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Except some of us with decades of deep experience are barely floating in the water, while the decks are suposedly crowded with those recent hires.

dartos 2y ago
Surprisingly, I’ve had more luck on the job boards of discord servers than LinkedIn, at least with getting interviews. The elixir, go, is, and rust discord servers have pretty active job boards. Also yconbinators job site seems good if you live in sf.
roenxi 2y ago
That is a cruel way of discovering that one's skills are low value or obsolete. But an economy is quite cruel.
- jacknews 2y ago
  You presume. But you are wrong. Decades of experience does not equal an old COBOL programmer. Personally I'm pretty up to date, with latest backend and some frontend frameworks and languages, rails, next, rust, clojure, etc, and even quite a bit of self-studied Torch, LLM tuning, plenty of mentoring, team-leadership and so on, and extensive system-design in enterprise, investment banks, etc. I do have the disadvantage of living in a 'developing nation' while being a westerner (therefore expecting more than a rice-bowl salary). But you can think it through step by step. No-one is hiring, therefore no-one is getting hired, regardless of skills or experience. Meanwhile, it takes time to clear the decks and for sentiment to improve. So you are right about the vagaries and dis-function of "the market".
- Silhouette 2y ago
  I doubt being able to solve real problems for other people by using technology is a skill that will go obsolete any time soon. Unfortunately at the moment we have several trends in the industry that interfere with matching up people who have real problems and people who can figure out how to solve them. Years of cheap money have flooded the industry with low-skilled workers, completely broken recruitment, destroyed any kind of trust between employers and employees, and created astronomical expectations of compensation in some parts of the industry that were never competitive outside their own bubble. Then there are the hype cycles. Right now the big one is AI. As usual there are plenty of people in management positions who don't really understand the issues at all but have delusional expectations of game changing results that will let them dramatically downsize their teams without losing effectiveness. Obviously sooner or later they'll learn or they'll fail but in the meantime it's another barrier to good people finding good problems to solve and getting real work done. If you're good and you're looking for interesting work then I suggest considering smaller employers. The era of the Big Tech free lunch is over and it's probably not coming back any time soon. Meanwhile there are people all over the place still trying to solve important problems who will value experienced colleagues who can get things done.
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  The problem is: who gets to define "low value?" Management typically doesn't have the engineering chops or in-the-trenches experience to properly discern "low value" engineers from "high value" engineers.

dartos 2y ago

Surprisingly, I’ve had more luck on the job boards of discord servers than LinkedIn, at least with getting interviews. The elixir, go, is, and rust discord servers have pretty active job boards. Also yconbinators job site seems good if you live in sf.

roenxi 2y ago

That is a cruel way of discovering that one's skills are low value or obsolete. But an economy is quite cruel.

jacknews 2y ago
You presume. But you are wrong. Decades of experience does not equal an old COBOL programmer. Personally I'm pretty up to date, with latest backend and some frontend frameworks and languages, rails, next, rust, clojure, etc, and even quite a bit of self-studied Torch, LLM tuning, plenty of mentoring, team-leadership and so on, and extensive system-design in enterprise, investment banks, etc. I do have the disadvantage of living in a 'developing nation' while being a westerner (therefore expecting more than a rice-bowl salary). But you can think it through step by step. No-one is hiring, therefore no-one is getting hired, regardless of skills or experience. Meanwhile, it takes time to clear the decks and for sentiment to improve. So you are right about the vagaries and dis-function of "the market".
Silhouette 2y ago
I doubt being able to solve real problems for other people by using technology is a skill that will go obsolete any time soon. Unfortunately at the moment we have several trends in the industry that interfere with matching up people who have real problems and people who can figure out how to solve them. Years of cheap money have flooded the industry with low-skilled workers, completely broken recruitment, destroyed any kind of trust between employers and employees, and created astronomical expectations of compensation in some parts of the industry that were never competitive outside their own bubble. Then there are the hype cycles. Right now the big one is AI. As usual there are plenty of people in management positions who don't really understand the issues at all but have delusional expectations of game changing results that will let them dramatically downsize their teams without losing effectiveness. Obviously sooner or later they'll learn or they'll fail but in the meantime it's another barrier to good people finding good problems to solve and getting real work done. If you're good and you're looking for interesting work then I suggest considering smaller employers. The era of the Big Tech free lunch is over and it's probably not coming back any time soon. Meanwhile there are people all over the place still trying to solve important problems who will value experienced colleagues who can get things done.
JohnBooty 2y ago
The problem is: who gets to define "low value?" Management typically doesn't have the engineering chops or in-the-trenches experience to properly discern "low value" engineers from "high value" engineers.