Since Dec 2023

<aside> 🪡 TLDR My thesis is follows:

• I do knowledge work better than 80-90% of people with similar experience and a college degree, and have university level math skills
• surely, I can trade this for the ability to work 30-40 hours a week async and make enough to self sustain, with a little extra for retirement
• employers will not think that I am spoiled or entitled for wanting flexible hours

It turns out that I am very wrong :) and not being fresh out of college + no recent portfolio means I am incredibly uncompetitive ✨ in the labor market. Let’s examine why 🧐

</aside>

In spite of what various economic indices may suggest, software is still in a recession. Some key indicators:

• Unpaid, untracked overtime for existing hires
• Job vacancies abound but only at Senior+ positions
• Deflated wages and lower leverage for new hires

My Stats:

Cold outbound: ~100 Recruiter inbound: ~20

Number of phone screens (recruiter): ~10 Number of phone screens (cold call): ~6 Number of onsites: 4** Number of offers: 1***

** Generally I felt that I’d been rejected because I hadn’t prepped enough for the specific format of the interview the company was screening for. This sort of “interview to the letter, not the intent” rings as another indicator that the market is skewed in favor of employers and is very hard for me to self-motivate on

*** I didn’t take this because the only team in the city I was interviewing for (Montreal) closed hiring on a whim. I had an alternate offer for hybrid Toronto which I turned down

Objectively I’d consider this extremely poor for software; as recently as 2019 I heard stories of two year engineers closing on multiple offers easily and 4-5 recruiter emails a day. The two conclusions are

• Maybe I need to upskill
• Maybe I need to screen employers better

Where to upskill, without killing myself