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.
replies(2):
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...
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.
"in fact I own three houses: A fixer-upper starter home in a rust belt upstate New York university city, and a patch of beautiful remote rural land with 2 pretty humble and simple cabins on it an hour from the city house"
He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta be joking. He says he can't clear the 25-year old Steve-Jobs complex SV bro mini-boss. Well, duh.
That's the industry. It sucks you up and it spits you out. It vampires the best years of your life and then you're on your own.
Sorry that the author had to find out, but I think I've seen that coming from the day I was first employed as a junior engineer. I just averaged up the ages of my colleagues and it was blindingly obvious how things turn out in the long run.
Nor "AI" as in "Artificial Intelligence", but "AI" as in "Ageist Industry".
P.S. Look on the bright side: at least you're not a 42 year old woman looking for software jobs. Hah.
This is such an odd take. I see lots of older folks around me - and 42 isn't that old.
That said, it's undeniably true that expectations are raised the further along in your career you are. Interviewers will accept mistakes from a fresh college grad that they won't accept from an engineer with 20 years of industry experience who should know better (and is paid more). Not to mention there's just statistically fewer openings for TL positions. All of that definitely makes interviews harder as you're further along in your career.
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?
> ...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.
Where are the all knowing AI bots who are going to fix this?
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.
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.
How many AI cheaters do you need to catch on the technical phone screening interview to incorporate a habit of doing IRL CAPTCHA challenges?
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
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.
(Typing this from an office.)
> ...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)
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.
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
"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
Then, when the job market contracts by what would otherwise be 5 or 10 percent, all hell breaks loose, and there's an enormous chain reaction.
Advice to other commenters here on HN. Before clicking 'add comment', ask yourself:
- If I post from a non-empathetic stance, to what extent is my lack of empathy a strategy to avoid experiencing discomfort?
- If I post from a contradicting or fact-checking stance, to what extent is my skepticism motivated by a desire to feel safer in the world?
- If I post from a relativising or contextualizing stance, to what extent is my reframing driven by the fear that it could happen to me?
You don't have to ask yourself any of these things; but they are hard-won tools I've gained through a lot of work on myself, and they have been of benefit to me. May they be of benefit to you as well.
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.
I did the hour commute thing, I hated it even when it was the norm.
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
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?
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.
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
The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944911 - May 2025 (5 comments)
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.
On you resume, change your name to "Shawn Kay." Wait until you're doing HR paperwork to use your legal name.
i hope things don't get so bad that my options are destitution or the defense industry, but i'm used to eating ramen.
I just wholly disagree with the conclusion that this is a common situation brought by AI. AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.
I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant. I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on, because something tells me it’d provide insight to whatever is going on here.
again not trying to be dismissive, but even with my fairly unimpressive resume I can get at least 1st round calls fairly easily, and my colleagues that write actual software all report similar. companies definitely are being more picky, but if your issue is that you’re not even being contacted, I’d seriously question your approach. They kind of get at the problem a little by stating they “wont use a ton of AI buzzwords.” Like, ok? But you can also be smart about knowing how these screeners work and play the game a little. Or you can do doordash. personally I’d prefer the former to the latter.
Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.
AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.
I only know personally of one counter example to your message. In my career, I've reviewed, interviewed, and hired a few hundred people for somewhat known companies and startups. I also helped many friends find jobs in the past, before the market became what it is today, without any issues. So I like to think I understand what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for.
End of last year, a friend with 12 years of relevant experience started looking for a job. I reviewed his CV (which he tweaked for some of the applications) and cover letters (he wrote one for each company). Everything was as good as it can be for the position he was applying for.
Out of ~20 applications he got a total of 4 replies: 3 generic rejections and one screening that led him to being hired. He killed it during the interviews, but just getting his foot in the door was so hard. Maybe in some parts of the world we're back to 2015-2020 levels of recruiter "harassment", but in others it's super dry, even for senior positions.
This year I'm actually looking, applied for multiple jobs, and had silence.
Might be a Trump effect but it's not the same just now. Reminds me of 2008.
I 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 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...
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 this person has been working for 20 years, they were definitely working at the time when MD5 hashing was considered security in the PHP community and the best technology that community could muster at the time was the horrifying architecture of WordPress.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this fella is a good engineer but you could not convince me that back in the day PHP had anything going on for it except for low barrier of entry.
I'm using Claude everyday for my work. Am I just missing out on how awesome the things have gotten in this space?
Why would parents burden their kid like this?
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.
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.
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?
What surprised me is that the OP had no reaction for personal messages.
Of course, as a sibling comment, I think, said it could be the end of ZIRP. But maybe the truth is it's end of ZIRP, seeing a "peer" shed employees en masse and not fail outright, and AI.
Twitter deal in 2022. Headcount by year for a few (not suggesting this data supports my theory; just sharing to reality check)...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
Edit: grammar
It 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.
It's worth remembering Twitter was a buggy mess before Elon bought it. Sure it's still a buggy mess today, but the staffing costs are dramatically lower.
Losing a ton of money was something Twitter was also pretty good at even before Elon too - only profitable 2 years out of the 8 leading up to the acquisition while it was still a public company etc.
He reduced the headcount to roughly what it was in 2017. At the time of the acquisition, many of the employees were in non technical roles, contributing nothing of value, posting videos about their empty work day on TikTok. Jack Dorsey admitted that he made a mistake by over hiring - more than doubled the headcount from 2017 to 2021.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
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.
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.
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?
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring.
2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people"
3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground.
4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money.
It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we don't really know until it plays out. If you believe history rhymes, humans will figure out what AI does well and doesn't do so well. Once that's worked out, the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up around the new norm.
It'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 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 have a hard time believing it's making people that much more productive. It certainly helps me here and there with very specific low-level implementations, but the really important, higher-level work I do? The way I decide which low-level work to do in the first place? Not really, no. I have to interface with very non-technical people who need bespoke solutions to their problems. I need to tie implementations for them together with existing systems that are not standardized, not well-known, and often poorly documented. I need to consider how the life cycle of these solutions can integrate with that of others, how it fits into the workflow and capacity of myself and people I work with, etc.
AI can't do any of that properly right now, and I don't expect that it will any time soon. If I tried to get it to work, I'd likely spend as much time fighting Claude as I'd save. I don't know... What are people doing that they can actually be replaced? Or that companies could decide they actually need fewer people?
My suspicion is that with money being more expensive to borrow, teams are staying lean because we were absurdly inefficient as an industry for the better part of a decade. That's not an AI thing, but a staying closer to actual means thing.
Like the article mentions, the cornerstone of US based society is that everyone needs to do something that provides value to others. Yet we constantly seek to scale and automate, to lower our dependence on others.
There must come a day where, you don't need others, but they need you. Then what?
The fundamental problem is, as the OP gets at towards the end, what happens when a society built upon the trade of time and labor for income to provide for one’s needs, meets innovations that threaten to wholesale eliminate vast swaths of labor, permanently. A society that demands labor for survival, against corporations that demand growth at all costs, inevitably creates a zero-sum conflict between the working class and the Capitalist classes.
Workers, desperate to survive in a society hostile to the under or unemployed (and increasingly hostile to the presently employed), will continue to resort to more desperate means over time and as their numbers grow. This is an inevitability bore out through history time and time again, OP is just joining the chorus of voices warning that we are rapidly approaching such an inflection point if we continue soldiering onward “as-is”.
All feels on my part just to hopefully add to the dialogue. Nothing scientific here.
With respect, that is a red flag for me and would indicate a bit of an "attitude problem" if I was interviewing or reviewing applications and this was mentioned. If going to the office - something absolutely normal and expected of any desk worker - is a "red line" for you and you let potential employers know that, then frankly I am not surprised people are not biting. Yes we all had a good ride over COVID but the trend (whether people like it or not) is for the bosses to want everyone back in the office.
I would respectfully suggest you suck it up, don't make a deal of it in your resume/CV or interview, and accept that you'll be badging through the turn-style 5 days a week along with everyone else and don't expect special treatment.
Good luck.
Yeah; no more chillin' out in your camper upstate in the middle of nowhere.
Bummer!
(Writing from on-site office chair here.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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?
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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.
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.
There was a huge hiring spike circa 2022 that apparently misled a lot of people.
I think it does become a problem where formal systems are inflexible and unable to accommodate or be corrected.
It saddens me that tech people have become so intrinsically beholden to a lifetime association with some rich paying Company.
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.
This might sound silly to you, but it absolutely works, because it will distill your experience better, ask you to re-arrange and generalize, and more importantly, it is far superior to us in finding unique key word combinations that work.
i 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'll point out that what is your reality in your job market might be far different from mine. I'm in Europe.
I try to screen out people who come across as zealots or dogmatic about just about anything. Everything could have it's time and place - PHP included ;)
I look for people who are pragmatic and doubt I represent the "people who are hiring pool" to a great extent. But I am hiring and I can just tell you what I see here and how I see it.
I had the same impression. Anyone reading this who is younger: at some point in your life your employment will probably mostly depend on the connections you make to your successful peers, the companies you start, or the products/ technologies you are associated with. When you are starting, strangers will hire you off of your resume. At some point this effectively stops and if people aren't familiar with you or your work they will not consider you. This has been true long before LLMs existed.
Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.
Are the properties underwater on the mortgage?
Can you rent out the vacant units?
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?
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.
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.
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.
I have a friend in a similar situation to the poster and tbh I don't have great advice.
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.
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.
Did you mean something else, as in LI itself is fruitless and to reach out directly to past colleagues?
Perhaps offering an opportunity for more humility and introspection. Instead you’re here doubling down on the victim mindset.
Wishing you the best.
Please explain to me like I'm five what point I'm missing here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/namenerds/comments/10hssp8/why_do_p...
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!)
In any case, networks can be hard to build and maintain, and they can easily fall apart if you fall into a rut.
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.
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.
Basically, the ownership class was pissy that some people were able to actually get away from exchanging time for money.
Unpack this for me: what constitutes significant contributions to peers or the field?
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.
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.
Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.
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.
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).
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 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.
Wishing you well and best of luck with your search.
Tough times. You’re doing everything right (except perhaps reading too many of the comments which is probably not great for your mental health) - your break will come. The night is darkest before the dawn and all that.
Peace & love.
I learned a word cruising Reddit the other day that summarizes that issue quite well - "liminal". At the time, it was in the context of malls, and the collapse of American storefront consumerism, yet the issues are similar:
"relating to the transitional stage of a process", or "the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage"
We're stuck in that in-between land where your 2) seems like it's often the response to most suggestions. We'll, we don't really want to take a risk ... cause tomorrow AI may make that choice irrelevant. We don't really want to invest ... cause tomorrow AI may make our investment worthless. We don't really want to hire more people ... cause tomorrow AI may do their jobs easily. And there's always that number 3) sensation somewhere "your team can do more, you're just not leveraging tools enough".
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.
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.
You are the rare type of HN user I look for whenever I read the comments, which is not very often these days.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
Fishing is sending out applications all over the place. This is casting your reel. Changing your CV over and over is changing your bait. Reaching out to your network without a specific request to recommend you for a specific job is fishing.
Work backwards a bit. Find a job at a company you want. Look up the recruiters and hiring managers. Send them a note. Look up people in your network, or people connected to your network, and ask them to recommend you for the specific role. Companies incentivize this. They’ll want spend 2 minutes to possibly win a few thousand dollars by getting you in. Incentives align.
Lastly there’s a lot of independent head hunters out there. Hire them like you’d a trail guide.
I 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
Not diminish your analysis. I just hope it adds a bit of perspective.
Keep your head up. These are interesting times. Things will get back to normal at some point.
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.
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.
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?
Many companies are also way overstaffed, IME (thinking non-software/"tech" F500s here)
Having worked as a consultant with various F500 companies over the last few years, there's loads of people that do very little work, and much of the work is low value--myself included; I make no claims I'm above any of this.
I've encountered countless project managers that do nothing other than move Jira tickets around.
Me: "Hey I'm blocked, can you get me in contact with $TEAM that owns this stuff"
PM: "Uh no, ask $PERSON"
How many of this person does any company need?
Even developers--I've worked with loads that take a week to set up some Angular project or cloud resources, and the even darker part of all of that is the whole project is destined to fail, cause the sales org sold em on some "modernization" thing that'll never get off the ground, that they don't have the staff to maintain, and they don't have the organizational will or discipline to integrate.
I've been on countless projects like this, there's piles of excess people doing low value (or no) work at all, saved only from unemployment by the sheer complexity of byzantine, bureaucratic organizations.
I 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
This seems completely incorrect and repudiates much of what you've said and countless others have experienced.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
To be honest, the substack is a decent step forward in sharing knowledge if he can fill it with technical articles.
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.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68240746-14ec-8006-bc64-44c7a04d71...
Then open your eyes. It was exactly 2022 exactly as the article states.
> 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.
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!!
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.
Fingers crossed for you, good luck finding a way out and up - I'm surely you'll make 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
This is a $900k ARR business already. Android and iOS apps published, as well as a webapp. We do not have a dev team.
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"?
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.
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
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 ...
- 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.
There's lots of evidence of recruiters and sometimes AIs discriminating against female names, "foreign" names, low-status names and so on.
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.
This is insane but there is a lesson that even a small thing might affect your resume.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> population of substackistan
> 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?
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!
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 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'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.
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.
Having worked with various computer services, choosing a single letter name is a bold move :)
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
Still, I can definitely see someone new to the language thinking Perl 5 was a dead end.
I really believe the layoffs were not about needing less people, it was about gaining some ground in the employee/employer dynamic.
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.
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.
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 would love to read more about that; do you have a link?
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Add to that incentive misalignment rewarding the wrong type of efficiency, perhaps.
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.
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 must say, nothing about European or North American culture sounds remotely as bad as Indians importing their birthright social hierarchy system into our organizations.
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.
So it would have even worse implications for anyone complaining against them, who isn’t clearly way beyond that threshold.
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.
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.
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.
It sounds like there were poor investments made in owning a bunch of property and now that issue is coming to roost.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
They’re not going to assume the author is any more virtuous/wise/etc… than the complained against, without some compelling evidence.
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.
A minor signal is still a signal, that may, or may not, accrue to other converging ones.
I don’t see the connection to how any random group of HN readers perceive this or that.
> 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.