I just said fuck it and am turning to my life long back up plan: military. I have consistently held a part time job in the military for moments like these. My military job pays much less than my long experience as a software developer allows but enough to cover all the bills. I was able to find an open slot for my next required professional military education course in the very near future which will allow me several months of runway to reevaluate civilian life and promote on time (in the military) next year.
As I become old it looks like I am vastly out growing software as a profession and will probably need a masters to become management, a principle, a product owner, or just go do something else. Software, at least web development, feels like a game nobody wants to play without either unrelated technologies and/or massive third party tools to do all the actual development. That means being between the concerns of a legacy tech stack or decisions dictated by expert beginners… just to get hired.
I have never wanted to be a tech stack expert. I wanted to be a better developer writing faster and more durable applications. This is part of my frustration.
I just decided to pivot into consulting. Had saved so I have a bit of a runway, but the moment the thought occurred to me that I can forget about letcode shenanigans, and interviews and performance reviews, and terrible codebases and focus on jobs that I want to take, I couldn’t go back
I hear you. On top of it all I had to move to change countries for personal reasons, so now I'm away from my network.
The job market is filled with scammers and really low offers.
One way to go is to bite the bullet, as others mentioned, and go through the 18 interviews, pointless ridiculously difficult tests and whiteboards, 3-days long code projects, all that to be accepted into a codebase full of legacy tech, bad team practices and 36 meetings per week. Then you spend a year working your * off trying to convince them to improve, until their funds run dry, they fire you, and the whole thing starts anew. Only this time everything is aggravated because of the recession.
Quite frankly, the whole thing is quite tiring. A career should sum up to something more than that. This can't be it. This whole process is flawed. It's a self serving loop, sub product of greedy business practices.
The world is full of problems, there has to be a better way to contribute, to be productive to society without wasting oneself to all that. I don't know which better way that is. It's all just exasperating.
I went through the whole cycle of "software is magic" to "All jobs are just babysitting horrible codebases" in about five years. I'm done.
I've said this before elsewhere, but I'm starting anew. I'll be studying the classics and will tend bars/sweep floors to make ends meet if necessary. I'm lucky to be in EU where education is nearly free.
There are many companies and industries, not everything is like that. If you're OK taking a pay cut, the process to work on the film industry (VFX), or bio industry, is definitely much easier, and the work can be more meaningful
I’m still figuring it out :) just the position change in LinkedIn has started some conversations but I’m currently working on my personal site because it feel like when people ask me where to look for what I can do I don’t have anything to show them yet (most of my career has been for employers, so I don’t own any of my previous work, only stories)
At the same time I’ve started attending local networking events and meeting businesses (chamber of commerce, meetup, etc) and I’m working on some simple items for friends to get testimonials and portfolio.
It is kind of annoying looking back at more than a decade of work and not owning anything of it! Sure, I got paid, but so what?
A little over 6 months unemployed with around 6 years of experience. Recruiters dried up except for a couple spouts last year and couple last month. Most of the interviews were shockingly hostile. Job applications are a void and frankly I’m seeing less and less jobs relevant to my skill self and less generalist jobs in general.
If things don’t shape up this month, I’m preparing for the worst and possibly giving up. It probably hurts a lot, but I’m still preferring remote. I had a lot of bad luck at the beginning of the year and had to hemorrhage a ton of money on emergencies and am steadily bleeding mostly through rent and bills. I really do not want to pay for moving expenses right now.
Worst I had was one where one guy hijacked the interview to just complain about all the other candidates. I’d try to take the conversation somewhere more productive, but this guy was really good with tangents.
I left my previous job about a year ago due to extreme burnout. Took some time to recover, started looking for the next thing a few months back and so far it's pretty bleak. I'm in EU and most jobs are on-site in expensive cities. Quite often offered salaries would not work for an expat as you won't be able to afford rent (e.g. being required to make 5x the rent per month). Not being young and with about 20 years of exp., even if I go for more junior jobs, I'm being rejected for being overqualified and having higher ambitions. And there aren't enough senior jobs to go around where I'm at or remote. Couple this with most companies not replying or ghosting after an intro. Overall, pretty depressing and I'm barely holding it together.
May I interject? The McKinsey Digitization Index shows shockingly low engagement in the Healthcare, Government and Related sectors and small business is desperate for you to help then save money and better engage with their customers. The Business Automation (niche?) or whatever you want to call it is booming. Lawyers, Plumbers, Gardeners etc all need data gathering and massaging to increase their profits etc. Getting lists of Plumbers in your area and making them and offer via Valpak (with a 90% open rate) may lead to surprising results. The data is free, the US Gov has tons of info and it applies here in a big way. It's easy to find and package....
Holding onto a contract but I'm a bit burned out after 10 years in the industry and was considering sabbatical.
I hope you find a chair somewhere soon, but tbh it feels like most of us will have to drastically rethink viability of our careers in coming years if not immediately. It comes for us all, its just a question of time...
I think most people that are kind of burnt out start to think negatively thus reproduce the same kind of thoughts, rethinking and viewing their career as not viable anymore...
Plus there's so much negativity the last couple of months, just because the market is tight and no more easy job hunting.
its easy to write everything up to negativity, but if you been in the industry for some years and know a few old timers, you may know the job itself is declining in prestige and pay and is currently facing uncertain times....
its not really encouraging when the career you threw your life to may change from ground up into something you may not even enjoy and like (due to AI etc)
lets have at the popular horse analogy; sure people could have always retrained to be "taxi drivers" but what if some of them just enjoyed riding the damn horses and feeding their family at the same time? and did the 20 years of horse riding on the prehistoric CV really translate well when applying for the new fancy taxi driver positions?
I've been a professional since 2016, i know that doesn't make me an old timer but... when were the salaries higher compared to last couple of years?
I agree that prestige tends to decline, is that important though?
About the uncertain times you mention... there are people who think that it's just a phase and it shall pass, and they aren't all newcomers. Also, not everyone views AI as such a game changing force. There is also the case that not much really changes in this industry, I mean we're still writing bash scripts right? Of course you need to keep up to date with latest trends and I understand it could be unpleasant to do so longterm...
> I've been a professional since 2016, i know that doesn't make me an old timer but... when were the salaries higher compared to last couple of years?
just for context I'm located in EU and I consider faang type jobs and compensations something that happens in a minuscule of cases in land far far away. if you look at salaries in "ordinary sw jobs" they may not have been higher in the past, but when adjusted for cost of living (and housing) and inflation, they definitely haven't been keeping up with the times
also in the past when engineers were considered "magicians" it was not uncommon to have royalties for authoring, license agreements in place for very simple low hanging fruit type of applications. this is completely opposed to current power dynamics where employers got the hint and redrafted the employment contracts to make sure most engineers are replaceable cogs in a cost centers dishing out lines of text. I'm not complaining, just giving examples about the decrease in the prestige and benefits in the job itself...
Middle of last year I got laid off. I just hit up a few friends and got job offers immediately. I was able to delay going back to work for 6 months (the last job paid me out ~20 weeks redundancy, I saved a lot) and just chilled out.
Having friends in the industry helps tremendously.
This is important. I didn’t have a good network through my 20s and burnt so much time in interviews, took jobs at lousy companies I didn’t know and so on.
My last 2 jobs were through contacts and have been fantastic.
UK based with 10 years of experience in web dev, been unemployed from December to May 2nd.
December - February I searched as I would years ago - respond to a recruiter here and there and apply to a couple of great roles every week. Usually this would result in several offers.
I never got so few responses, so in March and April I went all in, and applied for 50+ jobs (not sure how many exactly, but a lot). Got a couple of offers well below my day rate.
I got tired of it and just emailed some of my ex-colleagues. Got the job at a place where I already worked within a week.
I'm 5 years into my software development career, for now I am fine. But I am also making sure that my next possible job is already lined up. I'm not taking any chances with a single client, company or even a technology holding a decision over whether I can earn a livelihood; now or in the future.
As I become old it looks like I am vastly out growing software as a profession and will probably need a masters to become management, a principle, a product owner, or just go do something else. Software, at least web development, feels like a game nobody wants to play without either unrelated technologies and/or massive third party tools to do all the actual development. That means being between the concerns of a legacy tech stack or decisions dictated by expert beginners… just to get hired.