As I write this, I am 2 weeks shy of the 1-year anniversary of me starting to look for work again. I took 6 months completely off to deal with family illness and clear my head from same as well as the toxicity of my previous gainful employment situation and the industry of which it is a part. I needed that time away, and I was filled with optimism and hope that I was finally free of the corpo shackles and I had a chance at a second career or to at least get into a place that wasn’t all about hiding worker exploitation behind the red herring of “fiduciary responsibility”.
But somewhere along the way, likely before I ever left that previous company, the rules of the game changed and have continued to change, and I was and am not prepared for the new strategies. The old methods that I used to get a job don’t work anymore, and I find the new methods still to be so ideologically repugnant to me that I can’t bring myself to play the new game. The irony here is that I used to work at one of those companies on the job board side of things - the companies that were actually the ones doing a majority of the game-changing - but I didn’t see it, and I certainly didn’t think it would happen to me.
Insert rueful chuckle here
There’s massive competition due to so many companies (tech and otherwise) constantly cannibalizing themselves by laying off large swaths of workers so that the executives can get (or keep) more money in their pockets. The “AI” bubble has led to the whole “bots talking to bots on humans’ behalf” phenomenon both on the HR-resume-filtering side as well as the human-application-submission side. Supply of qualified software devs has now far exceeded the demand, and yet tech companies still put applicants through a grueling hunger games-like interview process to try and find “the best”. Experience counts only insofar as it gives the companies the ability to deny proceedings because the applicant is either too qualified or not specifically qualified enough. Resumes need to be tailored with specific keywords to match each individual job in order to get seen by a human.
I don’t understand these rules or have a good feel on how to operate within them.
As of now, I’m 50 years old, I’ve been writing software professionally since the day I graduated college (so about 28 years now), and I have used all sorts of languages from Visual Basic to Java and all sorts of tech from Linux to AWS cloud services. I haven’t worked for 18 months. I have become at the very least a socialist, if not a full communist, and I hate the capitalist system in which I am forced to exist. I think UBI is a really, really good idea. I’m no longer “in it for the money” and believe that technology will not save us, that there are human problems that tech cannot solve (but can certainly exacerbate and make worse), and that all these techbros, self-proclaimed “entrepreneurs”, techno-feudalists, and gosh danged “influencers” should be rounded up and ejected onto the winning billionaire’s nearest space colony.
What I haven’t used (or rather, what I am not proficient with) is Python, Go, and front-end development frameworks like React or Angular (that last one is completely by design, because I suck at interface design, I know it, and I don’t enjoy the bit-flipping and knob-twiddling which that area of things requires). And therefore, as a result of this, I am not a “full stack developer” which every corpo and their freakin’ sister seems to want their developers to be. I’ve spent a career focusing on middleware and backend technologies and specializing in some areas with deep knowledge while also having a fairly wide breadth of tech into which I have come into contact.
And I have a mortgage that still needs payin’, healthcare costs that I have to pay for myself, and a fair number of housing-related upkeep costs that I keep seeming to crop up at the worst possible times. Just living and maintaining the life that I have both been given and built is expensive, folks! And the older I get, the more it costs me - especially when it comes to the upkeep costs on my house. For example, just last week I had to replace my air conditioning system after just 11 years, which is a very expensive problem to have (especially when you have no money coming in to pay for it).
So here I sit, having been through hundreds of applications, a handful of interviews, and no inkling as to why I keep getting rejected. Am I too old? Too much experience? Missing some technology experience? Been not working too long? My ability to excel at contrived, pressure-cooker assessment tests not good enough? Too rigid? Not 10X enough? Unqualified to be a manager? Wants to be a manager too much? Not interested in the startup grind or “wearing many hats”? Do I have a tell that is subconsciously exposing my disdain for the industry and its practices in which I am, at that very moment, trying to get a job?
What is it? Why do I keep getting kicked to the curb? And why the hell won’t anyone tell me what I’m lacking so I can remedy the problem???
And switching careers has been tough also. I could go with “unskilled” labor (like retail or something), but that won’t pay me enough to live on with just one job, so I’ll have to get 2. Anything that would pay me the bare minimum I need to cover my expenses also seems to require additional training or certifications which I don’t have. There’s not a lot of “regular” jobs out there that seem to do on-the-job training or that don’t already require some sort of experience or certification(s) beforehand. It just seems like every company in just about every industry is only looking for people that have some level of experience and doesn’t seem interested in training people to do the job and make a career out of it; and in this keyword-matching marketplace, I would think that I would have a lot of transferrable skills but I have no idea what they are or how to highlight them in a transferable form that would make sense in another industry.
So now I feel useless. I’m unable to get a job in my chosen career field (even ones that I should, by rights, receive an offer for just based on my experience and longevity at previous companies alone). I feel discarded and worthless, like I’ve already been put out to pasture. I want to do something good, something that helps society, but based on the society that I live in it has to pay me enough money to live on - which includes paying off the rest of my house which ain’t much, but is significant enough of an amount.
I guess that tech and society in general cares about as much about maintenance and sustainment of personal property (for lack of a better term) as they do about the same things in their software. I would work for literally 1/5th of my previous salary if that was all that was available to me because that’s all I need to maintain. And yet with the way that this ridiculous capitalist meat-market behaves itself in a lord-of-the-flies recruiting process through grinding up “the best of the best”, I really have no idea where to even look to find those jobs. I can’t just do whatever I want to do to help society, because I have to get paid something and when even work like warehousing requires certifications and licenses and up-front costs, I’m screwed because I don’t have the time required to first get the certification(s) and then work my way up to the minimum pay level that I need.
If I’m being really honest with myself, I was one of those that never truly believed that it would happen to me, but it has. That thought is humiliating, demoralizing, confusing, and depressing and I honestly do not know what to do next. My last, desperate option is to knuckle under and start applying to those companies that I said I would never work for (again) and with whose ideals and founders I vehemently disagree with. As someone once said, “ideals don’t pay the bills”, but I honestly don’t know if I can stomach doing that. Certainly not for the remaining 10-13 years of “working life” that I have left.
I’m really starting to question my abilities and skills. Am I really a Principal Software Engineer or did I just earn that title simply through longevity or “failing up”? If I can’t ace every programming interview or assessment test, am I really good at my job? Am I really not team lead or management material? Maybe I’m not a good developer and maybe my skills really aren’t as good as I think they are. Maybe I’ve just been able to siphon enough skill from the teams I’ve worked with in order to hide out and keep my job (even though I have always tried to give credit to my teams for the work that they did). Are my “soft” interview skills really as good as I think they are? Do I often say the wrong thing because I’m unable to “read the room” or the interviewer to tell them what they want to hear to get an offer?
Lately, I’m feeling that I’m not very good at development and people have just been lying to me all these years, and rejection after rejection with no explanation of why just seems to underscore those thoughts. I feel like there’s something that everybody else can see but me and nobody’s willing to tell me the truth.
I honestly and truly don’t know what I’m going to do now.
