When the Job Search Becomes Impossible

Presumably the computer science departments will continue to churn out more supply for a while yet.

I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.

The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.

There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.

At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.

These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.

To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.

> Are you scared for your safety?

> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.

https://www.rev.com/transcripts/house-uap-whistleblower-hear...

If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.

Life never gets easier with age. I guess that's just something we all have to come to terms with eventually.

I like learning new things, and I hope to continue that into my 60s (and beyond), but I have to imagine picking up new skills will get harder as I age.

I feel like the underlying issue is less with age and more with ossification. If you're a world expert in Visual Basic but don't want to learn that "fad" TypeScript, well, get used to being unemployed.

That’s a long enough tech career to retire. I don’t know you, but I know that even 65 year olds with 6 million in the bank are nervous to retire.

This is becoming less and less true.

> You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.

Unless you're lucky, this is no longer going to happen. Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.

People who have networks all know this. The issue is that a shocking number of people don't have any network at all. These tend to be the sorts of people who are either actively antisocial at work (the "coworkers aren't your friends" type) or job hop so frequently that they don't spend enough time at any single job to develop any meaningful professional, let alone personal connections.

The majority of employment in tech is with large, corporate firms, and unless you are in the executive tier they all have implemented a massive amount of process to prevent bias in hiring which means that even networking has low impact on getting a job, beyond letting you know the positions even exist

Just be careful contacting recruiters directly. I know of at least one F100 that will blacklist you for pestering their recruiters. If you think ai-generated resumes are overwhelming recruiters, you should see their LinkedIn inboxes.

Use the paths available to you to get a job. Exhaust them all. If you know someone that works there and THEY track you down, yes this is good advice, great way to get a job.

I don't really have a good network, since I have worked in different countries.

This is straight up agism and should be banned. It's like saying black people can't code as well as white people.

Carmack and Torvalds would disagree with you.

I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.

Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.

It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.

It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.

When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.

Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.

>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.

You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.

I agree.

But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.

I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)

So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.

But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.

(I say this half-joking, but also I know a DBA who retrained as an electrician and was happier than ever. It's the fact he retired - early - which has put me in my current predicament.)

Dating is just a numbers game. Roughly speaking it's about maximising interactions with potential partners and taking a shot in as many of these interactions which go positively as possible.

You can game dating in your favour with a bit of strategy. Unfortunately job searches are much harder to game since you can exhaust the number of active positions for your preferred role quite rapidly. The only advice I can give on job searches is to keep your skillset as broad as possible. Specialising is good if when you find work you want to be paid well. Being well-rounded is good if you want to find work as easily as possible.