8 ms·

Well as a single datum: After I got laid off in late 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work (despite having AI experience) to the point my unemployment ran

by AIorNot 10mo ago

Well as a single datum: After I got laid off in late 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work (despite having AI experience) to the point my unemployment ran out - And I was 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, (never had trouble finding work) including stints as a leading EM and CTO, I’ve been an industry award winning innovation lead,a digital studio director, switching tech stacks and cloud certs all my career..mentoring juniors and doing podcasts and writing white papers etc, but peanuts - nothing Getting ghosted by 25 year olds in interviews and doing rounds and rounds and leetcode and all that but no success- for example I had a 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023 and then got ghosted (I probably doged a bullet since they had subsequent layoffs) a 12 month stint with nothing - we lost our savings as my wife got laid off too Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- joining incubators and finally got some work or at least cofounded some AI startups- now money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job… it sucks as a over 45 year old as I have so much experience but no one cares.. still dont have much grey hair so I can pass for 40 to get noticed No one stable is hiring or your resume just goes to a dead letter queue or is lost in ether or lost amid all the ai generated resumes out there - young ML and PHds and people under 40 seem to be getting work in Gen AI but thats about it networking is the only game left and most good recruiters I know got laid off too At least I’ve built up production experience in agents and context engineering RL, pytorch, langchain/LangGraph, RAG, KGa, etc python, BAML, LLM and LLMops to add to my years of full stack work

maxnevermind 10mo ago
Were you flexible with re-location or you were looking just at you current region or it is that bad no matter your flexibility?
donatj 10mo ago
The number of just straight out NO's I've gotten has been surprising and disheartening. I've been a developer for 20 years and genuinely don't think I've gotten an outright "no" before this year. Usually just no response. I've gotten maybe eight or nine actual rejections this year. It's honestly worse, emotionally. Ideally I want a job outside my wheelhouse to learn and move forward, but it seems like no one these days is interested in any sort of training. There have been two gigs I was really excited about that seemed more-or-less exactly what I have spent the past decade doing and they've BOTH actually replied that they didn't think my skills were a good fit. I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it. Before COVID I would regularly apply for jobs, almost always get them, and decline largely to keep my interview skills fresh. This last year of looking has been the total opposite. I've applied for umpteen places, and gotten a little bit of email back and forth, and a single interview (it's in a couple days, wish me luck).
- seanw444 10mo ago
  > I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it. The simple answer is that they probably had no intention of hiring you, or anybody, in the first place. The amount of fake job listings is absurd.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 10mo ago
    Why do they bother wasting time on interviewing the person though? Or does it never get that far?
    - sydbarrett74 10mo ago
      Pipelining, mostly.
    - chickensong 10mo ago
      Companies can have legal requirements to post the job, but have no intention of hiring a random outsider.
    - balamatom 10mo ago
      It costs nothing to simulate activity, the costs are incurred on the candidate.
    - spwa4 10mo ago
      It is one trick that allows management to lie to everyone, and to implement downsizing. Fact is that A LOT of US businesses became unsustainable due to the tariffs (which Trump totally did for "US first" and not, I repeat NOT to get an extra tax started for him to spend), the retaliatory tariffs, followed by Trump doing the largest mass-firing in US history, presumably because this is listed in introductory economics textbooks in the chapter "what caused the great depression". So a LOT of businesses are now in the position that they have to raise prices significantly into the worst market in decades. So they'll get significantly less revenue and they'll have to go into overdrive on saving money. That means no hiring, layoffs, price hikes, shrinkflation, ... the whole thing. They have to do a lot less with a lot less. How does management respond to this? Well, management generally isn't competent. Their only job is to negotiate, and now that will really be put to the test. The smarter ones know that negotiation doesn't even matter under these circumstances (since it's a fixed pie being divided: someone has to lose). So they're maximizing their runway and getting out. And first, of course, they lie. They tell people even inside companies that they're hiring, even to the point of having interviews. They post job postings, because that's part of doing covert layoffs: they replace full time employees by temporary ones, even interns. They wait with price hikes until they're through inventory. They notice they've signed long-term contracts with Walmart that they cannot fulfill. And so on. So they lie to maintain their reputation for after the crisis (so on their next interview they can believably claim "I could have saved the company, but I found a better opportunity ..."). So I bet we'll be seeing a LOT of managers, especially higher up, suddenly decide they need to find a new job, and when it turns out that doesn't work, take a 2-3 year excuse to take a break. As for replacing these people with AI: they're not spending ... and AI is expensive. Sure there's startups using AI, but larger companies are just firing people and not replacing them. Certainly they don't see the current period as a good time to change ... anything. Governments should be "countering the crisis" and hire, according to economics textbooks, and increase social spending with the savings from the decade past ... except ... there are no savings from the decade past. So governments are firing, laying off, saving on healthcare, and so on and so forth. The US obviously has everyone's attention but the UK is doing the same (frankly, worse) and so is the EU. Trump will be the most desperate manager of all, doing anything and everything he can to delay this from happening until the midterm elections in November, like lowering interest rates. But the thing everyone needs to remember about interest rates: they only lower for a good reason. The problem for Trump is ... either he delays this to beyond November or he becomes a "lame-duck" president, unable to do anything.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 10mo ago
Do you have a thesis for why that might be happening? Ageism? Overqualification? The next generation of hiring managers not knowing what to do with you? Past experience being deemed irrelevant to modern SWE problems? Is it all just a bad market? Your profile strikes me as the last one that would struggle with landing a gig.
- actionfromafar 10mo ago
  Uncertain outlooks in general + why hire people if AI soon will solve everything everywhere all at once?
- deadbabe 10mo ago
  The simple answer is we are in a recession and no one wants to spend money on new hires right now if they can avoid it.
ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
> 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023 Name and shame, this should be the norm. People are too shy on this subject. Thank you.
r33b33 10mo ago
Are you ready for great age of suffering? Because there will be no saving, no UBI, no plan B. This is it. This is the end of careers and beginning of centuries of misery. AI will replace everyone except around 3%. If you aren't one of those 3%, start accepting the reality of infinite pain.
- lotsoweiners 10mo ago
  Or you know the 97% can just kill the AI. I’d probably go that route.
  - r33b33 10mo ago
    You can't kill what's more intelligent than you and ubiquitous. You can the 3% though...
GardenLetter27 10mo ago
Yeah, once you hit 50 the wall is real. You need to maximise your earnings during your 30s and 40s to be able to just do contracting, etc. then.
- deadbabe 10mo ago
  Take care of yourself: exercise, skin care, fashion trends, botox, hair dye, etc. so you do not look 50+ and no one will know the difference.
  - idiotsecant 10mo ago
    Can we just pause and consider what happened to this industry where this is the advice. This is the natural consequence of marketing and fundraising completely destroying engineering. It's not about real things anymore. It's about image. It's an industry of carnival barkers turning everything it touches to shit.
    - deadbabe 10mo ago
      The industry had turned to shit long ago when we deviated from the path of the UNIX philosophy and fell into cargo cult frontend programming. We had the most powerful UI in the world, the command line, and we gave it up for pretty pixels and shiny buttons. We have lost what it truly meant to be an engineer, now just look at the kinds of people entering the industry today: No passion for the science, just chasing cash and quick thrills. And you wonder why our interview process has gotten so shallow?
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - projectazorian 10mo ago
      This is America, the land of grifters and carnival barkers. Everything is about marketing and image. Always has been.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
zipy124 10mo ago
Being overqualified is indeed a real phenomenom. Employers can think your too expensive, or that your desperatem and that you might not stick around long. All valid concerns.
spaceman_2020 10mo ago
My brother who is nearly 50 and has worked in tech since the dot com boom, got laid off in January and couldn't find a job until last week. This job, too, was just a contractual position at his old Fortune 50 firm. He has an engineering degree from one of the top 5 engineering colleges in India, a Master's from one of the top 5 engineering schools in the US. He built some of the systems that form the foundation of the entire call center industry. And now he pivoted to GenAI and has dozens of very impressive public projects including some heavily starred open source repos And yet...nothing. Ageism in the tech industry has never been worse
- Throaway1985232 10mo ago
  [dead]
- BergAndCo 10mo ago
  The dead comment replying to this said "Start your own company," which I hear a lot. The problem is, the #1 thing YC looks for in a founder is they're wealthy enough to absorb risk. You don't take on massive risk from a position of financial insecurity.
lvl155 10mo ago
What’s admirable is that you’ve actually applied to jobs below your pay grade. Most people won’t because doing that grind in your 40s is actually hard especially if you have kids.
- yodsanklai 10mo ago
  So what these people do if they can't find a job?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lazide 10mo ago
    It’s rarely good. Are you sure you want to ask that question?
yodsanklai 10mo ago
I work in a FAANG as a SWE. I'm not the on selecting candidates, but I do interview a lot of them. I'm pretty sure I've never seen a 50+ year old candidate. 99% of the candidates have less than 10 year experience, and are in their 20s or 30s. So yes, ageism is real. I suppose the company gets away with it by saying they look for candidates with 3-10 years of experience? At that stage, I think I would pass Leetcode with 2-3 months of practice, and I don't mind putting the work if this is what it takes. I'm just not sure I'd be given the chance.
- AIorNot 10mo ago
  Yeah forget it if you look old - old people like me might have to put on our glasses Linus Torovalds is 55 - so he’s too old right? Hes about dad age for most software engineer teams in FAANG and startups… Software engineering team culture is young and male skewed for years-
johnnyanmac 10mo ago
Yeah, this ageism factor mixed with how unstable in general my industry is had me adjusting my long term plan to focus on being able to survive off my own products. I'm still far off from that point but it's probably best to plan my mid-late career before industry locks me out... Doesn't help that I've tried to specialize for quite a while but simply can't stay around long enough without layoffs happening. Hard to be a domain expert when companies let you go ever 3 years. T shaped generalist it is, then.
ecshafer 10mo ago
Are you in a major tech market (SF? Seattle?) I was a laid off in the beginning of the year from my remote job, landed several interviews, and I found a new job in <2 months. My resume is less impressive than yours, ~10 years of experience. I was able to land interviews with some remote companies. I used to work at Shopify, a got some interviews at Ruby shops from that. Some possibilities: 1. Ageism, this is a distinct possibility. 2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies. 3. Talking to people I think non-tech markets look like they are doing fine. People I know in Rochester, Syracuse, and Cleveland aren't having issues getting jobs. I think the huge layoffs in big tech have left a big supply in tech cities to less demand.
- shagie 10mo ago
  > 2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies. --- Not only is there the overshadow worry, but there's the overqualified for the position. You were CTO once, and now you're a IC again... are you looking for a CTO position still? I had an experience (post dot com crash) where the team hired a senior engineer... who left the team within a year to be an engineering manager somewhere else in the company and our team was back to interviewing for the position again. From our team's perspective we wasted the time interviewing and onboarding a person when they job-hopped (even within the company) in under a year. Despite being qualified as a senior engineer it wasn't what they wanted to do. To that end, overly qualified candidates are similarly risky to hire as under qualified ones. I've also been in situations where someone in a senior or management position is hired with previous Big Tech or startup experience and tries to make the regional retail company's internals into a Big Tech engineering department which ended poorly for everyone involved. --- To your third point, the desire to stay on the coasts and around Big Tech companies is also a thing. Being willing to move to and within the midwestern states (some companies have return to office... others don't want to create a tax nexus in another state - if you don't hire anyone in California or Colorado you don't have to follow those laws... so hire everyone in one state and only deal with one state's payroll tax and insurance options).
eudamoniac 10mo ago
I don't mean this as a judgement; I am genuinely curious: with a career like that, how are you out of money after twelve months? Do you have unusual expenses? I am 31, currently making $180k (the most I've ever made) as a bog standard 'senior SWE', and I have nearly a million dollars. I am not frugal, I don't think; I just bought a $900 pair of sunglasses last week, and that wasn't a huge outlier expense. I have at least twenty years of savings right now. What is eating up your (and any onlookers', if you care to comment) budget?
- askafriend 10mo ago
  I bet poor investment planning and low-paying roles despite the years of experience.
  - mywittyname 10mo ago
    > I bet poor investment planning Or good investment planning. I only recently built up savings after spending my entire career maxing out 401ks. If I was laid off, I'd only have like 6 months or so of savings before I run out despite having a coastFIRE/leanFIRE NW. Yes, there are hardship withdraws from 401ks, but the older you get, the more retirement account means retirement account. Meaning, it becomes more clear that the money in that account needs to be left alone until things get dire. You're not going to be more employable in 20 years.
    - eudamoniac 10mo ago
      A 401k and an IRA together constitute only $31,500 this year, and less in each previous year, before taxes. That shouldn't be the main factor. FWIW I was including those accounts in my 'savings' number.
- foolswisdom 10mo ago
  It's also possible that OP means short term savings kept for circumstances like these, and long term investments bear more cost (e.g. keeping money in a money market fund vs in stocks has different tax implications when you take the money out).
jiveturkey 10mo ago
Try taking 10-12 years off of your resume. Especially if you don't have grey hair this might help a lot.
- mywittyname 10mo ago
  This is what I do. I leave just enough on the resume to look "senior" while not appearing to be older than 30 or so on my resume. Having a great, timeless linkedin profile picture helps too.
creer 10mo ago
"Now it's different". Is it really? One aspect of these stories is that we all do age and we do climb into higher positions. So we run into "too old" and "too qualified" and "will leave asap for something better". And the reason is not that the economy or job market are different. The reason is that we are older. Nothing wrong with both happening at the same time but this "I never ran into this problem before" does have a common difference which is "I was never that old before". I use "old" for shock value here while being totally in the camp that companies would do well to find ways to use older, more experienced talent at a lower cost than "normal". (Even after I have run into "older" as inflexible and a pain to work with.) But there is also another problem in many of these reports: Older and still applying by sending resumes in response for job postings! If you are older you should have a network you can use. If they find nothing for you - or don't care to talk to you, then THAT is the better signal. And still not necessarily a signal about the job market.
- AIorNot 10mo ago
  Not sure what you are on about - I have a giant network in linkedin and it did help me find a job eventually… You only cultivate a regional network if you live in the same spot for years - i moved from the south to Seattle - Im not moving back to the South- so my network is mostly useless I have for example a network with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic - all it got me was getting to the team match stage with Google followed by denial after almost 6 months in the interview process As for OpenAI and Anthropic you need to have success in the AI startup world+network+ be young (old is only allowed id you have massive career success eg VP at Google or Amazon)

by AIorNot 10mo ago

maxnevermind 10mo ago

Were you flexible with re-location or you were looking just at you current region or it is that bad no matter your flexibility?

donatj 10mo ago

The number of just straight out NO's I've gotten has been surprising and disheartening. I've been a developer for 20 years and genuinely don't think I've gotten an outright "no" before this year. Usually just no response. I've gotten maybe eight or nine actual rejections this year. It's honestly worse, emotionally. Ideally I want a job outside my wheelhouse to learn and move forward, but it seems like no one these days is interested in any sort of training. There have been two gigs I was really excited about that seemed more-or-less exactly what I have spent the past decade doing and they've BOTH actually replied that they didn't think my skills were a good fit. I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it. Before COVID I would regularly apply for jobs, almost always get them, and decline largely to keep my interview skills fresh. This last year of looking has been the total opposite. I've applied for umpteen places, and gotten a little bit of email back and forth, and a single interview (it's in a couple days, wish me luck).

seanw444 10mo ago
> I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it. The simple answer is that they probably had no intention of hiring you, or anybody, in the first place. The amount of fake job listings is absurd.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 10mo ago
  Why do they bother wasting time on interviewing the person though? Or does it never get that far?
  - sydbarrett74 10mo ago
    Pipelining, mostly.
  - chickensong 10mo ago
    Companies can have legal requirements to post the job, but have no intention of hiring a random outsider.
  - balamatom 10mo ago
    It costs nothing to simulate activity, the costs are incurred on the candidate.
  - spwa4 10mo ago
    It is one trick that allows management to lie to everyone, and to implement downsizing. Fact is that A LOT of US businesses became unsustainable due to the tariffs (which Trump totally did for "US first" and not, I repeat NOT to get an extra tax started for him to spend), the retaliatory tariffs, followed by Trump doing the largest mass-firing in US history, presumably because this is listed in introductory economics textbooks in the chapter "what caused the great depression". So a LOT of businesses are now in the position that they have to raise prices significantly into the worst market in decades. So they'll get significantly less revenue and they'll have to go into overdrive on saving money. That means no hiring, layoffs, price hikes, shrinkflation, ... the whole thing. They have to do a lot less with a lot less. How does management respond to this? Well, management generally isn't competent. Their only job is to negotiate, and now that will really be put to the test. The smarter ones know that negotiation doesn't even matter under these circumstances (since it's a fixed pie being divided: someone has to lose). So they're maximizing their runway and getting out. And first, of course, they lie. They tell people even inside companies that they're hiring, even to the point of having interviews. They post job postings, because that's part of doing covert layoffs: they replace full time employees by temporary ones, even interns. They wait with price hikes until they're through inventory. They notice they've signed long-term contracts with Walmart that they cannot fulfill. And so on. So they lie to maintain their reputation for after the crisis (so on their next interview they can believably claim "I could have saved the company, but I found a better opportunity ..."). So I bet we'll be seeing a LOT of managers, especially higher up, suddenly decide they need to find a new job, and when it turns out that doesn't work, take a 2-3 year excuse to take a break. As for replacing these people with AI: they're not spending ... and AI is expensive. Sure there's startups using AI, but larger companies are just firing people and not replacing them. Certainly they don't see the current period as a good time to change ... anything. Governments should be "countering the crisis" and hire, according to economics textbooks, and increase social spending with the savings from the decade past ... except ... there are no savings from the decade past. So governments are firing, laying off, saving on healthcare, and so on and so forth. The US obviously has everyone's attention but the UK is doing the same (frankly, worse) and so is the EU. Trump will be the most desperate manager of all, doing anything and everything he can to delay this from happening until the midterm elections in November, like lowering interest rates. But the thing everyone needs to remember about interest rates: they only lower for a good reason. The problem for Trump is ... either he delays this to beyond November or he becomes a "lame-duck" president, unable to do anything.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 10mo ago

Do you have a thesis for why that might be happening? Ageism? Overqualification? The next generation of hiring managers not knowing what to do with you? Past experience being deemed irrelevant to modern SWE problems? Is it all just a bad market? Your profile strikes me as the last one that would struggle with landing a gig.

actionfromafar 10mo ago
Uncertain outlooks in general + why hire people if AI soon will solve everything everywhere all at once?
deadbabe 10mo ago
The simple answer is we are in a recession and no one wants to spend money on new hires right now if they can avoid it.

ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago

> 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023 Name and shame, this should be the norm. People are too shy on this subject. Thank you.

r33b33 10mo ago

Are you ready for great age of suffering? Because there will be no saving, no UBI, no plan B. This is it. This is the end of careers and beginning of centuries of misery. AI will replace everyone except around 3%. If you aren't one of those 3%, start accepting the reality of infinite pain.

lotsoweiners 10mo ago
Or you know the 97% can just kill the AI. I’d probably go that route.
- r33b33 10mo ago
  You can't kill what's more intelligent than you and ubiquitous. You can the 3% though...

GardenLetter27 10mo ago

Yeah, once you hit 50 the wall is real. You need to maximise your earnings during your 30s and 40s to be able to just do contracting, etc. then.

deadbabe 10mo ago
Take care of yourself: exercise, skin care, fashion trends, botox, hair dye, etc. so you do not look 50+ and no one will know the difference.
- idiotsecant 10mo ago
  Can we just pause and consider what happened to this industry where this is the advice. This is the natural consequence of marketing and fundraising completely destroying engineering. It's not about real things anymore. It's about image. It's an industry of carnival barkers turning everything it touches to shit.
  - deadbabe 10mo ago
    The industry had turned to shit long ago when we deviated from the path of the UNIX philosophy and fell into cargo cult frontend programming. We had the most powerful UI in the world, the command line, and we gave it up for pretty pixels and shiny buttons. We have lost what it truly meant to be an engineer, now just look at the kinds of people entering the industry today: No passion for the science, just chasing cash and quick thrills. And you wonder why our interview process has gotten so shallow?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - projectazorian 10mo ago
    This is America, the land of grifters and carnival barkers. Everything is about marketing and image. Always has been.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]

zipy124 10mo ago

Being overqualified is indeed a real phenomenom. Employers can think your too expensive, or that your desperatem and that you might not stick around long. All valid concerns.

spaceman_2020 10mo ago

My brother who is nearly 50 and has worked in tech since the dot com boom, got laid off in January and couldn't find a job until last week. This job, too, was just a contractual position at his old Fortune 50 firm. He has an engineering degree from one of the top 5 engineering colleges in India, a Master's from one of the top 5 engineering schools in the US. He built some of the systems that form the foundation of the entire call center industry. And now he pivoted to GenAI and has dozens of very impressive public projects including some heavily starred open source repos And yet...nothing. Ageism in the tech industry has never been worse

Throaway1985232 10mo ago
[dead]
BergAndCo 10mo ago
The dead comment replying to this said "Start your own company," which I hear a lot. The problem is, the #1 thing YC looks for in a founder is they're wealthy enough to absorb risk. You don't take on massive risk from a position of financial insecurity.

lvl155 10mo ago

What’s admirable is that you’ve actually applied to jobs below your pay grade. Most people won’t because doing that grind in your 40s is actually hard especially if you have kids.

yodsanklai 10mo ago
So what these people do if they can't find a job?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- lazide 10mo ago
  It’s rarely good. Are you sure you want to ask that question?

yodsanklai 10mo ago

I work in a FAANG as a SWE. I'm not the on selecting candidates, but I do interview a lot of them. I'm pretty sure I've never seen a 50+ year old candidate. 99% of the candidates have less than 10 year experience, and are in their 20s or 30s. So yes, ageism is real. I suppose the company gets away with it by saying they look for candidates with 3-10 years of experience? At that stage, I think I would pass Leetcode with 2-3 months of practice, and I don't mind putting the work if this is what it takes. I'm just not sure I'd be given the chance.

AIorNot 10mo ago
Yeah forget it if you look old - old people like me might have to put on our glasses Linus Torovalds is 55 - so he’s too old right? Hes about dad age for most software engineer teams in FAANG and startups… Software engineering team culture is young and male skewed for years-

johnnyanmac 10mo ago

Yeah, this ageism factor mixed with how unstable in general my industry is had me adjusting my long term plan to focus on being able to survive off my own products. I'm still far off from that point but it's probably best to plan my mid-late career before industry locks me out... Doesn't help that I've tried to specialize for quite a while but simply can't stay around long enough without layoffs happening. Hard to be a domain expert when companies let you go ever 3 years. T shaped generalist it is, then.

ecshafer 10mo ago

Are you in a major tech market (SF? Seattle?) I was a laid off in the beginning of the year from my remote job, landed several interviews, and I found a new job in <2 months. My resume is less impressive than yours, ~10 years of experience. I was able to land interviews with some remote companies. I used to work at Shopify, a got some interviews at Ruby shops from that. Some possibilities: 1. Ageism, this is a distinct possibility. 2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies. 3. Talking to people I think non-tech markets look like they are doing fine. People I know in Rochester, Syracuse, and Cleveland aren't having issues getting jobs. I think the huge layoffs in big tech have left a big supply in tech cities to less demand.

shagie 10mo ago
> 2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies. --- Not only is there the overshadow worry, but there's the overqualified for the position. You were CTO once, and now you're a IC again... are you looking for a CTO position still? I had an experience (post dot com crash) where the team hired a senior engineer... who left the team within a year to be an engineering manager somewhere else in the company and our team was back to interviewing for the position again. From our team's perspective we wasted the time interviewing and onboarding a person when they job-hopped (even within the company) in under a year. Despite being qualified as a senior engineer it wasn't what they wanted to do. To that end, overly qualified candidates are similarly risky to hire as under qualified ones. I've also been in situations where someone in a senior or management position is hired with previous Big Tech or startup experience and tries to make the regional retail company's internals into a Big Tech engineering department which ended poorly for everyone involved. --- To your third point, the desire to stay on the coasts and around Big Tech companies is also a thing. Being willing to move to and within the midwestern states (some companies have return to office... others don't want to create a tax nexus in another state - if you don't hire anyone in California or Colorado you don't have to follow those laws... so hire everyone in one state and only deal with one state's payroll tax and insurance options).

eudamoniac 10mo ago

I don't mean this as a judgement; I am genuinely curious: with a career like that, how are you out of money after twelve months? Do you have unusual expenses? I am 31, currently making $180k (the most I've ever made) as a bog standard 'senior SWE', and I have nearly a million dollars. I am not frugal, I don't think; I just bought a $900 pair of sunglasses last week, and that wasn't a huge outlier expense. I have at least twenty years of savings right now. What is eating up your (and any onlookers', if you care to comment) budget?

askafriend 10mo ago
I bet poor investment planning and low-paying roles despite the years of experience.
- mywittyname 10mo ago
  > I bet poor investment planning Or good investment planning. I only recently built up savings after spending my entire career maxing out 401ks. If I was laid off, I'd only have like 6 months or so of savings before I run out despite having a coastFIRE/leanFIRE NW. Yes, there are hardship withdraws from 401ks, but the older you get, the more retirement account means retirement account. Meaning, it becomes more clear that the money in that account needs to be left alone until things get dire. You're not going to be more employable in 20 years.
  - eudamoniac 10mo ago
    A 401k and an IRA together constitute only $31,500 this year, and less in each previous year, before taxes. That shouldn't be the main factor. FWIW I was including those accounts in my 'savings' number.
foolswisdom 10mo ago
It's also possible that OP means short term savings kept for circumstances like these, and long term investments bear more cost (e.g. keeping money in a money market fund vs in stocks has different tax implications when you take the money out).

jiveturkey 10mo ago

Try taking 10-12 years off of your resume. Especially if you don't have grey hair this might help a lot.

mywittyname 10mo ago
This is what I do. I leave just enough on the resume to look "senior" while not appearing to be older than 30 or so on my resume. Having a great, timeless linkedin profile picture helps too.

creer 10mo ago

"Now it's different". Is it really? One aspect of these stories is that we all do age and we do climb into higher positions. So we run into "too old" and "too qualified" and "will leave asap for something better". And the reason is not that the economy or job market are different. The reason is that we are older. Nothing wrong with both happening at the same time but this "I never ran into this problem before" does have a common difference which is "I was never that old before". I use "old" for shock value here while being totally in the camp that companies would do well to find ways to use older, more experienced talent at a lower cost than "normal". (Even after I have run into "older" as inflexible and a pain to work with.) But there is also another problem in many of these reports: Older and still applying by sending resumes in response for job postings! If you are older you should have a network you can use. If they find nothing for you - or don't care to talk to you, then THAT is the better signal. And still not necessarily a signal about the job market.

AIorNot 10mo ago
Not sure what you are on about - I have a giant network in linkedin and it did help me find a job eventually… You only cultivate a regional network if you live in the same spot for years - i moved from the south to Seattle - Im not moving back to the South- so my network is mostly useless I have for example a network with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic - all it got me was getting to the team match stage with Google followed by denial after almost 6 months in the interview process As for OpenAI and Anthropic you need to have success in the AI startup world+network+ be young (old is only allowed id you have massive career success eg VP at Google or Amazon)