applying on their website. As a hiring manager, also interviewed many people who got theirs at other companies' websites. Networking is better but website applications used to work alright. This could have changed with AI resumes.
I know this is just anecdotal but just want to say I got my current job just applying to a job from a linkedin email. I admit I was surprised how easily and smoothly it all went actually...
Referrals by hiring managers who I have previously worked with and want to hire me aren’t even getting me a phone screen from their recruiters.
The majority of employment in tech is with large, corporate firms, and unless you are in the executive tier they all have implemented a massive amount of process to prevent bias in hiring which means that even networking has low impact on getting a job, beyond letting you know the positions even exist
> It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
Just be careful contacting recruiters directly. I know of at least one F100 that will blacklist you for pestering their recruiters. If you think ai-generated resumes are overwhelming recruiters, you should see their LinkedIn inboxes.
This might work if you already have a network, but otherwise good luck getting through to people on the phone. HR will answer the generic questions, but tell you to apply online. Cold "calling" people on LinkedIn is a shot in the dark. Some people don't mind you doing it, most will ignore you.
You can start building a network by reaching out to alumni, former colleagues, open-source contributors for projects you're contributing to [1], etc.
Hardly ideal, but it's a start.
[1] And if you're not contributing to an open-source project, please do it, it's a great way to learn stuff, improve your CV, network and of course give back.
If you just graduated college or have no network, you can reach out to alumni and mention that connection. Or, you can ask personal friends/family for contacts (will probably be local companies, which may be a first step job).
Or you can reach out over social media. "Hi there, I follow you on X and am just getting started in the industry. Do you mind if I ask a few research questions?" A friend of mine just used this technique to land a role in an industry where he had no contacts.
If the situation is "good luck getting through to people on the phone", then that probably means this person is not a real friend of yours, they are a stranger, and you shouldn't try. You should be reaching out to people who actually know your name, or you have a mutual friend.
Ridiculous. So 99% people wait in line for the pizza but you waltz up to the counter and say you know the owner? That's fucked up
This isn't true and is horrible advice.
Use the paths available to you to get a job. Exhaust them all. If you know someone that works there and THEY track you down, yes this is good advice, great way to get a job.
> A form is not going to a hire you, a person is.
This is becoming less and less true.
> You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
Unless you're lucky, this is no longer going to happen. Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
No form is going to extend a job offer autonomously. At some point in the chain, there will be a boss, a person, who talks to you and thinks, "I want to work with this person", and decides to make the offer.
So the goal is to figure out how to get in touch with that hiring manager as the first step. Even if the form or HR "rejects" you, this person can step in say, "that's silly, I want to work with them. Send them through"
I think this charade of sending in resumes to forms is causing people so much pain. It feels like rejection and is not moving them closer to a job.
> No form is going to extend a job offer autonomously.
Just wait... some time-pressed startup is going to find a killer LLM prompt that filters in exactly the people they want, and then post something on the benefits of "vibe hiring". Complete with large, well-spaced text, colored with one accent color, and several graphs of hiring spending vs. income or something.
You heard it here first!
> Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
That's not a new thing. It's how it's always been.
> Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
Getting a starring role in a movie has a lot to do with abilities, not just luck and who you know.
Many companies are looking for strong mission alignment, because when it's a buyer's job market, why not select someone who has intrinsic motivation for what you are doing? Are you passionate about the problem? That is a lot like auditioning for a starring role: do you understand the character you might be playing? Many jobs - especially desirable ones - use this sort of "mission alignment" as selection criterion.
The thing that's different in software is that because the equipment needed to demonstrate technical skills is so cheap (just a computer) and trust in representations of technical experience is so low, they can test for technical skills in a way that other industries can't.
I don't think that anyone asks a civil engineer to design a bridge or a surgeon to remove an appendix to get a job.
The abilities is the threshold requirement - which many people have - the rest is luck and connections.
You need luck to have a network now?
Kinda, yeah.
My first job in the industry was in a startup that went belly down. Most of us didn't get much opportunity to network.
Thankfully, I happened to contribute to two open-source projects. One of them was a (then) obscure language called Rust and another one was Firefox. Both contributions eventually turned into career-defining moments for which I'm still reaping benefits 15 years later.
Had I contributed to Vlang and Camino instead, my career would probably have been much less satisfying.
Vlang catching strays made my day.
I've gotten several jobs this way, including the best jobs of my career. It's insufferable the way so many commenters here assume their experience is representative of or applicable to others. It's like if main character syndrome was a web site comments section.
And of course it's the people that have a different experience than you that are insufferable, not the ones that share yours, right?
That's not anywhere close to my point, it's not their stance I have any issue with. it's their mindset that their own stance is universal:
> People should not do this.
> It is causing so much suffering.
> I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site.
> A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
> I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere.
My experience is opposite to this but I'm not selling it as absolute truth or even giving it as advice at all.
Can’t even tell if this is satire. If so, good one. If not, I have no words.
Sometimes you just need to look locally. Chances are there are positions available close enough to your home that its worth the following effort. I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me. I show interest, they show interest (generally, and even if they are not hiring). This has lead to much improved chances of getting an interview over just filling an application or email through a network. People like to see and get a feel for the people they might end up hiring. Face to face puts you ahead of the pack. This technique is critically underutilized. Obviously, if your only interested in remote positions, this won't work very well. If the org is big enough, you can try to locate a nearby satellite branch or office to find a person who can tap you in.
> I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me.
This is surprising to me. Unless you last tried this long enough ago that the manager said, "I like the cut of your jib, young man, you've got grit" in a transatlantic accent.
Is this in America? I can’t imagine walking anywhere, nor being able to get past security, if indeed there is even a human manning the gates.
I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. Forget that, they even refused to maintain good relationships with decision makers (and I did this too, but only once in my carrier), left jobs in bad ways, focused on chasing salary increases every 6 months.
And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
> you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)
So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.
But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.
> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.
Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.
It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. [If you’ve been] working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.
> the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too
I agree.
But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.
The pool of young kids that can challenge the technical ability of someone with 20 years more experience is small enough that I don't mind competing with them for employment.
>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills.
Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.
>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.
A kid twenty years younger than me is in their early twenties and they would have to be some kind of Wunderkind to have spent decades learning operating systems, networking, programming languages, business and law to the degree I have.
When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.
> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.
This is straight up agism and should be banned. It's like saying black people can't code as well as white people.
Carmack and Torvalds would disagree with you.
Would you say, broadly, concepts you disagree with or find uncomfortable should be banned? Do you think that's sufficient, or should they be criminalized as well?
False information targeting a group should be banned in my opinion.
Wrong comparison, black vs white is racism, ageism is real
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Relax. Opinions aren't that big of a deal.
This isn't twitter. You don't need to demand a ban against the first bruise to your ego.
I think the benefit of the “weird path” need not be monetary but instead a way to stay afloat of the burnout and find motivation to keep going. While I agree with many things in the article, I found in my experience that these feelings are not responsive to rational arguments, and rest doesn’t help after 6+ months when recruiters’ first questions to you are “what have you been doing since your last position?” That’s why I think the “weird” route can be a good way to answer by keeping up with new projects, etc.
Throw into the mix any immigration concerns and you have a perfect cocktail for stress :)
Something seems really off about this system. At least in tech, I see a lot of open recs and hiring. Im even seeing some teams struggle to fill open recs. It should be possible to build a system that matches workers to jobs without going through this dumb and stressful process.
How do you reconcile your experience with the common narrative that there is a huge shortage of tech workers in the US and, hence, the H1B/H4 programs?
That narrative is outdated. There is clearly not a shortage right now. Any decent job on LinkedIn shows 100's of applicants within a couple of days.
Is there actually a huge shortage of tech workers in the US?
I don't think there's actually a shortage of tech workers in the US. I think there is probably a shortage of tech workers in the US that are willing to work for the wages that companies want to pay.
Experienced tech workers? Yeah.
One of the "problems" companies have is that it's hard to find skilled workers in the US with good experience who are not demanding SF wages. And recent graduates aren't that useful so while they might technically be "tech workers" in the sense they would like to fill open roles, companies don't really want them.
So for most companies if you want to hire the most experienced and qualified for the role, and do that at a reasonable cost, you'll need to consider the H1B route.
So for an (employed) developer like me, who is dreading the next job search, what's a "hot" profession I could train myself on so my experience in the job market over the next 15 years could be like it was in the salad days of 1996-2022?
(I'm making a pass at "learning AI" but don't feel 100% certain that demand for that will be sustainable at a high level over the next decade ...)
Well, I'm currently having a hard time finding a good electrician, and the ones who I have employed in the past earn pretty generous hourly rates.
(I say this half-joking, but also I know a DBA who retrained as an electrician and was happier than ever. It's the fact he retired - early - which has put me in my current predicament.)
Jobs are aggregated into gigantic boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, and the market is national or international. You can choose among thousands of companies, but you're also just one potential applicant among millions. The cost of applying tends to zero -> number of applications increases. The only way to succeed is by sending out an absurd number of CVs. Numbers that would have seemed inconceivable a generation ago before everything moved online and globalized. It's normal to send out hundreds or thousands before getting hired.
Economists look at this and see only an improvement in market efficiency, but they're ignoring the emotional toll. Reject, reject, reject, reject, drip drip drip every day like water torture. It's the same thing on dating apps. No wonder people give up.
That’s before getting into the jobs that are functionally not real, even if the employer in question believes they are honestly looking.
Seeing bog standard senior engineer positions still advertising for the places that ghosted me 5 months ago means the job posting is fake for one of the n-teen reasons companies paste fake postings or the company has gotten unreasonably picky with how much labor is on the market
I think more often people cast the widest net and then filter what comes back based on “is this better than what I have”.
I’m not sure that the process the author describes is all that common in practice even if it is eminently sensible.
This feels like the dating market right now too.
What nonsense. Does he really think his friends are sharing the full extent of their difficulties? There is an exquisite feeling of shame, guilt, fear, and anger that goes with being jobless for the first time and making zero progress with the job search. When your savings is gone, when your credit cards are maxed and in collections, when you're selling your stuff to pay for food and electricity, when you're about to be evicted (and have no idea what to do with your stuff because you can't afford storage) - and you have to keep trying. Keep a smile on your face, act confident and happy because no-one wants to hire you if you're a drag. You revise your resume, you apply to tangential jobs - but you don't get any response, no interviews and no offers. The one you do get is a disinterested indian guy at a bank who is clearly not even hiring right now.
Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started.
Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump.
There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
This is genuinely well written. Anyone know who Jeff Wofford is?
His about page: https://www.jeffwofford.com/?page_id=464
Hate to say the obvious, but it's all about supply and demand. The field I was working in 30 years ago was "hot" and the hourly wage has dropped at least 5x since then.
Sure, in the last 20 years I did "development" work which was related but more advanced (24 hours a day stuff, it's always in your head) - but once those efforts were complete, so were the jobs.
My field was laboratory science and I still take solace in the fact that 200 years ago, only the rich (or minimally subsidized) ever got a chance to to touch this stuff. But solace doesn't pay the bills.
Maybe take on volunteer work? Once you get involved, it leads to stories and sharing and new perspectives. I've done a few thousand hours over the past 15 years. It feels good. You chose to do it. You see results and have new ideas. Maybe even a new business.
This only works if you had a good job and a decent amount of savings and no family to support.
or a dual income household. My wife and I have taken turns on who has the jobs with the benefits. Maybe you're right, maybe we're an exception. But I know educated guys around here whose wives work, and stay home with the kids, run volunteer .org in their spare time.
Right that works too. But only if a single income is high enough to keep the boat afloat for a while.
Yes but the flip side, is that we lived in Indiana for a while. Very cheap living there. So, keep your expenses low, with no debt. Freedom.
Very key point.
There are no jobs. I'm being stalked and fucked with in San Francisco. Constantly. Everyone here is insane and most people are sick. Life is pointless. I'm just waking up and doing something and then going to sleep in a shelter again.
They give me sick to their kids as some sort of sick joke and wait for me to die. I had someone put fentanyl in the coffee they served at de haro church while I was lugging fifty pound bags of potatoes to give to the poor. Cool way to fuck up someone's back. Because they're insane and murderous. It's like that shit everywhere unless you have money and can hire private security or a group of you and your friends have a secret way to poison people.
I've asked construction workers if I can do shift labor for cash and they always say no. Fucking bonkers. I hurt all over more or less all of the time. There are people that have had their entire bodies melt from disease from being exposed to weaponized sick here.
There's absolutely no point in giving a shit about anything anymore. I'm just waiting to die truth be told.
No offense, but maybe they're narcan-ing you because you because you're nodding out in public?
I am not doubting you have been fucked with -- I once got into a 2v1 brawl on the Mission and 16th BART that only ended because I sent one flying into a pillar and told the other if he kept coming, he was going onto the fucking tracks.These guys kept going over to a homeless guy who was just... sitting there... trying to get a rise, hoping for an excuse to "defend" themselves. And when I told them to quit being bullies, they tried to jump me.
So trust me, I believe you, and I get that trauma can have an impact on your life.
But if you are using narcotics, it will impact your search.
If you want help getting clean, I could send some resources to the email on your profile -- on the technical side you sound like a better coder than me and if you had that part locked down I suspect you'd quickly find work.