A colleague, who is very accomplished in tech industry (but not rich, for good reasons), said he would be in town, and asked to meet.

He strangely didn't say why (not even "to catch up"), so I thought it was probably that he had a new startup or executive role, and he was going to pitch recruiting me again.

But immediately after sitting down in the cafe, he said he was looking for work, and asked for my advice.

I hope I didn't laugh. Since I was in a similar boat, after a startup got disrupted. I wasn't seeing hardly any good job opportunities, so I wasn't feeling like someone who should be asked for advice on job-hunting, except as a cautionary tale.

Quickly moving forward from there, we had a good talk, exchanging thoughts and ideas, but neither of us had direct opportunities to give.

What's really dumb is that the world has capable people who spend huge amounts of time and downtime, simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillsets.

It's grossly inefficient and unpleasant. We know some of the reasons, but it's still dumb.

> simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillets

I dont think its this. I think its just brutally hard to earn a return on investment right now. For whatever reason, innovation has disappeared from the market. There's a lot of things changing with generative AI right now but very few actually valuable ideas have come out.

The real challenge today is finding problems to solve that people will pay money for.