I'm so tired. From the 2008 recession, into a short break in mid 2010s, into a pandemic, into an AI revolution, my career is a series of managing catastrophic changes. I was a sold a lie by society and universities that studying some field, i.e. CS, meant some kind of meaningful progression. In reality it is all about profit, and selling products. I guess I was too naive to be that cynical, but I'm realizing now, it's literally all about selling product and making money and nobody gives a shit about expertise, craft, or specializations.
I worked a general public facing job that I will not describe in detail lest I doxx myself, but you can imagine it as basically tourist facing retail. I did this for 10+ years. I was already deeply cynical by the time I went to school for CS, and yes, it was for money, and I still prefer it to the alternatives.
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.
It's perfectly ok to study CS for money. My point is that the job market in general doesn't really care about all this technical specialization, despite them signaling this over and over with CS degrees and technical interviews. At the end of the day all careers have to do with making more profit for the business, not specializing in some skill.
> In reality it is all about profit, and selling products.
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 isn't about being special. It's about what exactly I'm supposed to optimize and maximize as a skill in order to be successful. It turns out the only right answer is business and marketing skills. So then what's the point of learning anything beyond surface level? Especially now with AI, but this was true before as well going back probably many decades.
> Do you think farmers actually live free of the thoughts of profits and sales?
You can escape the market by becoming a subsistence farmer or trying to join the hunter-gatherers living on Sentinel Island. Might involve a reduction in standard of living though.
> All business endeavors are about profit and sales.
This is the kind of simplistic thinking that has destroyed the modern world. Businesses are just groups of people, and most people don't care about the endless optimization of profit and sales -- they care about having purpose and they want their work to contribute back to society in a way that benefits their community.
The problem is we've empowered "entrepreneurs" (mostly narcissists) who espouse this form of one-dimensional thinking because they're the best at consolidating money for their own benefit (and the benefit of others who directly help them).
> All business endeavors are about profit and sales.
You say this because to you business is a game about winners and losers, and in your interpretation you believe all players should simply work to maximize their "points" at the expense of everyone and everything around them. This form of thinking only comes from "entrepreneur" types who are actively destroying the world and the very fabric of our society for their own personal gain.
> It’s not even about cynicism… it’s just reality.
It's only reality because we've allowed a small group of selfish cynics to take control of our society.
I don't think business should be about just profit and sales, but your point is that it isn't about it right now, which I disagree with. It's not about us choosing to socially support or allow the narcissists to exist. The whole system that's set up here is self-reinforcing. The most greedy, selfish and cruel are empowered to rule over everyone else, because the only things that are rewarded with power and influence are gaining more money. Some people who run businesses with purpose and integrity still exist, but year after year they're getting slowly pushed out, until they will eventually occupy only the most fringe margins of economics and all the air is taken up by the narcissistic giants. In that sense, in 2026 business ventures are all about making as much money as possible and nothing else. Game theory-wise, anyone caving to their morals is playing business wrong and will lose, because that's how the game was constructed. As far as I can see, there is nothing you and I can do.
> You are one of the individuals who thinks it is about profit and sales. I'm recommending that you change your mindset.
I think you're severely misreading what I'm saying. I would never do or condone any of the abusive acts that modern businesses have largely sunk to. I'm just saying that the fact that our system has rewarded the biggest profit-chasers is completely obvious and will not change regardless of what my mindset is. Said profit-chasers are now integrated so deep into everything that it will take far more than regular people like us changing the culture. They don't care about culture, they already own everything and can do whatever they want.
I understand what you're saying, this is the part I disagree with:
> I'm just saying that the fact that our system has rewarded the biggest profit-chasers is completely obvious and will not change regardless of what my mindset is.
Specifically the "will not change" part.
It's our system, and we do have the power to change it. First we have to change the way we talk about it. Stop calling them "winners" and stop calling those who follow a moral compass "losers." Call the entrepreneur-types what they are: sad, selfish individuals who deserve no power in our society. They're not winning at anything -- they're dragging our entire society down with them and making all of us losers.
I'm not assigning moral value to them when talking about 'winners' - objectively, in a game where money equals absolute power, it would be kind of absurd to say that the tiny minority that together holds far more power than the remaining majority didn't 'win' at that game, right?
He said 'all about profit', not 'about profit'. There's a difference between building a great, innovative, useful product and making a profit from that vs literally enshittifying/worsening an existing product (or just building total crap that came out of some illiterate MBA's ass in general) and aggressively leaning into marketing, dark patterns narrative control, etc.
These days it seems like most of SV and US tech industry in general is mostly the latter. This is a big reason why US tech companies can't compete with China anymore - VCs and big tech have captured the US market 10 years ago, and have been just squeezing it for profit ever since.
Your knowledge and experience is super valuable. Your bosses and the typical parasites running the typical SV tech company do not have the knowledge and experience you do .
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.
> you can build a product and/or company from the ground up
The MBAs can. Engineers can write a program, spend 5 years polishing it and convert maybe 2 paying users. The "just start a business" is the "learn to code" advice of the 21st century. It's not a panacea, or a viable path for most engineers to return to the career they had before.
No they can't. Their only skill is in squeezing profits out of existing products and corporate politics. These people are mostly technically illiterate, and they don't understand the tech market/business well either. Even AI will not enable these people to deliver working, quality code.
Writing code is a very specific and highly technical skill, you cannot just will yourself to do it without many hours of study and practice. Doing business strategy + machiavellianism 101, which is realistically what 99% of these people do, is not a very complicated or technical skill at all, the average high schooler understands these things for the most part, and AI can do it better already.
There are thousands of products and companies out there that were once okay, and did pretty well, after which they got taken over by the MBA/marketing people, and now their products are enshittified, stagnated dogshit, they only exist because of existing customers and connections, and they can be easily outcompeted.
To the contrary - good products and businesses die all the time, because they have no executive leadership or marketing plan. Highly intelligent programmers end up starving themselves trying to sell a video game or an innovative algorithm.
Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers. They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did. The programming mindset is restrained by unprofitable concepts like "taste" and "respect" and other nonsense principles that the industry long since forfeit to FOSS. The victor will be the contractor, the business grad and the tradespeople. The library maintainers, indie devs and SaaS addicts are going extinct.
The programmer will begin their final phase-out, the one that started when Oracle and Microsoft subcontracted their war crime software to third-world workers.
That's true, you do need marketing, sales, etc. But is there any secret sauce to that beyond having existing connections? Not really. AI does that job better than the 99% at this point.
> Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers.
Show me a single, actually working, profitable tech company built by a non-technical MBA without the need for developers. Until then it's fantasy. I've watched numerous seemingly high-ranking, very successful MBA/marketing people try - it's a complete joke - they need nerds to babysit them 24/7.
> They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did.
Cool fantasy I guess
AI/LLMs are an amazing tool and a multiplier, but they are far from perfect - it requires technical understanding to use effectively. An experienced software engineer can leverage it 1000x more effectively than a typical corporate MBA NPC. That's all there really is to it.
Where's the disruption? If experienced engineers can leverage AI "1000x more effectively" than their peers, we should be seeing the consequences. The only thing that's happening is that software is getting cheaper. The high waterline of quality that used to differentiate software products has boiled away. Many professionally-designed programs are being functionally replaced by vibe-coded alternatives. FAANG is barely shipping software any more dignified or advanced than vibe-coded crapware.
Ask yourself this; do you think Apple would rather give up their engineers, or their brand image? Only one of them is replaceable.
The disruption is definitely happening. The main roadblock is that the US tech industry is completely captured by big tech and VCs, who openly collude with each other. But that is temporary and the cracks are starting to show - the aggressive push towards AI regulatory capture is just one obvious sign. Explain to me how DeepSeek, a company with far less access to compute and capital, and starting from behind, is now able to offer LLM inference at roughly 10x the value per dollar of the frontier US AI labs.
> Ask yourself this; do you think Apple would rather give up their engineers, or their brand image? Only one of them is replaceable.
What do you think the 'brand image' is? Is it a pretty design/image, or a cute ad campaign, is it just whatever the marketing/propaganda says? Or is it actual product quality, reliability, efficiency, etc. ? If apple gives up their engineers they have no more brand image at all, and no more products either.
This makes me appreciate being in a stable relationship.
My wife and I have completely different careers, over the years it happened again and again that one of us would be better positioned than the other but the status quo remained stable.
I think in a world of machines, human relationships will be much more important.
I'm a former lead software engineer, currently looking for a job for more than two years. What I have learned is that resumes don't work anymore. It only matters who you know personally and who knows you. That's the thing recruiters will never tell you.
> I'm based in Russia and looking for a remote job worldwide
No employer or freelancer hirer is going to risk sanctions to hire a freelancer located in Russia. Any method to pay you would require breaking dollar and euro sanctions.
Your only option as a freelancer is to immigrate to Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Turkiye, Azerbaijan, etc like others in your shoes.
In California and haven’t worked either. Interviews are not enough, as they’ll look for any reason to not hire, even with referral. They’re easy to find as no one is perfect.
There are only several hundred tech companies in SoCal, plus another several hundred entertainment, aerospace, biotech, and defense companies...
Right now, entertainment in SoCal is hurting pretty bad but the other 4 industries have hundreds of open job positions for engineering positions. The caveat is that you have to be an "engineer" and not just a "coder."
I think that the author's doom was probably taking a career break to get a hobby degree.
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.)
Fir most fire gurus the FI part of FIRE mean a bunch of stocks and bonds and etfs in their portfolio. But how would that work if/when the market collapses?
Live below your means and max your savings and investment to FIRE out of the workforce as soon as possible, because you have no control over when you will be made permanently redundant by your age or employers unwilling to hire. The fix is a permanent jobs program to offer jobs to those who want one who cannot find one in the private market, will that fix come? Unlikely. If you cannot find a job, you're simply SOL in the current socioeconomic and political system configuration.
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."
This was among the best advice the man who raised me ever offered.
Decades later, I still live (alone, thankfully!) in a shithole rental without health insurance in a mid-sized USA metro, for less than $2000/month (all expenses). No contracts, cash only; I own my car; no cell phone/email/subscriptions.
My savings grow silently and (immensely &) although my current living arrangement isn't ideal, it is easy. Money unfortunately is among few door-openers for strangers in new cities, you just have to know how to live lesserly.
Previously, my IBEW data center experience allowed me to save/invest enough that I don't have to work any more than extremely part-time, which is how I continue choosing to live. Needing benefits will eventually bring me back into full-time employment, which I dread, existentially...
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This isn't a lifestyle that anybody with dependants nor romantic interests could easily manage – I've dated two women in the past decade, and they were both eccentrics (as well). But I live well (to my own enjoyments): haven't set an alarm clock in many many many many years...
Yeah, I am off-grid in rural Colorado. Although I have a couple of side hustles, it would be really thin pickings without some "passive" income and without having set myself up so the big expenses are mostly taken care of.
The last several folks I've dated have been very odd people, mostly living in vehicles.
I don't have health insurance, either. Or indoor plumbing.
But I do play a lot of music, have time to volunteer, and only take work that requires an alarm clock when I feel like it.
> Decades later, I still live (alone, thankfully!) in a shithole rental without health insurance in a mid-sized USA metro, for less than $2000/month (all expenses). No contracts, cash only; I own my car; no cell phone/email/subscriptions.
I unwillingly ended up doing the same: M34, fully paid flat in a fairly large city, no car, no ex wifes, no kids, no debt of any kind. My monthly fixed expenses are just bills (electric power, natural gas, internet), public transportation and groceries. Everything else (very little) is a monthly subscription i can stop paying if something goes wrong.
I save most of my paycheque (around 60-70%).
Can confirm that after splitting up with my last girlfriend my monthly expenses went down dramatically.
I learned the lesson the hard way through loss of a job for over a year and a foreclosure during the 2008 global financial crisis. For others to learn from my costly experience via my advice is free, I hope the advice lands.
Best wishes. I never thought I'd be worth more than $0.00, again (dropped out of medical school even poorer than when started), but somehow it happened (it's not much, but I live much simplerly: tied to nothing with [almost] zero responsibilities).
I'll bet when you read On the Road [0] you were also left wondering "that's it?! that's the entire journey?! how is this boring text so popular?!"
Us crazies ("I'm on the fun side of crazy," I like to profess) rarely stumble across one-another. Write me a postcard: I'll let you squat in the flat next door for a week; if you get chased out, I also have a shed (air conditioned, but 100sqft).
I've been dying to visit Slovenia (or other poorer EU countries). I'll write back – used to couchsurf before endless eternal septembers.
Check out https://couchers.org/, they are a non profit for couchsurfing. No affiliation besides as a donor for their annual costs (i aggressively defend and support public goods).
Would love to read a blog post about your EU travels after you make it there. Come back with stories and experience to share.
I'll be sure to dedicate All the Times We Never Got Caught to /u/toomuchtodo =D
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It starts in Oakland, decades ago, after dropping out of medical school to grow marijuana in abandoned warehouses and taken-over houses – with occassional farmed drug muling, to pay bills – eventually discovering the rewards and consequences of blue collar livelihood.
Years later, I'd meet a longlost supplier (after serving time) and eventually work at the local charity he helped found after his imprisonment.
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Still writing chapters, hopefully. The world is certainly weirder than anybody can voluntarily choose to make it.
[Chapter 9: impulsive EU vacationing with internet strangers]
Actually I rescheduled my last winter's sabbatical, cancelling US plans in favor of Antipodes because of the TSA, ICE, and general political climate. Will save the comment, who knows. Thanks!
Cannot blame you for avoiding USA: I really don't want to be here after the midterm riots (current "year goal": move to much smaller MSA, live even more simply, perhaps build desire for health benefits); never imagined we'd become unwelcome travelers with these "leadership" (sycophants, of all colors/sides) marching us along so blindly.
Thanks for the midday distraction; hope your sun sets well (looking forward to your eventual postcard). I have nothing else to offer but time, words, and (possibly) a squat =P
The advice you gave, while not wrong, is retroactive. I think the OP is asking for advice while already in this predicament, not preemptively.
Also, huge swaths of the younger populations can't do this at all because lots of them are not even given the opportunity to work a job (either any job, or a job that will allow them to have any noticeable amount of savings while remaining housed). This will only get worse, the door is already shut for some people.
Unfortunately, if you wait until the ship is burning to have stocked a lifeboat, it is too late. And if you don't have a lifeboat, you're fucked, potentially or very likely through no fault of your own. No one chooses to be born, but they are forced to exist in these systems. Life is inherently unfair.
> Also, huge swaths of the younger populations can't do this at all because lots of them are not even given the opportunity to work a job (either any job, or a job that will allow them to have any noticeable amount of savings while remaining housed). This will only get worse, the door is already shut for some people.
Strong agree. Either policy will fix this or a generation will be lost. It's terrible, tragic, and I/we have little control over this. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.
"When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” -- Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison (i am doing my part, to the best of my ability, to free and empower others, ymmv)
Very, very few people are going to have a social network that does more than get a foot in the door.
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.
The kind of nepotism that gets you a job via your friend is mostly gone. I’m sure some high up executives or the ceo or board can still do that for their network but the most people can do nowadays is give you a referral and that barely even counts for anything nowadays.
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.
"In my last role in communications and public relations, I was earning £48,000 a year ... I have about 25 years’ experience as a journalist and in communications and PR"
The UK has been in a white collar recession for much of this decade.
Brexit and the rise of GCCs in the CEE and Asia means a number of professional jobs that would have been in the UK are now shifting to Warsaw, Prague, Bangalore, Manila, etc.
"I think what shook things up in my 40s was the fact that I took a career break at 43 to study for a Master of Science in Paleobiology for a year..."
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
Except it doesn't work that way. You can't meaningfully learn a skill to get a job because you will have no experience in the skill and potential employers are looking for people with experience in whatever skills they are asking for.
Employers have become very good at finding means of screening out older workers without exposing them to charges of discrimination.
> On one level I recognise that I have male privilege, but men do face their own problems, especially around midlife.
Male priviledge for 90% of males in Europe is non zero probability of being drafted and losing limbs or having face melted. In some regions the probability is approaching 100%. While underprivileged females will be free to leave the country and receive refugee benefits. Please stop mentioning it because it's spiralling quickly into support for extremist parties.
> Long-term unemployment is all-consuming; it prevents you from moving on and doing what you want to do with your life. You see all your friends on social media who are still employed and going out and doing amazing things.
Actually only then you finally have time to do what you want. The really cool stuff, not takeaway coffee, going to cinema, or one week vacation. Assuming you were saving and investing while employed. Social media posts of what employed people are doing while on annual leave is particular form of cynical tragedy.
Ive lately experienced that asking for 100% office onsite time is rising eye brows with many people:
I hate remote work since Covid, I want an office, leave my appartment, meet colleagues.
But it looks like Im by far the minority, if I remember recent discussions?
The covid experience for corporate is that they can save money by downsizing the office, reducing leases and maintenance costs. In my experience this was followed by increased in-office requirements, such that you are then competing for space.
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.
Most remote workers will also tell you they do not hate on-site. Being at the office, meeting co-workers is great for mental health.
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.
My issue with RTO is a lot of folks are working for international companies with teams spread all over the world. Sure, I can go back to the office... but I work with literally no one there on a day to day basis. I'll be going to a hot swap desk spot to take meetings on Teams all day anyway. Makes zero sense.
Around me everything is at least hybrid, with nobody complaining if you want full time on-site. More and more companies are moving back to on-site full time.
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.
Will AI create abundance for everyone though? I can certainly see how it would benefit both business owners (no more annoying office employees!) and blue collar workers (cheap professional services for everyone!), but it's hard to see how it would benefit most white collar middle class folks, who spend most of their time moving information around.
My guess based on previous transitions is that the "net new jobs" will benefit the next generation, not the current one.
From my POV (jaded early-40s tech dropout, electrician); the joke on jobsites back when Andrew Yang campaigned (Presidentially with UBI as a platform policy) was:
>We're either going to have to have Universal Basic Income, or send a bunch of young men off to die in foreign wars – and leadership won't ever voluntarily implement UBI, so I guess it's time for a bunch of dudes to die.
[here we are, six year later]
Maybe the datacenter jobsites are a bit too morbid, but I was really hoping that UBI would've been possible (by now), one pandemic later. We even got (surprise MFers!) LLMs to help with re-distributions... and all we got was a trillionaire!
They are not even ashamed anymore to say that they are doing that for profit. It is our fault to grab on weapons to kill other fathers and families.
It is only about oil.
Get any young adult, they have been brainwashed to think it is someone else's fault
The owners of these companies would be the ones taking hammers to the machines if UBI was ever more than a wild pipe dream being suggested by unpopular political aspirants.
They are addicted to wealth and aren’t willing to share.
>owners of these companies would be the ones taking hammers to the machines if UBI was ever more than a wild pipe dream
I was a union sparkie (IBEW) early in my electrician career, and it always surprised me just how much money companies will spend to break any attempts at unionization – I live near USA's only VW facility, and they recently got their Union (3rd attempt in decades) – millions and millions of dollars – leading one to ponder the great question:
"Why would companies spend so much money on union-busting (often more than membership would cost!) if it weren't to their advantage to do so?
Healthcare is still considered a "communist" opinion for a significant percentage of Americans. There are politicians in the current administration that think children shouldn't have free lunch at school.
I'm so tired. From the 2008 recession, into a short break in mid 2010s, into a pandemic, into an AI revolution, my career is a series of managing catastrophic changes. I was a sold a lie by society and universities that studying some field, i.e. CS, meant some kind of meaningful progression. In reality it is all about profit, and selling products. I guess I was too naive to be that cynical, but I'm realizing now, it's literally all about selling product and making money and nobody gives a shit about expertise, craft, or specializations.
I worked a general public facing job that I will not describe in detail lest I doxx myself, but you can imagine it as basically tourist facing retail. I did this for 10+ years. I was already deeply cynical by the time I went to school for CS, and yes, it was for money, and I still prefer it to the alternatives.
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.
It's perfectly ok to study CS for money. My point is that the job market in general doesn't really care about all this technical specialization, despite them signaling this over and over with CS degrees and technical interviews. At the end of the day all careers have to do with making more profit for the business, not specializing in some skill.
> In reality it is all about profit, and selling products.
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.
It isn't about being special. It's about what exactly I'm supposed to optimize and maximize as a skill in order to be successful. It turns out the only right answer is business and marketing skills. So then what's the point of learning anything beyond surface level? Especially now with AI, but this was true before as well going back probably many decades.
> Do you think farmers actually live free of the thoughts of profits and sales?
You can escape the market by becoming a subsistence farmer or trying to join the hunter-gatherers living on Sentinel Island. Might involve a reduction in standard of living though.
This may surprise you, but there is actually a whole realm of possibilities between late-stage social-darwinist capitalism and subsistence farming.
> All business endeavors are about profit and sales.
This is the kind of simplistic thinking that has destroyed the modern world. Businesses are just groups of people, and most people don't care about the endless optimization of profit and sales -- they care about having purpose and they want their work to contribute back to society in a way that benefits their community.
The problem is we've empowered "entrepreneurs" (mostly narcissists) who espouse this form of one-dimensional thinking because they're the best at consolidating money for their own benefit (and the benefit of others who directly help them).
> All business endeavors are about profit and sales.
You say this because to you business is a game about winners and losers, and in your interpretation you believe all players should simply work to maximize their "points" at the expense of everyone and everything around them. This form of thinking only comes from "entrepreneur" types who are actively destroying the world and the very fabric of our society for their own personal gain.
> It’s not even about cynicism… it’s just reality.
It's only reality because we've allowed a small group of selfish cynics to take control of our society.
I don't think business should be about just profit and sales, but your point is that it isn't about it right now, which I disagree with. It's not about us choosing to socially support or allow the narcissists to exist. The whole system that's set up here is self-reinforcing. The most greedy, selfish and cruel are empowered to rule over everyone else, because the only things that are rewarded with power and influence are gaining more money. Some people who run businesses with purpose and integrity still exist, but year after year they're getting slowly pushed out, until they will eventually occupy only the most fringe margins of economics and all the air is taken up by the narcissistic giants. In that sense, in 2026 business ventures are all about making as much money as possible and nothing else. Game theory-wise, anyone caving to their morals is playing business wrong and will lose, because that's how the game was constructed. As far as I can see, there is nothing you and I can do.
> I don't think business should be about just profit and sales, but your point is that it isn't about it right now
It both is about it and isn't about it right now, depending on who you ask.
> anyone caving to their morals is playing business wrong and will lose
You are one of the individuals who thinks it is about profit and sales. I'm recommending that you change your mindset.
If we change the culture, we might be able to change who's in control.
Anyone who thinks business is primarily about P&L should be considered mentally ill.
> You are one of the individuals who thinks it is about profit and sales. I'm recommending that you change your mindset.
I think you're severely misreading what I'm saying. I would never do or condone any of the abusive acts that modern businesses have largely sunk to. I'm just saying that the fact that our system has rewarded the biggest profit-chasers is completely obvious and will not change regardless of what my mindset is. Said profit-chasers are now integrated so deep into everything that it will take far more than regular people like us changing the culture. They don't care about culture, they already own everything and can do whatever they want.
I understand what you're saying, this is the part I disagree with:
> I'm just saying that the fact that our system has rewarded the biggest profit-chasers is completely obvious and will not change regardless of what my mindset is.
Specifically the "will not change" part.
It's our system, and we do have the power to change it. First we have to change the way we talk about it. Stop calling them "winners" and stop calling those who follow a moral compass "losers." Call the entrepreneur-types what they are: sad, selfish individuals who deserve no power in our society. They're not winning at anything -- they're dragging our entire society down with them and making all of us losers.
I'm not assigning moral value to them when talking about 'winners' - objectively, in a game where money equals absolute power, it would be kind of absurd to say that the tiny minority that together holds far more power than the remaining majority didn't 'win' at that game, right?
Well said.
> You say this because to you business is a game about winners and losers
i never mentioned winners and losers, so please do not put words in my mouth.
any business MUST be profitable to stay in business (in a healthy way).
He said 'all about profit', not 'about profit'. There's a difference between building a great, innovative, useful product and making a profit from that vs literally enshittifying/worsening an existing product (or just building total crap that came out of some illiterate MBA's ass in general) and aggressively leaning into marketing, dark patterns narrative control, etc.
These days it seems like most of SV and US tech industry in general is mostly the latter. This is a big reason why US tech companies can't compete with China anymore - VCs and big tech have captured the US market 10 years ago, and have been just squeezing it for profit ever since.
Your knowledge and experience is super valuable. Your bosses and the typical parasites running the typical SV tech company do not have the knowledge and experience you do .
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.
> you can build a product and/or company from the ground up
The MBAs can. Engineers can write a program, spend 5 years polishing it and convert maybe 2 paying users. The "just start a business" is the "learn to code" advice of the 21st century. It's not a panacea, or a viable path for most engineers to return to the career they had before.
No they can't. Their only skill is in squeezing profits out of existing products and corporate politics. These people are mostly technically illiterate, and they don't understand the tech market/business well either. Even AI will not enable these people to deliver working, quality code.
Writing code is a very specific and highly technical skill, you cannot just will yourself to do it without many hours of study and practice. Doing business strategy + machiavellianism 101, which is realistically what 99% of these people do, is not a very complicated or technical skill at all, the average high schooler understands these things for the most part, and AI can do it better already.
There are thousands of products and companies out there that were once okay, and did pretty well, after which they got taken over by the MBA/marketing people, and now their products are enshittified, stagnated dogshit, they only exist because of existing customers and connections, and they can be easily outcompeted.
To the contrary - good products and businesses die all the time, because they have no executive leadership or marketing plan. Highly intelligent programmers end up starving themselves trying to sell a video game or an innovative algorithm.
Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers. They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did. The programming mindset is restrained by unprofitable concepts like "taste" and "respect" and other nonsense principles that the industry long since forfeit to FOSS. The victor will be the contractor, the business grad and the tradespeople. The library maintainers, indie devs and SaaS addicts are going extinct.
The programmer will begin their final phase-out, the one that started when Oracle and Microsoft subcontracted their war crime software to third-world workers.
That's true, you do need marketing, sales, etc. But is there any secret sauce to that beyond having existing connections? Not really. AI does that job better than the 99% at this point.
> Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers.
Show me a single, actually working, profitable tech company built by a non-technical MBA without the need for developers. Until then it's fantasy. I've watched numerous seemingly high-ranking, very successful MBA/marketing people try - it's a complete joke - they need nerds to babysit them 24/7.
> They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did.
Cool fantasy I guess
AI/LLMs are an amazing tool and a multiplier, but they are far from perfect - it requires technical understanding to use effectively. An experienced software engineer can leverage it 1000x more effectively than a typical corporate MBA NPC. That's all there really is to it.
Where's the disruption? If experienced engineers can leverage AI "1000x more effectively" than their peers, we should be seeing the consequences. The only thing that's happening is that software is getting cheaper. The high waterline of quality that used to differentiate software products has boiled away. Many professionally-designed programs are being functionally replaced by vibe-coded alternatives. FAANG is barely shipping software any more dignified or advanced than vibe-coded crapware.
Ask yourself this; do you think Apple would rather give up their engineers, or their brand image? Only one of them is replaceable.
The disruption is definitely happening. The main roadblock is that the US tech industry is completely captured by big tech and VCs, who openly collude with each other. But that is temporary and the cracks are starting to show - the aggressive push towards AI regulatory capture is just one obvious sign. Explain to me how DeepSeek, a company with far less access to compute and capital, and starting from behind, is now able to offer LLM inference at roughly 10x the value per dollar of the frontier US AI labs.
> Ask yourself this; do you think Apple would rather give up their engineers, or their brand image? Only one of them is replaceable.
What do you think the 'brand image' is? Is it a pretty design/image, or a cute ad campaign, is it just whatever the marketing/propaganda says? Or is it actual product quality, reliability, efficiency, etc. ? If apple gives up their engineers they have no more brand image at all, and no more products either.
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This makes me appreciate being in a stable relationship.
My wife and I have completely different careers, over the years it happened again and again that one of us would be better positioned than the other but the status quo remained stable.
I think in a world of machines, human relationships will be much more important.
I'm a former lead software engineer, currently looking for a job for more than two years. What I have learned is that resumes don't work anymore. It only matters who you know personally and who knows you. That's the thing recruiters will never tell you.
My dad is in his 60s and is still landing interviews (even in big tech) with his resume and no networking.
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.
Well, I can share my resume if you'd like to take a look at it.
Also, I'm not in a tech hub. I'm based in Russia and looking for a remote job worldwide.
> I'm based in Russia...
This would be an immediate disqualification for any tech job I can think of.
> based in Russia
immediate non-starter
> I'm based in Russia and looking for a remote job worldwide
No employer or freelancer hirer is going to risk sanctions to hire a freelancer located in Russia. Any method to pay you would require breaking dollar and euro sanctions.
Your only option as a freelancer is to immigrate to Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Turkiye, Azerbaijan, etc like others in your shoes.
China might work also if they can get a visa.
In California and haven’t worked either. Interviews are not enough, as they’ll look for any reason to not hire, even with referral. They’re easy to find as no one is perfect.
You're in SoCal. Not a tech hub.
There are only several hundred tech companies in SoCal, plus another several hundred entertainment, aerospace, biotech, and defense companies...
Right now, entertainment in SoCal is hurting pretty bad but the other 4 industries have hundreds of open job positions for engineering positions. The caveat is that you have to be an "engineer" and not just a "coder."
https://archive.is/20261021112112/https://www.telegraph.co.u...
Many of us will face this issue. What's the fix? What should we do now to prepare?
I think that the author's doom was probably taking a career break to get a hobby degree.
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.)
To be honest I’m skeptical about fire.
Fir most fire gurus the FI part of FIRE mean a bunch of stocks and bonds and etfs in their portfolio. But how would that work if/when the market collapses?
Live below your means and max your savings and investment to FIRE out of the workforce as soon as possible, because you have no control over when you will be made permanently redundant by your age or employers unwilling to hire. The fix is a permanent jobs program to offer jobs to those who want one who cannot find one in the private market, will that fix come? Unlikely. If you cannot find a job, you're simply SOL in the current socioeconomic and political system configuration.
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."
>Live below your means
This was among the best advice the man who raised me ever offered.
Decades later, I still live (alone, thankfully!) in a shithole rental without health insurance in a mid-sized USA metro, for less than $2000/month (all expenses). No contracts, cash only; I own my car; no cell phone/email/subscriptions.
My savings grow silently and (immensely &) although my current living arrangement isn't ideal, it is easy. Money unfortunately is among few door-openers for strangers in new cities, you just have to know how to live lesserly.
Previously, my IBEW data center experience allowed me to save/invest enough that I don't have to work any more than extremely part-time, which is how I continue choosing to live. Needing benefits will eventually bring me back into full-time employment, which I dread, existentially...
----
This isn't a lifestyle that anybody with dependants nor romantic interests could easily manage – I've dated two women in the past decade, and they were both eccentrics (as well). But I live well (to my own enjoyments): haven't set an alarm clock in many many many many years...
Yeah, I am off-grid in rural Colorado. Although I have a couple of side hustles, it would be really thin pickings without some "passive" income and without having set myself up so the big expenses are mostly taken care of.
The last several folks I've dated have been very odd people, mostly living in vehicles.
I don't have health insurance, either. Or indoor plumbing.
But I do play a lot of music, have time to volunteer, and only take work that requires an alarm clock when I feel like it.
> Decades later, I still live (alone, thankfully!) in a shithole rental without health insurance in a mid-sized USA metro, for less than $2000/month (all expenses). No contracts, cash only; I own my car; no cell phone/email/subscriptions.
I unwillingly ended up doing the same: M34, fully paid flat in a fairly large city, no car, no ex wifes, no kids, no debt of any kind. My monthly fixed expenses are just bills (electric power, natural gas, internet), public transportation and groceries. Everything else (very little) is a monthly subscription i can stop paying if something goes wrong.
I save most of my paycheque (around 60-70%).
Can confirm that after splitting up with my last girlfriend my monthly expenses went down dramatically.
I learned the lesson the hard way through loss of a job for over a year and a foreclosure during the 2008 global financial crisis. For others to learn from my costly experience via my advice is free, I hope the advice lands.
Best wishes. I never thought I'd be worth more than $0.00, again (dropped out of medical school even poorer than when started), but somehow it happened (it's not much, but I live much simplerly: tied to nothing with [almost] zero responsibilities).
Dude I'm you but in Central Europe, even including the health insurance part.
I'll bet when you read On the Road [0] you were also left wondering "that's it?! that's the entire journey?! how is this boring text so popular?!"
Us crazies ("I'm on the fun side of crazy," I like to profess) rarely stumble across one-another. Write me a postcard: I'll let you squat in the flat next door for a week; if you get chased out, I also have a shed (air conditioned, but 100sqft).
I've been dying to visit Slovenia (or other poorer EU countries). I'll write back – used to couchsurf before endless eternal septembers.
[0]
Check out https://couchers.org/, they are a non profit for couchsurfing. No affiliation besides as a donor for their annual costs (i aggressively defend and support public goods).
Would love to read a blog post about your EU travels after you make it there. Come back with stories and experience to share.
I'll be sure to dedicate All the Times We Never Got Caught to /u/toomuchtodo =D
----
It starts in Oakland, decades ago, after dropping out of medical school to grow marijuana in abandoned warehouses and taken-over houses – with occassional farmed drug muling, to pay bills – eventually discovering the rewards and consequences of blue collar livelihood.
Years later, I'd meet a longlost supplier (after serving time) and eventually work at the local charity he helped found after his imprisonment.
----
Still writing chapters, hopefully. The world is certainly weirder than anybody can voluntarily choose to make it.
[Chapter 9: impulsive EU vacationing with internet strangers]
Actually I rescheduled my last winter's sabbatical, cancelling US plans in favor of Antipodes because of the TSA, ICE, and general political climate. Will save the comment, who knows. Thanks!
Cannot blame you for avoiding USA: I really don't want to be here after the midterm riots (current "year goal": move to much smaller MSA, live even more simply, perhaps build desire for health benefits); never imagined we'd become unwelcome travelers with these "leadership" (sycophants, of all colors/sides) marching us along so blindly.
Thanks for the midday distraction; hope your sun sets well (looking forward to your eventual postcard). I have nothing else to offer but time, words, and (possibly) a squat =P
The advice you gave, while not wrong, is retroactive. I think the OP is asking for advice while already in this predicament, not preemptively.
Also, huge swaths of the younger populations can't do this at all because lots of them are not even given the opportunity to work a job (either any job, or a job that will allow them to have any noticeable amount of savings while remaining housed). This will only get worse, the door is already shut for some people.
Unfortunately, if you wait until the ship is burning to have stocked a lifeboat, it is too late. And if you don't have a lifeboat, you're fucked, potentially or very likely through no fault of your own. No one chooses to be born, but they are forced to exist in these systems. Life is inherently unfair.
> Also, huge swaths of the younger populations can't do this at all because lots of them are not even given the opportunity to work a job (either any job, or a job that will allow them to have any noticeable amount of savings while remaining housed). This will only get worse, the door is already shut for some people.
Strong agree. Either policy will fix this or a generation will be lost. It's terrible, tragic, and I/we have little control over this. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.
"When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” -- Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison (i am doing my part, to the best of my ability, to free and empower others, ymmv)
Don't live in the UK nor take extended career breaks without an explicit and formal sabbatical.
The reality is the author worked in PR and Comms in the UK.
25 years in the industry and not building a social network that is able to find you a job somewhere is beyond a generational fumble
Very, very few people are going to have a social network that does more than get a foot in the door.
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.
The referral/interview is the point here, if you fumble the interviews its your own fault.
In other words, autistics should simply go away.
The kind of nepotism that gets you a job via your friend is mostly gone. I’m sure some high up executives or the ceo or board can still do that for their network but the most people can do nowadays is give you a referral and that barely even counts for anything nowadays.
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.
"In my last role in communications and public relations, I was earning £48,000 a year ... I have about 25 years’ experience as a journalist and in communications and PR"
The UK has been in a white collar recession for much of this decade.
Brexit and the rise of GCCs in the CEE and Asia means a number of professional jobs that would have been in the UK are now shifting to Warsaw, Prague, Bangalore, Manila, etc.
"I think what shook things up in my 40s was the fact that I took a career break at 43 to study for a Master of Science in Paleobiology for a year..."
Yep, that likely played a role.
It is very hard to hire in the UK.
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
Except it doesn't work that way. You can't meaningfully learn a skill to get a job because you will have no experience in the skill and potential employers are looking for people with experience in whatever skills they are asking for.
Employers have become very good at finding means of screening out older workers without exposing them to charges of discrimination.
Haha if someone paid me and assured I would use it in daily tasks, I would finally have the motivation to learn SQL thoroughly.
Same for me.
> On one level I recognise that I have male privilege, but men do face their own problems, especially around midlife.
Male priviledge for 90% of males in Europe is non zero probability of being drafted and losing limbs or having face melted. In some regions the probability is approaching 100%. While underprivileged females will be free to leave the country and receive refugee benefits. Please stop mentioning it because it's spiralling quickly into support for extremist parties.
> Long-term unemployment is all-consuming; it prevents you from moving on and doing what you want to do with your life. You see all your friends on social media who are still employed and going out and doing amazing things.
Actually only then you finally have time to do what you want. The really cool stuff, not takeaway coffee, going to cinema, or one week vacation. Assuming you were saving and investing while employed. Social media posts of what employed people are doing while on annual leave is particular form of cynical tragedy.
Ive lately experienced that asking for 100% office onsite time is rising eye brows with many people: I hate remote work since Covid, I want an office, leave my appartment, meet colleagues.
But it looks like Im by far the minority, if I remember recent discussions?
The covid experience for corporate is that they can save money by downsizing the office, reducing leases and maintenance costs. In my experience this was followed by increased in-office requirements, such that you are then competing for space.
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.
Most remote workers will also tell you they do not hate on-site. Being at the office, meeting co-workers is great for mental health.
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.
My issue with RTO is a lot of folks are working for international companies with teams spread all over the world. Sure, I can go back to the office... but I work with literally no one there on a day to day basis. I'll be going to a hot swap desk spot to take meetings on Teams all day anyway. Makes zero sense.
Is it because companies have scaled down their office space do you think?
Around me everything is at least hybrid, with nobody complaining if you want full time on-site. More and more companies are moving back to on-site full time.
Here on HN we're definitely a minority, but in the real world, saying you want to be in the office isn't that weird.
That's not weird.
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.
Paywall.
Not if you disable JavaScript.
There will be more net new jobs out there thanks AI creating abundance.
Universal Basic (and High) Income will most likely ease this transition.
Will AI create abundance for everyone though? I can certainly see how it would benefit both business owners (no more annoying office employees!) and blue collar workers (cheap professional services for everyone!), but it's hard to see how it would benefit most white collar middle class folks, who spend most of their time moving information around.
My guess based on previous transitions is that the "net new jobs" will benefit the next generation, not the current one.
There will not be any universal income. That's a discourse so people don't act early on it despite the hundreds of problems already found.
Unfortunately I agree with your assessment.
From my POV (jaded early-40s tech dropout, electrician); the joke on jobsites back when Andrew Yang campaigned (Presidentially with UBI as a platform policy) was:
>We're either going to have to have Universal Basic Income, or send a bunch of young men off to die in foreign wars – and leadership won't ever voluntarily implement UBI, so I guess it's time for a bunch of dudes to die.
[here we are, six year later]
Maybe the datacenter jobsites are a bit too morbid, but I was really hoping that UBI would've been possible (by now), one pandemic later. We even got (surprise MFers!) LLMs to help with re-distributions... and all we got was a trillionaire!
They are not even ashamed anymore to say that they are doing that for profit. It is our fault to grab on weapons to kill other fathers and families. It is only about oil. Get any young adult, they have been brainwashed to think it is someone else's fault
Seinfeld recently (mockingly) said it best [worst] [0].
[0] the current state of Power in this world, whose...
I will not re-write or link to open display(s) of hate.
The owners of these companies would be the ones taking hammers to the machines if UBI was ever more than a wild pipe dream being suggested by unpopular political aspirants.
They are addicted to wealth and aren’t willing to share.
>owners of these companies would be the ones taking hammers to the machines if UBI was ever more than a wild pipe dream
I was a union sparkie (IBEW) early in my electrician career, and it always surprised me just how much money companies will spend to break any attempts at unionization – I live near USA's only VW facility, and they recently got their Union (3rd attempt in decades) – millions and millions of dollars – leading one to ponder the great question:
"Why would companies spend so much money on union-busting (often more than membership would cost!) if it weren't to their advantage to do so?
Healthcare is still considered a "communist" opinion for a significant percentage of Americans. There are politicians in the current administration that think children shouldn't have free lunch at school.
But, somehow, they will implement UBI.
OP's issue isn't an AI issue though - it's a "working in PR&Comms in a relatively stagnant economy" issue.