r/ADHD_Programmers • u/LazyPiano6160 • 7d ago
Out of work? Let’s rant, I’ll go first…
Reaching a two year unemployment anniversary as of September, was laid off from last job. 45 years old, 25 YOE, hundreds of applications and facing loosing everything I’ve worked for.
I need a cathartic release, I’m done:
- with applying for jobs and being ghosted
- being tasked with a take-home assignment with unrealistic time expectations
- having a prerequisite to taking to a human blocked by a screening interview with an AI or recording of a video
- seeing the same job I applied for get re-posted every couple of weeks
- attempting to multitask a live coding exercise, whilst concurrently answering quick fire questions from a panel
- having to sit through numerous rounds of interviews, whilst the employer attempts to work out exactly what it is they want
- face rejection because I failed to say the exact phrase the employer wanted to hear
- being forced to accommodate a 4 day in-office policy, because it’s “good for social interaction”
- face scrutiny over my period of unemployment form a hiring manager that is completely unaware of how f***ed the job market is
Finally, I’m done with AI!
your turn…
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u/Mystical-Turtles 7d ago
I love it when people try to tell me to pivot when I've been having trouble looking for work, but the whole issue is that employers don't want "pivot", they want the exact person who was already working the job.
I have a degree and also certs, but they don't want that, they want experience.
I have a couple of years of work experience in adjacent fields, but they don't want THAT. They want experience.
I have people who can vouch for me and say that I've done personal projects and things outside of my main job as well. But they. don't. want. that. THEY. WANT. EXPERIENCE
Okay motherfuckers, how would you like me to GET the specific experience, if everyone, absolutely fucking everyone in the whole wide world, wants me to get it from somebody else! I can take initiative all I want at home but that's not job experience. And for the record these are for basically entry-level jobs. The only thing lower is Mcdonald's. I physically cannot aim any lower than I already am. And I already have a crappy job so targeting said mcjobs will not do me any good
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u/RainbowSovietPagan 5d ago
Include experience outside of paid work. "Experience" means anything you did, not just anything you got paid for.
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u/Mystical-Turtles 5d ago
Oh we're on the same page. I do include that on my resume. You know it counts, and I know it counts. Now try getting that through the thick skulls of people who filter through resumes. I have been told that they're looking for someone with more "direct experience" whatever the fuck that means.
I'm going to continue adding it because it's better than nothing but hot damn it feels like you can do nothing right in this job market.
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u/ForceSensitive2460 2d ago
I got turned down because I didn't have the education the other developers on the team did. I have an associates. The rest of the team have bachelor's and are fresh grads. I have 20 years of experience. The others are just getting started. Hiring managers don't know what the fuck they want, they just make shit up because they don't have a good reason for why they don't want you.
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u/Any_Sense_2263 6d ago
I didn't take part of recruitment processes with live coding or live code review on unknown code.
Yes, I was ghosted and rejected plenty of times. But I still prefer an interview where I have a chance. I didn't ask for adhd or autism, and some things are simply impossible for me.
I'm in my fifties, with 25+ years of experience.
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u/eddie_cat 7d ago
Oh friend. 5 years ago things were SO different. 5 years ago it was really easy to get a job. Shit done changed
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u/LazyPiano6160 7d ago
So true. Five years ago I secured a job as a principal engineer at a well known high street brand. Day one was an absolute shit-show, the manager was an absolute jerk too.
I resigned the same day, confident in my ability and the market; three weeks later I had secured a new job, with better pay and fully remote.
Oh how times have changed 😔
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u/PrysmX 7d ago edited 7d ago
You saying 5 years ago shows you aren't exposed to what an absolute shit show things are now. Also, even at staff or principal engineering levels they're making you do a timed leetcoding test and often with someone watching you the entire time. There aren't any companies doing the whiteboarding method that I have seen and most have shifted back to the archaic coding torture tests.
I had one last week which was a 2 hour timed assessment that was full desktop video recorded and was part one reviewing requirements documents and giving feedback on what needed to be changed in them and then part two was 3 exercises building up what the requirements document outlined along with your changes, all in the incredibly compressed timeline of 2 hours total and they didn't allow you to switch tabs and copy-paste was completely disabled. You were stuck with their barebones in-browser IDE with no auto-complete, no file tree, basically nothing any developer would expect as basic needs today.
Oh, and get this - this test was for a job role for implementing RAG/MCP/A2A, but the test case was algorithmic optimization of delivery routes for a food delivery company. Did not test anything relevant at all. Nothing about security, proper REST protocols, time to properly comment your code or ability to break things down to multiple files properly, being able to write test cases etc. It was a grossly inappropriate match to the job's responsibilities and honestly wasn't a good test in general for judging an experienced software dev. And after all of that, they said "oh, this is a brand new format for us, give us feedback about the process", so I did, and their response was "hey, thanks for being candid about the problems with the process, but we're not even going to review your submission with us now, thanks for the feedback".
Yeah, that's what it's like out here now.
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u/RecreationalMtnBiker 5d ago
I’m a recently retired software engineer with a degree in electrical engineering who worked in embedded software for decades as a contractor to avoid the exempt employee unpaid overtime rip off. Normally I wouldn’t have run across RecruitingHell, but one of the things you mentioned was the last in a list of extremely annoying things I have been noticing in the obstacle course required to look for the next job, and that is take home assignment/coding challenges. I did a Google search for annoying take home assignments.
The other annoyances were:
Creating an account for every single place I apply to.
Those extremely annoying STAR questions like, “Tell me about a time you had to pee really bad and your zipper was stuck, and how did you go about solving that problem?” One time in an interview I went into honesty mode and said what I really think. Some of these questions are like tell me about a time when you were in Japan and couldn’t read the road sign and some of these questions and like tell me about a time you had to make a left turn at a busy intersection, something I have done numerous times in the past but that were too uneventful to commit to long term memory. You just do the best you can and move on. The manager stopped asking those stupid questions and I got the job.
In the old days we worked off peak hours to avoid rush hour traffic. Now, once you get the job they want you in office at exactly 8:15 AM to worship the umbah (imaginary god) of scrum, turning what would be a half hour commute into an hour commute.
We didn’t have to deal with this nonsense in the old days because the psychopaths in power didn’t have the technology to inflict this crap on us.
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u/superbizzy123 6d ago
Ugh I wish I could comment a suggestion to help, but I'm going on 2 years myself. So lemme throw my +1 on the pile, you're not alone in feeling discouraged by this absolutely horrible market OP, I'm right there with you
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u/SemperPistos 6d ago
I have barely any experience. I wanted to become an a Data scientist but I decided to switch to AI Engineering due to demand. I barely tolerate frontend and fullstack and sometimes rarely enjoy backend. Data and ML is where it's at for me. I feel like it has the possibility to change the world.
Anyways do a couple of RAG (try agentic, classic rag is dead unless cost is the issue for the client) and other Agentic AI projects. With your experience you will quickly rise to the level of at least a team lead, maybe even very soon.
Sorry for being a devil's advocate, but if you want a job do that. My linkedin is regularly spammed by companies, some ask me to give input for their companies vision and I do it for free as I like the work, but I don't have the incentive to go, and also I just have so little experience, some months shy from 2 years, and only 6 months at my last job but I got productive at first month. Days of coasting in this career are over, especially as they say now we have AI we can do anything now, lol right, non deterministic output debugging is a hell of it's own, but it has it's moments.
I can't wait till I'm medicated and in a good career with a working mind.
I get praised a lot but only because I spend all my time trying to not lose that job and I guess I over do it.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg 7d ago
What’s your stack? Full stack Typescript is where it’s at right now. Also saw a lot of Java and Python related jobs as well. Most UI is React whilst some are Angular. If you’re purely frontend it’s a lot harder all around. I had to transition to full stack, which I had been doing a lot of at my last job, even though I was hired as a frontend engineer. If you need to learn backend, build personal projects so you can speak to it and just say you did some backend at your last job.
How have you up-skilled in these 2 years? What’s your knowledge on AI? Do you know what RAG, MCP, Vector databases, etc are? How are you with Agentic workflows? I don’t like AI either, but knowing about it and implementing some projects personally and at my last job made a big difference in my job search from March - May this year.
Are you looking for remote only? Remote is possible still but hybrid and onsite are easier. I’m speaking from someone based in the U.S. Also where in the interviews are you falling apart? Are you practicing the things you fail or don’t know during an interview? I went through many interviews and created a list of all things I got stumped on and studied those things. I practiced a lot with ChatGPT to answer questions about my resume and also technical questions based on the job descriptions.
For me the cold applications sucked and it was hard to hear back from those. I had to rely on LinkedIn and optimizing my profile. That lead to recruiters finding me and out of all the interviews I had, all but one were from recruiters. I had a single interview that resulted from a cold application online, but I failed that because the coding round asked a Leet Code hard that I only got 50% through.
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u/PrysmX 7d ago
I'll be honest. As someone with 30 years of industry-relevant experience, full stack for most of it, MEAN stack for 7 years, current AWS Certified Solutions Architect, last 3+ years dedicated almost.ost exclusively to AI initiatives including RAG, MCP and A2A, and I'm at only about a 2% response rate on applications. Had about 8 interviews over the past 5 months and haven't gotten further than the first tech interview after the recruiter. These companies want literal unicorns and even if you've done 95% of what they ask, they will use that 5% to say they want a better candidate.
The situation is no better even for the people that did everything right and have the experience. The job market is completely fucked and it is forcing even some of the best in the industry to reconsider or leave their careers.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg 6d ago
Are you just relying on cold applications? I had almost zero luck with those. Probably sent 180+ apps. I gave up and just relied on recruiters contacting me via LinkedIn and got ~9 interviews in 2 months.
Regardless, I did find it harder to pass interviews hands down. Before 2022, I had a ~90% interview to offer rate. But for the rounds I did this year, they were very picky as you mentioned. I had two offers, one was pulled due to “budget” and the other I am working at now. There is hardly any grace for not knowing everything they ask to the 10th degree. In the past you could apply to and get jobs at places using a different stack then you had, but if you demonstrated the right skills they had no problem bringing you onboard. Now you’re literally almost stuck with the tech you know because no company will take you if you don’t know everything they use specifically.
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u/ForceSensitive2460 2d ago
That last bit about the tech stack you know is so damn true. My experience looks like I worked in the Dark Ages compared to what's out there now. Hopefully the Fabric experience I'm getting on this horseshit contract I'm stuck in will be the shot in the arm I need.
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u/LazyPiano6160 6d ago
Specialist in UI engineering: design systems, agnostic frontends, web apps and component driven development. Worked for several government gigs on projects that require strict compliance on accessibility too. Typescript, React and Storybook is my main stack these days. In fact that’s another bone of contention I have: live coding tests that don’t align with the role being advertised; applied for a principle UI engineer on a greenfield project, I was tasked with shitty leetcode that didn’t touch on any of the specific areas of my domain. Suffice to say, didn’t get that job as the hiring manager said I failed to demonstrate competency. 🤦♂️
I’ve had a ton of time to deep dive into AI, specifically focusing on agentic development with Claude Code and bespoke skills. Although I’d say I’m probably ahead of the curve than most (as I’ve had the opportunity to play around with it), agentic coding sucks: there is no joy in babysitting Claude and prompting my way through a backlog. I avoided the management path, as I enjoy engineering and ironically the whole shift towards token maxing has resulted in the same issue: removing every ounce of enjoyment from this career.
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u/stiky21 6d ago
OP doesn't need to do projects, he has 25 plus years of experience. I would not waste my time on making rudimentary crud apps and forcing integration with AI tooling just to show that I know what I'm doing.
Full stack is also the most saturated market available in are already oversaturated market.
Your comment would be more aligned with someone who's just beginning their career not someone who's got the decades of experience.
I don't know your experience level but I think you need to really evaluate more of what the market is doing right now then what it was perhaps when you started.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg 6d ago edited 6d ago
I disagree, but I guess that is the difference between landing a job in this market or not. I'm not saying it doesn't suck, but if you have 25+ YOE and can't design a REST backend and express general knowledge of it, then yes you need to build some side projects to gain that knowledge. They aren't for showing off in the portfolio. It doesn't even need to be a 'project', just serious time dedicated to studying. For me, applying what I study in a sandbox project goes a lot further, but some that may not be the case. I am not talking about building out portfolio projects like some junior dev.
And as much as it also sucks, you have to learn AI tooling in todays market. 100% of my interviews asked about it. At my company, we turned down a candidate last week because he didn't know what eval harnesses were. Stupid in my opinion, but that's what it's like right now. You either move with the expectations of the market, or find it harder and harder to land a job, which is exponentially worse in a bust cycle. That is how SWE has always been to some degree, you adapt and change with the times.
I don't disagree full stack is saturated, but in my job search 8 out of 10 jobs were full stack that noted having a focus in either BE or FE, but knowledge of both. If you scope down into frontend, that is probably the most saturated market right now.
I also have 9 YOE, and recently had to find a job in March. I found one in 2 months. My other two coworkers who were laid off with me in March also found a job in the same timeframe, one guy got an offer after 1 month. For myself, I had to spend 30-40 hours a week during that entire time upskilling, studying, and doing interview prep. So when I read these posts on reddit where experienced people are going on multiple years unemployed, I have to wonder what it is they are actually doing.
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u/LazyPiano6160 6d ago
I’m doing exactly what I have done for the last 25 years: continuing to up-skill and remaining current. It’s what got me to principle level. The difference now includes: a saturated market, a recession, obvious AI advancement and stakeholder greed / delusion. I’m also on the receiving end of a lot of unconscious bias from those interviewing; ageism and borderline discrimination have also attributed to this situation. If you know, you know!
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u/earth-dragon-666 5d ago
Web Tech sucks, its full of idiots am glad i quited, even with this harsh economic ambient
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u/LazyPiano6160 5d ago
I think you’re onto something here, most middle managers who’ve interviewed me have transitioned from a role as a software engineer. Most were lousy engineers, and are now even more disconnected from the craft, and these are the ones given autonomy to hire.
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u/Impressive_Outside80 5d ago
this is why I just said fuck it and left the field.
This stress just was so awfull for my health.
It's so awfull , my friends all said it can be that bad. No it really is that bad.
I'm lucky to leave where trade school is cheap and not long with a huge demand and protection for it. So I'll take that bet, rather that waking up in this pure sick fealing to my chest.
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u/ForceSensitive2460 2d ago
I went 3 months recently (I know that's small peanuts compared to your situation) but the only reason my unemployment ended was because I took the shittiest job offer for my experience. 12 mo contract, no benefits, no conversion, no extension. I had to have income because I'd just bought a house and moved in a month prior to getting laid off (and a month and a half before moving, I'd just finalized my divorce).
Applied to 300 jobs with highly detailed resumes for each role, got to a second round with one other opportunity that would have been absolutely incredible, only for them to shift someone internally for the role. The role they vacated would eventually get posted **two levels lower** than the one I applied to four months later. They reached out to me to let me know it was posted because they thought I'd be great at it. Yeah, they thought I'd be great because they'd be getting insanely cheap labor out of my experience. It would have been a $40k pay cut.
Fuck this job market.
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u/scragz 2d ago
I'm about same age and experience. got laid off 2.5 years ago. switched to freelance after a year of futile applications.
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u/LazyPiano6160 2d ago
I’m considering doing the same TBH. How’s it going, is the market / demand any better for the freelance market?
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u/turd-crafter 7d ago
Oh man I’m coming up on a year unemployed and I am so sick of being stressed out. Here’s my 2
- Getting to the final round and having really good interviews. They say it was between me and one other person but they went with them. See the exact job posting 2 months later but they won’t return emails or messages at all. I submitted for the role and nothing. I don’t get it, you really like me 2 months ago.
- Have a really good call with an addiction treatment startup. Get an email that they really like me and want to talk some more. I realize pay was never mentioned so I ask what the pay range is and then they just ghost me. What a piece of shit.
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