Hello, friends! 😀
It’s been occurring to me more and more often, lately, that as job seekers, we are told to keep doing the exact same things on a loop.
Keep “updating your resume”. Keep “networking”. Keep “upskilling” and getting new certifications. As if people who already have those certifications aren’t just as unemployed as the rest of us. Not to mention that I already have on the job experience with those tools, like AWS anyways.
Last, but not least, “it must be your resume”. Trust me, there’s only so many ways to spin it when all your software engineering experience is in the same boring old enterprise-friendly tech stack (Spring Boot, Java, React).
Many people who say this to me are well-intentioned, and were lucky enough to have great careers. Good for them! But times have been so bad for the past year, that people are wondering if the white-collar career as we knew it is dead and gone. I wish people would be a bit supportive, and give people room to explore new things, instead of rattling off the same old “advice” constantly, to the point where they are just blaming the victim.
Speaking of blaming the victim, you’re also told constantly that you can’t badmouth employers, point out abuse, object against clearly bad ideas/processes, or anything that might demonstrate some kind of self-preservation. Yet companies lie constantly to candidates, or change up their working arrangement without any warning, as a “soft layoff” tactic. They also routinely post “ghost jobs” that they have no intention of ever filling. And let’s not forget that big companies get bailed out constantly, despite sometimes receiving small fines for misconduct and market manipulation
Makes you wonder why there’s so many double standards. It’s because fairness isn’t the point
I’ve also been discriminated against on the basis of my religion, while working at Chase, and have worked more than once in toxic and verbally abusive environments. One of these places also had so many hours of pointless meetings per day, and such a lack of documentation, that I struggled to get any work done. I would have to work around the endless meetings, that were sometimes unscheduled, and outside of that, I had to spend hours in calls with other engineers, because the system was poorly built, and not documented at all. It would take changes to more than 10 files in the project just to add a new endpoint to our Java 8 web application, when it shouldn’t take more changes than can fit on one hand.
On an unrelated note, this same system lost track of 10,000+ users’ data in one fell swoop, and releases were riddled with bugs. This was a healthcare payments company, so it wasn’t a great time for them.
Personally, I am still doing the traditional job hunt a little bit, but I’m now investing more time and effort into my blog and YouTube channel about software development and operating systems. I think the way forward for most of us is going to be starting our own monetized channels, income streams, and small businesses, because I’ve been cast aside by too many large corporations, too abruptly, to have faith in working for them anymore. It’s the only way we can change the situation we’re in, as the established players like Google, Microsoft, and such, are too big to lose. We’ll just have to do our best to take our ball and go home, wherever possible.
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