I am the author of this piece, and i didn't share it to HN, I don't hang out here. I just gotta say wow, tough crowd. i wrote this piece from an emotionally low point after another fruitless day of applying to jobs. I didn't have a particular agenda in mind. I was voicing what i've been through and some of what I was experiencing with no expectations.
you'll notice in the comments section that the population of substackistan is much less FUCKING CYNICAL AND NEGATIVE than you guys, with many commenters saying they are in the same position. I heard from writers, designers, engineers, going through similar times.
my portfolio site is https://shawnfromportland.com, you can find my resume there. if you have leads that you think I might match with you can definitely send them my way, I will even put a false last name on an updated resume for you guys.
for those who are wondering, I legally changed my name to K long ago because my dad's last name starts with K, but I didn't like identifying with his family name everywhere i went because he was not in my life and didnt contribute to shaping me. I thought hard about what other name I could choose but nothing resonated with me. I had already been using Shawn K for years before legally changing it and it was the only thing that felt right.
I’m not trying to be unsympathetic in this comment so please do not read it that way, and I’m aware having spent most of my career in cloud infrastructure that I am usually in high demand regardless of market forces - but this just does not make sense to me. If I ever got to the point where i was even in high dozens of applications without any hits, I’d take a serious look at my approach. Trying the same thing hundreds of times without any movement feels insane to me. I believe accounts like this, because why make it up? as other commenters have noted there may be other factors at play.
I just wholly disagree with the conclusion that this is a common situation brought by AI. AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.
I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant. I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on, because something tells me it’d provide insight to whatever is going on here.
again not trying to be dismissive, but even with my fairly unimpressive resume I can get at least 1st round calls fairly easily, and my colleagues that write actual software all report similar. companies definitely are being more picky, but if your issue is that you’re not even being contacted, I’d seriously question your approach. They kind of get at the problem a little by stating they “wont use a ton of AI buzzwords.” Like, ok? But you can also be smart about knowing how these screeners work and play the game a little. Or you can do doordash. personally I’d prefer the former to the latter.
Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.
It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons:
1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring.
2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people"
3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground.
4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money.
It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we don't really know until it plays out. If you believe history rhymes, humans will figure out what AI does well and doesn't do so well. Once that's worked out, the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up around the new norm.
Pure speculation, but I wonder if it's not so much AI as tech companies realizing they actually can do more with less. And, again, I have no evidence to back this up other than "feels," but I swear when Elon bought Twitter and cut so much of the workforce that's when sentiment seemed to shift materially. I wonder if that wasn't a bit of an "aha" moment for mega tech and tech in general. It's like all the major companies said maybe we don't need as many people as we have. Of course people are going to debate whether the changes at Twitter had a monumentally-negative impact (they may very well have in terms of revenue, but I'm not so sure in terms of absolute or even relative profit).
Of course, as a sibling comment, I think, said it could be the end of ZIRP. But maybe the truth is it's end of ZIRP, seeing a "peer" shed employees en masse and not fail outright, and AI.
Twitter deal in 2022. Headcount by year for a few (not suggesting this data supports my theory; just sharing to reality check)...
I am 61, and have been working for almost 40 years. I don't really have a lot of personal connections, because I am on the autistic spectrum. Yes, I have many former co-workers linked on LinkedIn, but to most of those people, I'm just an old acquaintance, not someone they are going to phone up with a hot new job opportunity.
The exception is one college friend who did help me get multiple jobs at startups, but he retired several years ago.
Establishing and maintaining relationships is hard, and many of us are simply not good at it.
Now I did make sure to stay in touch with a couple ex-managers who I knew would be good references. One of them even helped me get an interview. But even when I had a connection on the inside of a company, all that really does is move me to the head of the line, past the HR screen. I still have to interview, something I still suck at despite decades of practice.
Overall I'd agree with your sentiment, but it depends on the market.
I only know personally of one counter example to your message.
In my career, I've reviewed, interviewed, and hired a few hundred people for somewhat known companies and startups. I also helped many friends find jobs in the past, before the market became what it is today, without any issues. So I like to think I understand what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for.
End of last year, a friend with 12 years of relevant experience started looking for a job. I reviewed his CV (which he tweaked for some of the applications) and cover letters (he wrote one for each company). Everything was as good as it can be for the position he was applying for.
Out of ~20 applications he got a total of 4 replies: 3 generic rejections and one screening that led him to being hired. He killed it during the interviews, but just getting his foot in the door was so hard. Maybe in some parts of the world we're back to 2015-2020 levels of recruiter "harassment", but in others it's super dry, even for senior positions.
>> Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.
I had the same impression. Anyone reading this who is younger: at some point in your life your employment will probably mostly depend on the connections you make to your successful peers, the companies you start, or the products/ technologies you are associated with. When you are starting, strangers will hire you off of your resume. At some point this effectively stops and if people aren't familiar with you or your work they will not consider you. This has been true long before LLMs existed.
I see you already have 27 replies...but I'll throw in my two cents.
I didn't believe it was this bad until I was made to believe it. My kid with 1 year full time experience at a FAANG adjacent company and a 6 month internship prior to that, is simple unable to get ANY interviews at all. And he is genuinely good at software development, much better than I was at his age.
I was skeptical, I thought his approach was wrong, I thought this and that. He let me take over his job looking process for a week. I submitted over 100 applications for positions local and remote - positions that he is qualified to do. Not a single interview. Not even a phone screen.
Compare this with when I left college. Interviews were available at the drop of a hat.
It's hard to say for sure without knowing his whole situation, but I will agree with you that when I hear someone say they've submitted 750 applications, my first thought is that they're taking a machine gun approach, applying to a lot of jobs in a short time. I was always taught that you tailor your resume to the position you're applying for, and apply only after doing a lot of research on the company to know whether you are suitable for their position. I'm older than the author of this post, and applied for my most recent job at about his age—though it was a few years ago, before AI was really a consideration. In my entire life, I've probably applied to ~25 positions, made it to the final round 8 times, and been hired 6 times.
Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.
I 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...
Honestly, his power-wash business is likely his redemption.
If I was running into the kind of wall he was trying to get a coding job [1], I think I, like him, would be looking at a career change.
When I was in the Bay Area, living on a street of white-collar professionals, the one "blue collar" guy on the block had a house painting business. It's probably no surprise he began as a painter himself, working for someone else. He was smart enough to know how to bail and go into business for himself. That eventually lead to him hiring others. He's the boss now.
When I retired and left the neighborhood, his day appeared to begin with going out to the various job sites that day and see that his crew were on task, knew the plan. He played golf most of the middle of the day. By the afternoon he went around the sites to see how his guys had done. In the evening with the garage door open, he would be at a small desk doing books, whatever.
Have pickup truck will travel.
[1] The jobs are going to come from knowing people already employed that can say, "Hey, we have an opening — I'll send your resume to my boss."
> I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant.
Sounds like you dont have kids to help look after or a parent to care for, and you're still in the desirable age to hire from. Wait another ten years after you help kids with their homework or sports in the evening and dont have energy to work on a side projects.
Could it be that your particular position required more ongoing learning, and that has kept you better prepared for a changing world?
What fraction of positions require that ongoing learning, or at least to that degree?
Also, consider many other jobs, are they doing their job, and the doing of their job itself provides the experience that makes you a more valuable worker? Or is the doing of the job basically a necessary distraction from the actual task of preparing yourself for a future job? What fraction of humanity actually takes on two jobs, the paying job and the preparing-for-the-next-job? Might doing the latter get you fired from the former? Most importantly, is doing that latter job getting more important over time, that is, are our jobs less secure? If so, is this what is an improving economy, rising, as it were, with GDP?
I have heard from doctors and lawyers that there comes a time in your career when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.
It sucks that this perception attaches to people at this point in their career. Many become managers at this point because that's an easy way to have broader impact and show career growth when you don't _really_ care about engineering.
If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field, everyone knows where your priorities are. It's okay that you aren't that interested in engineering. It does mean that it's harder to get a job than someone who really is, especially in tight markets. You're also not going to find employment below your level because they know you're going to jump ship when the market shifts. It does mean lowering your standards on certain things, like the "100% remote" requirement.
For the last 20 years, there has been tremendous demand for software engineers that has allowed people to coast. That demand is cooling down for a variety of reasons, AI being one of them (but IMO not anywhere near the most significant). That cool-down really started in ~2021-2022 and really hasn't picked back up. When the market cools down, the unremarkable old-timers are sadly the first ones to be shown the door.
> when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.
I have to emphasize this a lot to mid-career developers that I've mentored. In the past decade it was really easy to find a comfy job and coast, or to job-hop every year to get incrementally higher salary.
Juniors are mostly a blank slate. Once someone has 10-20 years you should be able to see a trajectory in their career and skills. I've seen so many resumes from people who either did junior-level work for a decade, or who job hopped so excessively that they have 1 year of experience 10 times, almost resetting at every new company.
It's hard to communicate this to juniors who are getting advice from Reddit and peers to job hop everywhere and do dumb things like burn bridges on their way out (via being overemployed by not quitting the old job until they're fired, or by quitting with 0 days notice, or just telling them off as you leave). A lot of people are having a sudden realization about the importance of leaving a good impression and building healthy relationships in your network now that organic job offers are hard to find.
I just want to comment that the trend where "average" workers pushing 50 are undesirable, is a very scary one. And it should be for everyone.
Any present day 45-year old must assume that they will have to work AT LEAST 20 more years, but most likely 25. This generation will be working well into their 70s.
Statistically, the majority will be average - or "mediocre".
Economically, it is very unsustainable to have a system where only the top 20%-30% of people over 50 will be able to keep their job. You'll end up with a very large number of people that end up on welfare, or unable to spend money like the modern society is designed (less spending, less revenue for companies).
> If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field, everyone knows where your priorities are. It's okay that you aren't that interested in engineering.
Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.
It's not even that you necessarily have a ceiling, some people work for twenty years and are lucky with success, some are unlucky. You can be 45 and not have reached your ceiling. But the perception is there and you have to think about ways to re-invent yourself. It's really hard when you have family obligations and can't take a lot of risks.
I have a friend in a similar situation to the poster and tbh I don't have great advice.
> That cool-down really started in ~2021-2022 and really hasn't picked back up. When the market cools down, the unremarkable old-timers are sadly the first ones to be shown the door.
It makes me wonder if we're in a the early stages of some kind of economic depression or recession.
> In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.
Yes, this is something that is poorly understood. (And something that I fear, given that I'm middle-aged.) It's easier to take a risk on someone who charges less, than to take a risk on someone who charges more. Often budgets just won't allow for an expensive software engineer, especially when an overseas engineer is cheaper.
just for reference about my amassed 'wealth', the combined cost of my mortgages is less than a studio apartment's rent in the bay area. i left the west coast for precisely this reason
When I was 10 years old, I sat next to a traveling linoleum tile salesman on a plane who told me he used to be an aeronautical engineer, "before the bottom dropped out of the job market".
I've always remembered that, and never taken it for granted that software development will always be in high demand. It's been a hell of a run, but it will probably end someday.
> You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.
Skimmed through his resume and he has a decent one with many real world projects. Is it even possible to stay employed in this industry past the age of 35 if you don't move into a management role and aren't self employed?
Hmm, do we have any options then? Go work for the TSA maybe? Finding a cushy government job and securing a pension is clearly looking like a harder path now.
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
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 took a look at your resume to see if I would have relevant work for you but doesn't seem like it.
Maybe having vibecoding listed as a skill on your resume is a problem?
Alarm bells also go off when I see "Github (advanced)"
While you are powerless to change it I would also be concerned reviewing this resume as with the sole exception of your consultancy your longest tenure anywhere is just two years.
thanks. this is the fifth iteration of my resume in this last year's search. im clearly trying to push for ai-coding, as i think i was often overlooked for being too 'trad'. in reality im all-in on ai.
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.
This is an interesting perspective. I've sort of intentionally pushed towards working where AI isn't so useful (physical workflows that are heavily dependent on inputs from humans—scientists in particular) but my experience nonetheless has been discovering how useless AI is in so many ways I envisioned it replacing people by now. It's extremely useful in very narrow bands of application, and outside of that, it's often more of a distraction than an advantage.
I have a hard time believing it's making people that much more productive. It certainly helps me here and there with very specific low-level implementations, but the really important, higher-level work I do? The way I decide which low-level work to do in the first place? Not really, no. I have to interface with very non-technical people who need bespoke solutions to their problems. I need to tie implementations for them together with existing systems that are not standardized, not well-known, and often poorly documented. I need to consider how the life cycle of these solutions can integrate with that of others, how it fits into the workflow and capacity of myself and people I work with, etc.
AI can't do any of that properly right now, and I don't expect that it will any time soon. If I tried to get it to work, I'd likely spend as much time fighting Claude as I'd save. I don't know... What are people doing that they can actually be replaced? Or that companies could decide they actually need fewer people?
My suspicion is that with money being more expensive to borrow, teams are staying lean because we were absurdly inefficient as an industry for the better part of a decade. That's not an AI thing, but a staying closer to actual means thing.
I live in syracuse, I found a job this year after being laid off in 2 months. It was a stressful time. Instead or 5-6 hours a week hed be better off studying C,C++ and Java and applying to places locally. Syracuse does not have a ton of web work, but there is a big defense industry here (Saab, SRC, Lockheed, AFRL) so there are things. Cornell, SU, UofR, I imagine are hiring fewer software engineers now though with the potus changes.
> I even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work
This to me is likely the issue. I suspect if he was willing to move and work on-site, he'd have been back in the saddle quite quickly. My forced career moves also all involved a nationwide job search, and corresponding move.
Still, I believe the struggle, and worry that we'll all be there in the next few years.
Yup. The trust issues around overemployment or straight up fraudulent candidates have made remote work rare and have lead to companies offering a premium for hybrid or fully in person roles. I don't think WFH only is line you can afford to draw anymore if you're on the ropes and leveraged.
And then I realized that he started with just getting home after driving 6 hours of uber to make $200, which didn't really square with on-site work being rock bottom.
I don't want to argue the validity of AI taking jobs, but I really miss the tech job market in mid 00s to early 10s so much.
It was genuinely such an exciting time back then. People were still optimistic about the web and new platform like mobile. There was so much to build, yet relativity few people working in tech. And those of us who were weird enough to work in tech loved it. It felt like almost every week there was some new startup asking around for tech talent and they'd take almost anyone they could get. And when you joined you built cool things that had never been built before.
Today tech feel so stale. People who work in tech are not techies, but just see it as a career. There's so few novel things to build that SWE has basically become a profession of plumbing already built libraries and SaaS tools together. Even startups feel so much more mature from the get go. Back then startups were often bootstrapped projects by a dude in his bedroom. Today before a single line of code is written startups already have CEOs, CTOs, CFOs and several million dollars of investment.
Perhaps this guy should have kept up with trends, but 20 years ago the dude would have had a job at a company where he was respected greatly for being the dude who could throw together an e-commerce store in a few days or something. He probably would have been building genuinely new stuff with a team of other people who loved tech.
I feel terrible for this guy, but he really has stacked the deck against himself by moving to a rural area and refusing (or being unable) to work "on-site". He is up against every new grad and every laid off FAANG programmer clinging to the notion that they should be able to work remotely. To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of remote work but I recognize that many power dynamics have shifted in the last few years.
I could offer a number of critiques about things but instead, I'll encourage him to go back and un-delete his AI vlog content as even if he feels the ground has moved, I would likely find his interest in this topic as a positive thing. I would also recommend he move his tech vlogs to someplace where the topic was the focus rather than blending it into other important parts of his life.
Okay, I've read the whole article. His dad was a drug addict who is now dead. It sucks to have a bad parent. And his mother is disabled and can't really help him. I see now where all the disgruntlement and negativity comes from. And why it is so hard for him to live a life. It's always is hard when one (or in an even worse case both) of your parents are bad. Not only such parents do not pass over their knowledge of life and wealth to their children, they actually take from them. This really sucks, I'm sorry. The man is living this life on a higher difficulty. I feel for him.
I feel for all who feel obsolete and unneeded. The only solution I found for myself was to switch from implementing other people’s ideas to implementing mine. It’s a luxury some cannot afford, but I honestly think it’ll be necessary for many to think long and hard about an idea they can monetize. I wrote about it here:
https://www.cleverthinkingsoftware.com/programmers-will-be-r...
It's brutal out there. I'm currently 36 years years old. I got laid off in March last year from an outsourcing shop because no work was coming, mostly working with PHP, with some Javascript and python sprinkled in there. I thank the Lord for not having a wife and children, because it would have been so painful watching them suffer because of me, and I thank my parents for helping me float through the tough times.
I got a small leyline around September with a part-time job doing Wordpress stuff for a former client. No days off, zero security, just barely surviving month after the other. Fortunately, things are turning around for me! I'm starting a new full-time job next month. It's pretty well paid too, hybrid role, so I will be able to rebuild my savings, contribute to my pension fund, keep up with my balooning mortgage, etc.
The Lord is indeed merciful! I really hope I can make it work, because I get maybe an interview every few months or so.
I think the most brutal part that no one talks about is just how many scams are out there that target unemployed people. I tried doing freelancing for a while, but I never got paid even once. Contracts don't even matter because I don't have the muscle to enforce them. I almost fell for a bunch of scam job interviews/offers as well. I think I broke into tears after an interview that seemingly went well, then I got forwarded some forms to fill, one of them asking for my credit card information for payment.
It's beyond my powers to help him, but I hope things turn around for the OP as well.
> I 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.
I am cutting my experience in the CV to show only last 10 years. In my mind there is some unreasonable expectation that in 20 years you should be able to show research papers or patents, have a network of friends who will refer you, then show leadership skills, i.e. manage people (successfully), and to be a genius who can solve leetcode hards in 20 mins. I do have a substantial number of OSS work but that rarely was of interest to anyone.
[+] [-] shawnfrompdx|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JohnMakin|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bradgessler|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] harmmonica|10 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] kagakuninja|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sabellito|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] georgeecollins|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] starik36|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] karaterobot|10 months ago|reply
Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|10 months ago|reply
> 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."
[+] [-] johnea|10 months ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|10 months ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] rr808|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ponow|10 months ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] pclmulqdq|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aurornis|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TrackerFF|10 months ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] jere|10 months ago|reply
Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.
[+] [-] georgeecollins|10 months ago|reply
I have a friend in a similar situation to the poster and tbh I don't have great advice.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shawnfrompdx|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|10 months ago|reply
Unpack this for me: what constitutes significant contributions to peers or the field?
[+] [-] suzzer99|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 0x1ceb00da|10 months ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] havblue|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|10 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] hackingonempty|10 months ago|reply
On you resume, change your name to "Shawn Kay." Wait until you're doing HR paperwork to use your legal name.
[+] [-] more_corn|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] leksak|10 months ago|reply
Maybe having vibecoding listed as a skill on your resume is a problem?
Alarm bells also go off when I see "Github (advanced)"
While you are powerless to change it I would also be concerned reviewing this resume as with the sole exception of your consultancy your longest tenure anywhere is just two years.
[+] [-] shawnfrompdx|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 1attice|10 months ago|reply
Advice to other commenters here on HN. Before clicking 'add comment', ask yourself:
- If I post from a non-empathetic stance, to what extent is my lack of empathy a strategy to avoid experiencing discomfort?
- If I post from a contradicting or fact-checking stance, to what extent is my skepticism motivated by a desire to feel safer in the world?
- If I post from a relativising or contextualizing stance, to what extent is my reframing driven by the fear that it could happen to me?
You don't have to ask yourself any of these things; but they are hard-won tools I've gained through a lot of work on myself, and they have been of benefit to me. May they be of benefit to you as well.
[+] [-] Barbing|10 months ago|reply
Thank you for these great questions.
[+] [-] shawnfrompdx|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ecshafer|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] flerchin|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] starkparker|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] awkward|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aorloff|10 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] kypro|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] uberman|10 months ago|reply
I could offer a number of critiques about things but instead, I'll encourage him to go back and un-delete his AI vlog content as even if he feels the ground has moved, I would likely find his interest in this topic as a positive thing. I would also recommend he move his tech vlogs to someplace where the topic was the focus rather than blending it into other important parts of his life.
[+] [-] autumnstwilight|10 months ago|reply
(Typing this from an office.)
[+] [-] cynicalsecurity|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dexterlagan|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Arnt|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dyauspitr|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Shaddox|10 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ball_of_lint|10 months ago|reply
> 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?
[+] [-] sublimefire|10 months ago|reply