Agreed. They also portray things in a rather false manner.

> I think I'm giving up on being a "professional" software engineer. I've tried it for a decade. I've been laid off more than half of the times I've been in the game.

According to their own resume, their first stint as a software engineer was in 2019. Maybe my maths are just bad - but this doesn't even get close to a decade.

> But this feels more like being kicked out. Getting more than 5 rejections a day despite my past work is humiliating. Having to be told that "you're great but no" more than 6 times a day is demeaning. And having to hear that it'll take a year to find a job — how the fuck does society claim to be in a good place if folks have bills to pay during this time[2]?

They also don't seem to have any experience or any awareness of how bad it was in 2008, the dot-com bubble, etc. It's giving main character syndrome vibes.

> Did my bringing up of a book at a company get one of the executives too upset?

and

> Did me having a crisis in public become too embarrassing for another?

It's a lot of assumptive takes that the reader would know every aspect of their lives.

> It is solely a game of referral: it does not matter what you apply with because other people are cheating in the application process.

This has been a "thing" since forever. Companies even incentivize referrals.

> It's more if they like and trust you.

They completely miss the mark with the pivotal point here: Trust. If a company can't trust you, for whatever reasons, then - yes - you are liability in many forms. Again, this isn't something new or manufactured in the last decade.

> I think I get a little bored of seeing the same old business as usual when more than 30% of people are fucking going through for it for no reason outside of "you're not the match we're looking for". Well, what was it then!?

See: AI.

I wasted too many cycles on this -- but there's a whole lot of "it's not me, it's everyone else" in here. The market is especially tough, right now, and if you don't have a set of skills or experience[s] to make you stand-out from the 300+ people that are applying, what do you expect? It's tough for everyone, not just you...

Ok the "decade" thing can slide in my opinion. I've been doing this for 25+ years but my resume won't show that.

But. Based on my recent job search, getting eleven notifications per day means he must have been submitting hundreds of applications per day. Over the course of 4 months, I submitted for something like 120 positions. I'd be lucky to get one rejection a day (usually just no feedback ever).

And yeah the like and trust thing is paramount. You can be a John Carmack level engineer but if you're a jerk or not trustworthy then yeah it's going to be really hard to find a job.

> According to their own resume, their first stint as a software engineer was in 2019.

I've been told to drop my earlier roles at Shutterstock because it was "too old" and "too short".

> It's giving main character syndrome vibes.

Eh, it's a monologue.

> It's a lot of assumptive takes that the reader would know every aspect of their lives.

Again, a monologue and a lot of it is phrased as a question. If you've read my blog before, it might not be news. Link's at the top of site!

> Again, this isn't something new or manufactured in the last decade.

Of course not but I do think the initial trust dance has weakened dramatically over the course of the last decade.

> but there's a whole lot of "it's not me, it's everyone else" in here.

I explicitly do not do this in the article, wtf? lol