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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25740 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Im curious what peoples predictions for the coming demographic decline is for the US and other countries? Here is mine: An increase in healthcare related work, and a stagnation of other job sectors. Apparently, excluding healthcare, the amount of jobs in the US is on the decline or stagnating. Not such a fun job market, especially for someone like myself you falls in the "information" category. This will probably continue as the population declines and ages.

Its fascinating, because many people in the gen-z bracket were told to got to college, get a degree, and you'd have a nice cushy office job lined up. While this wasnt all the way bullshit, as i do actually have one of these jobs - as someone who is competing in the current job market, it is BRUTAL. I've had applied to a around ~ 50 jobs (All of these jobs that are at least close to my skill level & credentials, i live in florida for reference and its not the best market for tech to begin with, even though the tech sector is growing here according to the data). In total ive gotten about 3-4 call backs 2 - 3 interview. One were i made it to the final round after 3, and was rejected. Ghosted in another, and have one up and coming.

For more perspective here is my resume (& yes, im aware of the slight formatting error in the projects section). Multiple internships, degrees, & certificates, im trying my best to be competitive. More than one person in my friend group is happy to hear about this population decline; the job search is just so tough for them cant say id blame them, but what many dont understand about declining populations is that population both creates and takes jobs simultaneously. Sure if the population declines, you might have less competition, but you'd also have fewer openings as well. Hard to get hired when a lot of people are not around to create the job you'd be working to start with. The whole demographic decline is good because there will be less people to compete with strikes me as a shortsighted perspective - Humans make the wheels turn all the way down and less people being around isnt gonna create more opportunities for us as a whole.

Still, i can't help but empathize with the sentiment. Constantly apply to every job listing, going through multiple round interview, just to get rejected is so incredibly brutal. Many countries outside the US like china and italy have it even worse with high youth unemployment. It certainly doesnt feel like having more people would be a good from that perspective, even if it likely would. Aging populations mean that a lot of our future jobs and productivity is gonna be directed toward the health sector of our economies, inevitably taking away from or slowing growth from other sectors. I envy people who already have a strong career with high pay and benefits, its insanely difficult for the rest of us.

Looking at your resume, I see someone I'd invite to an interview for a tech or junior sysadmin role, if we had one open (we don't right now, but we had recently, twice in the last year).

I'll ask you the three questions I always ask in interviews, maybe it will help understand how the hiring process looks like from the other side of the table:

  1. A user is unable to login to their computer, list as many possible reasons as you can think of this could happen.

  2. Describe to me the process you go through to troubleshoot an issue you're never encountered before.

  3. A piece of software on Windows crashes during a common operation, but there is no error message that pops up. Where do you go look to find more information.

Question one is an open-ended experience yardstick. Everyone who's worked operations has encountered login issues, they exist at every support "level", how many come to mind will tell me exactly how much shit you've seen. It can be as simple as "user is not entering the password correctly" and the slightly trickier "caps lock was on", then harder ones like AD account issues (lockouts) or the user might be trying to log on to an AD-joined computer with uncached credentials on a computer that isn't able to talk to a DC, the list really goes on and on... At your level, I would expect the easy "user error" ones and at least a few trickier ones.

Question two is to make sure you work in a structured way. I honestly don't really care what the process specifically is, as long as you DO have a way to untangle an issue you've never seen. I've had to work with juniors who did not have a process, and it was really annoying as they would either end up asking me every single thing or just spin their wheels making fruitless google searches with generic error messages or behaviors, before they even tried isolating the issue, eliminating possibilities, etc... If you tell me that you try to find error messages or logs that are unique to the issue, so that you can narrow your searches, that's good.

Question three, as long as it's not completely entry level, I expect you to at least go looking for log files, and ideally you'd mention the Event Viewer by name. If it's a linux position, log files and JournalD.

If I were sitting in an interview with you, if you got these three right, you'd get the thumbs up from me. If there are multiple candidates that got the thumbs up from me, then it comes down to whether I feel like you'd make our users/clients feel confident, etc...

I could probably beat those 3 questions without issue. My technical knowledge is fairly sharp - I probably need to find a way to just beat out the other candidates out via soft skills. Not that i dont have them. But at the final stages ive heard many people say it can come down to who the HM likes more, who has a better personality if all else is equal. "Culture Fit" so to speak.

The problem that affects young people with career searches is the same problem that affects dating: the proliferation of internet matching has made automated, algorithmized, and impersonal selection not only the default, but the preference. This creates a market where you don't just have to compete with those in your social circle -- you have to compete with everyone who has access to the internet. Boomers like to talk about "meeting people in person," and "submitting your application in person," but neither works today. Increasingly employers will laugh at the idea of submitting a paper resume, just as women will increasingly give you dirty looks if you try to ask them out in person (even if its an appropriate situation in which to do so).

Both have become a selector's (read: employer's) market, and those are always immensely painful for selectees, particularly in that they're thralls to the algorithms and the AI that are used to delineate the worthy from the unworthy. And, of course, to the dehumanization that being a PDF or a set of stock photos and a bio does to oneself. But the powerful prefer it this way, where hiring can be made impersonal and optimized -- and therefore any negative feelings that come with active rejection can be minimized. Illegibility is strength.

This creates a market where you don't just have to compete with those in your social circle -- you have to compete with everyone who has access to the internet. Boomers like to talk about "meeting people in person," and "submitting your application in person," but neither works today. Increasingly employers will laugh at the idea of submitting a paper resume

Also that the manager you meet in person isn't the first gatekeeper: I've seen HR block resumes because they disagreed with the hiring manager (who knew the candidate's skills and experience from working with them) over being allowed to interview a candidate.

An issue downstream of this is how it incentivizes bullshitting and otherwise gaming the system. Because the process is impersonal, exaggerating your abilities is incredibly easy. The only part of me you see, is what I write. No facial expression, tone of voice, or body language. Then once I am at the interview, and you ask me to verify my claims, all I need to do is smile and nod. With dozens or hundreds of applicants, it only takes one person who games the system to get hired over the honest worker who does not, forcing everyone else to adapt to a kind of prisoner's dilemma where you either exaggerate your abilities or stay unemployed.

I think in most cases it requires bullshitting, and a lot of trying to figure out the exact phrasing necessary to get past the algorithm that scans the resume to even be seen by a human. It’s not really optional either, as most professional jobs have an algorithm that weeds out most résumé’s before the humans get a shot at it. Which I think drives a lot of credentials simply because having the degree is what gets you sorted into the “maybe get read” pile.

As a related note, I believe that IT has been a bad field to be in for a while. Sysadmins from the IT department used to run the servers that held business critical software, and got to install stuff like databases. Now with the proliferation of saas, iaas, cloud, and devops, the role of the IT department is shrinking significantly. The software that was previously run on premises is now hosted by the software vendor themselves, and for software developed in house developers can handle most of the ops.

Mostly what IT is left doing is helpdesk stuff and provisioning user accounts.

Maybe my consulting firm is atypical since we specialize in non-tech, tricky, bespoke business software and in maintaining difficult codebases, but that has not been my experience. Devops mean the ops team has to waste more time in meetings with devs as they are involved at more steps of the process. Clients that have moved business software to the cloud needed as much or more ops support, some clients are moving those back to on-premise, and while "standard" cloud services like O365 are technically able to force multiply your ops team (less personnel required for same services), the expectations are increased to make up the difference rather than the hours cut. A small company before would not have expected the same services from 5-10 hours/week of an IT ops guy's time than they now do with Office 365.

Though as I said, my experience might be atypical. But in conservative fields outside of tech (manufacturing, agricultural, etc...), people tend to be multiple steps behind in the IT "tech tree". Most of the companies I deal with are in-between the virtualization era of IT operations and the cloud era. Mid to late 00's "tech level". None have reached the level of sophistication to employ tools like orchestration, let alone ops AI. I'm at about the mid-point of my career, so if AI starts eating all the jobs at the bleeding edge, I figure I've probably got time to reach retirement before it eats mine.

It's always weird to me when the IT field gets conflated with "Tech" which to me (not that I am an authority) is a shorthand for Software Engineers/Machine Learning Engineers/Computer Scientists. The two fields have radically different variables, IT is almost always a cost center to someone. You are either doing it in house, or working for a consulting company selling your cost center-ness to other companies. The Tech folks are money generator in that they create products/services/work that is then sold (in some fashion). On a balance sheet these are two radically different outcomes, and when the economy slows, companies don't want to expand the cost center.

I lost my job in late 2024 as part of a lay-off. I sent out probably a 100 resumes via websites, linkedin, recruiters, et al. It took me about 6 weeks to find another job that ostensibly required me to relocate, but in practice I was able to prove my value staying at the local office near me. My boss no longer talks about me relocating. One of the interesting things I noticed, is that remote work jobs are insanely over-valued. If you are applying to work remote, 10,000 other people with your skills or better are too, and unless you are the creme de la creme, you aren't standing out. In person jobs are much better competition wise, and you can even turn them into quasi-remote jobs once you have proven yourself.

Its fascinating, because many people in the gen-z bracket were told to got to college, get a degree, and you'd have a nice cushy office job lined up

Only if you picked the right field, got internships and work experience, and either networked, did projects, research or went to the right school. The extra parts were just implied. No one smart ever thought getting an English bachelors or HR degree entitled you to a nice cushy job. The part about going to college, is that it requires you to also demonstrate you can think without being told to. Figuring out which jobs are flush with applicants or are low pay is fairly straightforward with some independent thought. The only lie that gen-z was sold was that it required no extra effort, no extra thought, just color inside the lines like you were told to, you good little lemming. And that's probably because that extra effort/thought is a costly signal. And why pollute the costly signal, the smart ones will figure it out, which is the point of a costly signal.

here is my resume

You have too much white space, it definitely shouldn't be 2 pages. Everything reads super bland. You don't need to always do the "show me don't tell me" it just needs to read better than something 10k other entry level IT folks also all do.

Only if you picked the right field, got internships and work experience, and either networked, did projects, research or went to the right school. The extra parts were just implied. No one smart ever thought getting an English bachelors or HR degree entitled you to a nice cushy job. The part about going to college, is that it requires you to also demonstrate you can think without being told to. Figuring out which jobs are flush with applicants or are low pay is fairly straightforward with some independent thought. The only lie that gen-z was sold was that it required no extra effort, no extra thought, just color inside the lines like you were told to, you good little lemming. And that's probably because that extra effort/thought is a costly signal. And why pollute the costly signal, the smart ones will figure it out, which is the point of a costly signal.

Yes, let's fuck over everyone who can't read between the lines. Then don't be too surprised when, ten years later, those same people are voting en masse for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

When the system is out to fuck you, it's time to burn down the system.

Yes, let's fuck over everyone who can't read between the lines.

Considering I am autistic as fuck, and I still got the message. I'd advise that just thinking about it is pretty straightforward, blaming others for not telling you to think is literally the point. If you can't think for yourself you are not intelligent, period.

Lmao I'd don't think I've ever been an advocate for the system, so go ahead. I'm sure IT jobs are going to be more needed in the apocalyptic subsistence economy that follows.

It's always weird to me when the IT field gets conflated with "Tech" which to me (not that I am an authority) is a shorthand for Software Engineers/Machine Learning Engineers/Computer Scientists. The two fields have radically different variables, IT is almost always a cost center to someone.

Why wouldnt IT be tech? Infrastructure is still technology (Network devices like routers and switches, configuration of servers, cloud computing, ect). Software still runs on hardware at the end of the day. For an analogy here: An OBGYN & a Dermatologists are both under the medical field, even though feminine genitals & skin are both different organs, they play a roll in the body and in human general health, so grouping them together under medicine still makes sense.

You have too much white space, it definitely shouldn't be 2 pages. Everything reads super bland. You don't need to always do the "show me don't tell me" it just needs to read better than something 10k other entry level IT folks also all do.

Thats an interesting critique. I havent heard of the too much white space critique before. How do i compress everything, while still sounding significant? Run it through GPT-5?

Only if you picked the right field, got internships and work experience, and either networked, did projects, research or went to the right school. The extra parts were just implied.

I mean. Per my resume, I did do most of this. As did many of my peers. We aren't jobless at all. Its just difficult to take the next step after help-desk.

Why wouldnt IT be tech? Infrastructure is still technology

Its a bit of a category error. IT IS technically "Tech", but it's not in the context people actually talk about it. People like to ride up on coat tails of adjacent things that give them prestige by believing they are apart of the "great transformational wave" The tech boom has been driven by an explosion of SWE and SWE-specialty jobs not IT jobs. When people call this the "Tech Boom" they expect everyone to understand the imprecise terminology. IT jobs are costs, more of them doesn't drive a surplus of value because more cost is just more cost. As far as I know IT folks don't really develop products unless they are selling them to other IT folks as costs for their IT stuff. Cloud Engineers are probably a border area, idk who claims them. Idk if the modal Cloud Engineer starts as a help-desk IT intern either. The ones I know are SWE -> Cloud.

Your analogy is actually good, but you misunderstand it. If we said there was a Medicine Boom: lots of high paying medical jobs, shortages of skilled laborers, go get the job from college ASAP! And then a bunch of people went out and got Chiropractor, Acupuncturist, CNA jobs and then complained about low pay and large competition. Well those are technically "medical" jobs but the "medical jobs" we were really talking about was doctors, nurses, and PAs. Another would be women in STEM, which is Science Technology, Education, Medicine. Well women actually already dominate Education and Medicine, about 50% of Science, and 50% in things like Biomechanical Engineering, or Environmental Engineering. They have low numbers in hard sciences, and hard engineering disciplines like ECE, CS or Aero. IT is the same for CS, its "Tech" but its not the "Tech" that's being talked about as driving the Tech boom.

Thats an interesting critique. I havent heard of the too much white space critique before. How do i compress everything, while still sounding significant? Run it through GPT-5?

Your resume is literally 2 pages, I didn't even realize it at first. You just get rid of all the extra white space. idk if you need a llm to do that. Think about it this way, If you have a lot to say because you've done so much stuff, then your resume would like bursting, you want it to look like you almost struggled to include all of your stuff in 1 page. Instead it looks like you have lots of white space and two pages which means you wanted to fill the page so you added empty lines (not actually, but could be framed as such).

I mean. Per my resume, I did do most of this. As did many of my peers. We aren't jobless at all. Its just difficult to take the next step after help-desk.

This might just be the difference in our two "Tech" fields. But my career path looked like: Electrical Engineer Intern -> Robotics Intern -> ML Intern -> ML Engineer. My last two internships I was just doing normal Junior ML work with a bit more hand-holding. It wasn't difficult to transition because the transition was just more independence on the same experience. I'm not sure what the transition from Help-Desk IT to Cloud Engineer is, but it feels like Cloud Engineers, or Network Engineers don't start at help-desk or the transition is a lot.

P.S. I could also just be full of shit, I'm not in your field and don't pay much attention to it. Just giving my experience.

So, I know you probably aren't really looking for resume advice, but I can't just leave this. If you are applying to tech jobs, your resume should not be more than one page.

You can easily fit what you have into one page. The fact that you haven't gives any interviewer who gets your resume a negative first impression. It shows you lack fastidiousness.

Also the formatting is ... not great. Your headers don't pop, and to be frank, it looks like you put this together in Google Docs. There is nothing wrong with writing a resume in Google Docs, but it can't look like it.

If you just google "Good Tech Resumes" you'll find plenty of examples, but as a "I found this with a few minutes of searching", consider https://old.reddit.com/r/technicalwriting/comments/1b11gw9/resume_template_that_gets_me_interviews_and_got/

One page, clear headings, doesn't look like a default Google Docs document.

I know this seems nitpicky, but it's really important. You will be far better served job hunting spending ten hours working on a really good resume than spending ten hours applying to jobs if you're having trouble getting callbacks, which it sounds like you are. And having a good resume is a lot easier than having a good github.

Source: I work in FAANG and occasionally do interviews. Take this with increasingly large grains of salt depending how far away from a FAANG position you're applying to. To the best of my knowledge, this is industry-wide, but ???

Ok, Interesting. I was actually advise to use the Harvard Style resume. As outlined here, it supposedly helps bypass the ATS system. Im also not running into a lot of FAANG companies here in florida. So perhaps FAANG and non FAANG hire differently.

it looks like you put this together in Google Docs. There is nothing wrong with writing a resume in Google Docs, but it can't look like it.

As an aside, I've had very positive responses from typesetting my resume with LaTeX. You've got to be applying to the types of places where the people reviewing your resume are likely to know it on sight, but it's a positive signal (irrational as it is, I've noticed that when I'm interviewing people even I give more benefit of the doubt to good typesetters). And it would be much easier to pack in a bunch of hidden buzzwords or the full list of technologies you've worked with, for the benefit of automated systems that prefilter.

So long as it's not in Computer Modern. Dislike that font family.

I have been part of the hiring process at companies outside of FAANG, and honestly nobody gives a shit if your resume is more than one page. Maybe if it was 10+ pages that would raise eyebrows, but there's no need to have a hard target of "one page or bust".

I've been specifically complimented on having a good onepager. The ability to condense information down to only what's important is increasingly critical in an age of ai slop. Actually, that remains one of the things i find myself consistently better at then any model I've tested. Any model with it's salt can take bullet bullet points and turn them into a sentence, but i have her to find one that can maximally compress them.

I work outside FAANG, sometimes do interviews and am involved in the hiring process and I tend to prefer 1 or 2 pages, with the most relevant information being at the top. Someone at the start of their career probably could do one page. Experience, skills, education.

Yeah. One page for early career, maximum of two pages (one sheet front & back) for those with more experience.

Nobody is going to read past the first page though. If the goods are in the first page, then you're good to go, people won't even notice that the second page exists. If the goods aren't on the first page, then you're in trouble.

Especially these days the HM is only going to spend 5 seconds looking at your resume so make those 5 seconds count. I believe the current meta for people who have relevant work experience is to put that at the top, because that matters much more than education.

That's fine, but "it doesn't benefit you to have a 2-page resume" is very different from "it actively harms you to have a 2-page resume" (which was the original claim). I think the former is true, while the latter is not.

Eeeeh I really think it depends where you're applying, again. There are plenty of places where a junior resume with more than one page is an immediate black mark.

Apparently there are lots of places where that'a not true as well, which is cool!

But it is Definitely A Thing in the circles I run in.

Huh, interesting. Good to know!

I guess the other question here would be: barring specific length, do you think this resume generally looks good? Would you also push back against my formatting advice, or not so much?

I would say that your formatting advice is good in terms of standing out from the pack. OP's resume isn't bad, it's not going to make someone think less of him IMO, but it's not going to stand out either. It'll be just another resume in the sea of samey-looking resumes. If the job market is super tight, he probably needs every advantage he can get, so I think it makes sense to work on the formatting to really make it pop.

Outside of formatting, would there be anything else?

Its fascinating, because many people in the gen-z bracket were told to got to college, get a degree, and you'd have a nice cushy office job lined up.

I'm surprised people are still being told this. I'm GenX (so two generations older than you) and we were told the same thing, but it was already starting to be no longer true. I think the dot com boom kept this "wisdom" around for a while longer, and until recently it was still kind of true for STEM, but I thought the Millennials had already figured it their job market was a different world than that of the boomers.

When I was in highschool it was something encouraged by my teachers. Im also a 1st generation immigrant and my parents stressed education, and i know people in my friend group who were told this as well (Specifically get something in STEM, and i did). Perhaps my immigrant background probably makes an impact here.

I'm a millennial, and I definitely got the same message at school and in pop-culture: college, college, college.

From Freaks and Geeks (1999):

Lindsay Weir: You know who didn't go to college? Albert Einstein

Jeff Rosso: You know who else didn't go to college?

Lindsay Weir: Who?

Jeff Rosso: Frank

Lindsay Weir: Frank who?

Jeff Rosso: Frank, the guy who pumps gas into my car

From Good Will Hunting (1997)

Chuckie: [in a bar] Are we gonna have a problem here?

Clark: No, no, no, no! There's no problem here. I was just hoping you might give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities, especially in the southern colonies, could be most aptly described as agrarian pre-capitalist.

Will: Of course that's your contention. You're a first-year grad student; you just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably. You're gonna be convinced of that 'till next month when you get to James Lemon. Then you're going to be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year; you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

Clark: Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social...

Will: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth"? You got that from Vickers' "Work in Essex County," page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you, is that your thing, you come into a bar, read some obscure passage and then pretend - you pawn it off as your own, as your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?

Will: See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!

Clark: Yeah, but I will have a degree. And you'll be servin' my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.

Will: Yeah, maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal.

Where the hell else was I supposed to get the opposite message? All my friends were going to the same schools and watching the same shows and movies. My parents didn't have a clue, being from South American, but even if they had been American their experience would have been a generation out of date. Blogs were just starting to take off around the time I graduated, and streaming wasn't a thing yet; the alternative information ecosystem we take for granted today simply didn't exist.

but I thought the Millennials had already figured it their job market was a different world than that of the boomers.

No, millennials were still at the age where they took Boomer advice semi-seriously. Gen Z is, correctly, more hostile to that advice.

For more perspective here is my resume

Your projects section is counter-productive. Don't tell me what you've built - show me.

Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.

Constantly apply to every job listing

This is a low success strategy and will burn you out. You're still early in your career so I empathize but the reality of the matter is that you do need to be networking with people so that when you need a job or you want to move up for more money, your talking to a human whom you know and who knows you already. Resume blasting was mostly dead five years ago and with AI HR systems it is 100% dead today.

Networking in a nutshell:

  1. Find people who are working on things in areas that genuinely interest you. Twitter is bizarrely high leverage for this. I have scored many clients via cold DM on twitter because they posted something like "I am working on a banana counting machine" and I DM'ed with "That seems cool. I've been in the banana counting game for 10 years. Want to trade notes?"
  2. Add value in whatever small way you can without expecting anything in return. The default way this is done in networking is to recycle your network meaning you see that Person X is into thing Y, and you also know that Person Z is into thing Y. You introduce them. That's sort of networking 101. I think a better strategy is to shoot random e-mails / texts / DMs to people you already know asking for nothing but a 15 minute catch up call. No objectives, just listen to them talk about work. People like to be heard, a the kids say, and just kind of generally strategizing about work and career with other people pays off well if you're actively engaged and earnest present with it. If you're not, you'll come across as a scuzzy network robot.
  3. Returning to twitter - this is where real tech networks exist and evolve. Linkedin is a hellscape for jobseekers and ... in general. There are some things that Linkedin is really useful for (mostly, getting to people who are Linkedin addicts but have budget and authority). I'd say skip it or use lightly.
  4. (And this one, I think is 100x more true in the age of LLMs) Have a digital public presence that is your own. Not linkedin, not even twitter. Build a blog. Substack is getting pretty cringe and hearing someone say "hey take a look at my substack" is almost a counter-signal. There are plenty of other plug-and-play blogs that don't force branding and their platform into your face. If you're already semi-regularly posting on forums, you can carve out the 1 - 3 hours per week it takes to post a solid 1000 word blog post. Once a week is fine for someone employed full time.

One of the many failures of the boomers was in failing to teach their children the reality of networking and jobs. My own folks, as much as I truly do love them and as much as my upbringing was 11/10 fucking awesome, failed at this as well. I was told, up until college, that you got a job by working hard, having a slick resume and a good handshake. Then I got to a fancy college and all of my friends who had grown up knowing the game went "lol, no, bro, it's networking."

Whatever the outcome of LLMs, I'm quite certain that the returns to cultivating deep relationships will grow ever higher. I feel good and bad about this. It's good to have meaningful connections to real people but, on the other hand, schizo posting with you degenerates is fun the entire original promise of the internet was that physical proximity no matter constrained meaningful knowledge sharing and productive interaction. I suppose the remedy would be a fundamentally new protocol that enforces "humanness." Twitter's recent bot nuke is a gesture in this diretion, but now I am getting off topic.

I guess trying to explain the benefits of networking to a Boomer is like trying to explain to a fish why it benefits from being underwater. The idea of scrutinizing stuff that works is not something that even occurs to most people.

Your projects section is counter-productive. Don't tell me what you've built - show me. Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.

I mean, i do know how to develop software, ive develop my own programs here and there, but I've actually decided that id like to stay on the infrastructure side of tech, as i personally find it more enjoyable.

The networking advice is probable my best shot at the next job. Ive also heard that many jobs are part of a "hidden job market" where friends of friends get each other hired via referrals. Ill look into it.

Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.

If only this were true. I’ve never had an interviewer ask about my open source work in a way that indicates they clicked through the links in my resume and read the well formatted READMEs on the projects I maintain. When I do interviews, the rubrics I’m supposed to work towards don’t have any way to include an assessment of open source work, and other members of hiring committees have never known what I’m talking about when I bring up a candidates open source work. The general sentiment seems to be that evaluating open source work is unfair to people who’ve done their work in corporate environments. I’m sure there are some hiring managers in some companies who can and do use it as a signal, but the degree to which it is ignored in standard tech companies is a huge blackpill. It’s not terrible advice because it can’t hurt, it’s just not the magic foot in the door some people hope it would be. There’s no magic key if you’re early career, especially these days. I feel bad for the youngsters.

Your networking advice sounds good, but I find it exhausting and I know a lot of great hackers do to (not claiming to be one of them). Building your personal brand is probably great for your career, but I want to write code, not win instagram to get a job. Like I probably could get more ROI by writing a blog post every five patches, but I barely have the energy to write patches, so I definitely don’t have the energy to blog and tweet about it.

I’ve never had an interviewer ask about my open source work Other members of hiring committees have never known what I’m talking about when I bring up a candidates open source work.

These sound like companies that will fail

but the degree to which it is ignored in standard tech companies is a huge blackpill.

The dude who wrote OpenClawd literally got hired by OpenAI less than a month later.

Like I probably could get more ROI by writing a blog post every five patches, but I barely have the energy to write patches, so I definitely don’t have the energy to blog and tweet about it.

Sounds like you should change careers.

I'm being pretty harsh on purpose.

"The job market isn't what I want it to be." Correct. You can either adapt to it or try something else. Complaining alone gets a person nowhere. It's an old redpill quote, so take it for what it's worth, but the saying goes "Life never gets easier, but you can get better."

Technical hiring has been fucked in one form or another since the easy money days of 08 - 16 (roughly). The people who succeed are the people who don't follow the herd and make an effort. If all you want is to resume spam that's fine - expect resume spam level results.

If you, instead, build a network, build a brand (also - who said anything about Instagram? Some of the biggest voices in tech still run their own personal text heavy blogs. Gwern comes to mind). If you don't want to do either of those things, I'm not sure what to tell you.

These sound like companies that will fail

All have been well established and successful to varying degrees. I’ve observed this pattern at FAANG, at unicorns, at established enterprise shops, basically everywhere. The only place that seemed to engage with my open source work was a very early stage startup, so maybe it helps there but for the vast majority of tech jobs it just doesn’t matter.

The dude who wrote OpenClawd literally got hired by OpenAI less than a month later.

Just write a virially successful project with enormous buzz bro. It’s a totally viable career path for average devs to become the Twitter main character for a week and land a job!

Obviously this will work for some people, but that doesn’t mean it will for most.

Sounds like you should change careers.

I’ll hang onto the gig where I get overpaid to write fun little programs until it gets automated away, thanks though. I was talking about barely having the energy to do extra unpaid work for fun on open source stuff. That I do it at all means I’m in the top few percent of professional devs passion wise. Open source work is not normal, and if you think it is you must be way out of touch with most of the industry.

This feels like getting a job on hard mode. People should be able to find work thru normal processes not needing to be sort of a small business owner after graduating.

This seems like a sign of let’s shut down the Indian IT mills. If companies really needed employees you could get work thru formal processes instead of networking. It seems like there are a lot of people in his situation. Being better at networking changes who gets the job but not the overall need. If jobs are plentiful then companies would hire off the resume pile instead of selecting someone they are already friends with.

If jobs are plentiful then companies would hire off the resume pile instead of selecting someone they are already friends with.

Managers will always go for friends (or at least former coworkers/employees they were on good terms with) first if they can. When jobs are plentiful, they'll search the resume pile, but only after exhausting the group of people they know.

The problem with people talking about "networking" is there are some people good at networking, and these people tend to be concentrated in professions such as sales, marketing, and in management in all fields. Whereas other people are bad at networking, and some fields -- certainly including non-management tech -- have a lot of those people. Telling those people to do networking is a waste of breath; at best they might know what networking is (but just as possibly the term may have no sensible referent), but they have no way of doing it.

Which of course is why networking works so well in those fields. You have to do networking to get a sales job, but everyone's doing it; it's a minimum requirement and you need more, or at least to be better at networking than your competition. If you can do networking in tech, you're way ahead of the competition.

Wow, that kind of hit rate on interviews even with a CCNA?

I was in a similar boat minus the certs a couple years ago and after 6 months of looking post-graduation I took a job in a business tech support call center for an ISP. The pay absolutely sucks and getting screamed at by customers also sucks but it was one of two places that didn't ghost me out of 75ish applications, and the other place (an MSP) would have paid even less, comparable to McDonald's pay in a hcol area.

CCNA is not a very noteworthy cert, so I wouldn't be surprised. It doesn't hurt to have one, but it's not really going to help you stand out much either.

I'm in a similar boat to cablethrowaway. What things on a resume would help someone stand out?

Turns out I should've looked at thread context instead of replying from my notifications. If you meant what will help you stand out in terms of skills, unfortunately it's really hard to stand out early in your career. I got my break by working desktop support and learning as much as I could. Eventually (read: it took me 8 years at that job), I was competent enough that I made an impression on the server admin team and I got a shot at doing higher level stuff. From there it was a lot easier to get jobs, because I had legitimate sysadmin experience under my belt and could get into higher level sysadmin roles. I've also seen people just be in the right place at the right time and get hired as junior sysadmins even though they were really green, but you can't count on that.

Certs can help you, especially if you have a high tier one like CCIE (if someone is a CCIE and isn't at least getting interviews, that would be cause for surprise). But they are expensive AF to get on your own, as they are priced with the expectation that some corporation is paying you to get it and won't balk at a several thousand $ cost to get their guy certified. Because of that, I can't say I recommend pursuing certs as a way to get hired early in your career.

I think the formatting tips @Yeet_far gave were good, but another good trick I've seen is to bring your resume to the interview printed on nice heavy paper. I remember a candidate doing that one time, and we (the interviewers) were super impressed by his resume because of that. It kept us talking about him and honestly, if he had the qualifications (sadly he didn't) I have very little doubt he would've gotten hired because that one thing made him memorable in a positive way.

It teaches some useful stuff and probably means I can trust you with a crimp tool if I need wires run, but the higher-tech sides of it aren't very useful for the overwhelming majority of people and the useful sides aren't very high-tech. And like A+, it's been absolutely swamped with rubber-stamps.

If you end up looking for a job again, my recommendation is to look for Desktop Support roles in Hospital IT. You can get some weird hours, but after a year or so if you keep up certifications you can possibly swing to other parts of the IT organization. The first year of Desktop IT actually helps you get a full breadth of the IT environment, so that when integration issues arise you have a high level understanding of it already.

I actually did an internship with a hospital for IT. They sadly did not have a spot for me.

I've known several people who have made good careers out of just supporting EHR systems like Epic and Cerner for hospital systems. There are entire companies that do only that. Feels like one of those careers that is moderately protected by regulatory requirements as well.

Yeah, also with a CCNA he has a potential of joining a Network Team, which will pretty much always be needed and can't be offshored.

That's actually what I myself did, and for that reason.

It's not a bad life. Very high skill/earnings ceiling too.

The major thing is you've got less than 2 years of post-college professional experience, which tends to disqualify you for anything but entry level jobs -- and those tend to be filled out of college recruiting offices. If I'm reading it right you're also specializing in on-site IT in an increasingly cloud world, though that might work in South Florida where there's a bunch of financial firms who remain (properly) wary of cloud stuff. Other than that it's all Windows stuff and I don't know much about that market.

The major thing is you've got less than 2 years of post-college professional experience, which tends to disqualify you for anything but entry level jobs -- and those tend to be filled out of college recruiting office

Yeah, i suspected as much. Not a lot of easy ways around experience. It is king. I was actually thinking about doing either System Administration or Network Engineering. Do you think cloud might be a better future proof direction?

I've done all of these and it really depends. If you get to a high enough skill level with AWS or Azure or something, you can kind of write your own ticket. However, until you reach that skill level, it's just you vs. every mid-level cloud engineer in the world. You have no geo-moat at all.

Network + cloud is a strong combination, as integrating cloud resources with on-prem networks is very valuable and also kind of arcane unless you have experience in both. AWS offers a cert that's just for this. (https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-advanced-networking-specialty/) It's a hard test, I had to take it twice to pass, but it's worth a lot when it's needed. However, like anything else, the material will barely even make sense until you have a couple of years working with the stuff.

Thank You for your insights!

Sadly, my company has an opening that'd be perfect for you (if you’re willing to relocate to SC), and I don't believe we generally have too many applicants as competition... except that it requires 4 years experience plus the degree. And our HR is inflexible in new and exciting ways about that sort of thing.

As @HereAndGone2 wrote, it really is the classic job trap.

This sounds like ‘there are more people trying to get cushy well paying jobs that don't entail being ordered around all that much than there are such jobs to go around’, which is a historical constant that has of late had some exceptions to it, either driven by bubbles on new technology or low interest rates or in affirmative action meaning your company had to have a pet black woman vp or whatever. The vast majority of people will always be worker bees, and a stratum that can’t adapt to that is doomed over the long run.

I agree with the thrust here, but speaking as a Millennial that also bought into the whole 'go to college or you'll be flipping burgers' shtick, I think the real implication was just a bit more than about having money and a 'cushy' job, but also:

A) Having 'proved' yourself by obtaining a degree (especially if your job was related to your major) was 'supposed' to entitle you to some extra dignity and respect right off the bat.

B) Likewise it was supposed to 'open up doors' to areas you'd otherwise either never be allowed into, or that you'd have to grind for years and years to open otherwise. Not quite a 'VIP access' ticket, but definitely a 'priority boarding' pass, if you will.

In my case, B) was literally true because I had to bypass the "undergrad degree" gate to access the "law degree" gate and then the "bar license" gate.

But what 'we' found was that no, you're basically treated as a lowly intern to start, your pay might be a little better than if you lacked the degree, but it afforded you almost no actual respect and, in all probability, you'd have more respect if you'd been working that job 4 years rather than studying in that time.

(Yes, it makes perfect sense that a 4 year veteran should outrank the new recruit, but that was emphatically not how things were sold)

We also found that the 'doors' were actually opened by knowing the right people, which was a function of going to the right school for meeting those people, and almost completely orthogonal to the degree itself. We tried waving around impressive GPAs and extracurriculars and finding that we were still locked out unless we knew the secret handshakes, or had a ton of money to grease palms with.

So in this sense, think of how college was sold as an almost pure status boost. "You're a smart guy, you could jump into the workplace and eventually find yourself in a prestigious position, well-compensated and respected. But hey, if your SATs are high enough you can take a small detour to acquire a piece of paper that certifies you're a smart guy, and jump ahead to having some extra clout without the long climb from the bottom."

Shades of Elite Overproduction, but more about trying to skip the perceived 'minimum wage, maximum stress' grind that most young people have to overcome.

Its a very tempting deal on its face.

But what 'we' found was that no, you're basically treated as a lowly intern to start, your pay might be a little better than if you lacked the degree, but it afforded you almost no actual respect and, in all probability, you'd have more respect if you'd been working that job 4 years rather than studying in that time.

In what field would you be able to go in as a newbie either with or without a degree? Obviously not law, where you need an advanced degree just to get in. In a blue-collar trade you might have more respect after working for four years without a degree than you would in a white collar profession as a newbie with a degree, but that's comparing apples to oranges. In retail I think the most common thing is you work at the bottom forever, but if you're the ambitious type you could move up in four years -- but you're going to quickly hit a ceiling without the degree. The major chains seem to maintain a sort of "staff/line" distinction and while you can move from "staff" to "line", you need to get a degree.

So in this sense, think of how college was sold as an almost pure status boost. "You're a smart guy, you could jump into the workplace and eventually find yourself in a prestigious position, well-compensated and respected. But hey, if your SATs are high enough you can take a small detour to acquire a piece of paper that certifies you're a smart guy, and jump ahead to having some extra clout without the long climb from the bottom."

Except as you pointed out, this isn't how it was sold. It was 'go to college or you'll be flipping burgers'. The "detour" doesn't so much jump you ahead as put you on a different ladder.

The big firms require a degree as part of the advancement process, presumably to filter out people incapable of getting one, but usually overweight previous experience with the company compared to degreeholding even so.

In what field would you be able to go in as a newbie either with or without a degree?

Fields that don't require a degree and where universities purport to teach you how to perform those jobs at a competent level through lengthy instruction.

(Catch-22 in that once college degrees became more common, more fields started 'requiring' them.)

Journalism, Political Science, Marketing, HR, Education, International Relations (LOL), certain art major/Graphic Design areas, arguably Accounting, Criminal Justice (as prep for law enforcement), even Information Technology.

A lot of stuff outside of the STEM/Law fields, basically. Jobs you are absolutely allowed to learn as you go, that aren't blue collar, but still have a long 'grind' period where you're paid poorly and worked doggedly, and most people would LOVE to just hop into the more lucrative, prestigious positions as soon as possible.

It was 'go to college or you'll be flipping burgers'. The "detour" doesn't so much jump you ahead as put you on a different ladder.

I'm saying it was both. The "burger flipping" was the stick, but the carrot, the actual reason you could justify taking on five or six figures in debt is to shortcut the miserable process and prove competence for roles you'd be unable to access otherwise.

I'm NOT claiming that this promise was ever made explicit by the colleges themselves, although their advertising certainly nodded suggestively in that direction.

(Catch-22 in that once college degrees became more common, more fields started 'requiring' them.)

My impression is that this process has slowed down because there are few fields remaining that could require a college degree but don't. (Which hasn't stopped especially crazy new requirements, like daycare workers needing a degree)

On the other hand, ‘some college’ requirements are reasonably common and working your way up is definitely allowed in those places. They tend to be shitty jobs to start with, but still.

Yeah, I'm just pointing out that there were a LOT of jobs that Boomers could walk into with merely a high school diploma and learn as they go, that NOW are very clearly gated by the degree requirement, OR knowing a guy.

Here's a REALLY interesting bit from Mr. Carl Bernstein's wiki page:

He began his journalism career at the age of 16 when he became a copyboy for The Washington Star and moved "quickly through the ranks". The Star, however, unofficially required a college degree to write for the paper.

At the University of Maryland, College Park, he was a reporter for the school's independent daily, The Diamondback. However, Bernstein was dismissed from the university after the fall 1964 semester for bad grades.

Guy FAILED OUT of college, but had already acquired Journalism experience at the ripe age of 16, so just kept hopping into Journo jobs until he became one of the best known Journos ever.

This sort of story is profoundly radicalizing for a certain class of Millennial and, likely, Gen Zer, who considers failing out of college to be economic doom.

Definitely a case of elite underproduction at that point in history and into the 1980s, at least.

People also sometimes overlook the social-signaling aspect of a degree; it would infer that someone was "a college man," who fits into an upper middle class environment and can interact comfortably with clients. This became something different a bit later: "it doesn't matter what you major in; you just need to graduate," and "a degree demonstrates that you can finish something," but the first aspect still (sort of) exists, depending on the degree/person.

I have seen people qualified on paper for things like account management positions in tech hit a wall in interviews and promotions because they're rough around the edges socially.

Yeah, I'm just pointing out that there were a LOT of jobs that Boomers could walk into with merely a high school diploma and learn as they go, that NOW are very clearly gated by the degree requirement, OR knowing a guy.

I once worked on a project with a former Smithsonian curator. He only got his undergrad in history after he started working for the Smithsonian, and as he put it, with his credentials (no Masters or specialized Museum Studies degree), he wouldn't even get past the screening if he applied to his old job.

I'm a (early) millenial. I failed out of college. I got into a decent career in IT ops despite it, including working at some pretty prestigious places. I didn't know a guy, at least not initially. Networking (the socializing kind, not the technical kind) is what got me my bigger breaks.

At the risk of sounding like a boomer, I still think my path would work out. Find a niche that underserved (in my case, it was secretarial support), and then learn how to do the socializing. Young people nowadays seem to expect life to be like train tracks, that it's systems that are keeping them out, that if they do the right thing the wheels will pop on top of the rails and everything will get into place. But ultimately it's all people that you need to convince. Personally, when I interview people, I don't care about education or credentials; everything I need to know, I'll figure out by talking to you.

Yeah, I've actually got a decent amount of IT experience despite no formal college training in it, funny enough.

It was my 'fallback' career option if Law didn't work out (which was a close thing for a bit).

I think that's still one of the few places where if you're bright and you grew up working with computers and networks and troubleshooting people's electronic devices (a rarer thing among young kids) you can probably get picked up by a small outfit and put to work.

It looks like Geek Squad will still accept applicants sans a college degree, so that's something.

This sort of story is profoundly radicalizing for a certain class of Millennial and, likely, Gen Zer, who considers failing out of college to be economic doom.

Well, the danger of failing out of college in 1964 wasn't so much economic doom as literal death by Viet Cong. Bernstein somehow scored an Army Reserve spot, so I assume he actually DID know a guy.

Bob Woodward didn't graduate from college either, if Wikipedia is to be believed. He did serve in the Navy though.

I know nothing about software engineering, but your resumé reads like you're not long out of college and don't have a lot of work experience right now. So you're caught in the trap of "we want someone with five years experience in X", but if you can't get a job, how can you get that experience?

Job searching is always brutal, I think the notion of "just get a basic qualification and walk into a job" happens/happened at specific times (e.g. when there was full employment and employers were desperate for any warm body to fill the vacancy) or for specific niches (e.g. when software engineering took off and became a viable job and there were more vacancies than qualified people).

Good luck with the search, keep on ploughing through!

What does "basic qualification" mean in this context please?

Used to be "finish your education at 15, that's plenty old enough" then "finish high school, don't drop out at 15", then "get some kind of post-school training or qualifications" then "get a Bachelor's Degree" and now "a basic BSc? not nearly good enough, even a Masters is no good, PhD or bust" or "okay, you did a basic BSc, now you need qualifications in this, that and the other".

And of course "you need to get into the right university, a mediocre degree from one of the top tiers will get you into more places than a great degree from some cow college".

God knows what "basic qualifications" will look like in the dawn of AI employment. Are we already beginning to see that?

I think Millennial and GenX people share cultural memory of a prosperous, cozy, modern society in wide consensus about social rewards and obligations. The message was: study hard, conform to social norms, don’t have a criminal record, don’t have children out of wedlock, don’t be an addicted lout, take care of yourself, make sure you graduate in time and look for a job. In return, society pretty much guarantees you a relatively good job worthy of your degree. This has fallen apart around the time of the financial crisis of 2008. It’s dead and gone, but again, people still remember it as something that was the norm for decades.

Can't speak for the Millies, but I think for GenX the defining cultural touchstone is "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (and I hate that movie with a passion, I hate the lead character, I hate the assumptions underpinning it) and I think you're correct: you can goof off but still expect, since you are on the 'right' path, to have a comfortable life just like your parents ahead of you. You can rebel against the authority of The Man, but we all know that this is not genuine rebellion and you will follow the path of 'go to college, get the degree, get the job, get the life'. I think the position of Dean Rooney in the movie is intriguing; he has no real authority. Ferris can trick him and expect to get away with it, and nobody in similar positions of authority (the police) will back him up. Teachers have gone from being respected to being regarded as losers, in a sense; Ferris will move on in his life (probably into a cushy PMC job like his dad and his friends' dads) and be successful, while the teachers are stuck in (low-paid) repetitive jobs doing the same thing with the same age groups over and over again. Cameron's father can own a Ferrari, at the end of the movie Rooney has to hitch a ride on a school bus.

Authority can be mocked but the social bargain still applies, is what the movie ends up saying; you are owed the Good Life if you follow the Rules, even if you bend the rules about "respect authority" and "tell the truth" and "do the work". Being smart and knowing which rules are for chumps and how to game the system gets rewarded. If you want a day of self-indulgence, go for it. Truancy records? Missing school? Who cares? You don't need that, you just need to be charming and know how to socially engineer relationships.

Then the bottom all fell out of that, certainly in the economic slump, and so the Millennials onwards feel cheated. They were promised the Good Life! Why aren't they getting what was promised? Well, turns out if you keep mocking authority for being old-school fuddy-duddy about 'do the right thing and don't cheat and don't break the rules', eventually you end up with other forces in its place that operate on the same "keeping to the rules is only for suckers" level, and they won't stick to the bargain of "follow the path laid out for you, you get the Good Life, you can then indulge yourself as a self-actualised individual whose only responsibility is to yourself and what makes you happy and fulfilled".

And of course "you need to get into the right university, a mediocre degree from one of the top tiers will get you into more places than a great degree from some cow college".

Hey, hey, it's not "cow college", it's "land-grant university". (And yes, we had cows)

Round here we do have a cow college and our new(ish) university fought its way over decades to get that status from starting off as a vocational training, not a university, no degrees, practical trades third-level institution.

Cow colleges are nothing to be ashamed of!

As long as it doesn't have a point of the compass in the name, it's probably okay.

Its fascinating, because many people in the gen-z bracket were told to got to college, get a degree, and you'd have a nice cushy office job lined up.

I'm not sure if that has generally been the case since 2008 or so. For those who graduated from college until 2006 or so, maybe. But those people are GenX and Millennials, not GenZ.

An increase in healthcare related work, and a stagnation of other job sectors.

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