The great displacement is already well underway? | Hacker News Reader

The great displacement is already well underway?

shawnfromportland.substack.com

517 pointsJSLegendDev500 comments

I am the author of this piece, and i didn't share it to HN, I don't hang out here. I just gotta say wow, tough crowd. i wrote this piece from an emotionally low point after another fruitless day of applying to jobs. I didn't have a particular agenda in mind. I was voicing what i've been through and some of what I was experiencing with no expectations.

you'll notice in the comments section that the population of substackistan is much less FUCKING CYNICAL AND NEGATIVE than you guys, with many commenters saying they are in the same position. I heard from writers, designers, engineers, going through similar times.

my portfolio site is https://shawnfromportland.com, you can find my resume there. if you have leads that you think I might match with you can definitely send them my way, I will even put a false last name on an updated resume for you guys.

for those who are wondering, I legally changed my name to K long ago because my dad's last name starts with K, but I didn't like identifying with his family name everywhere i went because he was not in my life and didnt contribute to shaping me. I thought hard about what other name I could choose but nothing resonated with me. I had already been using Shawn K for years before legally changing it and it was the only thing that felt right.

I thought most of these comments have actionable if not tough to hear advice.

Perhaps offering an opportunity for more humility and introspection. Instead you’re here doubling down on the victim mindset.

Wishing you the best.

i have spent the last couple days responding to hundreds of comments on the substack piece. no new pieces of advice came up on this thread which were not already covered on the substack comments. advice which i have acknowledged. i was already about to do most of the pieces of advice anyways on my own as the next step, such as applying with a normie pseudonym. you don't know me. im not a victim and i don't have victim mindset. i am survivor.

I haven’t read most of the comments here and none on substack, but looking at your resume, I’d spend some time making it look slightly warmer, throw some color in there.

I’d also consider re-working your job history, it “looks like a lot of bouncing around” which shouldn’t be a bad thing, but it can be if framed poorly.

Finally, I’d spend a few weeks with c++/java and slap it on the resume as a competency. Can’t hurt, and you’re just learning some syntax at this point.

Best of luck to you. Market is tough, and there are a lot of sw folks looking around right now.

> im not a victim and i don't have victim mindset. i am survivor.

Anyone who uses the kind "labels" to describe themselves probably wouldn't even be considered for a job where I work. It's a massive red flag to most HR departments, especially in tech. Not trying to be offensive, but this has been my experience. You will probably have more success not trying to describe yourself in terms of politically-loaded labels.

Genuine question but since when is being a "survivor" a politically loaded label? Is this an American thing?

It's not political, it's just melodramatic. Some people choose to frame their life as a story about "overcoming adversity". Most of the time the struggles they describe, while genuinely difficult, are things that most people face at some point in their life. But these people seem to expect some sort of social credit for it, as if carrying on makes them a hero.

This is an irritating habit that makes them seem whiny and self-important, but it is unfortunately widespread. Having such a "story" to tell about yourself has become almost fashionable in our modern culture.

To me it suggests that this person might be a bit overly dramatic and ready and willing to compete in the Adversity Olympics at the drop of a hat.

For me, I want to work with people who are just going to get on with their job without harping on about how they've faced this adversity or that adversity and how they're a survivor - just do your job please, I'm genuinely not interested in your personal life. kthx.

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he calls himself a survivor in response to accusations of having a 'victim mindset,' but not during SWE interviews...

Try not to hold it against people for not also having read hundreds of comments. Most people are going to respond to the just the article, which is going to result in duplicate advice, and that's fine. If you've already taken action for all the advice you consider actionable, great! That doesn't change how much of the advice is actionable in the context of the article though.

Hey, sometimes people don't want advice. Sometimes they just want to kvetch.

Secondary: sometimes they've already been offered this advice.

I'm with you that there's a "rubber meets the road" place where you have to put in the work. But there should also be a place where we can offer sympathy and solutions, instead of only focusing on solutions.

I love this comment. Comments like this are one of the main reasons I love this site.

You are the kind of person I want to work with and who I’d like to have as a friend.

Thank you for sharing.

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!”

> I will even put a false last name on an updated resume for you guys.

You’re doing no one a favor except yourself. What I mostly saw was constructive criticism and some comments about trying something different.

I am heeding and already doing all of the advice that has come up here and on the original thread, with the exception of 'move to where there are in-office jobs and try to get an in-office job' because that's not really feasible at this time

I hope you make it. I believe there is some good advice in this thread.

As I mentioned in my previous comment on this post, my overall sense is that HN commenters often struggle with fear. It's a scary time to be a professional in this industry, and to be a human on Earth more generally. Sometimes, one of the ways people here try to manage their fear is through skepticism of, and/or hostility toward, accounts where someone has suffered through no fault of their own, which I believe is your case.

Without anger or judgment, I think our industry's culture has room to grow.

I wonder what happens now to workers, who never really thought of themselves as workers, discover themselves as such. 'Individual Contributor' just means _worker_. It's like calling the barista a Customer Happiness Officer.

When we remember how to be on each other's side, this will change; but for now, I'm afraid, we self-perceive, as Cory Doctorow put it, as 'temporarily embarrassed founders'. And we act accordingly.

Thank you for writing this, and for your previous comment too.

You are the rare type of HN user I look for whenever I read the comments, which is not very often these days.

Seconded. Thanks for writing that!

+1 My airplane convo with CD really reinforced what a visionary and near-future-predictor Cory is. Great person, and he sees through the usual social norms we've established to excuse these behaviors. Totally agree with your point people act accordingly, even to their own detriment.

While there are scepticism and hostility as a result of fear, I think HN is often so focused on trying to understand the world that it neglects to consider the people. I read most of the scepticism as being more about reconciling two conflicting bits of information. It's an impulse towards risk management, not fear management.

I've been helping a friend interview, as well as casually keeping an eye out for a new job myself, and we've noticed that the market is down, but we're still employed, still seeing messages from LinkedIn recruiters and positions on job boards, and my friend is still getting interviews. I got this job a year ago, got an interview for every position I applied to, and this was the top of my list. Meanwhile, Shawn K has applied to nearly a thousand jobs and is driving for DoorDash. What's different? Have things changed in the last 12 months? Are my friend and I also going to be in trouble? How do our resumes differ? What lessons can I learn? Am I safe?

The unfortunate reality of seeing a car crash is that the first thing we do is slow down our speed, tighten up our driving, search for hazards on the road ahead, and look to our own safety. Only after all that do we think "I hope they're okay".

I'm glad that's your experience -- as it happens, it's not my own; I am glad your luck has held. But my own more closely resembles that of the OP.

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.

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.

> the population of substackistan is much less FUCKING CYNICAL AND NEGATIVE than you guys,

I took some time to offer some resume review tips here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43978225

This is a really difficult topic to address because it appears you're interesting in venting and commiseration, but it's mixed with pleas for job placement and opportunities. If you want some honest advice:

- Your resume still needs a lot of work. See my other comment with more details. After reading your Substack I see why you're keyword stuffing words like "Vibecoding" as your #1 skill, but I don't think you realize how much this is hurting you.

- I've read your resume and I clicked the link to go to your website. I still don't really understand what you specialize in or what kind of job you're trying to get. In a market like this one, you need to have a resume that tells a story of why you're a great fit for the job, not someone who has a couple years of experience 10 different times at 10 different things. There's a lot of vague claims about "award-winning state-of-the-art web experiences" but then you have everything from AI and Vibecoding to VR apps to teaching classes on your resume. Broad experience can be good, but I think you need to start writing different resumes tailored to different jobs because I can't make heads or tails of your career goals from the way it's all presented.

- I'd separate the Substack from your resume, personal website, and job search as much as possible. To be blunt, the tone is alarmingly cynical in ways that any hiring manager would want to keep away from their team. Phrases like "Generally, it’s the fresh-faced bay area 25 year old with a Steve Jobs complex" ooze a sort of anger with the world that people just do not want to bring into their company. Blaming everything on AI and "the great displacement" falls very flat for anyone who has just read your resume and seen "Vibecoding" as your top skill while trying to figure out what, exactly, you did at your past jobs.

- Consider sprucing up your portfolio a bit. It's a little jarring to read a resume about "award winning state of the art web experiences" and then encounter some centered yellow text on a black background in a quirky font that slowly fades into view. I would also recommend that you include screenshots of your specific work on each site and a short description of what you did for each. Random links and screenshots aren't helpful. Hiring managers aren't going to watch YouTube videos at this point of scanning your resume, either. Try to view your website like a hiring manager who wants to know what they're getting into. Seeing "21 years of experience" and then having the first large link on your website being a link to University of Oregon because that's where you got your degree doesn't make sense.

- To be more blunt: There are some major red flags that you need to clean up. Your portfolio links to the live nike.com/running website, but your resume says you last worked on a Nike website over a decade ago. This is the kind of thing I expect to see from fake applicants, not a real person. I would go so far as to suggest leaving your portfolio off of your resume until it can be cleaned up and modernized with specific information about your work. Use a template if you have to, but the site clashes with your headline claim of being an award winning web developer.

- Finally: Try to create a cohesive narrative in your resume and application process. If you're applying for full-stack web-dev jobs, your resume should show a career trajectory of starting with small websites and working up to more and more complex projects. Right now the top job entry lists "tens of thousands of MRR" as an achievement but a decade ago you were working on Nike.com. You need to find a way to tell the opposite story, that you've been working your way up. Unfortunately the substack article makes this even worse with talk of being a Doordasher now. It's okay to vent on Substack, but don't cross the streams with your application process.

thank you for taking the time. If i was petty i could share the past 5 versions of my website and resume i created in the last year which precisely followed most of what you recommended here. I had a completely vanilla narrative resume by version 3, and was getting nowhere. analytics and my own vibe check was making me think that all of that was too verbose and it wasn't being read. I was feeling unseen and began retargeting things to create an impression in 2 seconds, enough to hopefully hook someone to want to talk to me to learn more. the latest strategy was to try to emphasize within 2 seconds the point that im all about ai coding, while having a conventional cs/agency background at the same time.

Because you have taken the time to review this stuff and make these same recommendations that everyone else has here, i am going to refactor the site and resume yet again according to these recommendations.

I would love it if my career arc had one through-line narrative that made sense, but I'm afraid it doesnt necessarily. I started as a data architect and backend developer for the first many years, never touching front-end. I had to expand to tackle front-end to meet the changing market demands. in later years, the distinction of what were primarily front end vs back end tasks or roles has become a lot more fuzzy, as things have turned into "all-js-all-ts-everything-everywhere!" I've adapted, and been working full stack ts roles.

I often feel my data architecture / problem-solving skills are overlooked when my last few roles show that i've been developing with a vue ecosystem, pigeonholing me as a front-end dev, something i have never identified with.

It might be good to expand on your data architecture work more in your CV. Write a paragraph about the data architecture work you did at your last company. You could remove some of the older jobs to free up space.

@Auronis here are the updates I have in progress. this is bringing it back to something closer to what i had a few versions ago. any feedback? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_sxoyHpYjahnagfRhOlWsLEo...

Not PP, but I'd remove year counts. They can do the math if they need to. The main question for the hiring manager should be: can you do the work?

I would probably rephrase your professional summary to focus on you (e.g. Full Stack Engineer specializing in..., Engineering Team Leader for ..., ), and perhaps active verb phrases describing your most significant activities and accomplishments.

I'd move education/degree to the bottom. Recent achievements, experience and skills are more important.

Experience section should provide evidence to support your claims when possible.

Also I haven't looked at your linkedin page but it should be comparable. Best of luck!!

This is good! Good luck!

This is the best advise here. OP, I'm sure that life is hitting you hard, but there's some valid criticisms. When we're in angst it subconsciously gets into everything we write, including resumes.

You need to sober up. Tailor your resume to each application, Cut excesses. Write simpler and make sure your experience covers what the position asks.

Also, consider talking to friends or doing therapy. Opening up with someone you trust helps a lot. Avoid doomscrolling. Things can look bad right now, but they can get better. Good luck.

Regardless of what people have said here my advice is simple:

You’ve been fishing for a job. You need to hunt for one.

And I’ll expand on this:

Fishing is sending out applications all over the place. This is casting your reel. Changing your CV over and over is changing your bait. Reaching out to your network without a specific request to recommend you for a specific job is fishing.

Work backwards a bit. Find a job at a company you want. Look up the recruiters and hiring managers. Send them a note. Look up people in your network, or people connected to your network, and ask them to recommend you for the specific role. Companies incentivize this. They’ll want spend 2 minutes to possibly win a few thousand dollars by getting you in. Incentives align.

Lastly there’s a lot of independent head hunters out there. Hire them like you’d a trail guide.

Great posts and helpful. It's about specialization. It always is. And a focused resume and communication that brings forward the skillset or personality that particular employer is likely to need.

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.

I read the post knowing it would likely remind me about all the times I read the handwriting on the wall and decided it was a message for someone else.

I hope you find a good place to land. I know it has been a while for you but you are still motivated and focused on the right outcomes. You will find a niche, maybe not the one you expected but you will drop into a groove and realize that things are looking up for you and your Mom.

I understand the whole home ownership angle where you could liquidate an asset but would have to absorb a loss in the process since the place needs some work and you can't afford to do it yet. Hang on to the houses, all of them. They can be your landing zone or safe spot.

We have a home that we have leased out for around 30 years. It has always been the best in the neighborhood because I did the work of maintaining and upgrading it myself, along with my wife and part of my family. I would sell it now but it needs siding and the bids for that are way out of my price range so that is one of the next DIY projects for me. I just need to get a tenant into it ASAP and that will allow me to make it happen. The materials to do it cost under $10k but like your property, we have had years where we made money on the house and years where we barely covered or lost money due to maintenance items or other ownership costs.

Leverage any opportunity to work with local contractors swinging a hammer bending nails or using a saw to shorten boards. That can be a path to obtaining scrap materials or unusable items that would go to a dumpster. Contractors have to pay disposal fees so anything that allows them to reduce the size of the load saves them money when the job is done. Warped or curled dimensional lumber can be straightened at home. Half sheets of plywood or siding nail up as tightly as full sheets. There is a place for all that if you examine your needs and keep an eye out for things that can be made to work.

My grandfather built a business as a home-builder by first building a home for himself and my grandmother to move into as soon as they married. He got the materials by asking around with locals who were working on their own places and inquiring about whether he could have the scraps and cutoffs. He ended up needing to buy nails and a few other small items but he built a house with materials that cost him the labor to clean up building sites. Once he finished the house a local man who had been watching the process offered to buy it from him. He sold that house and took the money and built a new house with new materials and moved in with my grandmother to a much larger, much nicer place than they would've had. Others who knew him and watched the process approached him about building things for them and in no time he was building houses, church buildings, sheds, etc all over the region. He built custom homes until he passed away about 60-65 years later.

Since it appears you may be up around Syracuse, Ft. Drum is right down the road. One of my brothers got the money to start his own business by driving for Pizza Hut. If you can get established as the pizza guy on a base like that you're on your way up. Soldiers tip well. Pizza is a huge seller. You do need a base pass but I think the pizza outfit sets you up. He would always bake the order and then bake several extra pizzas and carry it all onto base. By the time he had dropped off the pizza that had actually been ordered he had a line of soldiers hoping to get one of the extras. Pizza is great food option. Many of those guys became regular customers. He made great tips and sold lots of pizzas that otherwise wouldn't have been ordered. After a couple years of pie-hawking during which he was also mowing yards and trimming trees with a friend who had a local tree service, he took money he had earned and bought himself a new mower and chainsaw. That was 10 years ago now and he grossed $300k last year with one employee doing nothing but tree service. He has a bro-dozer truck with large dump trailer to handle the wood and debris and he rents other equipment as he needs it.

Pressure washing can be a real winner too. That's one thing my brother has mentioned branching into. Staining fences and decks. Cleaning gutters. Washing windows. Caulking siding and painting.

There are lots of services that people need that don't take much investment. Door hang flyers with contact info and let people know you are available. Visit a t-shirt printer or embroidery place and have them make a few shirts with a reasonably memorable logo or slogan and your name and contact info. Wear them to the grocery store and home improvement store and let people call you.

I have several gardens I built to help manage food costs. It is unbelievably easy and satisfying to be able to open my door and select a few herbs from my pizza garden while my pizza stone warms up. We have a wide selection of all the things we enjoy eating and some we want to try. Fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs, berries. So many things are easy to grow. That can help you manage your food costs and improve the quality of your food at the same time.

Good luck to you. I don't think you need it though. Your heart is in the right place. All the other things will fall in line behind it.

thank you, i appreciate it

Not to be rude, but unless your portfolio site is nothing short of spectacular you shouldn't include one. In all likelihood, its doing you more harm than good.

Keep your head up. These are interesting times. Things will get back to normal at some point.

Comments on your resume:

1. First line is "Using Cursor, Claude 3.7, and OpenAI every day". You can't win with this. You don't take weekends off? Red flag. You do take weekends off? Then the first line of your resume is a lie and I wonder what else isn't honest.

2. #1 skill is Vibecoding? Red flag. Your resume would look better without the left column of skills. None of your experience backs up those skills.

3. The experiences listed are all 1-2 years, with the longest one being your self-employed one. Why are they all so short?

> The experiences listed are all 1-2 years [...] Why are they all so short?

Presumably because employers don't want to pay more unless it's for a new hire.

Yes, please ignore the cynical and negative folks. They are not doing you any good.

Like what a few other folks in this thread pointed out, your resume and your portfolio looks outdated and fragmented on my first glance. Most recruiters and hiring managers spend 5 seconds max during the first pass, so first impressions matter.

Here are the things you can do to bring your resume up-to-date: * "Key achievements" does not include numbers to describe impact. For example, "pre-screen and match thousands of patients a day" could be rewritten as "pre-screen n patients per day and match them to m healthcare provider with 99.99% uptime" sounds impactful. * Self-rating of your skills is not necessary. Nowadays your description of your impact is implicit on how you learn and work. In addition, "expert" for one person may not be the same for others.

On your portfolio: * Listing your education is no longer necessary after the first job. Putting this in your portfolio site makes you look inexperienced. (Leave education in the resume, however.) * The screenshots for Nike and LG look outdated, which contradicts "cutting-edge internet experiences".

Putting his education on his portfolio is not why 900 companies didn't hire him.

It's not because AI automated his job either.

> Like what a few other folks in this thread pointed out, your resume and your portfolio looks outdated and fragmented on my first glance. Most recruiters and hiring managers spend 5 seconds max during the first pass, so first impressions matter.

From the blog post, it seems the author already received that feedback multiple times, but somehow failed to act upon it.

It is also baffling how, after receiving feedback to showcase his skills in places like substack and YouTube, the blogger somehow opted to post self-comisorating content and even lambast anyone who ever interviewed him for the audacity if picking someone else.

The blogger's knee jerk reaction of attacking anyone expressing anything but support as being "cynical" and "negative" also conveys the idea of someone being unable to receive feedback and even handle feedback well without lashing back. Handling feedback is a fundamental skill to work in a team environment. Attacking those who give it with ad-hominems such as "fresh-faced bay area 25 year old with a Steve Jobs complex" screams out toxic personality.

And those are the good aspects the blogger cherry-picked expecting to portray himself as the victim. God knows what's the actual impression their peers got from him.

> such as "fresh-faced bay area 25 year old with a Steve Jobs complex" screams out toxic personality.

Well... that may as well be a very clinical observation; I've lost count of how many I've met in interviewing rounds, on either side of the table or in my own teams. It wouldn't surprise me a lot of tech people go through such a phase, at some (hopefully as shortest as possible) point of their early career. I probably have.

It reveals a mediocre mindset and likely self undermining too… since most of those types are in fact smarter than the ~80th-90th percentile.

So it would have even worse implications for anyone complaining against them, who isn’t clearly way beyond that threshold.

> It reveals a mediocre mindset and likely self undermining too

It could.

> since most of those types are in fact smarter than the ~80th-90th percentile.

But you’re skipping the very issue of this mindset. Being smarter along a very specific scale of evaluation doesn’t make one de facto « smarter » in general, neither properly adjusted to work and collaborate in an organisation.

Denouncing arrogance might not be the best move in some context, but it is not a show of weakness.

How would this matter to a random passing reader?

They’re not going to assume the author is any more virtuous/wise/etc… than the complained against, without some compelling evidence.

Why should people refrain from stating what they see? It's his blog, why should he refrain to express himself? Why should you decide in his stead, what does matter or not to him to express?

A minor signal is still a signal, that may, or may not, accrue to other converging ones.

How does this relate to my prior two comments?

I don’t see the connection to how any random group of HN readers perceive this or that.

And that’s the problem.Lot of people are not in the top 10% of intelligence spectrum but they do need to make at least 130-150k per yer to survive in USA and the only skill they have is related to computers.

Huh? median salary is much much less than that.

You mean “survive” in their desired neighborhoods?

> Here are the things you can do to bring your resume up-to-date: * "Key achievements" does not include numbers to describe impact. For example, "pre-screen and match thousands of patients a day" could be rewritten as "pre-screen n patients per day and match them to m healthcare provider with 99.99% uptime" sounds impactful. * Self-rating of your skills is not necessary. Nowadays your description of your impact is implicit on how you learn and work. In addition, "expert" for one person may not be the same for others.

I've seen this a lot online, but as someone who struggled to add this sort of data to my CV before, where exactly are people getting these stats?

Every company I've worked for either didn't know how changes affected things like uptime or conversion rate or page views or didn't share the information with the engineering team.

Do most people just make up these stats? Guess and hope it's somewhat correct? Work for companies that just happen to tell their engineering teams everything about the impact of their work? Actually go out and measure it themselves somehow, like throgh Google Analytics?

Just feels like it may be difficult for the author to show this sort of data, since they may not have access to it at all.

In the cases of uptime and conversion rate, might you only implement the change after looking at the desired metrics and verifying that they've improved?

re GP comment: it's more about the tone -- one should seem confident and well-acquainted with what they choose to show -- than the actual numbers. If you told me that you improved conversion rates by 2%, or 20%, I would barely know the difference, but I would see both of those very differently than just "improved conversion rates". If you don't have numbers, I would try to be specific in some other area instead (e.g. technologies used, names of big clients). Similarly, phrases like "had creative input across the full stack" might give me pause -- what does that mean? It implies a low amount of impact; why not say something more attractive, like "contributed and assisted others across the full stack"?

> where exactly are people getting these stats?

You can basically make them up - just make up something plausible for your field. It's not like everybody else isn't rounding up anyway.

Most are making up these stats. Don't say 100% improvement, though, unless you can back it up but 30% with a process improvement should be easy to justify in an interview. The point here is to make your resume "skimmable" since no one reads text anymore.

The product management team, or whoever was pushing for the project in the first place, should have this data, and will often be very happy to share. They might not themselves know 100%, but they should have some estimate of benefits. It's not always widely shared, but you could certainly ask.

The modern CV art is purely about how confident and fluent you are in answering anything on it. The actual roles and projects may be anything; you just base it as a biopic adaptation based on your life.

This is difficult for those of us with moral compasses... an obsolete form of navigation I suppose.

same here, i've never had any stats or measurements about any of the features i've built.

Then how can you know if building the feature made any sense?

Engineers don't usually get to decide which features to build.

Someone needs to have data to validate a feature has value. Otherwise the company is just operating on the GIGO principle.

I’ll admit, companies like that do exist and somehow survive!

I should think the vast majority of companies operate without data on the value added by specific product features. The cases where you can assign a dollar value to a specific feature are the exceptions, not the rule.

It's not necessarily a case of GIGO, either. Take VSCode, for example. Tons of useful features. How many of them can be linked directly to increases in Microsoft's revenue?

One would hope that the VSCode devs are trying to build a good text editor according to their own taste and intuition (while also listening to outside feedback). It would be a complete waste of time to try to 'validate' every feature added.

the business users asked for it, ergo it makes sense ipso facto

Do not put in the key metrics unless you can stand behind them.

Most AI resume review services tell people to do this and it's the first thing I ask about. When the people can't explain how they are measured it's an instant no.

1000 times this! When I see a number in a resume, I don't care if the number is big or small, I care why they picked this number over any other. If they can give me a coherent explanation, that moves them highly up in my rankings. If it's clear they're bullshitting (and you really can't bullshit as well as you think you can), it's an instant no despite anything else they might have.

Agree! The metric, even if it's an intelligent guess, justify why you did such tasks. It helps to bring a coherent story about your professional work. The tasks are not for vanity.

100% this. I interview a lot of people for "performance engineering" roles, and ~50-80% of performance engineering is measurement. If you have a number on your resume, how you measured that number is often a lot more interesting to me than how you achieved that result. A lot of people have bad answers.

I also always ask how it was measured and if they published that anywhere. It's also informative to ask how it compares to other similar projects at similar companies and how (when applicable) it compares to state of the art in academia.

Company size matters of course but it is nice to see how a decision got made and how the results compared to expectations. Was this done thoughtfully and rigorously? If it's just made up that comes through really really quickly as well.

My advice for all getting hired is to try to skip the recruiting pipeline. Yes it's hard and there is no silver bullet but the standard pipeline is a brutal gauntlet to go through and I'd rather spend the time building rapport with a hiring manager or future peer instead.

The informal job market is very good to use. I got one internship through the cold-call process, but haven't been successful sending out resumes otherwise. Every job since then was a referral - all still involved interviews, but a referral is a nice way to bypass the resume shredder.

Ironically, every company I have worked for has said they get much better candidates/employees through referrals, too. Yet another sign that the "resume and a firm handshake" idea is broken.

> "Key achievements" does not include numbers to describe impact.

And that's perfectly fine too.

Don't make up numbers just to satisfy the quantitative-obsessed people/recruiters, who won't make satisfying customers/bosses anyway.

Not only does it make no sense to make up numbers, but straight numbers are definitely suspect, depending on how they are put forward.

Both quanti and quali are important, and in some jobs, even engineering ones (especially in the glue/soft/transverse positions) quali is much more relevant than quanti.

If you have precise numbers, and it matches the discourse you want to put through, go ahead. If you don't, if your strength is not in this particular corner, there is no requirement to bend yourself into a box that does not fit.

>you'll notice in the comments section that the population of substackistan is much less FUCKING CYNICAL AND NEGATIVE than you guys

I still visit the site daily and comment often enough because it really can be interesting as hell right along with many of the comments..

But yeah, the common trend here is to have more than a few grossly humorless, pedantic, self-absorbed, bubble-dwelling, neckbeards shit all over anything they don't find precisely honed to their self-absorbed preferences and fetishes.

And don't even get me started on the blatantly idiotic system of letting any random asshole flag a post they don't like for whatever childish or ideological reason of their own, or perhaps worse in a more insidious way: the downvoting thing, and how it slowly erases often perfectly decent differences of opinion.

Rant over, thanks for reading.

Also, liked your piece, and sincerely wish you luck.

Shawn from PDX, I'm also from Portland. I'm also unemployed. Let's be friends. Come to the next Rust meetup and hang out.

thanks for the invite! i had to leave portland in 2020 due to the cost of housing and the humanitarian disaster of homelessness. I'm in New York state now which is also not great for other reasons. I hope Portland can improve things for itself.

It has gotten better over the years with much more progress to be gained.

Is the rust meetup PDXRust or is there a different group? I have considered trying to create a professional network for awhile but haven't taken the plunge.

PDX Rust, yes.

Not an American, or SE, or homeowner - I can't relate nuch. But just at a human level - good luck. It sounds like you're in a tough spot, and kudos for looking after your mother despite all that.

Fingers crossed for you, good luck finding a way out and up - I'm surely you'll make it.

I'm not going to sugarcoat any of this.

Look at other developer resumes to get an idea of how people are designing their resume. Also view your resume from the viewpoint of the hiring company.

Since you graduated from UofOregon, have you contacted their alumni dept to see if they have any help to get alumni hired? Maybe other UofOregon alumni are hiring?

You have to imagine your resume as a brochure for you as a [insert desired job].

Comments based on Shawn_K_Resume_2025-7.

Github link - one pinned public repo - (4 public repos, 1 of which is AI-generated, so really only 3 public repos by you). Your activity dropped off substantially after 2024 March, only contributions to private repos since 2025 March.

If you put something on your resume, you're calling attention to it. What do you think your GitHub account tells prospective employers? Does that match what you want employers to perceive?

Goals section - remove it from your resume. You want a job - that's why you're applying for the job opening. The company is looking for a person with a certain set of skills (probably not Liam Neeson). Your goals can limit how the company perceives you.

Skills section. I'd say group the skills in appropriate sections - list frontend skills, then backend skills, then soft/personal skills.

You list Laravel framework as a skill, but not PHP? You list Vue and Vuetify. No React experience? see where the market is heading - https://gist.github.com/tkrotoff/b1caa4c3a185629299ec234d231...

"SQL & NoSQL". What particular SQL/NoSQL DB's have you used? Postgres? MySQL? sqlite? MongoDB?

In the comments to your post, you've stated that you've learned "30 or whatever" programming languages, but HR people/recruiters have to go through hundreds of resumes, so unless you've ticked all/most required checkmarks, you won't make it past the first cull. Decide on which languages/frameworks to learn and take a few weeks to learn/experience them.

You should list the tech that you used with each project so employers have an idea of the stack you're familiar with compared to their own stack.

Under first listed experience, "Lead Full Stack Engineer - framevr.io":

"Built and maintained maintained GCP infrastructure..."

It seems like you've repeated the word "maintained" again, unless you're trying to say that you "Built and maintained maintained-GCP infrastructure", in which case, the second maintained is redundant.

"Had creative input across the full stack." That sounds weird. How about "Co-designed full stack for project"?

For the second listed experience, "Sr. Full Stack Engineer - CIS.us":

you list "verizon, ATT, Tmobile". Those aren't the actual names that those companies use, "Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile". Is it Cisco and separately Meraki? A web search shows Meraki refer to themselves as Cisco Meraki, https://meraki.cisco.com/ .

Third experience, "Sr. Full Stack Engineer - shawnfromportland.com":

"... and match thousands of patients a day..." should be "... and match thousands of patients each day..." or "...per day..."

Fourth experience, "Web Dev Instructor - Thinkful.com"

"Taught about a dozen students JavaScript and web development fundamentals, one-on-one."

'about a dozen' is vague.

"Taught students JavaScript and web development fundamentals in one-on-one sessions."

Fifth experience, "Web Dev Instructor - Thinkful.com"

"Represented the backend voice of my agency in-person at Nike world HQ meetings."

What? You went to meetings? That's an accomplishment? If yes, explain why it's an accomplishment. I've never heard of attending a meeting for my team as "Represented the XXX voice..."

Hope some of this helps.

I liked it, it's refreshing to read a developer blog post that was written by a human living an actual life. I remember being unemployed, I joined the work force later than most. Life outside the tech bubble is difficult and discouraging in the US. It will be ok; you'll find the next thing to do. All the best to you

On the website: Why is 'year' alone on a line in the opening sentence? Personally I'd give an indication there's more to scroll down towards when showing the copernicus image. I like to imagine every HR lady to basically be my grandma.

I believe the IT market is very tough now. I was looking for last 3 months or so, until I contacted an old employer and he told me I could work with them.

Another ex-colleague of mine contacted me as well who's been freelancing for many years now and he asked me how I did find work, since emigrated to another country and he's also about to emigrate. Told him the market seems tough right now and he agreed. He will also be contacting some old companies / employers in hope of finding something new.

I am not sure AI is the cause - perhaps it's just cyclical. However, also reading Microsoft / Google laying of thousands of people, it just means many more people competing for the same jobs (and I'm sure ex-Microsoft / ex-Google devs will have an easier time finding new jobs than devs working for small companies).

I also find it funny, I got many messages from companies (through LinkedIn) that look for developers to train their AI models - it seems like a decent way to make some money on the side while looking for jobs. However, it seems all these companies end up at the same website and this website, for whatever reason, doesn't allow me to go through the registration process - the process seems bugged. But the support department doesn't seem to respond to email either. Makes me wonder who does the development and support there ...

Makes me wonder who does the development and support there ...

an AI obviously ;-)

Is the company DataAnnotation? I ask because the feeling I get from comments on the Internet is that they are not a real company - they might just be collecting people's contact information for their own reasons. Just my opinion.

As someone who recently went through similar experiences and ended up moving out of the US to get employed again - AI isn’t really the cause (as in AI making people redundant), it’s an excuse, and a different kind of cause - increasing confusion, fear, and automating the BS causing confusion and fear. It’s allowing weaponized FUD at a scale previously unimaginable.

The real cause is changes to numerous structural factors in short succession (widespread sudden allowance of remote work, changes in interest rates, changes in taxation methods, etc.) finally breaking the nearly uninterrupted 20 year up-and-to-right software Eng compensation boom. And once that ‘up and to the right’ line starts to look like it might down ‘down and to the right’? Everyone starts doing the math and the oh shits start.

It was similar-but-different in ‘01 as part of the dot-com crash, including referral only hires, some metro areas (including Seattle) being mostly dead for hiring, employers requiring absurd qualifications and then not hiring anyway, etc.

It’s a brutal mess, and anyone who already has some emotional damage? Doubly so.

Eventually, like ‘01, the smoke will clear and an entirely different landscape will emerge. Some people will have been lucky and have not experienced any issues at all, others will have been dragged through hell.

Who is in what group will have had little to do with skill set or qualifications, though everyone will have their own story spinning it one way or the other.

Overall, the industry will be much smaller. Some people will have kept (or made) fortunes, many will have lost the ones they had.

Remembering the dot-com crash of '01, when the tech jobs aint there, they simply aint there, and no amount of c.v / resume polishing will change that. No-one should take this personally. At times like that its maybe best to do something else to earn a living. 2001-3 I did a couple of ski seasons in a hotel, unrelated to tech. In early 2004 got a not-fantastically-paid-but-using-good-skills job with a startup, then mid-2005 a new job with a return to "proper rewards that recognised my skills". So, sometimes that market is down, and you gotta be flexible. People worry about forgetting all their skills. That didn't really happen to me, but I mucked about with Linux on the side, and that was useful for getting the next job. Not sure what today's equivalent is. AI muddies the waters here. Of course, when you have a family, being without tech compensation can be a problem. My answer to that is, its essential when entering the tech industry, to recognise it as a "feast-and-famine" / "manic-depressive" industry. One day it pays big bucks. Next day no jobs. So, manage expenses and financial commitment accordingly and put something aside.

Yup. The challenge I think a lot of people are having is that ‘01 was 24 years ago, so for a sizable percentage of the industry (80-90%?) it’s outside of their living memory. Certainly outside of their professional experience.

It’s a harsh change from the prior ‘always get a raise when you change jobs, barely have to interview, change jobs every year’ type bubble that has been expanding for a very long time.

yeah for me it's a capital starvation issue, 5 years ago I got millions to fund a vague idea and would hire left and right for the price you'd give, didn't matter. Now I'm building a sustainable business with the little funding available and growth and success is severly limited by the lack of capital, 150k/year would be almost half our entire company salaries. I won't mind increasing salaries for everyone including myself as we grow and become profitable, but right now that would just be suicide. Appart from big corps that are just increasing profit margins and dividends, I wouldn't be surprised if lots of small businesses are in a similar situation where they would love to hire seniors but the pool that was dumped by big businesses is just too expensive for them. Would be interesting to see the job market as a stock market I'm pretty sure atm lots of these 150k/year profiles would now be 75k/year max since the big corps dumped their stock. Smaller businesses don't have that kind of capital since VC dried up.

Thank you to be brave enough to write this blog post after another hard day. In the last six months, many people have posted here about their similar experiences.

    > population of substackistan

I love this term and will be using it again in the future!

the design looks a bit old fashioned, and then the first few projects look like they might be a bit old fashioned, the design later on after you have scrolled looks more modern and what people are used to, so I worry a recruiter first opening up and scrolling might think you have less skills than you evidently do, and then they don't scroll any farther.

this site is filled with hypercaffeinated steve jobs wannabes, so of course they're gonna blame the victim. if you're not a future billionaire like them, then it's your fault for not hustling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U).

don't sweat the cynics, bro. this AI shit is gonna come for them too. they won't be so smug after having their soul repeatedly annihilated by the job market.

i don't have anything to offer except "hang in there" and "don't let the bastards win". you're in a rut, but don't give in to despair. our brains are efficient irrationality machines, so it's gonna feel hopeless. the first battle you have to win is with our human tendency towards irrational doom and gloom. once you conquer that, you'll be unstoppable. i'll be rooting for you, bud!

Not sure if it was mentioned, but times like it is good to have relationships with real human recruiters. The best play long game and give you feedback and just do networking.

Out of curiosity, why didn't you update your name on Linkedin, especially that the banner just above advertizes K.

Having worked with various computer services, choosing a single letter name is a bold move :)

The plural of anecdote is not data, but your personal experience definitely aligns with the "vibes."

AI will remove the need for a lot of tech worker cycles. Period. The idea that "some new work" will just show up to fill the void seems ludicrous on the face of it.

There will never be a need for "junior developer" type work, and "senior developer" types will be able to LLMs to generate working software that they can audit / maintain.

There's no new untapped market for "tech labor" that can plausibly emerge. Companies see this future, even if it's not here yet. Even if they aren't doing layoffs yet, they are downsizing through attrition, assuming the robots will replace the lost labor.

I've been in this field for 25 years. I consider myself pretty good at what I do. Although I can ask the robots to do more and more of my job for me to try and stay employed, I know I'll find little joy in that. I'm just hoping I can make it to retirement, or my spouse can support me.

As a society it's not fair to put people in this position where all their expertise and craft becomes worthless, but that is how capitalism works.

The Luddites knew it. Now it is our turn.

You're speaking with great confidence. In the medium-long term I agree, but my lived experience says you're wrong in the here and now -- we, for example, are still hiring juniors.

You're right, I'm thinking about the future. We're still in the window where the tools aren't really ready.

If you need to get shit done right now you have to mostly do things the old way with similar headcount. I assert though that on the margins the market is already shrinking - if for no other reason than employers with longer time horizons are looking to target future employment levels.

I am sorry that you're going through this. For what it's worth (not much, I'm afraid), I feel your pain. The difference for me, was that I had saved enough to be able to walk away from the rat race.

It's highly likely that some self-reflection could help, here. I have found it to be useful, but also extremely difficult and humbling (and very much worth it).

It sounds like the main issue, is getting past the "gatekeepers," whether AI, or the classic Clueless HR Droid. As far as your résumé goes, there's no difference.

So the obvious answer, is to figure out how to craft your CV to get past them. This was never something that I mastered, myself. I probably could have done better, if I had put the effort into it. In my case, I often got at least phone screenings. It was after that, that the wheels came off.

Upstate NY is pretty moribund. It is the ruins of an old manufacturing economy. Cheap housing, but there's a reason for that cheap. It sounds like any job would be remote, unless you got something in Albany or Rochester (the only two places up there that really use tech).

I would gently suggest that part of that "self-reflection," is to avoid public online polemics. They are probably not gonna help.

Sincerely, good luck.

Don’t let these morons get to you, ignore the noise from this nest of squawking seagulls, making a racket and shitting all over everything when something isn’t shiny enough to appeal to their Very Smart (tm) interests. They only know criticism and a kind word is foreign to most here it seems.

I know it’s hard right now, and I don’t have much advice other than keep trying to get what you want. Persistence is vastly under appreciated and most give up right before they strike it. Keep on!

Sorry you are going through this, both the situation and the responses you are getting from the 'tough crowd' folks.

I'm lucky enough to not be in a similar situation currently (I have a software development job that I enjoy) but I have a feeling that the majority of people who are dismissing your experience out of hand are probably also among the lucky ones who haven't yet been forced to confront a new reality formed over the past 1-2 years and are suffering from similar delusions as people who think their health insurance in the US is fine (because they haven't had to actually use it for something expensive and become a cost center for their insurer).

I've had a long and varied career in software development and the early 2000s dot-com crash (and the subsequent near-global-hiring-freeze that took place in the US tech sector) is the last time I've ever had even a temporary worry about being able to find a new job easily. While I haven't yet experienced it directly this time it feels like we're currently in a similar environment, except its a lot less clear that this one cycles out in the foreseeable future, if ever.

Well, its not really a hackernews- more a bruteforcenews now.. just grind or be ground down. The solutions of the past must apply to the present and if not -more pressure, more of the same.

There really is a few comments here with great suggestions for how to improve your resume and online presence. It seems like some of it can still be tried, or if you feel it was already tried but got rolled back, then they can be tried again altogether.

Unfortunately, there's also a lot of noise here too... As a start, I'd say these few comments have solid, specific, actionable suggestions:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43978225

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43978405

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43981072

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43983905

But I also want to say... I sympathize and agree with you that it's tough now out there. There's ageism, offshoring, AI, end of ZIRP, economic uncertainties, etc.

I hope you get to a position you're happy with soon.

I find resume advice very difficult to implement.

Maybe you made some drastic resume changes at the beginning of this HN discussion that I didn’t see, but since then you’ve only had time and energy to fix the repeated “maintained” word in …_Resume_2025-7 (current version is 8 now).

Your latest two posts in substack are interesting reads tho.

So I decided to spend some time to rewrite your resume. IMHO this is better, but there is still so much room for improvement even here.

I anonymized it somewhat as I don’t have your permission for this, but perhaps it’ll help you or someone else to see this revision. I’m not a pro resume writer, so maybe I’ll get some feedback here to learn from too.

Best wishes!

***

Note: links to your other online presence was intentionally deleted and omitted from the resume. See other’s comments linked above for more great suggestions.

***

Sam Hayden

Somewhere, USA / Sam@example.com

Senior full-stack engineer with 20+ years experience in ZetaScript, data architecture, machine intelligence tools, and immersive web. Builds production-grade systems, leads high-impact teams, and values clear and kind communication.

Objective

Seeking a role on a small to mid-sized engineering team solving complex problems with machine intelligence tools. Focused on growing technical leadership and contributing to cutting-edge work in applied ML and immersive tech.

Experience

Lead Full Stack Engineer – WorldSpaceXR.dev

2021 – 2023

• Built full stack subscriptions system resulting in tens of thousands MRR.

• Built an in-world AI-assistant NPC using VectorX RAG search and ChainWeave.

• Built and maintained Atlas Cloud infrastructure.

• Led DevX and documentation improvements.

• Designed user experiences in Glance/GlanceUI.

• Implemented front-end interfaces with responsive UI components.

Sr. Full Stack Engineer – LinkLayerNetworks.io

2018 – 2020

• Built management dashboard software for enterprise networking and SD-VPN systems.

• Integrated with over a dozen telecom APIs including HorizonLink, AlphaComm, TriWave, OmniNet, and MatrixComm.

• Delivered custom tooling for clients like Beanbrew Co., FitNow Gyms, ForgeGear, and SureTrust.

• Enabled client management of large-scale networking and telecom infrastructure.

Sr. Full Stack Engineer – Sam.example.com

2011 – 2018

• Built IVR phone screener system used by top biotech companies.

• Enabled daily pre-screening and matching of thousands of clinical trial patients worldwide.

• Developed a form-building and e-signing app to streamline commercial property title deals.

• Delivered custom CRM API integration for clients like Liberty Mutual Bank.

• Supported tens of millions of dollars in daily property transactions.

• Produced and self-released 5-star-rated VR app Metro Canyon Express.

• Optimized VR experience to run at 60fps on low-end mobile XR hardware.

• Released the VR app on multiple major platforms.

Full Stack Engineer / Backend Developer – Multiple Studios

2007 – 2011

Studios include: EchoPeak, ModernHue, SignalCore.

• Built internal tooling for Ikea athletic, Samsung, and pets.example.com.

• Created data infrastructure for state-level tourism and sports optics organizations.

• Represented backend team in client meetings at major brand HQs.

Education

B.Sc. in Computer & Information Science, State University of the Northwest

Skills

ZetaScript, JScript+, Glance, GlanceUI, Atlas Cloud, Sparkbase, ForgeStack, Relational DBs, DocDBs, CI/CD, API architecture, SDLC, DevX, XR, ML (ChainWeave, VectorX), UX, DX.

It just occurred to me that without the “before” version, one wouldn’t be able to do a compare and contrast of the revision proposed above. So here’s the original, similarly a little anonymized.

***

Sam Hayden Somewhere, USA

sam.example.dev | sam@example.com

linkedin.com/in/samexample | github.com/samexample

Professional Summary

• 20+ years full-stack engineering experience specializing in data architecture, JScript+ & ZetaScript, immersive tech

• Engineering team leadership experience

• Actively experimenting with ML-generating full codebases and intelligent tooling

• Strong focus on project methodology, automation, and comprehensive documentation

• Bachelor of Science in Computer & Information Science, State University of the Northwest

Goals

I am looking to be part of a small-to-midsized engineering team where I can have real impact by solving hard and previously unsolvable problems by leveraging machine intelligence tools. I am interested in growing my dev leadership experience. I am a motivated and self-directed learner, capable of deep diving into learning whatever new tools, languages, or frameworks I need to, on the job. I am seeking to leverage my problem solving skills and creative thinking rather than be a mere production-line engineer. I have a special interest (but not limited to) cutting-edge applied ML and XR, with experience in immersive environments since 2017.

Skills [n.b. was in 2 columns]

• 20+ years JScript+

• full stack ZetaScript

• Atlas Cloud and Sparkbase

• Glance & GlanceUI

• API development

• ForgeStack

• Data architecture

• Relational & DocDBs

• CI/CD pipelines

• Documentation & Technical Writing

• User experience & Developer experience

• SDLC methodologies

• Creative problem solving

• The vibecoding ecosystem

• Clear and kind communicator

Experience (selected) [n.b. “•” missing in original]

Lead Full Stack Engineer – WorldSpaceXR.dev (2021 – 2023)

Browser-based immersive meetings and more. Built full stack subscriptions system resulting in tens of thousands MRR. Built an in-world AI-assistant NPC with VectorX RAG vector search and ChainWeave. Built and maintained Atlas Cloud infrastructure. Led DevX and documentation improvements. Had creative input across the full stack. Designed and implemented user experiences in Glance/GlanceUI.

Sr. Full Stack Engineer – LinkLayerNetworks.io (2018 – 2020)

LinkLayerNetworks is a managed SD-VPN systems provider. Built management dashboard software integrating with over a dozen telecom APIs (HorizonLink, AlphaComm, TriWave, OmniNet, MatrixComm, etc.) for clients including Beanbrew Co., FitNow Gyms, ForgeGear, SureTrust and more to manage their networking and telecom infrastructure.

Sr. Full Stack Engineer – sam.example.dev (2011 – 2018)

Independent consultant. Built an IVR phone screener system that the world’s largest biotech companies use to pre-screen and match thousands of patients a day to participating clinics for clinical trials around the world.

Developed form-building and e-signing app used to close commercial property title deals. Used by clients like Liberty Mutual Bank. Custom API integration with CRM platform. Handles tens of millions of dollars in daily transactions.

Produced and self-released 5-star rated XR app experience Metro Canyon Express on multiple platforms. Highly optimized to achieve long-running 60fps performance on low-end mobile immersive hardware.

Web Dev Instructor – LearnCode.io (2011 – 2012)

Taught about a dozen students JScript+ and web development fundamentals, one-on-one.

Backend Engineer – SignalCore Agency (2010 – 2011)

Backend engineer on the team that built the award-nominated official tourism site for a U.S. state.

Brought a leading sporting optics company into the digital age, converting their technical IP into usable databases powering their web apps.

Backend engineer on the team that created an internal employee metrics and shoe ordering app used nationwide in retail locations selling a top athletic brand. Represented the backend voice of my agency in-person at brand HQ meetings.

Backend Engineer – ModernHue Agency (2009 – 2010)

Built an internal data management tool for Ikea Athletics to track compounds used in their products and the corresponding environmental regulations.

Built an internal employee recognition and rewards app for pets.example.com.

Built a backend server job that synced with a call center CRM for a major home security installer to coordinate and schedule customer events around their system installs.

Full Stack Engineer – EchoPeak Agency (2007 – 2009)

Built an employee training and rewards app for Samsung.

Maintained web accounting software for a leading global electronics brand.

Immersed in full agency environment working across the creative stack with screenwriters, designers, and video producers.

> I don't hang out here

From the OP:

> the other hundreds (thousands?) of hours of my time in the last year trolling [...] the YC message board

That's here, though.

Cool of you to post here, and congrats on having an article blow up like this.

Substack commenters are maybe not as in the trenches? I don't understand how an engineer could use AI every day and feel threatened. The leap that would have to happen for a non-technical managers to cut out engineers and build/test/deploy software just using an AI is so astronomical it is impossible to even put a timeline on.

I think you hit the crux of the issue . While coding jobs will still be around they will probably employ top 1% of the people in the intelligence spectrum whereas before it would have employed say 30% of this group of people (made up numbers). Yet those people still need a decent annual income to survive in USA and they don’t have alternative skillsets or assets. So yes you may be right in that we are in the early phase of the bell curve with things progressively going to look darker for more and more people.

> they will probably employ top 1% of the people in the intelligence spectrum

Nothing says that the top 1% of the most intelligent people (whatever that means) will want to work in that area.

Because: they may not want to (one could even wonder if they do today), they may not be incentivised to, they may find an even more powerful pursuit elsewhere.

Then, a lot of the skillset is transferable to other professions. The thing is that those professions too may be under pressure of some reorganisation.

Recruiters and hiring companies will also have to adjust how they read the market: multidisciplinary candidates, fragmented career paths are becoming more and more common, and it's generally a sign of adaptive people.

Someone buy this man a coffee. I did.

Hey man, wishing you a good early morning. Hope the responses haven't got you too down. If it's any consolation, your post must have resonated to garner 400+ upvotes. Personally I found it to be refreshing and real. Best of luck in your search and future endeavors.

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.

  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.

> it can be done at 10x productivity using AI,

doubt.

maybe if you are cranking out crud widgets, which you should've been using an abstraction in first place.

Right, but not everyone whose job title is 'software engineer' would think to do that.

True

Overall I'd agree with your sentiment, but it depends on the market.

I only know personally of one counter example to your message. In my career, I've reviewed, interviewed, and hired a few hundred people for somewhat known companies and startups. I also helped many friends find jobs in the past, before the market became what it is today, without any issues. So I like to think I understand what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for.

End of last year, a friend with 12 years of relevant experience started looking for a job. I reviewed his CV (which he tweaked for some of the applications) and cover letters (he wrote one for each company). Everything was as good as it can be for the position he was applying for.

Out of ~20 applications he got a total of 4 replies: 3 generic rejections and one screening that led him to being hired. He killed it during the interviews, but just getting his foot in the door was so hard. Maybe in some parts of the world we're back to 2015-2020 levels of recruiter "harassment", but in others it's super dry, even for senior positions.

That ratio you mentioned vis a vis applications to hire is about normal for me and something I would consider tolerable

I'm sure it varies quite a bit depending on role.

Before the market change, for senior engineering and eng management positions, the ratio was 1:1 if the person so wished. My whole career was exactly that: 1 application, 1 offer, always.

Absolute numbers are probably less interesting than the % change. If you're getting a 5% hit rate but you used to get 20%, that implies that someone who used to get a 5% hit rate is going to have a much harder time.

I'm not sure the relationship is strict enough that the formerly 5% hit rate engineer is now going to see 1.25%, but my guess would be that they'll at least find things a lot more difficult.

Last year I applied for a single job, out of a vague interest, and immediately had multiple calls from recruiters from different companies trying to talk to me.

This year I'm actually looking, applied for multiple jobs, and had silence.

Might be a Trump effect but it's not the same just now. Reminds me of 2008.

As someone commented below, I think the end of ZIRP is the cause and not Trump.

The end of ZIRP was well before last year.

The effects could take a while, I assume many companies had a ton of runway that’s now dwindling. There seems to have been a strong belief for some time that ZIRP will return too.

Your mileage may vary.

I know a number of very experienced engineers that went through hundreds of application over more than a year before finally finding employment.

Often there would be several rounds of interviews, sometimes 6!, with several leading to c-suite interviewers saying "you'll be receiving an offer", and then nothing. Ghosted.

These are people with decades of experience, big corps, successful startups, extensive contact networks.

The DOGE breed of 20 something darlings are in for a rude awakening down the road.

I'm very very glad I'm at the tail end of my 40 year career. If I were looking at university enrollment in the present, I don't think I'd choose engineering. The tech industry is just not the employment growth opportunity that it was.

I'd choose being an electrician before being an electrical engineer in the current conditions...

You made me login to reply :) , thanks.

Back in the early 2000s when I was finishing my Software Engineer BSc degree I saw the choice of becoming a "generalist" vs becoming a "specialist". I actually liked EVERYTHING technology wise: From Neural Networks to Game development (graphics with OpenGL) to algorithms, Web development, to Java JNI, assembler and whatnot. I couldn't see myself focusing in one thing.

Fast forward to 2025, I'm 44 years old and have been 24 years in the industry. In the last 5 years I've had 3 jobs: One, helping a startup move form a non-scalable monolith system (ruby) to a very scalable microservices one. I was CTO of a crypto-exchange company, building ECS/nodejs based microservices and then an App (React Native). And right now I am helping some young guys in a startup doing AI based Tax reconciliation (helping exporting companies recover their VAT).

In my opinion, right now is the BEST moment to be a developer. Coding with Cursor is magic. Implementing an API in python with FastAPI is so freaking easy and quick. I don't have to worry about recalling a lot of details, but mainly think on problem solving.

I have the hypothesis that the people that are struggling are the "specialists". Suddenly with AI it doesn't matter that you know the in and outs of Java, Hybernate and the whole stack. There's more value in solving problems. I am happy that I chose the "generalist" path. I think AI will reduce the demand the "specialist" skillset.

I am very much a generalist and this comment checks a lot of boxes for me. If you find yourself pigeonholed into some niche (which can be super profitable), and that niche disappears, you're not really left with much to work with other than a complete career change.

this is a factor for me. I've always had to pick up new languages frameworks and skills on-the-job. but today hirers are seeking only really niched down specific experts, and i suspect i am filtered out automatically by not matching that, with no regard to the fact that it's not that big of a deal for an experienced engineer to pick up something new

As a generalist "master of none" who also graduated from the same era, this is really reassuring. I use a lot of technologies but not enough to consider myself an expert in any of them. At the end of the day I can pipeline them into a useful tool or product.

I also recognize when AI is getting the answers wrong. LLMs are great at giving you general, well documented answers. For the moment it doesn't have the foresight to tackle complex systems. And that is where a specialist can really shine. But the world doesn't need a lot of answers to complex problems when most of the time a general one will do.

you are right in that as a generalist i have no fear to start a job in any new tech stack, no matter how unfamiliar. but with hundreds of applicants to every job there is always someone more experienced with the tech stack used there. to win as a generalist you kind of have look for jobs in niches where only few people apply. i am struggling as a generalist.

I found much better success on wellfound.com (formerly angel.co) than LinkedIn. Much more startup and generalist-focused, whereas LinkedIn only produced through recruiter recommendations.

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?

if you are in computer engineering and you are not doing "ongoing learning", you deserve to be left behind. While the company should provide some opportunities for learning, ultimately, it is your responsibility.

What's your strategy for continuing education?

I tend to hop into projects even if I only have a cursory knowledge of the platform and spend time ferociously reading the docs as I catch up to speed.

I ask a lot of questions of those who do know parts of it. If I hear something I don't know or understand in a meeting I always write it down and research it later.

In a dev environment, I poke at things. Back up that config file, tweak some things, see what happens. Take stuff apart, put it back together. Revert things to put it back when I'm done. It's the dev environment, it's supposed to be shaken up and messed with.

With code, I find a good debugger for whatever new platform I'm trying to get into. Put some break points into interesting spots, step into to the function, step into, step into. See what's really happening. Inspect all the things. How does this thing actually tick? Watch it spin.

When an employer offers any time for training, I take it. I try and get as much out of it as I can. My employer offers some continuing education reimbursement. I use it.

And I try and also teach things at my place of employment. This forces me to actually challenge what I do know and really dig into the topic. Sometimes I find out what I thought I knew wasn't really true! We have a regular meeting on Monday afternoons to share and talk technology. I usually talk Kubernetes and containers on the third Mondays, digging deep into how all that stuff actually works. And it's not just me rambling for an hour, we usually get good discussion going about the focus on the talk and I end up learning something knew even though I'm the one presenting!

Make time in your work schedule to spend some time learning every week. Make yourself a 30 minute or 1 hour recurring meeting with only you.

And finally, there's probably a lot of small dead time moments you have in your life. I'm not saying make all of those focused on learning tech, but if even a third of the time you would have spent doing something else unproductive you instead catch a few more minutes of a training or listen to a lightning talk from a programming conference you'll slowly still glean new stuff and find more topics to dig into when you get a chance.

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.

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

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.

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.

Ignoring the financial aspects, I agree to some extent with OPs opinion this trend of doing more with less engineers really took off following Elon reducing Twitters headcount.

It's worth remembering Twitter was a buggy mess before Elon bought it. Sure it's still a buggy mess today, but the staffing costs are dramatically lower.

Losing a ton of money was something Twitter was also pretty good at even before Elon too - only profitable 2 years out of the 8 leading up to the acquisition while it was still a public company etc.

We don't know if it is losing money. It's a private company.

He reduced the headcount to roughly what it was in 2017. At the time of the acquisition, many of the employees were in non technical roles, contributing nothing of value, posting videos about their empty work day on TikTok. Jack Dorsey admitted that he made a mistake by over hiring - more than doubled the headcount from 2017 to 2021.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...

We know the value as perceived by investors has dropped. We know usage and revenue has dropped. There are now several competitors in the same space, some fairly successful.

I was trying to stay away from the debate about the success of it by making that comment about it not failing even with a fraction of the former employees. My sarcastic reply to your question, though, is it depends on which side of the aisle you sit on. More seriously, there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living. I can guarantee you every major tech company took note of that reality and so I have to believe it begged some questions about headcounts.

It brings you back to that old HN saw "why do these companies need so many people to do that?" Maybe the answer actually was they didn't/don't.

>there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living.

this seems a gross misunderstanding of how software companies work at scale. Twitter doesn't hire engineers to run a monitoring system cause they need it to stay alive (there are alternatives to building and running their own!), they chose to do it to save money or increase revenue.

Twitter doesn't need an ad network, they can use Google, or build their own and take more profit. They might know that for every 3 engineers they hire on their ad network, they increase their click rate and thus revenue.

The same can be said for any infra team. You don't need to build much infra, but companies do it because sometimes it's a way to save hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud costs or licensing fees.

Are we disagreeing here? I'm not sure how you took my comment, but it seems like what you're arguing here doesn't really rebut what I was saying. Or at least is not directly related. FWIW I agree with everything you're saying, except for the tone, which, to be honest, I don't love.

>" Maybe the answer actually was they didn't/don't.

I'm disputing the claim that the above statement was ever in question. FAANG doesn't employ people because they mistakenly thought they needed that many, they do it because adding more employees has either lowered their infra costs or increased their revenue.

Typically cutting is a top-down decision, while hiring is organic. If they think they can justify budget for it, managers want to hire. Managing more people has direct rewards apart from anything the headcount is doing for the organization overall, so incentives are misaligned.

All the big FAANG companies that did major layoffs have rehired to the original amount since then.

I really believe the layoffs were not about needing less people, it was about gaining some ground in the employee/employer dynamic.

From a pure economics perspective, this is healthy for the business.

There are always low performers. Periodically transitioning out the bottom 10% or so, and rehiring different people, possibly in a different departmental distribution, is always net beneficial to the company.

Using regional/national/global events as the explanation is always better than blaming yourself.

Of course, it's impossible to segregate people into performance bins with perfect accuracy, and it's always bad for individual humans in the short term.

Arguments are made that it's good for society in the longer term, and wars are fought between opposing sides of that opinion. :)

> 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.

I just don’t understand how it’s possible. I admit I was one of the skeptics predicting Twitter’s immediate demise after laying off so many. Everywhere I have ever worked had at least 3X more work to do than staff to do it. You can’t get rid of even one person without feeling the pain. I just can’t fathom working for a company that can get rid of so many people and not struggle! My current company wouldn’t be able to even keep the lights on in the offices if it lost 80% of its staff.

To be honest if it wasn't for Elon's hand in various other ways and he was somehow perceived by most to be apolitical many people would call the cuts a success and it would be losing a lot lot less or be making money.

A huge amount of staffing cuts were to teams working on things like moderation or combating bots, which are areas Elon doesn't care about continuing development on. He's not so much doing more with less but rather doing less with less. We can debate about whether or not the projects he cut were worthwhile, but given the company's disastrous finances I wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt.

The bull case is that he sacrificed Twitter capital in exchange for political capital, which I think is pretty sound. But that doesn't really apply to most CEOs running most businesses.

Good point. I shouldn't have said more with less. I should've said Twitter lost 80% of its employees and somehow still exists (I thought it was "only" 50%). 80% is nuts. That said, if 100% of those reductions were outside of engineering (they weren't, I realize) then I'd mostly agree with your point. But I do think that even in that case it would cause every other company to ask some hard questions about staffing that could lead to layoffs and/or have implications for hiring.

All feels on my part just to hopefully add to the dialogue. Nothing scientific here.

I'm sure 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.

Yes, that was the turning point. You have to remember, in addition to the end of ZIRP this also happened after a few years of an extremely strong employee's market. Jobseekers were asking for and getting some pretty wild packages.

Elon's actions were a clear signal to the industry and investors that it's time to "fight back" and show the labor market who's really in charge.

It goes beyond Elon. PE was (are?) pressuring Google to lay off more employees because their pay was so high. And the Fed said that worker pay was "too high," in the context of inflation.

Basically, the ownership class was pissy that some people were able to actually get away from exchanging time for money.

Yep, precisely! But all that was happening on a slow burn. Elon's deliberately public actions at Twitter were a (very intentional, I suspect) match to the powderkeg.

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."

I'm sure some CEOs followed the Twitter lead, but I also think the entire industry was already shifting with regards to headcount. A lot of companies were hiring excessively going into that period and middle management bloat was a well-known phenomenon.

The overstaffing problem was painfully obvious at many of the companies I spoke too as a consultant during that time. They'd have bizarre situations where they'd have dozens of product managers, project managers, program managers, UX designers, and every other title but barely a handful of engineers. It was just a big gridlock of managers holding meetings all day.

One friend resigned from Twitter prior to anything Elon related, specifically citing the fact that it paid well but it was impossible to get anything done. Not all of Twitter was like this, but he was outside of engineering where he was one of scores of people with his same title all competing to work on tiny features for the site or app.

The pendulum seems to be swinging to the other direction, where companies are trying to do too much with too few people. I still see a lot of growing (or shrinking) pains where companies are cutting in the wrong places, like laying off engineers to the point of having more people with {product,project,program}-manager titles combined than engineers. I hope we settle out somewhere more reasonable soon.

This all rings true to me. I would take it a step further and say that during normal times throughout the history of corporate America, and especially in boom times, management will let fiefdoms grow fairly unchecked. Then an external trigger causes them to re-evaluate and that's when they're like "holy shit we don't need nearly this many people."

For those of us who have been around the block (i.e., are old), the only times I've personally seen companies aggressively cut personnel is during economic shocks (dotcom bubble and housing crisis as two examples) and only then were the companies running lean (I wouldn't even say they were running bare bones; it's the only time I've seen headcount actually optimized for the work being produced).

I think the Twitter purge was actually an example of a major trigger. Not on par with the previous two I mentioned (obviously), but it was so high profile that anyone in tech took note of it, which is why I made the original comment. I've never seen so much discussion around a layoff for a company that was not imminently imploding (some may say Twitter was about to implode, but if you said that at the time I think you were wrong regardless of the state of its financials).

I’ve heard this Twitter example bandied about tons of times, but I’m always confused. To be clear, I’m generally sympathetic to the view that there is tons of bloat at tech companies and big companies in general.

But I’m confused by Twitter being an example because:

1. Twitter went private so we don’t really know how well or poorly the business did after making the massive cuts

2. The little information we do have indicates that advertising revenue significantly declined after the acquisition

Since Twitter financials are private we can only speculate, but my best guess would be that Elon took a bloated, unprofitable business and turned into a lean, unprofitable business, which doesn’t seem all that impressive to me.

What about this story warrants it being dragged out into every conversation about businesses cutting bloat, I cannot understand. People seemed genuinely amazed that Twitter was able to keep the site online without ever acknowledging what an absurdly low bar this is. Like I can light money on fire and keep a site online too; it’s the making money part that is the tricky bit.

Just to clarify, I didn't trot it out initially because it's amazing (though at the size of Twitter I personally am kind of amazed; I thought it would be hard to keep it as stable as it's been with that much of a headcount reduction, but you're right about the opaqueness of the financials, although, really, not completely opaque re Fidelity write downs; it's been... not great).

That said, the trotting out was just to point out the coincident timing between when Elon started the cuts, and how aggressively he cut, and when other mega cap tech started slowing or even laying off workers. You might say "but none of those other companies clipped 80% of their folks," but that would be somewhat suicidal to do as a public company. But a high-profile trigger like that influences folks to take a harder look at how and why they're deploying personnel.

Last comment, when you heard what Elon was doing were you just like "wow, that's a lot of layoffs" and then went about your day? Or did it reinforce your view that "there is tons of bloat at tech companies..."? Do you really think the leaders at these companies are ignorant about that reality and that your opinion is unique? No offense, but I don't. They knew they were bloated. To steal another commenter's metaphor, there's all this overstaffing in the air, a combustible vapor of sorts. And Elon's reduction at Twitter lit a match.

Maybe it was a catalyst, I buy that because CEOs and thought leaders are still talking about it.

I just don’t understand why it would be. It’s an example you can’t learn anything from (since the company is private). But even if Twitter were still public, all the variables are confounded with the fact that the CEO is also a chaos agent, political operator, and potentially insane.

Sorry if my comment came off as attacking your post. I think your observation of the effect the Twitter cuts had on others is probably right. I am more criticizing the unscientific thinking of the people that claim to have taken a lesson from Elon’s management of Twitter.

No need to apologize. I thought your reply was thought-provoking and I think that’s why we’re all here—to share and learn from each other.

People were very skeptical that the site could even be maintained with that drastic a headcount reduction. Seems to me like the outcome was:

- site stays up and has sufficient ability to recover from outages

- can still deploy features in the frontend

- can't deploy features in the backend (look closely; mind you, Old Twitter absolutely sucked at product innovation too)

- moderation deliberately cut down

- due to some combination of increased unpleasantness, boycotts, and the personal brand toxicity of Elon, the advertising revenue is down

- site was levered into an unofficial US cabinet position (!), we have yet to see how lucrative that is. Maybe it includes a free jet.

The part missing is that Musk massively over payed for the bloated unprofitable business.

I would think Twitter is profitable with the cuts that were made it is just not nearly profitable enough to justify the investment.

Non-negative cash flow from operations but lighting money on fire when you add on the debt that was used to purchase the company.

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."

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.

> 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?

That’s what I am wondering as I aggressively spew technical debt into the universe, is the sudden accelerated creation of technical debt going to be good or bad for my long term job prospects?

> It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet

I learned a word cruising Reddit the other day that summarizes that issue quite well - "liminal". At the time, it was in the context of malls, and the collapse of American storefront consumerism, yet the issues are similar:

  "relating to the transitional stage of a process", or "the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage"

> general sense ..., but we don't really know ... the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up

We're stuck in that in-between land where your 2) seems like it's often the response to most suggestions. We'll, we don't really want to take a risk ... cause tomorrow AI may make that choice irrelevant. We don't really want to invest ... cause tomorrow AI may make our investment worthless. We don't really want to hire more people ... cause tomorrow AI may do their jobs easily. And there's always that number 3) sensation somewhere "your team can do more, you're just not leveraging tools enough".

The impact of AI already goes further than just delaying hiring - at least in fields adjacent to engineering, such as technical writing. Anecdotally:

For the past 10 years, one of my best friends has been the senior copy editor for [Fortune 500 company's] sprawling website, managing more than a dozen writers. It's a great job, full time, mostly remote, with fantastic benefits (including unlimited PTO, a concept that I can't even fathom as a freelancer). The website comprises thousands of pages of product descriptions, use cases, and impenetrable technical jargon aimed at selling "solutions" to whatever Fortune 500 executives make those kinds of mammoth IT decisions.

Recently, he was telling me how AI was impacting his job. He said he and his writers started using GPT a couple years ago to speed things up.

"But now I have to use it. I wouldn't be able to work without it," he said, "because in the last year they laid off all but two of the writers. The workload's the same, but they put it all on me and the two who are left. Mostly just to clean up GPT's output."

I said, "I don't know who ever read that crap anyway. The companies you're selling to probably use GPT to summarize those pages for them, too." He agreed and said it was mostly now about getting AIs to write things for other AIs to read, and this required paying fewer and fewer employees.

So while AI may be a nice productivity booster, it's not like there's unlimited demand for more productivity. Companies only need so much work done. If your employees are made 4x more productive by a new tool, you can lay off 75% of them. And forget about hiring, because the tools are just getting better.

Coders like me don't want to believe this is coming for us, but I think it is. I'm lucky to have carved out a niche for myself where I actually own a lot of proprietary code and manage a lot of data-keeping that companies rely on, which effectively constitutes technical debt for them and which would be extremely onerous to transition away from even if they could get an AI to reverse engineer my software perfectly (which I think is still at least a few years off). But humans are going to be an ever-shrinking slice of the information workforce going forward, and staying ahead of those layoffs is not just a matter of knowing a lot about the latest AI tech or having a better resume. I think the smart play at this point is to prepare for more layoffs, consider what it would take to be the last person doing your entire team's job, and then wedge yourself into that position. Make sure you have the only knowledge of how the pipeline works, so it would be too expensive to get rid of you.

> So while AI may be a nice productivity booster, it's not like there's unlimited demand for more productivity. Companies only need so much work done. If your employees are made 4x more productive by a new tool, you can lay off 75% of them. And forget about hiring, because the tools are just getting better.

Many companies are also way overstaffed, IME (thinking non-software/"tech" F500s here)

Having worked as a consultant with various F500 companies over the last few years, there's loads of people that do very little work, and much of the work is low value--myself included; I make no claims I'm above any of this.

I've encountered countless project managers that do nothing other than move Jira tickets around.

Me: "Hey I'm blocked, can you get me in contact with $TEAM that owns this stuff"

PM: "Uh no, ask $PERSON"

How many of this person does any company need?

Even developers--I've worked with loads that take a week to set up some Angular project or cloud resources, and the even darker part of all of that is the whole project is destined to fail, cause the sales org sold em on some "modernization" thing that'll never get off the ground, that they don't have the staff to maintain, and they don't have the organizational will or discipline to integrate.

I've been on countless projects like this, there's piles of excess people doing low value (or no) work at all, saved only from unemployment by the sheer complexity of byzantine, bureaucratic organizations.

This has been my experience as well. So much slop like this well before AI came out. Great for rest and vest/grifting but not good in general.

Wherever the vest disconnected from having a viable or profitable or useful product to invest in is where this whole shitshow of nontechnical people ruling over engineering serfs started. Roughly it went from search to ad networks to social graphs to crypto to NFTs to AI to vibe coding (with a physical side in jacking blue collar jobs in delivery, taxis and hotels), all driven by each 4-year crop of unimaginative business school frat boys piling on the last, as if they had been hazed into the delusion that they were smarter than the engineers they would hire and dispose of to get around the pesky laws. Now we're in the third generation of investors infused with the idea that one can grift indefinitely that way, the way that say, anyone who bought a house in California between 1946 and 2007 was guaranteed to make a fortune sitting on it. What we have run out of is people with non-derivative ideas and the actual skills to implement the same. To the extent that AI is just massive IP theft that might let the boys club continue to build the garbage they're currently choosing to build, by recirculating what has been done before, it's clearly a dead end. But they won't go down without a fight. What's so strange to me is, as a nerd boy born in 1980 in California, I definitely did not expect in the late 90s that the yuppies of 2025 would be even less original and more rapacious than their parents. That's what's been most disappointing about the first quarter of this century.

Honestly though, I think this is a structural and training issue, not a matter of who or what is answering the phone. Someone somewhere recently chained together a bunch of AI models to see what would happen if they emulated various departments in a large company, and they immediately learned how to pass the buck to each other and obfuscate the fact that nothing really got done. I don't think effiency, customer service or interdepartmental cooperation are really the problems the C-suite are trying to solve for by adopting AI anywhere they can. Or even productivity writ large, for that matter. Viewed through the lens of short term gains, AI looks like a way to cut costs and maintain at least the same level of bloat. In its current form, I'm suspicious as an investor of any company that treats it as a panacea for their structural and hierarchical maladies.

>Someone somewhere recently chained together a bunch of AI models to see what would happen if they emulated various departments in a large company, and they immediately learned how to pass the buck to each other and obfuscate the fact that nothing really got done.

I would love to read more about that; do you have a link?

Second that

My father was a commercial artist in the 80’s-2000’s. He was also very early on the transition of analog desktop publishing to digital graphic design. This is exactly how the ad agency guys talked about things: at first, it was great. We could double our output and revenue, but soon we were caught in a rat race to the bottom as the tools improved and the skill floor fell away.

5 (maybe) - Over the past decade or so, it became really common to job hop for higher salaries, and while that did give a lot of broad experience, it may not have done nearly as much for depth. Everything from tech stack to data being worked with to broader architectural decisions that affect maintenance. I'm wondering if companies have noticed this and are shifting away from job-hoppers to get better return on investment.

> I come from poverty. my father was a drug addict who is dead. my mother is disabled and i’m helping support her. my grandparents are dead. my friends are on the west coast, dealing with similar financial hardships and they are already living with their parents and on couches. I’m not above asking for help, but there is no one to ask.

I wonder how much this factors in. We know from statistic this situation tends to lead to worse outcomes.

Basically those connections you are talking about, are some form of nepotism and a kind of privilege. Should it be this way?

I don't think nepotism is what we're talking about here.

I don't come from poverty, I come from a firmly middle class background. We were a single income household where my dad was a public attorney. Nobody in my immediate or extended family worked in tech. Over the course of my ~15 year career, I've built up a fairly extensive network of former coworkers, many of who I'm sure would try to hire me or get me referrals at their companies if they found out I was on the market. None of this was built through nepotism, as I literally had no connections in tech when I started out.

So, that's the question. The author claims they have had a 20 year career. What happened to all those connections? Do they have a bunch of connections, but no prior coworkers would want to work with them again?

I don't think GP was talking about TFA - and thus not a professional network - with regards to nepotism, but rather being able to depend on family.

In any case, networks can be hard to build and maintain, and they can easily fall apart if you fall into a rut.

as i wrote in my other comment, for myself a 20 year career only led to a dozen or so meaningful connections. and, in my culture, using connections to get a job or a deal IS considered nepotism if not outright corruption.

i get where you are coming from. i tried 5 versions of my resume in the last year. talking to recruiters. shotgunning resumes. hand crafting one-off cover letters. I have tried many approaches. you can guage my resume for yourself. the current strategy is to pander to people who are mainly looking for ai-dev skills https://shawnfromportland.com/Shawn_K_Resume_2025-4.pdf

If you're up for some unsolicited feedback from someone who has read a lot of resumes:

This is one of the more chaotic and difficult to parse resumes I've seen. Can I suggest you try returning to a standard resume format where you simply list jobs in chronological order with short bullet points underneath each one?

You lead your Professional Summary with a point about using AI coding tools and the #1 skill you list in the skills box is "Vibecoding". It's good to keep up with AI-assisted tools, but putting "Vibecoding" in your resume is an instant turn off for most people. Vibecoding is associated with poor software quality, not professional development. I'd remove that word from your resume and never put it back.

Your job duty bullet points are very wordy but convey little at the same time. You have 3 jobs in a row where you "Built award-winning state of the art web experiences" but I have no idea what technologies you used, what your role was on the team, what the websites actually did, how many users were served, or any other useful information. At minimum you need to list some technologies.

Your entire personal brand is "shawnfromportland" but you apparently live on the other side of the country? I understand the attachment to your username, but you have far more "Portland" on your resume than "New York". If you're applying to any local jobs, the Portland branding is an obstacle for anyone scanning 100s of resumes who doesn't have time to consume every little detail and resolve ambiguities.

Using 1/5th of the page for context-less name dropping of skills isn't helpful. Delete that box and list specific skills in specific jobs. With 20 years of experience it's impossible to know if each skill you list is something you read a Wikipedia page about or used at 5 of your jobs.

Suggest hosting the resume on http://imlivinginnewyorkthesedaysbutimstill.shawnfromportlan...

I've seen worse but honestly you may be overshooting: agency work, education, and seven years of 'independent consultant' reads like you just coasted after the initial few years... for 20YOE I see limited leadership or tech skills.

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."

> 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.

This is a crazy assumption and really insulting to parents or non-parents and wrong on nearly every count.

Don't know why I'm being downvoted. Almost everything assumed in the GP comment about me is wrong. I'm north of 40 and I have dependents. Don't blame your decision to have kids for your failures or deficits. It's a really annoying thing people do and inevitably gets projected onto the children, who didn't ask to be here in the first place.

You do have a good angle that it is entirely possible. I dont think we're "blaming" children though, just the reality that a young single person with 10 years experience likely has a lot more spare time and energy than those older. Saying its easy to keep working long hours and learning new waves of technology likely aren't sustainable.

It's because the experience of so many parents these days is exhaustion. There just aren't enough hours in the day. In my experience it often turns out that if a fellow parent has significantly more personal time than me (for side projects, exercise, whatever) it turns out there is an unequal distribution of labor in the household. For example, a spouse who doesn't work who handles all the domestic stuff could allow the other spouse more free time. That same stay-at-home-spouse could find themselves with a lot of free time as the kids get older and require less hands-on parenting. That sort of thing.

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.

how am i supposed to achieve this balance? after working, doing some of the housework, helping to take care of the kids, spending time with them, spending time with my wife and taking some personal time to relax (1 hour tv, no more) there simply is no more energy or even time left to work on side projects.

Anecdotally mornings seem to be a good time, if you can stick them.

You don’t need side projects or to work at night to continue to learn new technologies. (I am a parent too)

when do you do it then? not on the job, at least not any job that i ever had, unless the job itself was already using new tech.

Sure, weekends and holidays will do.

>> 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.

it really depends on how your career is developing. the last 10 years i worked for a single company. i made a few connections there. but except one they are all my junior and themselves don't have enough connections so that they could refer me. beyond that there may be a dozen more. i talked to almost all of them. nothing so far. they either work in small companies that are not hiring, or in big ones where they can't influence the hiring process. add to that that where i am from using connections to get a job is frowned upon, bordering on corruption. the one connection that did give me work was an acquaintance i made at a tech meetup about two years ago, who then connected me to someone interested in working with me. but even then it took almost a year before we started working. and it's only a part time gig, not enough to cover expenses. otherwise i did get 3 or 4 interviews out of more than 100 applications. not a single offer though.

It's hard to say for sure without knowing his whole situation, but I will agree with you that when I hear someone say they've submitted 750 applications, my first thought is that they're taking a machine gun approach, applying to a lot of jobs in a short time. I was always taught that you tailor your resume to the position you're applying for, and apply only after doing a lot of research on the company to know whether you are suitable for their position. I'm older than the author of this post, and applied for my most recent job at about his age—though it was a few years ago, before AI was really a consideration. In my entire life, I've probably applied to ~25 positions, made it to the final round 8 times, and been hired 6 times.

Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.

That is my approach as well. It ends up being a lot less work than the machine gun approach.

I 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.

I see you already have 27 replies...but I'll throw in my two cents.

I didn't believe it was this bad until I was made to believe it. My kid with 1 year full time experience at a FAANG adjacent company and a 6 month internship prior to that, is simple unable to get ANY interviews at all. And he is genuinely good at software development, much better than I was at his age.

I was skeptical, I thought his approach was wrong, I thought this and that. He let me take over his job looking process for a week. I submitted over 100 applications for positions local and remote - positions that he is qualified to do. Not a single interview. Not even a phone screen.

Compare this with when I left college. Interviews were available at the drop of a hat.

That doesn’t seem to be particularly unusual at the start of a career. When did you leave college? When I graduated 22 years ago, basically no one in my (Ivy League) class had a job lined up, and a lot of us didn’t find one until a year later.

My anecdotal experience is very different. It's possible that you graduated just after the dotcom bust. Couple of years later and it was very easy for a new grad to get an offer without that much effort.

I know at least that it was back to that from 2008 - 2010, because I was involved in hiring then. The small company I was working for got swamped with new graduates. We ended up hiring more than we planned to, because they would work for so little.

I think generally, historically, being able to get a high-paying job right out of college with no effort is an anomaly that people just got used to treating as normal due to the periods of free money and fast growth because of the new and growing Internet, and free money. They’re gone now, and with the way things are, they’re unlikely to come back.

> I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on

I feel like early career is a huge factor. As a young person you'll be ok to be a junior when joining a company working on high scale problem. You're also ok with companies working on low scale.

But 10 years later, most high scale companies won't even think about hiring you for anything but junior position if you've never got to work on high scale operations. And that's not the kind of experience you can easily get on your own time.

So if you've accepted to work for small scale companies at the start of your career? You're stuck unless you accept a huge salary cut (and that's if you pass the "too qualified/old for this position" filter).

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.

just for reference about my amassed 'wealth', the combined cost of my mortgages is less than a studio apartment's rent in the bay area. i left the west coast for precisely this reason

property values are wealth. mortgage payments are costs. one doesn't imply anything about the other.

Are the properties underwater on the mortgage?

Can you rent out the vacant units?

if you read the original article i talked about how i got into this position. I originally had renters at both properties covering almost all the costs. they left shortly before losing my job.

I read it, but maybe I missed the details. Are they rented out now and can they be?

i gave it a 1-year shot at running the cabin as an airbnb, but it is only profitable the peak couple of months a year because we are extremely remote with very harsh winters. i feel a bit stuck under that until the end of this year because i have a bunch of guests booked and i would hate to rugpull them in order to transition it back to a long-term rental. I do believe with more time and money it could be a profitable short-term rental. my county just rolled out a 4% tax on airbnbs for no reason, which hurts. the city house would be income producing with another 30k$ of renovations, but in it's current state (i ran out of money on the renovations) it is half-rented, covering the operating cost.

can you fill the city house completely? Why push for short term rental in the cabins instead of long term?

It seems like getting those two sorted would greatly improve your monthly situation.

going back to the wealth thing, I recommend you think of these places as assets, not set in stone. If you are ahead on your mortgage, they literally are, slow to sell but worth real cash.

If your renter for a single room can completely cover your mortgage payments, there's a good chance that at least one of your properties has appreciated quite a lot since you bought it. That's wealth. If you go for a second mortgage or sell one of those houses, there's a good chance you will be covered on a relatively frugal lifestyle for quite a while.

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.

> when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.

I have to emphasize this a lot to mid-career developers that I've mentored. In the past decade it was really easy to find a comfy job and coast, or to job-hop every year to get incrementally higher salary.

Juniors are mostly a blank slate. Once someone has 10-20 years you should be able to see a trajectory in their career and skills. I've seen so many resumes from people who either did junior-level work for a decade, or who job hopped so excessively that they have 1 year of experience 10 times, almost resetting at every new company.

It's hard to communicate this to juniors who are getting advice from Reddit and peers to job hop everywhere and do dumb things like burn bridges on their way out (via being overemployed by not quitting the old job until they're fired, or by quitting with 0 days notice, or just telling them off as you leave). A lot of people are having a sudden realization about the importance of leaving a good impression and building healthy relationships in your network now that organic job offers are hard to find.

> If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field

Unpack this for me: what constitutes significant contributions to peers or the field?

For the HN crowd it's coming up with the umpteenth JavaScript framework, I think.

I’m more concerned it amounts to “be famous.”

It comes in a lot of forms: Publishing novel research. Doing open-source projects. Making tools and libraries. Leadership in general (tech lead/manager roles, and doing it successfully). Mentoring people. Anything that makes other people better. The longer you have had a career, the more leverage people need you to have.

To be honest, the substack is a decent step forward in sharing knowledge if he can fill it with technical articles.

Being a lead/manager requires people skills that some people don't have. Let's be frank: a lot of us are neurodivergent and on the spectrum and that often does not make for good people managers. It's not a failure of career progression to shy away from management.

Well, then publish stuff, do open-source, build libraries people use, or otherwise advance the state of the art. There are lots of ways to impact other people without being a manager.

You also don't have to be a genius to do any of this stuff. There are outsized rewards to just showing up and always being nice and helpful (eg on open-source).

I can get on board with the emphasis on giving back in some capacity.

> If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field, everyone knows where your priorities are. It's okay that you aren't that interested in engineering.

Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.

The first thing I thought of was he would benefit from joining an open source project.

You seem to think that I am making a negative judgment here. His lifestyle is fine with me and I assume he is a great person. He clearly has made many smart decisions around things like building lasting wealth through real estate and keeping good relationships with his family. He also clearly values his flexibility and his lifestyle, looking for 100% remote jobs almost exclusively. He talks quite a bit about the tax code and his three houses and how he wants to renovate them and use them to make money. However, if you look at the time spent on these things, it pretty strongly suggests that he prefers these things to programming/engineering.

I don't judge him as a person for this. In fact, he's probably better as a friend than many of us who did sacrifice a lot of this stuff for a career. Unfortunately, many careers in knowledge work are "up or out," and if you don't choose "up," "out" will be chosen for you.

Fair enough, but I don't think you realize how the original comment comes off. There's a lot of wiggle room in the terms "interested", "engineering", and "unremarkable", but the way I take it is: if one hasn't become a legend in their field by age 40, not only do they not deserve a job, they don't deserve to be here (since they're clearly not interested in engineering).

You're right on many of these points and I probably take it personally because I'm coming up on 20 years and am unremarkable. You never know what people went through to get where they are.

I went to a cheap state school, didn't major in CS despite wanting to desperately because my family convinced me it was a bad move, graduated into the GFC, got pigeonholed into QA for a while, spent years getting my masters in CS, wasted energy on side projects for many years, cared for sick family members for many years, struggled with major impostor syndrome and insecurity.

I've done things I'm proud of and I made it to FAANG after all that, but am unremarkable. It's kind of offensive to then hear that I'm not interested in engineering because I'm not a Distinguished Engineer or whatever.

If you made it to a FAANG without going to a top 20 college, there's a near 0 chance you are unremarkable. The rest of the story more than confirms that you aren't coasting.

> 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.

We are literally halfway to a nearly guaranteed recession, by definition. A lot of the sentiment in this thread reflects that.

> You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.

Skimmed through his resume and he has a decent one with many real world projects. Is it even possible to stay employed in this industry past the age of 35 if you don't move into a management role and aren't self employed?

I don't know if you read the same resume I did. It is great to have a lot of "real world projects" for a junior hire, but the bar shifts a lot for senior hires.

I just want to comment that the trend where "average" workers pushing 50 are undesirable, is a very scary one. And it should be for everyone.

Any present day 45-year old must assume that they will have to work AT LEAST 20 more years, but most likely 25. This generation will be working well into their 70s.

Statistically, the majority will be average - or "mediocre".

Economically, it is very unsustainable to have a system where only the top 20%-30% of people over 50 will be able to keep their job. You'll end up with a very large number of people that end up on welfare, or unable to spend money like the modern society is designed (less spending, less revenue for companies).

I wonder if the heavy ageism was more a one time thing. The entire tech industry blew up in the late 90s early 2000s and all of a sudden 20 year olds were handed endless VC money, of course they biased towards people their age when hiring. That isn't going to happen again, the huge players are established and founders are generally older. I started in 2012 and the same people who hired me when I was 20 are still around and are going to naturally bias towards people in their own range.

If anything I predict the ageism will be against young people, where anyone who got significant experience from 2000-2020 will be desired because they worked through those foundational years and never leveraged AI. Meanwhile a 22 year old who scraped through a CS degree will be viewed a bit dubiously.

Hmm, do we have any options then? Go work for the TSA maybe? Finding a cushy government job and securing a pension is clearly looking like a harder path now.

When I was 10 years old, I sat next to a traveling linoleum tile salesman on a plane who told me he used to be an aeronautical engineer, "before the bottom dropped out of the job market".

I've always remembered that, and never taken it for granted that software development will always be in high demand. It's been a hell of a run, but it will probably end someday.

Tough reading this sort of thing. :(

I don’t quite see the link to AI though?

The CV bot hellhole yes, but not how it replaced him? Is he saying nobody is hiring php devs anymore because of cursor & co? Presumably with 20 years experience he isn’t coding simple stuff so that doesn’t seem super likely

> something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years.

End of ZIRP. For a lot of companies, especially in the early stage world the math stopped mathing without free money

Regardless overall the message does seem directionally correct - society is going to need a solution pretty soon for people struggling to compete, AI or otherwise

Opinion: the end of ZIRP has a much greater influence on the job market than AI. No more free money means an entirely different incentive structure. There's a fair bit of "oops we overbuilt in the past assuming we'd have free money to hire more engineers". The interest rate thus mediates how and what we build (Conway's Law strikes again!).

Generative AI is a novelty that makes us crazy productive at certain tasks. But it doesn't yet seem to fundamentally change what we build or why. We just do it faster and sloppier with AI. It's a tactical tool to help you win, whereas interest rates define the rules of the game.

> Generative AI is a novelty that makes us crazy productive at certain tasks. But it doesn't yet seem to fundamentally change what we build or why. We just do it faster and sloppier with AI. It's a tactical tool to help you win, whereas interest rates define the rules of the game.

We're building some stuff that actively uses it—not (just) using it to write code, but integrating it into business processes.

This is both:

1) A far, far more valuable use of it than as a replacement for e.g. macros in your editor, assuming it worked as one might hope it would.

2) In practice so incredibly brittle, tightly-coupled, expensive, and slow to develop (not to mention some of the most boring work I've ever done in my 25 year career) relative to other options that the business could have embraced at any time in the last 15 years (but didn't because it took the hype of "AI" to gain activation energy for the project) all with no evident path toward any of that meaningfully improving, that I'm looking for an exit to another project that's ideally non-AI-related for when this one turns into a nightmare before eventually imploding and staining everyone involved's reputation, if not getting them fired. I reckon the nightmare phase is about six months out, for this one, and the implosion 12-18 out.

I expect similar stories are playing out all over the place.

The increased interest in using generative AI to replace high-paid workers may well have been caused by the end of ZIRP.

The end of ZIRP coincided with some reorganizing of the tax code that wasn't favorable to developers, as well. Both hit after a year or two of windfall profits and massive hiring due to covid.

AI is a very convenient way to tell that story as being about an ascendant new technology, rather than a post covid decline for the tech sector.

Not just end of ZIRP, not just Agentic AI / Vibe Coding being effective [1], but also:

"Software development is now considered a Section 174 R&D expenditure. This means it must be capitalized and amortized over 5 years (15 years for foreign software development)."

If any one of these were the case you'd have tens of thousands of previously gainfully employed swes out of work. But ALL of them became the case and pretty much in the last 3 years.

[1] - Let's just say I'm a believer

my parent corp let go many, maybe 20% of each of their various dev teams in early 2024, right after everyones productivity was starting to go 3-10x. instead of keeping everyone and dreaming way way bigger, it was more like 'get the same amount of stuff done with way less people.' now i have more experience and skills than ever before, but the ratio of applications to even getting a response much less an interview is lower than ever in the past. anecdotally, in my job searches in 2018 and 2020, roles that would say they had ~20 applicants within the first day of posting, now have like 1000+

> I don’t quite see the link to AI though?

Then open your eyes. It was exactly 2022 exactly as the article states.

I think your name is unduly handicapping you. Since it is only a single letter people reading your resume think you are being coy and trashing it.

On you resume, change your name to "Shawn Kay." Wait until you're doing HR paperwork to use your legal name.

Yep.

Some context from the blog post: > I turned to service apps this winter: doordash, instacart, uber eats. Their signup systems were incompatible with my full, legal, one-letter last name, and it took about 50 hours on the phone with doordash support in Malaysia and the background check provider in India to eventually get cleared to drive them. I was not able to get through on the other apps.

For sure the impact is not just limited to service apps.

If some piece of crap HR software won’t accept it, no one is going to chase you down to debug it. You’ll just end up in the no pile

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?

I'm a Collin with two l's. Not as uncommon as Gregg but it's never been a burden. I also don't bother correcting people unless it's happening a lot with the same person and someone I expect to interact with a lot.

Why would any parent name their child water with an extra L?

Nobody has ever misspelled my first name. They never misspelled the last one before "lite" beer appeared.

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.

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...

As an orphan that has wanted a last name change-- it's mostly because I am afraid of being locked out of my google account. Haven't I suffered enough?

Google has a surprising plethora of functioning, non-buggy tools for migrating an account's data to a different account. Do some research about what can't be migrated and make the change for everything else.

When you order Starbucks and say your name is “Gregg with three gs”, does the barista write something wild like “grgeg”?

This is completely insane. Anyone filtering out qualified applicants based on their names is messing up.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/07/man-named-kim-a...

This was an article about a dude adding Mr. in front of his name Kim in the CV to land a job.

This is insane but there is a lesson that even a small thing might affect your resume.

Not at all surprising. I used to work with someone whose first name could have been either male or female, so he always included his masculine middle name when signing email, etc.

Ideally the process is blind to avoid bias but that isn't how most people operate. In this case rejection is based upon his perceived behavior, because abbreviating a last name to a single letter to avoid identification is a lot more common than single letter last names.

I assure you they filter based on that and on your top level domain in your email address.

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

Also, haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but the most famous K is Josef K, of the 'The Trial'. Presumably that's why you chose it. But... you're hoisting a flag of dark cynicism. Reading your blog post, you have seemingly initiated a self-fulfilling prophecy. Getting out of your Kafka-esque nightmare could indeed start with changing your surname, at least informally.

Not any more. The most famous K is from Men In Black now.

https://meninblack.fandom.com/wiki/Agent_K

"the most famous"

I dunno, maybe there's some resume processing program that is used by most companies and an update to it started rejecting your name? Doesn't hurt to try.

Change name to an Indian one, problem solved!

Yeah well, if you choose unwisely, you may end up having a name typical for a lower caste, and then you'd get bullied by your "compatriots". Jokes aside, apparently it's a real thing — I've heard some nasty stories about devs of South-Asian descent with caste differences on the team.

Before you get appalled by this "news", let me remind you — the caste system in India has existed for over 3000 years and was formally abolished only in the 1950s. Also the long history of cuisine culture in China and Korea includes dog meat consumption. The point I'm trying to make — some aspects of Western culture might sound equally terrible to others, if not worse.

> some aspects of Western culture might sound equally terrible to others, if not worse.

I must say, nothing about European or North American culture sounds remotely as bad as Indians importing their birthright social hierarchy system into our organizations.

> nothing about European or North American culture sounds remotely as bad

Setting aside the sweeping generalization you moved the point on, making it look like as if all Indians support or perpetuate the caste system (which by itself a preposterous thought), are you sure about what you said? Aren't you forgetting the colonialism, forced religios conversions, military interventions, scientific racism and eugenics theories?

"Our culture" and technology have a long history of systematically imposing bad shit in the region. Rohingya massacres made by western social media through algorithmic amplification of hate speech for the sake of user engagement is just one of the examples, and that happened like yesterday. So like, wtf are you even talking about?

Unfortunately there's probably something in this. "People don't discriminate based on name" probably belongs in the "falsehoods programmers believe about names" list.

There's lots of evidence of recruiters and sometimes AIs discriminating against female names, "foreign" names, low-status names and so on.

Full remote PHP Single letter name

I assure you the problem here is not “AI” The problem is that the world has changed and some of your prior assumptions are no longer valid (full remote is very challenging right now, property is the path to generational wealth with notable exceptions which you are experiencing, weird names are cool and hip among cool and hip people but that might not be who you find yourself among). You’ve painted yourself into a corner, change some self-imposed boundaries and the corner goes away.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s a word for doing something repeatedly and being baffled at a negative response when the problem is so blindingly obvious to an outsider.

Maybe the word is just stuck. Many of the self-imposed problems seem intractable, but are not.

Maybe a step back is in order. What has been tried is obviously not working. There are ~10 items in play and solving for all ~10 is impossible. Stack rank the items desired and start checking them off?

I suppose I’d start by getting a job come hell or high water. go by a reasonable sounding name (reserve legal name for paperwork) 50% of initial screening is rejecting the name (your hell with onboarding proved that nobody’s name parsing gets it without help, in job interviews you get dropped silently). There is zero overlap between hip companies who appreciate a cool name and php.

Focus resume detail on current languages and frameworks (see above re php)

Start applying for in-person in palatable places. Land and negotiate enough remote to stay sane.

Sell cabin (need cash, and it’s not cashflow positive) You didn’t mention where your mom is living but you have equity somewhere. Cash it out to move forward with the free capital.

Finish remodel or sell (needs cash to be cash flow positive)

You haven’t been displaced you’ve experienced a change of the state of the world and you’ve failed to adapt…

I’m going to leave the next line as an exercise for the reader. A hint though: adaptation is necessary for survival.

I saw the same things you did and thought the same things you did. I made it to more than his salary in 1/3rd the time - from 2013 til 2019 is what it took me to get to $225k on almost purely frontend work despite being fired twice - and I've been vacation for three years now. I anticipate when I look for a job again I'll have no trouble. But I don't insist on remote, I didn't change my name to something edgy and impractical (if he was born to that name I apologize but that seems very unlikely, I've never seen or heard of an inherited single-letter last name in any culture), I have updated my skills as time has passed, and I'm not just building projects to look like I'm keeping up - I'm building real things I'm passionate about and which people use.

Moreover, after 3 years of work from 2019 I had saved enough to quit and go on vacation indefinitely. I haven't looked for work since and am on my second multi-month trip to Europe. It's not that hard. People are just absolutely trash with money. I didn't inherit anything and nobody is helping me pay for anything, not a penny. People are just bad with money, and in my opinion the situation this guy has described in the post gives off every conceivable red flag of someone who's terrible at both financial planning and career planning.

while i have a BACKGROUND in php, i have not been seeking php work and havent been working fulltime in php since like 2017. Since then i've been fullstack in typescript. i've been seeking typescript roles in apps & vr.

i have not been trying the same thing over and over. I have been continually trying something new every month or two of the search, seeing what works.

I have landed some interviews which was hard as hell, making it as far as fourth rounds, but no offers. I think you did not read the article but its ok.

I took a look at your resume to see if I would have relevant work for you but doesn't seem like it.

Maybe having vibecoding listed as a skill on your resume is a problem?

Alarm bells also go off when I see "Github (advanced)"

While you are powerless to change it I would also be concerned reviewing this resume as with the sole exception of your consultancy your longest tenure anywhere is just two years.

thanks. this is the fifth iteration of my resume in this last year's search. im clearly trying to push for ai-coding, as i think i was often overlooked for being too 'trad'. in reality im all-in on ai.

I am not sure if this will help you, but have an extended, deep conversation with ChatGPT about your resume. Tell it who you are, what you excel at, and list projects and technologies. Then, paste a couple of the job postings that did not work for you.

This might sound silly to you, but it absolutely works, because it will distill your experience better, ask you to re-arrange and generalize, and more importantly, it is far superior to us in finding unique key word combinations that work.

ive done this with chatgpt and claude

Look I don't want to pile on, but I sent the latest version of your resume through ChatGPT with o3 and it pointed out several things to fix or improve about the current version of your resume, which as a human who has interviewed 100s of candidates I mostly agree with. Hopefully this is helpful.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68240746-14ec-8006-bc64-44c7a04d71...

Look I don't want to be rude, but your resume screams "Dear AI Overlords I beg of you, please hire me! See? I did all the AI things to please you! Please don't abandon me, sniff"

It's downright comical.

My biggest problem with your resume is that it feels oddly vague and empty... "API development"? Come on.

20 years of full stack development experience? React is the de facto standard and as of today is 12 years old and it's absent. Absent! NodeJS? Absent!

Now think about what the key advantage of a highly experienced engineer is. Of course! It's the experience!

What you really should be doing is building a meta resume that contains all marketable job skills and experiences. Because you're experienced and know a lot of things, the resume will be too long, so what you need to do is tailor to the job posting and cut out all the irrelevant parts to stay under two pages.

Since you are so obsessed with AI, you could even let the AI cut your resume down (don't let it write new things) and then just send it off. What you 100% certainly shouldn't do is let it write the resume itself.

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.

There are a lot of small companies with home built software they need maintained. Go to the small businesses with the largest building's in your area. They have something whipped up they need fixed, expanded, etc.

I suggest putting vibecoding into the search bar on HN or YouTube to look at the critical side of how it's perceived, I'm not a professional coder but based on hanging out here it seems somewhat looked down on by some? I'm guessing it's like how loads of people use chatgpt to draft emails but would prefer you didn't know or think it's a positive (again I'm not a professional coder, so best analogy I had)

This was a good, albeit sobering, read.

Advice to other commenters here on HN. Before clicking 'add comment', ask yourself:

- If I post from a non-empathetic stance, to what extent is my lack of empathy a strategy to avoid experiencing discomfort?

- If I post from a contradicting or fact-checking stance, to what extent is my skepticism motivated by a desire to feel safer in the world?

- If I post from a relativising or contextualizing stance, to what extent is my reframing driven by the fear that it could happen to me?

You don't have to ask yourself any of these things; but they are hard-won tools I've gained through a lot of work on myself, and they have been of benefit to me. May they be of benefit to you as well.

Very obvious, but--you're good people.

Thank you for these great questions.

thanks

This is an interesting perspective. I've sort of intentionally pushed towards working where AI isn't so useful (physical workflows that are heavily dependent on inputs from humans—scientists in particular) but my experience nonetheless has been discovering how useless AI is in so many ways I envisioned it replacing people by now. It's extremely useful in very narrow bands of application, and outside of that, it's often more of a distraction than an advantage.

I have a hard time believing it's making people that much more productive. It certainly helps me here and there with very specific low-level implementations, but the really important, higher-level work I do? The way I decide which low-level work to do in the first place? Not really, no. I have to interface with very non-technical people who need bespoke solutions to their problems. I need to tie implementations for them together with existing systems that are not standardized, not well-known, and often poorly documented. I need to consider how the life cycle of these solutions can integrate with that of others, how it fits into the workflow and capacity of myself and people I work with, etc.

AI can't do any of that properly right now, and I don't expect that it will any time soon. If I tried to get it to work, I'd likely spend as much time fighting Claude as I'd save. I don't know... What are people doing that they can actually be replaced? Or that companies could decide they actually need fewer people?

My suspicion is that with money being more expensive to borrow, teams are staying lean because we were absurdly inefficient as an industry for the better part of a decade. That's not an AI thing, but a staying closer to actual means thing.

I 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.

> 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.

There are also quite a number of medical device and pharmaceutical companies on the east coast (based in upstate NY here), along with defense industry contractors. So, there are some more options.

medical devices i am slightly more sympathetic to, as a user of a DMD. pharmaceutical companies, only slightly higher than "defense" companies. they exist in practice so that few may benefit from the misery of many.

IME, medical device work is nice: they need high quality and they are willing and able to pay for it.

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.

i applied at a web dev role at SU, in-office, making less than what i made in like 2009, with skills that are frankly below me. custom written cover letter. job been posted for months. they just hit me with the 'no thanks'

Your resume might need to be rewritten then. Schools do pay very poorly, thats an undisputable fact, but their benefit of free tuition for you and your kids is pretty good.

I would reiterate that most jobs in syracuse are basically C, C++ or Java. The only real web shop is TCG Player, I think theyre C# and god sold to ebay so its the same high competititon. Equitable might have some stuff, not sure how things are going there but they are a java shop. Out to rochester you get a few more web places. But most of the web jobs even are corpro enterprise jobs, they probably dont have a ton of need for php or javascript front end really. Theres plenty of cloud out in Rome. Rochester has more than syracuse, from syracuse its doable, I know people that did that commute.

> I even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work

This to me is likely the issue. I suspect if he was willing to move and work on-site, he'd have been back in the saddle quite quickly. My forced career moves also all involved a nationwide job search, and corresponding move.

Still, I believe the struggle, and worry that we'll all be there in the next few years.

I stumbled upon this line as well.

And then I realized that he started with just getting home after driving 6 hours of uber to make $200, which didn't really square with on-site work being rock bottom.

On site work is exhilarating at the right place

Exhilarating on site work often doesn't line up with needing to be a full time caretaker for family, unfortunately.

Employment, in general, doesn't line up with needing to be a full time caretaker for whoever. SWE is a curious exception, sometimes, in some companies, but the vast, vast majority of the workforce goes to a place to work, then hires a nurse/nanny/caretaker to fit their other obligations.

I said what I said. it still beats going into in an office

You think doing gig work for pennies and slowly losing your dignity is better than just going into an office?

I'm sorry but the absolute privilege of the author here, goodness...

You sure about that?

I also can't find in-office work here because there just aren't as many opportunities locally, so I work full time for minimum wage to scrape my bills. Then I code on the weekend.

No dignity lost, but certainly lost my faith in software leadership.

My impression from TFA is not about lack of opportunity, which I would understand. The author simply refuses to work in an office.

I'm sure if he wasn't also a caretaker, losing control of his ability to schedule around being a caretaker wouldn't be "rock bottom".

His life would be much "easier" if he didn't have to be his mother's caretaker. But this is America, so he has to, so he's fucked.

for sure it would be much easier if it was just me to consider in the picture

I live near Boston, but far enough away that commuting daily is impractical. Instead, I go in once a week.

Perhaps you can focus on applying to jobs where you can show up in person occasionally, but not daily? It helps significantly to have a face-to-face relationship with the people I work with.

Yup. The trust issues around overemployment or straight up fraudulent candidates have made remote work rare and have lead to companies offering a premium for hybrid or fully in person roles. I don't think WFH only is line you can afford to draw anymore if you're on the ropes and leveraged.

ive had tons of in-office dev jobs, but have primarily been working online since like 2012. not only has it been way better for my health and sanity but my productivity is way way higher. the thought of going back to an office is PTSD inducing, a big step back

I worry about this, having moved away from a tech center for a better QoL. My current fallback plan if I can't find remote work on the next search is to look for hybrid jobs in NYC, which is a long-but-less-than-a-day's train ride from here, and to try to negotiate being in the office for either just a couple days a week or doing like a week on and a week off or whatever. It'd eat into salary to have to pay for somewhere to stay in the city for sure, but it'd be better than nothing.

> The trust issues around overemployment

I don’t think it’s really trust issues. Even If a candidate was fully honest that he’s planning to work two full time jobs, employers would still be against it. Even if the candidate was fully honest AND could somehow guarantee that his output would be 100% and he’d never miss a meeting, employers would STILL be against it. Full time white collar employers just feel entitled to exclusivity, that other kinds of employers just don’t seem to care about.

it's not entitlement. you only have so much energy per day. it also has been shown that the longer you work the lower your productivity gets. two full time jobs would be at least 70 hours per week, and even if you work 6 days a week, then that's almost 12 hours per day, leaving you with 12 hours for sleep and the rest of your life. that's barely manageable. i am half as productive when i am tired. you can do that if the work does not require a lot of concentration or energy and is low stakes. but not as a software developer.

I don't want to argue the validity of AI taking jobs, but I really miss the tech job market in mid 00s to early 10s so much.

It was genuinely such an exciting time back then. People were still optimistic about the web and new platform like mobile. There was so much to build, yet relativity few people working in tech. And those of us who were weird enough to work in tech loved it. It felt like almost every week there was some new startup asking around for tech talent and they'd take almost anyone they could get. And when you joined you built cool things that had never been built before.

Today tech feel so stale. People who work in tech are not techies, but just see it as a career. There's so few novel things to build that SWE has basically become a profession of plumbing already built libraries and SaaS tools together. Even startups feel so much more mature from the get go. Back then startups were often bootstrapped projects by a dude in his bedroom. Today before a single line of code is written startups already have CEOs, CTOs, CFOs and several million dollars of investment.

Perhaps this guy should have kept up with trends, but 20 years ago the dude would have had a job at a company where he was respected greatly for being the dude who could throw together an e-commerce store in a few days or something. He probably would have been building genuinely new stuff with a team of other people who loved tech.

I feel terrible for this guy, but he really has stacked the deck against himself by moving to a rural area and refusing (or being unable) to work "on-site". He is up against every new grad and every laid off FAANG programmer clinging to the notion that they should be able to work remotely. To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of remote work but I recognize that many power dynamics have shifted in the last few years.

I could offer a number of critiques about things but instead, I'll encourage him to go back and un-delete his AI vlog content as even if he feels the ground has moved, I would likely find his interest in this topic as a positive thing. I would also recommend he move his tech vlogs to someplace where the topic was the focus rather than blending it into other important parts of his life.

Am I a bad person for laughing when I realized he ranked "Wordpress theme developer" above the "rock-bottom" of applying for a non-remote job?

(Typing this from an office.)

It feels like we're living two separate lives when it comes to remote work. If my office was a 5-10 minute walk then in-office could be fine. I used to longboard to the office and I didn't have too many complaints. But after getting 2+ hours of my day back every day, an extra hour of sleep, gas money, not having to meal prep or get take-out, and work among my at-home comforts not under wight fluorescent light and an oppressive HVAC it's really hard to imagine an in-office job getting preference over basically any remote job.

I did the hour commute thing, I hated it even when it was the norm.

I hear you for sure. I personally have the luxury of working remotely on a semi-regular basis when I'm not on site at a client's location and I love it. I have worked remotely on and off for 20 years and it is not all gravy though. It does get kind of lonely sometimes. On the flip side, in my early career, I worked with a one way daily commute of 90 minutes or 3 hours a day! That was sure a kick in the crotch.

But isn't that a textbook self-caused problem? You could live in the city and have a 5-10 minute walking commute. But you choose to live somewhere with a lower cost of living, more space, etc.. and then complain about the commute. It feels like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, and (for OP) it's predictably backfiring.

I mean I do live in the city, 10 minutes walking doesn't actually cover that much distance. It gets me to the end of my street basically. I'm genuinely struggling to think of any US city where you wouldn't have to move any time you changed jobs to maintain a short walking commute.

Yeah of course, it depends on your city. But you're not going to have a two hour commute within city limits.

My city is conveniently on a quasi-island, so the sprawl is naturally limited -- if you get a place somewhere near the center it's a 20-minute walk to all of the "ends".

> But you're not going to have a two hour commute within city limits

"Within city limits" is where things get fuzzy in the giant metroplexes of the US. I've got family that live in Arlington and work in Plano. It's an hour and a half most days. They never really leave "the city" despite driving across several different cities. Just one massive sprawl.

They aren't the only people I know who have commutes like this. A friend lives in Josephine and works in Addison. I know people who live in Anna and work downtown.

Isn’t the cause the unnecessary requirement of onsite? This forces parent into the least of two bad options.

A cause not in your control is irrelevant. The industry is pretty clearly moving to RTO, and for cases where remote is possible, several workers in a third-world country for a fraction of your pay is clearly a better value prop.

The things you can control are 1) where you live, and 2) where you work. It's sounding more and more like the options are "live somewhere cheap and make pennies" or "live somewhere expensive and make decent salary".

People like OP stuck in the "remote or death" mindset aren't going to have much luck moving forward.

It seems common for people to struggle with something that's, to simplify, bad about the world, and to get many responses along the lines of "do x differently to deal with it." These responses may help the person or may not, and I'm completely in favor of responding pragmatically to your circumstances, but a fundamental function of the exchange should also be to change minds on the thing that's bad about the world so this happens less in the future. The individual complaints can be the trigger for that change, or can help it along, but instead usually get mired in responses which suggest individual solutions. I don't think that's smart for us in the long run.

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.

I was just offered a job in Capital One (the bank) in Mexico city(mexican living in a cheap state in Mexico). I declined because I already have a remote job and I prefer that.

But, if i didn't have that luxury, I would not hesitate to sort my stuff to go where the work is.

People that refuse to work on site and instead remain unemployed remind me of the saying "we've done nothing different and we are all out of ideas" .

Just 20 years ago we HAD TO go where the jobs were. We've become very entitled.

Okay, I've read the whole article. His dad was a drug addict who is now dead. It sucks to have a bad parent. And his mother is disabled and can't really help him. I see now where all the disgruntlement and negativity comes from. And why it is so hard for him to live a life. It's always is hard when one (or in an even worse case both) of your parents are bad. Not only such parents do not pass over their knowledge of life and wealth to their children, they actually take from them. This really sucks, I'm sorry. The man is living this life on a higher difficulty. I feel for him.

I'm feeling similar. Shitty people who are supposed to be your caretakers permanently reduce the brain cycles needed for other things. The damage is a lifelong condition, like diabetes or cancer. Everything that's their fault in an unrelated timeframe becomes your fault when the causal link isn't obvious enough to outsiders. They just assume you should know better because you passed an arbitrary age. Interpersonal relationships suffer (I empathize with the lack of a professional network). It drives desperation and cynicism.

Responders are going to address the lack of job success. The advice is good and actionable. But sometimes no one "normal" (non-therapeutic/paid for) is there to listen to you and the urge to get things off one's chest becomes unbearable. Like the urge becomes so strong you just have to scream it to the world to get relief from anxiety. The negativity is the inevitable result, and it's understandable. It's catharsis and a need being fulfilled. I hope things turn out alright for him.

I feel for all who feel obsolete and unneeded. The only solution I found for myself was to switch from implementing other people’s ideas to implementing mine. It’s a luxury some cannot afford, but I honestly think it’ll be necessary for many to think long and hard about an idea they can monetize. I wrote about it here: https://www.cleverthinkingsoftware.com/programmers-will-be-r...

TBH I much prefer your linked post to the OP for its positive tone and outlook. Thanks for sharing.

PHP is his only language, right? He's in the same situation as Perl-only developers a couple of decades ago.

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.

Damn, the last part of this comment was such an epiphany, thank you!

I've been off socials and on forums for 8+ years now for the same reason. I share similar sentiment as Bizzy's sibling reply. I say these things because lately I've been thinking about lot about dead internet theory and how strongly some believe it.

One of the most profound realizations I've had lately is that the perception of the medium of communication itself is a well that can be poisoned with artificial interactions. Major empahsis on perception. The meer presence of artifical can immediately taint real interactions; you don't need a majority to poison the well.

How many spam calls does it take for you to presume spam? How many linkedin autoreply ai comments does it take to presume all comments are ai? How many emails before you immediately presume phishing? How many rage baiting social posts do you need to see before you believe the entire site is composed of synthetic engagement? How many tinder bots do you need to interact with before you feel the entire app is dead? How many autodeny job application responses until you assume the next one is a ghost job posting? How many interactions with greedy people does it take to presume that it's human nature?

This is beautiful. One thing I'd like to add to the list is:

How many AI cheaters do you need to catch on the technical phone screening interview to incorporate a habit of doing IRL CAPTCHA challenges?

It used to be that you wouldn't be aware of what is going on in RU-net [1] or PTT [2] because you simply were not a Russian speaker or you weren't someone living in Taiwan speaking Chinese (yes modern Taiwanese people use a CLI app to login to a BBS in 2025, you can also do this with a web browser but where is the fun in that). So you simply were unaware that they even existed probably or if you do, you are like me and can only kind of speak Russian and get some of the memes, or you simply know about PTT because your Taiwanese friend told you about it.

But now, everything is bifurcated within languages because there is orders of magnitude more content being generated and that content is algorithmically delivered to your eyes and ears based on your interactions with whatever platform you use (e.g., instagram, reddit) and maybe even across multiple platforms. So you likely don't see anything related to Kim Kardashian because you aren't flipping channels anymore through what is essentially "static" content. Instead you are scrolling a feed designed for you and you have never indicated you wanted to keep up with the Kardashians based on what you like and dislike in your feed.

And so I think this bifurcation is combined with this kind of oily, artificial interactions you are talking about, and that makes the internet feel dead. Because the second you have a live experience, like going to a jazz bar without your phone and just hanging out and listening, everything feels so alive and real and amazing.

This all reminds me of these series of commercials by AT&T that were called like, the "You will" commercials or something like that and they were narrated by Tom Selleck [3]. The commercials show all these ways to use technology, that AT&T promised to deliver to you, to connect with both information and each other. Jenna Elfman sees her baby on a video phone, some kid sits in an online lecture and talks to his teacher, some dude sends a fax from the beach. All these things are of course possible today, but most of the time it really doesn't make you feel connected. I want to hold my baby not see it on video phone. I want to interact with my students in class not respond to their comments on some internet forum the university pays for. I want to discuss with my colleagues and build cool stuff together not sit in my office while they hang out at the beach. Everything promised in the AT&T "You will" commercials now exists. But none of it fulfills the promise that AT&T was making, that this would all make us feel more connected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ-667CEdo

Not only PHP: "modern technologies I've gone on to learn and be experienced with in more recent years."

Although, there's a Lisp-inspired PHP called Phel: https://phel-lang.org/

And PHP typing with version 7.4.0: https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.ph...

PHP isn't terrible any more. Necessarily, anyway. I wrote a PR for Symfony last year, it was quite a nice experience.

But if the only language he posts about is PHP, I think the source if his hiring problems is clear.

s/PHP/PHP 7 or Hack\/HHVM/

PHP is now good enough that I think you can trivially learn another language if you know PHP.

That's not really the case with Perl. And I love Perl, I really do. But it's just too wacky, too wild-west, too out there.

PHP is basically C# at this point with a bit more runtime bugs.

Yeah, modern PHP is very different from the old ugh. Still not my favourite language, but it's decent now. Just another day at the office.

But what do you think — was the blogger we're discussing was on the forefront of the PHP change (rewriting the old ugh code at his last job), or is his idea of PHP the old style? Just based on the way he writes, what do you guess?

Doesn't sound like it, no.

> ...when they learn I was developing advanced php web apps when they were in diapers. As if that has any negative relevance towards _the modern technologies i’ve gone on to learn and be experienced with in more recent years_.

(Emphasis mine)

I worked with PHP back in 2014 and nobody was building anything in PHP that could be called advanced by today's standards. That language barely had decent backend framework options and we're talking just 10 years ago.

If this person has been working for 20 years, they were definitely working at the time when MD5 hashing was considered security in the PHP community and the best technology that community could muster at the time was the horrifying architecture of WordPress.

I'm sorry, I'm sure this fella is a good engineer but you could not convince me that back in the day PHP had anything going on for it except for low barrier of entry.

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

Don't forget that Facebook used PHP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM

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.

I don't think that is racist at all.

A very good friend started an outsourcing firm here in Mexico 10 years ago. We (mexicans) were the cheaper alternative for US companies building software solutions.

Well, a couple of years ago they outsourced a lot of jobs from Mexico to Vietnam, because they were 1/3rd of the cost of a software dev in here . We were Out-Outsourced!

It's the fact of the market, and will continue unless the US government intervenes somehow.

I have been on the "lucky" receiving side of the issue. I've worked remotely for several US companies. They pay half of a US Director/VP of Eng for one; And I earn 3x the normal Mexico salary.

And as you say, right now , it doesn't make sense to pay US salaries for PHP development. Shit, I've outsourced Sr. QA automation to Argentina at $10 usd the hour (via upwork).

Perl also destroyed itself by growing an arrogant community that would eagerly race to be the first to shout "RTFM" at a modest inquiry by someone new to the language.

That was not my experience (at least with perlmonks) back when I used Perl, but maybe I'm mis-remembering things.

I think part of Perl's downfall was that TMTOWTDI became too many ways to do one thing, and it was too easy to create terse, unreadable code. Basically, the opposite direction of modern concepts like "idiomatic Go".

I'm sad that Perl is dying while people are still writing fucking bash scripts in production code. (Perl is still better than that!)

Perl was great! But perl came and went.

Shell scripts are forever. So far.

Perl is still here, lurking in the corner.

Huh. As someone who worked in Perl a very long time ago, my strong impression was always that Perl died almost entirely due to Perl 6/Second System Syndrome; Perl 5.x became, implicitly, the already-outdated thing, and yet Perl 6 wouldn't meaningfully exist for like two decades.

There was that, too. But I remember people being happy to use the latest Perl 5 and expecting it to be continually updated (which is still is today). Perl 6 was considered a different language altogether at best, and vapourware at worst.

Still, I can definitely see someone new to the language thinking Perl 5 was a dead end.

i have a BACKGROUND in php in the caveman times, but i have been working fullstack typescript/GCP since 2017

I looked at your resume and here are my thoughts as a hiring manager for what it’s worth.

Get rid of the generative AI, VR, LLM augmented stuff from the top of the resume.

Make your typescript experience more prominent. Talk more about your experience with popular stacks and technologies in general.

Come up with a last name, the resume doesn’t have to be your legal name.

Agree. I think all the AI stuff need to be removed. Are you seeing lots of open positions asking for people use AI to code? And if you are applying for VR, make resume VR oriented. If applying for web development, make resume focus on for web development.

No need trying to show everything you know and every experience which could be overwhelming and the HR probably will not feel you are a good match to their narrow definition.

My 2 cents. It was light on detail. Not a big enough word count to hit all the recruiter keywords and nothing to back up the claims made.

Obviously a resume can be too long, but i think you need some (well chosen) technical specifics on paper. Intro and current role should be most of the first page, everything else on page two. Two pages is fine.

It's brutal out there. I'm currently 36 years years old. I got laid off in March last year from an outsourcing shop because no work was coming, mostly working with PHP, with some Javascript and python sprinkled in there. I thank the Lord for not having a wife and children, because it would have been so painful watching them suffer because of me, and I thank my parents for helping me float through the tough times.

I got a small leyline around September with a part-time job doing Wordpress stuff for a former client. No days off, zero security, just barely surviving month after the other. Fortunately, things are turning around for me! I'm starting a new full-time job next month. It's pretty well paid too, hybrid role, so I will be able to rebuild my savings, contribute to my pension fund, keep up with my balooning mortgage, etc.

The Lord is indeed merciful! I really hope I can make it work, because I get maybe an interview every few months or so.

I think the most brutal part that no one talks about is just how many scams are out there that target unemployed people. I tried doing freelancing for a while, but I never got paid even once. Contracts don't even matter because I don't have the muscle to enforce them. I almost fell for a bunch of scam job interviews/offers as well. I think I broke into tears after an interview that seemingly went well, then I got forwarded some forms to fill, one of them asking for my credit card information for payment.

It's beyond my powers to help him, but I hope things turn around for the OP as well.

I've been looking for 18 months and the scams are starting to infest everything, especially in the past 3-4 months.

It's getting to where I just bail out of any application that asks for something unusual like the name of my high school or what kind of people I'm attracted to (and I've seen the latter multiple times now).

> I own three houses

> I could just about manage covering all the expenses

You put literally all your income into non-liquid assets, taking on significant debt to do so. As you said, you had <5% of your income leftover at the end of the years. This is a lot of why you're in such a bind now. Even just held as cash, that money would be available to help you through this difficult time. Investing in an index fund would also have been fine, and would again be available to you now.

Landlording is a tough game. Don't you think?

There seems to be a perception, actually particularly on here, that being a landlord is a gateway to magic free money, and maybe a lack of consideration that it is basically a _job_, working with risky rather illiquid assets.

I kind of thought this belief was a young-person thing, though; I'm a little surprised to see someone my age going all-out on it, because they were presumably around for the great financial crisis, when, ah, bad things happened to a lot of overleveraged amateur landlords.

I am cutting my experience in the CV to show only last 10 years. In my mind there is some unreasonable expectation that in 20 years you should be able to show research papers or patents, have a network of friends who will refer you, then show leadership skills, i.e. manage people (successfully), and to be a genius who can solve leetcode hards in 20 mins. I do have a substantial number of OSS work but that rarely was of interest to anyone.

> I do have a substantial number of OSS work but that rarely was of interest to anyone.

This was a sad reality for me. I spent thousands of hours putting my heart and soul into OSS projects that people loved and used.. and for what? When I graduated university, recruiters never clicked the links. The companies I joined treated me like a baby who never worked on anything. I switched gears and grinded Leetcode to land a FAANG job instead, but I can't help but feel my engineering craft regressed in all this time.

There's you who insisted on a FAANG job to make 6x more than you probably need and then there's me living on 1.5k a month because I refuse to do anything that feels more than 1% useless (i.e. most things in the enterprise). I'm not saying my attitude is better than yours, but I do think you didn't really need to grind leetcode if you really didn't want to do useless things

OP, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

Stop being so different and try to match what companies are looking for.

Remote only.

Single letter surname.

This constraint, that constraint, you’re getting the answer you are telling the market to give you.

Yes there are now significant barriers you face: x months not in a relevant role, laid off, 20 years in the industry without a management role.

If you’re pitching yourself against people who have 3-5 years experience, will work 50-60 hour weeks coz early in career and lifestyle unencumbered, it’s not going to go your way.

That means you have to go the extra mile to fit what is wanted.

And yes, that likely means significant drop in salary / attractiveness of role / commute etc.

Maybe there just isn’t the work where you are and you will need to move, maybe your mother too.

Talk to people in the industry you know and trust about this, not HN.

I’ve been in similar situations, currently in a very tech role at 62, but that’s not usual.

Wish you the best

20+ years in the industry without significant leadership of one kind or another (either being a tech lead/staff engineer or manager) makes someone very hard to hire.

I’ve seen this described as “2 years of experience, 10 times”

Staff engineer is incredibly hard to attain in a lot of companies outside of FAANG as there are so few positions - sometimes even 10 year old companies only recently create the position. They want you to become a manager instead. IME you stay Senior for a very very long time but basically do the job of Staff

This is an interesting , and often heard, take. I wonder if its mainly a US thing? I fit this description but not had problems getting jobs, and know others in the same situation. None of us expect top dollar though, and we probably (hopefully ; ) ) give a vibe of "they might be older than me but more likely to be a help than a hindrance in my team" to managers.... Personally I think its short-sighted to dismiss those who shun / ignore leadership opportunities. There are many great experienced engineers who appear to be coasting but actually do keep up with skills, and are very productive with no drama. 20+ years experience makes you avoid blind alleys and over-complexity, deal well with messy legacy codebases, and learn some social skills along the way ;)

This is absolutely a US thing, but even so, if you're a nice person, you can get away with a lot more than if you're not. I have heard before that you can be a successful engineer if you are two of brilliant, affable, and diligent (pick any two). Just being nice goes a long way.

However, note that being a nice person combined with knowing your way around legacy codebases is a form of leadership in itself. Not one that we reward well, sadly, but if your colleagues have a chat with you (which they like to do anyway) and then save hours of work, that's leadership.

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”.

thank you.

> Workers [...] will continue to resort to more desperate means over time [...] This is an inevitability [...] that we are rapidly approaching

And how does one prepare for this inevitable inflection point? Buy a plot of land and hide from civilization? Prepper stuff? Buy lots of guns? Learn to barter?

I obviously can’t win over someone as receptive to the idea of change as yourself, but on the off chance a passerby sees this and actually is interested in different perspectives or growing their knowledge, here’s what you can do to not be as blindingly trolling as this commenter here:

* Read more books about systems and history. Understand that the times we’re in now aren’t as novel or unique as we’re lead to believe, and that we’ve solved worse problems before.

* Join local community-based organizations. Donate your time and expertise to those who need but cannot afford it.

* Learn different perspectives and backgrounds from others outside your immediate social circles or class. Spend more time with people who work more than you do, for less than you earn. This will teach you that many of your plights are shared, and that you have lots of allies already.

* Study systems. No single solution will fix all problems, no innovation will lift all boats. Changes reverberate, having unintended consequences. Failure to understand systems is failing to remedy or maintain them.

* Accept you cannot fix these issues alone. It will take time, it will take collaborative effort, and it will take compromise.

Many a healthy above median earner is unaware of the privileged shortcut to capital class available to them. Spend a third of your income for nine years and you're there. Make that a quarter to finish in six years. Especially for dual income people without dependents, that's quite feasible.

Not diminish your analysis. I just hope it adds a bit of perspective.

There is no “shortcut” to vast wealth, because if there were then everybody would be using it as the default and it would no longer be a shortcut. What are often described as “shortcuts” are highly situational opportunities with lower-than-typical risk, which by virtue of announcing them to others means the opportunity has passed and the risk has increased.

For there to be vast amounts of wealth hoarded by a few, there must also be vast amounts of exploited people desperately getting by on table scraps. There is a finite supply of wealth, and if we do not build systems to redistribute it equitably then it will always and inevitably by hoarded by the few lacking a moral compass or basic empathy for their fellow man.

Thank you for you interaction.

> There is no “shortcut” to vast wealth, because if there were then everybody would be using it as the default and it would no longer be a shortcut.

Absolutely. I was not writing about shortcuts to vast wealth though.

> What are often described as “shortcuts” are highly situational opportunities with lower-than-typical risk, which by virtue of announcing them to others means the opportunity has passed and the risk has increased.

Of course the shortcuts are highly situational opportunities with lower-than-typical risk. "above median earner", "healthy", "dual income", "without dependents" are situational to a large extent. Yes, that means some people have more agency.

Some will play the personal finance game smart. They realise the smart way is to focus their game away from the situational, to where they have most control: on the expenses side.

Where we disagree is about announcing a shortcut to wealth equaling it disappearing. Not every informed actor decides to take the shortcut. Not all the situationally blessed want to ruthlessly focus on expenses.

> For there to be vast amounts of wealth hoarded by a few, there must also be vast amounts of exploited people desperately getting by on table scraps.

I share this analysis.

> There is a finite supply of wealth, and if we do not build systems to redistribute it equitably then it will always and inevitably by hoarded by the few lacking a moral compass or basic empathy for their fellow man.

Redistribution of wealth is a tricky problem. It requires a delicate balance between individual agency and collective force. Push too far towards either and humans will be suffering unnecessarily.

It is nature that demands labor for survival, not society.

Society has been gradually diminishing that demand, and may theoretically be in the position to remove it entirely, but such a state of affairs has never existed.

It's not AI's fault that this website can't save cookie preferences.

I believe other factors are also involved, such as having the necessary skills for software development.

Ok so it isn't just my browser then. I thought it was weird that no matter how many times I click "only necessary" the popup keeps coming back.

Hey nice - the substack cookie dialog went into an infinite loop when i clicked 'only necessary' cookies.

Are you in Firefox? I just had the same loop of click allow all cookies over and over again until only necessary made it disappear!

Firefox and ublock origin.

Are there any other browsers left? :)

I’m on safari mobile and ended up in an endless loop. I had to use reader mode to get out of it.

Well it does the same for "accept all"

I think it's interesting to ask ourselves if there are still jobs for everyone that pay well, and where people can get the training to do.

Like the article mentions, the cornerstone of US based society is that everyone needs to do something that provides value to others. Yet we constantly seek to scale and automate, to lower our dependence on others.

There must come a day where, you don't need others, but they need you. Then what?

You'll become a servant for the people who have some wealth, and they'll feel thrilled to be able to order you around.

It's no wonder that applications don't work. I can confirm this, but I just quit wasting time on them, went via contacts network.

What surprised me is that the OP had no reaction for personal messages.

I have seen people in similar circumstances that have enormous personal blind spots for issues that show up in interviews and with past colleagues. It's much easier to blame AI rather than admit or address those. If you have 20 years of experience and no one wants to work with you again, that is telling.

I've worked primarily with offshore devs. I can't say that's been great for a network and if I'd known how bad of an impact it would have on my professional development due to effectively zero network, I'd have avoided it entirely. Healthcare IT is dominated by offshore so beware.

i got words of encouragement but no one had leads

Consider that that is what most people tell past co-workers who they don't want to refer

You likely need blunt feedback from someone you can trust in the industry

4 or 5 of them told me they were in the same situation, highly regarded people i never thought that could happen to

I guess you missed this part: "manually messaging EACH of my 250 linkedin contacts asking if they had any leads"

I did read it. What did I get wrong?

You said you went via contacts network. Is this not his contacts network?

Did you mean something else, as in LI itself is fruitless and to reach out directly to past colleagues?

Yes, correct. I went to my contacts, not only in LI. And he writes he PMed all of his ones, and it didn't work, which is surprising to me.

What if you're not the type to maintain relationships w/ former coworkers?

Anyone I once had the personal contact info of - which could now be stale - is also a contact on LI. It just seems like a less weird venue to hit up someone you haven't spoken to since you last worked some position. That's also been largely the case when old coworkers reach out to me.

The key thing is he did hit up what could be defined as his network and got nothing.

I guess you missed the 3rd sentence of the 3 sentence post.

I saw it. "no reaction for personal messages" - presumably, reaching out to contacts means sending personal messages.

Please explain to me like I'm five what point I'm missing here.

>"no reaction for personal messages" - presumably, reaching out to contacts means sending personal messages.

Yes, and culebron21 read that in the article and found it surprising that they did that with no success.

To be frank, I do too. I think my network could shake out a few jobs.

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.

> When i make it past all of them and land an interview, I face a series of final bosses: Generally, it’s the fresh-faced bay area 25 year old with a Steve Jobs complex dismissing me when they find out my dinosaur age of 42, or the moment they hear the words “php” uttered when they learn I was developing advanced php web apps when they were in diapers.

I'm about your age. I'd wonder how much of this is perception vs reality, tbh; while there _is_ ageism in the industry, people tend to overstress it a bit. Are you, in these situations, possibly reacting to something that's all in your head? Being interviewed by younger people is, at our age, fairly inevitable and shouldn't be seen as a problem; for that matter, your manager may well be younger than you too, and that's fine!

There _is_ some ageism out there, no question, but you'll do yourself no favours if you see it everywhere.

> Before AI was on the scene 3 years ago, I was already beginning a transition from individual contributor to engineering manager. I tried to greet my layoff at first with great positivity and enthusiasm for the opportunity it provided to step up to EM role.

Bit late now, but this _probably_ wasn't a great idea; it's very difficult for someone with no experience as an EM to be hired as an EM (and for good reason, honestly; an EM is a high-risk hire and a bad EM can destroy a whole team). If you do want to go this route, it's probably better to do it by going from IC to EM within the same job.

> 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.)

We need a solution to stuff like this. Unfortunately, right now we seem to be cutting everything in sight to help the rich, so... I don't see that help or hope on the horizon.

Stuff of nightmares.

Some of the solution(s) have already been played out a few times, we humans use our imagination(s). Everything that has been built with computers was just an idea a few decades ago.

In the 80's there were a few slices of thoughts, why are you interested in computers? They won't go very far... or we don't know how to make money from them...

IT, Computing, the Internet has for the last 25-30 years been stuck thinking about shopping and billing.

The brute force statistical copy and paste we see today, it may or may not replace a large part of the internet systems, but there were always many other aspects of computing or the world that computers could be used for that have hardly been touched.

To any social media platform's (if any of them can really be called this) that are saying they can not or will not police their own platform's of dangerous content, really you will be held responsible!

Just because the big IT corp's might become blinded they will live in fear of being on the brink of extinction, if they replace the creative people or their customer's. To the CEO's and management sucking billion's/trillion's of dollars out of the market(s) this can't continue.

There has to be change(s) because we have boxed ourselves into weird position(s), i.e always chasing the cash cows.

We are not even at the start of what's possible, what "people" will/could create in the next 50 years, with the right levels of education and inspiration the computing world will most likely not be stopping or slowing down any time soon.

The guy owns three properties. No, we don’t need “a solution” for landlords who overextended on credit during ZIRP and are now underwater; they need to sell the fucking properties.

You might be overestimating the profitability of selling underwater real estate.

I don’t think this is because of AI. Rather, it seems a continuation of a shift which has already been occurring for my entire career, which is that the tech industry continually sheds people whose skills are entirely practical and are tied to a specific era or regime of technology. For instance, at one point, there were webmasters, but now those jobs don’t exist anymore. Sysadmins have gone through a similar struggle with the advent of the cloud. Once there were sysadmin jobs, and now there are no more. Today it is happening to a certain kind of full-stack engineers specializing in technology of the last 15 years. In the future it will probably happen to YAML engineers who specialize in Kubernetes and GitHub Actions.

Consistently the most durable roles seem to be those which require theoretical understanding of the fundamentals —- UI/UX, systems, algorithms, etc. It’s unfortunate that not everyone gets a chance to learn these things.

We've somehow built extremely fragile systems. Technological, yes, but not only technological. Also social, economical, and structural. Somehow, our systems can no longer absorb even slight shocks.

Then, when the job market contracts by what would otherwise be 5 or 10 percent, all hell breaks loose, and there's an enormous chain reaction.

I like this answer. Any theories on what caused the shift?

is "late stage capitalism" too broad of an answer?

Too vague yes

Misguided efficiency, perhaps. Good systems have slack to absorb variance. Squeeze out too much slack, and the next big shock takes down the whole system.

Add to that incentive misalignment rewarding the wrong type of efficiency, perhaps.

I'm not sure this is really AI driven. I think it's more interest rate and age driven. I'm probably going to lose my job in a couple months and I'm afraid I'll be in a similar position of endless posting. I'll probably end up working at Walmart or something for about $20/hr.

It's not AI. I can hire QA automation Sr level for $10 usd in Argentina... you wouldn't want to work at Walmart for that.

The US government has to do something, or its Knowledge Worker market will keep suffering.

(And I say this as someone outside the US that had benefitted from this)

That's exactly it. Workers in countries with high cost of living are competing with those in the global south. We are going to lose every time. Something should be done (but probably won't) or the knowledge worker will have the same fate as the American industrial worker.

I wonder what could be done about it. I suppose regulations like in the defense industry could be applied more broadly.

We didn't do anything about manufacturing being off-shored and it was even seen as a benefit by many, allowing the freed up labor to focus on higher skilled work (mostly). However, there doesn't seem to be a replacement this time for the labor to move into. I wonder if we've reached a point where automation and other technological improvements have created a global negative trend in required labor.

How does your experience jive with the massive shortage of SWEs we have in the US. We've been inviting an additional ~150k foreign workers each year because there are no Americans applying for the long list of tech positions.

There is a mismatch between employer expectations and employee expectations. Employees expect things like WFH and pay comparable with previous years. Employers expect to do more with less. Inviting the additional foreign workers reduces pressure on employers to engage.

There is no shortage. Offshore consulting firms and HR collude to create impossible reqs that can only be filled by liars. HR gets a kickback, offshore consulting firm gets a cut, and some useless loser gets a shitty pointless job.

> because there are no Americans applying for the long list of tech positions.

This seems completely incorrect and repudiates much of what you've said and countless others have experienced.

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?

Tangential, for people looking for engineering/technical roles, I created this terminal app to help scrape and automatically filter jobs to match your resume using AI: https://github.com/nicobrenner/commandjobs?tab=readme-ov-fil...

I recently updated it with application tracking as well, so you can keep everything in the same place

Any feedback and issues on GitHub are welcome

It's not the AI, the dude wants $150k for a simple engineering job in this economy.

It’s got a lot more to do with interest rates than AI.

Hey, I am heading your way, as it seems now. Not because of AI, but because of me, and I think you are in this position because of you, even if it looks like its AI. So I wanted to suggest something to you, and maybe it could help, and then maybe it would help me eventually too, if I was to reflect on you. Have you tried smiling recently? Try it. When you talk to people, write on the keyboard or talk over the phone - try smiling for a bit. Not the obligatory smile, but one that shows the better part of you. Your CV is probably perfect but does it smile? You need to re-learn how to smile, because out there is a team that probably wants you but also wants no angry newcomers. It's tough for you right now but presenting it the way you've done gives off just the very wrong vibe, as if you'd be a burden.

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.

I think what you describe is an anecdote.

> Don't know how many programming jobs this describes but ai is definitely nibbling at the lower end of the market.

Now it's starting to sound like it was written by someone working in marketing at an AI company.

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.

My thoughts go to this guy; many are always one bad-move away from falling through the cracks, and I know first-hand how hard everything becomes with aging relatives who are not financially independent.

I don't think AI is impacting much of it currently (but I may be wrong), but I believe it's a matter of time before it does and then things are going to get worse.

While I don't usually advocate for such things, I feel that in the coming years many of us will be better off moving to places with small-village dynamics. It doesn't need to be an actual small village. It can even be the sort of workplace where people know each other and implicitly treat their colleagues with kindness and dignity; such places still exist.

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?

Everyone nitpicking OP's personal choices, is this because the job market is not in fact being gutted by AI?

It's being gutted by a focus on AI investments which translates to more AI jobs, but that's not the same thing as AI itself automating your job away.

I'm using Claude everyday for my work. Am I just missing out on how awesome the things have gotten in this space?

I'm building a business and if it were, say, 2018 I would have already made several dev hires already this year. But using LLMs I simply do not have the demand for labor that I would have had.

This is a $900k ARR business already. Android and iOS apps published, as well as a webapp. We do not have a dev team.

I don't know how to process this because people are saying Claude is among the best and I'm using it everyday. It just provides great code help but there's no way it can reduce a decision to hire.

Can you share the apps?

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

There's honestly not much reason to think that. The job market's definitely not what it was, though it's showing some regional recovery, but blaming that on AI, vs the far more glaring end of ZIRP (plus current economic uncertainty and recession risk, which will tend to suppress hiring) seems like a _bit_ of a leap.

The travails described in this post could just as well be my own, except that my career disintegration began in 2017 or so, soon after I turned 50. I've pursued every job search strategy this author lists, and encountered the same lack of progress. I've just submitted an application to work at the local grocery store for $17/hour.

We can blame ageism, offshoring, AI, what have you. The basic problem is that the technology industry has never prioritized hiring or retaining experienced people as developers. Our roles are persistently misunderstood by management, and "AI could do that!" is just the latest misapprehension.

Meanwhile, be kind to your DoorDashers and store clerks.

All I wanted to say is, this is not because of AI. Or at least, I have not seen data that shows that. The loss of jobs is happening in all sectors, all over the world. Some say its because of higher interest rates, not sure though ?

I don't know what the situation is in the United States but down here in Australia trained members of the military are very well paid with excellent conditions and they are recruiting cyber and technical roles.

Militaries don’t normally enlist 42 year olds unfortunately.

The US military does. The branches all state an age limit, but it's easily and routinely waived.

Have you tried working with recruiters? I don’t have recommendations for how to find them, but they find me on LinkedIn and it has lead to my last 2 job opportunities and most of my interviews.

It feels like you're describing my own experience. I've worked in the tech industry for years, putting in so much effort, and suddenly, everything I worked for seems to have lost its value. The changes brought by AI have been so fast, it's like a complete upheaval. What seemed like a stable career path has suddenly become fragile. The hardest part isn’t losing the job, but feeling like I’ve been left behind by a system that’s rapidly changing.

This has to be a location based problem, or maybe the types of companies they are applying to? I can easily get another job doing something in software in the greater Milwaukee area. I typically look at companies that are not software companies, but who still need some software work in their IT dept to make their company work and keep them relevant.

I hope that as people talk about onshoring manufacturing jobs, they also look at onshoring technology jobs as well.

I doubt it is AI that has taken your job - it could just as easily by cheap labour, either via H1B or working from their home nation.

errr your gonna have to change your name to shawn kay … that’s it, right therr

> 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.

Would you feel the same way about a disabled employee?

Is it special treatment to be asked to still be able to feed myself and put a roof over my head despite having a spinal cord injury? In my country, I must be allowed to work from home, but only if already gainfully employed, it will not assist in getting said employment.

I worry this will be me if I lose my current remote job. Pending more surgeries which may change the situation, commuting and being in a physical office is just is just not a reality and so I’ve been forced into remote work to have any kind of work.

I am not optimistic for my future. Then again we didn’t think I’d work at all again so take the good with the bad I suppose.

> Would you feel the same way about a disabled employee?

No because that is totally different. In the UK (all I have experience of) employers would be expected to make "reasonable adjustments" to avoid "significant disadvantage". But note that is not just bend over backwards, totally capitulate, and do whatever the hell the employee chooses.

E.g. if the office is already totally wheelchair-friendly and there is viable transport etc (which is basically the case for any office building built in the last 20+ years) then they might say that no further adjustments are needed as the employee would not be "significantly disadvantaged", so come on in to the office. It is a balancing act though and every request would be treated independently. Might suck I agree, but there you go. Good luck.

I was asking honestly by the way, because I truely don’t know how I’ll be evaluated if I’m forced to make a move so I appreciate the answer.

Reading this site is not a fun experience with astigmatism. my gawd! Will try to continue reading now

This discussion saved my growth path from being sabotaged by cynicism.

I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with AI, other than making it harder to get an interview. He seems to get a few of those. I think the real problem he has is... well, the meaning of life, i.e. 42.

He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta be joking. He says he can't clear the 25-year old Steve-Jobs complex SV bro mini-boss. Well, duh.

That's the industry. It sucks you up and it spits you out. It vampires the best years of your life and then you're on your own.

Sorry that the author had to find out, but I think I've seen that coming from the day I was first employed as a junior engineer. I just averaged up the ages of my colleagues and it was blindingly obvious how things turn out in the long run.

Nor "AI" as in "Artificial Intelligence", but "AI" as in "Ageist Industry".

P.S. Look on the bright side: at least you're not a 42 year old woman looking for software jobs. Hah.

> He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta be joking.

This is such an odd take. I see lots of older folks around me - and 42 isn't that old.

That said, it's undeniably true that expectations are raised the further along in your career you are. Interviewers will accept mistakes from a fresh college grad that they won't accept from an engineer with 20 years of industry experience who should know better (and is paid more). Not to mention there's just statistically fewer openings for TL positions. All of that definitely makes interviews harder as you're further along in your career.

Someone who's 42 needs to be a "TL" (tech lead?). Not everyone can be a leader (like you say, not that many openings available) -- and leading is often a totally different job and skill set from developing software. So what do you call it when everyone above a certain age is automatically shunted into a smaller pool of openings for a different role? I would call that ageism.

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.

Some quotes stood out to me

> ...in fact I own three houses

> ...I left behind everything and everyone i know and love on the west coast to come to New York specifically for this opportunity of helping care for my family and growing long term equity with real estate

> With my full time engineering job bringing in around $150k, a salary that I clawed my way slowly and steadily for 20 years, I could just about manage covering all the expenses, maintenance, and planned improvements for the long-term vision of the properties, maintain my 16-year-old daily driver car, and maybe even have four or five thousand dollars left over each year to take one little camping trip and make a couple stock and crypto investments.

Rather than building a career as a software engineer, he spent most of his time as a small-time real estate and crypto(!) investor subsidized by his software engineering side hustle.

lumping in a camping trip with investments is odd. A camping trip might cost very nearly zero dollars, depending on distance and what I have available. We'll be generous here and assume $100 was spent for some reason. That $100 is expended, you don't get it back.

A stock investment might "cost" $4000, but I would hope to have nearly $4000 in some asset. My absolute worst investments, I typically still exited them with 40% of my initial capital.

I think it's clear he considers the real estate to be actual investments, but the camping trips and crypto/stock to be "play money". Perhaps not a bad strategy.

i was just describing the all around comfort level of my lifestyle. if you drive a couple states away for a camping trip for a week, get a couple motels maybe, eat out, etc, it can be 2k$ pretty easily

And somehow thinks upstate NY is a better real estate investment market than California.

I was just trying to become a homeowner. my first house in new york was about 1/4th to 1/5th the cost of a "starter home" anywhere in california. I was never going to be able to afford that

I don't want to sound like I'm victim-blaming here, but the reality is there's no free lunch. Investments are not risk-free, and, as you've discovered, there's a reason you got these properties at such a low cost. It seems like your real estate situation can't go on like this forever, right?

> selling my properties would be a ruinous move letting go of my most valuable assets that are the only toe hold I have in this economy, and may threaten my ability to become a homeowner potentially ever again, depending on how this economic future plays out.

Despite these negatives, it's possible that selling is the financially-smart thing to do. Keeping your properties may also be a ruinous move that could cost your ability to become a homeowner ever again. It's unfortunate, but it sounds like you need to choose whichever is the lesser of two evils and stick with it.

> If i was bestowed some gift of capital, I could complete the renovations and make the house income-producing.

As an alternative, if this is actually true, then you'd be the perfect candidate for a loan against your house. People commonly get emotional around housing and debt, but there's no room for that when you're struggling to survive.

As much as I have sympathy for dealing with an aging family and being a caretaker, it's these three quotes that essentially threw me away. I'm in a similar position and will never be able to afford property or a home, let alone three houses and the ability to throw a bunch of money at crypto despite having a salary at a similar level.

It sounds like there were poor investments made in owning a bunch of property and now that issue is coming to roost.

> 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.

The author makes it clear that he can't simply "move closer to where office based jobs are" because he cares for his disabled mother.

I get that, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. He won’t be much use to his disabled mother if he can’t cover the bills.

I wonder if he should consider taking his mother with him and moving somewhere with a better local job market. Similarly, parents move and take their kids with them when the job market demands it.

There is a separate conversation to be had about whether this is a good thing -- should we allow the job market to force people to move away from their homes/families/friends/connections? -- but it's already a fact of life for a lot of people.

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

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.

>That's the industry.

I think this is complete nonsense to be honest. If you're 42 with 20 years of experience you can walk into any random municipal office in a reasonably large town and find a software or at least IT admin job that people will throw at you, because chances are the youngest person there is 55.

The only ageist part of the software industry is the whole web and startup sector, your average post office, hospital, government and education software job is full of middle aged people. If you're unemployed just take a job there

>P.S. Look on the bright side: at least you're not a 42 year old woman looking for software jobs. Hah

They suffer even more age discrimination?

They suffer even more discrimination in general.

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.

btw i can barely scroll your website through my android firefox phone. it's got these weird animations that's making everything very slow.

If the people who used to hire you would sell your work to clients for $2000 per day, then instead start freelancing your own work and selling it for $1000 per day.

It saddens me that tech people have become so intrinsically beholden to a lifetime association with some rich paying Company.

I feel like "AI is replacing tech workers" is a far more negative opinion and unjustifiable opinion than tech companies "overhired" and governments pushed supply of tech related jobs too much (particularly CS degrees)

I'd like to see even a shred of evidence that your previous field of expertise was automated away. IF I was cynical and negative I would say spending 2 to 5 hours a day consuming AI media has caused brainrot and skill degradation which is preventing you from being hired.

My father is in his 70s and still makes enough money driving to people's houses and companies to fix miscellaneous network and computer most of which probably could be solved by Google for the last 30 years, let alone ChatGPT. Sure the company work is more involved then I'm letting on and he handles procurement (ordering stuff from amazon), setup, referal etc. His degree? EE.

You clearly aren't interested in SE so why pigeon hole yourself to it? Talk to some people and your neighbors about your houses. Open a LAN cafe or something be creative. If AI really is replacing skilled labor then it should be a piece of cake LOL

This is the true definition of "AGI".

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.

Not the greatest word choice, those words have a lot of racist history.

Recent and related:

The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944911 - May 2025 (5 comments)

7 more years and I moving to another country.

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?

    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.

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"

Oh ye read the piece a bit too fast.

Maybe the solution is AirBnB.

He's already doing AirBnB. It's in the article.

Using hands for other things than typing...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com