'I've applied for 300 jobs. My 25 years' experience is worthless'

Are you actually up to date on your skills and in a tech hub?

Are you expecting remote first? If so you have to change your expectations - remote first is only for known entities now.

Edit: You live in Russia. No one will hire you out of risks of sanctions. Your only option is to leave like other Russians in your shoes.

Edit 2: The risk of secondary sanctions for Western and Dollar/Euro transacting businesses only began in 2024-25.

This is why I don't buy many of the "woe is I" stories on HN. Dig a little and massive red flags come up.

Edit 3: "mixmastamyk"

You're in SoCal. Not a tech hub.

Tech is now back to being clustered in the Bay, Seattle, NYC, and Austin with 2-3 days in the office being expected.

The world of menial jobs is absolutely miserable, depressing, and will grind you to a pulp - it's nearly impossible to get out of, by design.

All business endeavours are about profit and sales.

I don’t know why people in tech keep thinking they are special in this sense.

There is the widespread meme about getting out of IT and going farming or sone variation of that. Do you think farmers actually live free of the thoughts of profits and sales?

It’s not even about cynicism… it’s just reality.

You shouldn't be discouraged just because they don't understand or value your skills and expertise - you can build a product and/or company from the ground up by leveraging your skills and using AI to fill in the rest. They cannot do the same thing.

Time to stop worrying about the fact that you can't serve these clowns and time to start building.

There's nothing wrong with self-cultivation and education, but such breaks are risky even if you're doing them as part of an approved sabbatical. You need to go into them with a backup plan just in case the job market collapses while you're out (switch careers, lean on a strong social network, FIRE, etc.)

Assuming the above, best case, you work as long as you want to work (until retirement and/or death). Worst case, you're not in poverty when you're no longer able to find work. "It is what it is."

The reality is the author worked in PR and Comms in the UK.

Typically, referrals have positive impact like making sure your application gets looked at by a human and possibly tips a "maybe" into the candidate's favor for scheduling a phone screen or moving to the next round of interviews.

There are plenty of very talented people with large networks of former coworkers who will attest to their capabilities and give them referrals, who nonetheless are still struggling to find work.

I am a well networked person and I cannot offer any help to the numerous people (who are all great, many former colleagues or even alumni who could slot right in and help us) who are reaching out to me for even just a referral.

My employer has seen record breaking quarters and years and we have nothing open in engineering or even IT or support. In fact, I can already smell the blood in the water from the layoffs that are surely coming, probably shortly into 2027.

I had two friends refer me for bog standard senior engineer positions with a stack I had experience with and they ghosted me with no explanation to my friends.

My other friends in faangs say if they refer someone they’re not allowed to be involved in the hiring process at all.

Good part of it is because the salaries are too high because everything is crazy expensive. The second thing is that people do put many restrictions. We had a position that we had a bare minimum bar but we said that we needed the candidates to understand well few topics and they simply said they wouldn't. I am not saying like "become specialist in Fortran in 3 weeks" But more like, learn SQL and database well enough to not make a 1 Million USD query and we heard, more than once, that they did not want to learn SQL and if they needed they would just quit the process.

It sucks for everyone folks. This AI bubble will soon burst. People are already seeing diminished returns with each new model and AI is not returning value as everyone promised.

Now it is the hard part which is a bunch of suit guys trying to excuse that no one could foresee it was going to happen like everyone said it would

My guess based on previous transitions is that the "net new jobs" will benefit the next generation, not the current one.

2 days ago I wrote a piece about how we think about jobs: starting with translators, then programmers then mathematicians, see https://rudolf.observer/en/posts/i-was-not-a-programmer-afte...

Not to mention how naive it is to think UBI would work.

But, somehow, they will implement UBI.

They are addicted to wealth and aren’t willing to share.

There is always an internal tension between what works and what they can cut. They will tend to err on the side of cutting too much, in order to meet cost reduction goals, and then correct in order to meet production goals. In control theory we recognize this as not optimal.

What's not great is schools end in the afternoon, young children can't be left alone at home. What about a sick kid at home? These are real problems that our society has washed it's hands off expecting people to 'figure it out'.

Also spending an hour in commute is no fun, more so if you are a family person.

Most of my Gen-Z colleagues feel the same way. They hated the isolation of the lockdowns and want to be able to go into the office and meet people every day. Some of them are terrified of working alone because of phobias developed during the lockdowns.

Amongst the older crowd, those with families prefer remote schedules but otherwise the preference is for hybrid for the balance between social interaction and freedom.