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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PM: "Uh no, ask $PERSON"

How many of this person does any company need?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second that

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

> I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people"

That is almost certainly happening. What needs to play out for the pendulum to swing the other way is all of these companies realizing that their codebase has become a bunch of AI-generated slop that nobody can work on effectively (including the AIs). Whether that plays out or not is an open question: how much slop can the AI generate before it falls over?

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

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

Pure speculation, but I wonder if it's not so much AI as tech companies realizing they actually can do more with less. And, again, I have no evidence to back this up other than "feels," but I swear when Elon bought Twitter and cut so much of the workforce that's when sentiment seemed to shift materially. I wonder if that wasn't a bit of an "aha" moment for mega tech and tech in general. It's like all the major companies said maybe we don't need as many people as we have. Of course people are going to debate whether the changes at Twitter had a monumentally-negative impact (they may very well have in terms of revenue, but I'm not so sure in terms of absolute or even relative profit).

Of course, as a sibling comment, I think, said it could be the end of ZIRP. But maybe the truth is it's end of ZIRP, seeing a "peer" shed employees en masse and not fail outright, and AI.

Twitter deal in 2022. Headcount by year for a few (not suggesting this data supports my theory; just sharing to reality check)...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...

Edit: grammar

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

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

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

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

Do people see Elon's takeover of Twitter as a success? I think he leveraged Twitter as a social media platform to make himself wealthy, but as far as I can tell, the actual company has been losing a ton of money.

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

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

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

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

We only know that value when they make an offer to buy the company. Otherwise it’s all speculation.

If the perceived value has anything to do with Elon Musk’s politics then that becomes irrelevant under new ownership.

I don’t think there are any real new competitors. Blue Sky is a joke. Ultra niche platform for weirdos. No economic value there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a pure economics perspective, this is healthy.

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.

Bad for people in the short term, of course. Arguments are made that it's good for society in the longer term. Wars are fought between opposing sides of that opinion. :)

> More seriously, there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living. I can guarantee you every major tech company took note of that reality and so I have to believe it begged some questions about headcounts.

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

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

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

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

For every engineer who sees things not working on the site and going unfixed, there's a manager who sees how many people still use it.

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

I'm sure companies are realizing this - and tech unemployment is still on the rise - but if this trend was as pervasive as people seem to suggest, it doesn't really explain why tech unemployment is still significantly lower than the national unemployment rate. Maybe it going from 1.5% to 3.4% or whatever is what people are feeling, but it doesn't seem like that should result in massive amounts of people spamming resumes with no response. I'm sure some jobs/careers are gone forever now, but it can't seriously be that many.

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

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

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

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

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

Meta is probably the better example, here - dropped 20% of it's headcount (11% in Nov-22 and another ~9% subsequently, plus whatever's happened since Jan-24) and then 7x'd it's stock price. You can probably argue about decommitting from the "metaverse" fever dream idiocy, but a lot of companies looked at the deep cuts to headcount and certainly thought "AI or no AI, a lot of these people aren't adding value and Meta (and possibly Twitter, depending on what you believe) prove(s) it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- can still deploy features in the frontend

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

- moderation deliberately cut down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[delayed]

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

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

Could it be that your particular position required more ongoing learning, and that has kept you better prepared for a changing world?

What fraction of positions require that ongoing learning, or at least to that degree?

Also, consider many other jobs, are they doing their job, and the doing of their job itself provides the experience that makes you a more valuable worker? Or is the doing of the job basically a necessary distraction from the actual task of preparing yourself for a future job? What fraction of humanity actually takes on two jobs, the paying job and the preparing-for-the-next-job? Might doing the latter get you fired from the former? Most importantly, is doing that latter job getting more important over time, that is, are our jobs less secure? If so, is this what is an improving economy, rising, as it were, with GDP?

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

What's your strategy for continuing education?

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

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

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

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

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

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

This has slowed down as I've gained experience but basically I am always volunteering to work on stuff I only have a shaky understanding of or never have done before. If I'm not doing new things on a job for ~1 year or more I get extremely uncomfortable, or start learning on my own. People call it "resume building" but I usually work for small skeleton teams where there's a ton of work available for someone that just volunteers to do it. That was basically how I crawled into my terraform/IAC niche, I was on a team where that was needed, they weren't going to hire, and no one else volunteered to take it on.

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."

  AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.

Perhaps in years 3-20 they relied solely on skills and knowledge they acquired in years 1 and 2. So even if the work still needs to be done, it can be done at 10x productivity using AI, requiring fewer people.

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

doubt.

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

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

True

Your mileage may vary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You made me login to reply :) , thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end of ZIRP was well before last year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suspect it's not AI.

> dismissing me when they find out my dinosaur age of 42

I gave up, after encountering this (at 55). It's been a thing for quite some time (more than the 2.5 years he mentions).

What's annoying, is that the very people doing the dismissing, are ones that will soon be in those shoes.

I believe ol' Bill Shakey called it "Hoist by your own petard."

> I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant.

Sounds like you dont have kids to help look after or a parent to care for, and you're still in the desirable age to hire from. Wait another ten years after you help kids with their homework or sports in the evening and dont have energy to work on a side projects.

As someone who has kids and actively participates in their lives (homework, hobbies, etc), I think I can safely say: the need to keep learning and growing never stops.

You have to balance it with other needs.

But this industry doesn’t stand still, and as a part of it, I can’t either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure, weekends and holidays will do.

>> Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.

I had the same impression. Anyone reading this who is younger: at some point in your life your employment will probably mostly depend on the connections you make to your successful peers, the companies you start, or the products/ technologies you are associated with. When you are starting, strangers will hire you off of your resume. At some point this effectively stops and if people aren't familiar with you or your work they will not consider you. This has been true long before LLMs existed.

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

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

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

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

I am 61, and have been working for almost 40 years. I don't really have a lot of personal connections, because I am on the autistic spectrum. Yes, I have many former co-workers linked on LinkedIn, but to most of those people, I'm just an old acquaintance, not someone they are going to phone up with a hot new job opportunity.

The exception is one college friend who did help me get multiple jobs at startups, but he retired several years ago.

Establishing and maintaining relationships is hard, and many of us are simply not good at it.

Now I did make sure to stay in touch with a couple ex-managers who I knew would be good references. One of them even helped me get an interview. But even when I had a connection on the inside of a company, all that really does is move me to the head of the line, past the HR screen. I still have to interview, something I still suck at despite decades of practice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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