Adjust your definition of a “real career” as one making over 150k. Another adjustment is thinking 4 months is a long time, especially given you know you could improve interviewing.

Check out data fields. I’m in data analytics, no I don’t make 150k, but it’s a good living and I consider it real. I do a lot of good and save government a lot of money with my tech skills.

You have set a high goal of $150k salary without a clear way to achieve it, or a clear passion, if I'm reading correctly.

What is your depth of knowledge in? You say software?

Law would be an risk idea if you don't love it with all your heart, even people who love law hate it by the end of law school.

If you want to stay in the bay area and leverage your experience, perhaps you want to become a technical co-founder for someone?

Otherwise it might make sense to move out of the bay area to where there are lower costs of living and then lower your salary expectations to match.

Bear in mind that being a good corporate drone or middle manager requires different soft skills and attitude than being the CEO of your own company. You have to march to someone else's drum which can be hard.

You need to prove to yourself and others that you can be a regular developer now, you're in a position where you might need to sacrifice salary, job description and/or working conditions to get a foot back on the ladder.

Beyond salary, the culture of working hours in the bay area might be a bad fit for you. If you're looking for a boring (in a good way) salaryman programmer role you might need to see where those sort of companies are centred.

Note, I live and work outside the US so I can't give specific US advice.

I don't really know what it's like in America but 150k here is insane. If you really can't land a job, it's either time for an attitude adjustment or perhaps a third bite at the apple.

From the tone of your post, you might be suffering from a bit of burnout. If that's the case, then I would recommend taking any extremely low paying and low stress retail job for the rest of this year. Perhaps, when January rolls around, having had a chance to mentally decompress, you might once again consider a position in the startup world. In this job market, given your situation, you're going to have a really tough time applying for jobs at large companies while hoping to beat out all the other job applicants for that $150K+ position. If you're willing to consider taking a lower salary, I would recommend that you focus on applying for jobs at tiny startups where money is tight and the base salary they are offering is $100K or less. A lower salary means that there will be fewer job applicants that you have to beat out for the position. Right now, it might sting to take a lower salary, but, the job market might pick up in a year or two, and then it might be a lot easier to land a high paying position.

FWIW it's a very challenging job market right now. It took me 7 months to land a job, and I know other people are struggling even longer than that.

Networking seems to be the only way to get past the HR filters.

I’m in the same boat, but fortunately have a job right now. I’m not sure what I’ll do after this current one.

Seems like the interview pipeline is geared towards new grads and junior engineers and penalize senior and staff. At what point do I stop having to do these silly coding interviews?! At what point does my resume and 20 yrs of experience speak for itself? So called senior/staff interview loops are a joke with toy system design questions. What do you really learn asking “design twitter” 100 times?

The only answer I can come up with is networking. Basically, don’t bother interviewing. 4 of my last 5 jobs were via networking—no interviews.

Sorry to hear you are in this situation. I've been there as well, but sticking in the middle of this is more than nerve wracking and a serious health issue... First, I agree that AI will be shaking up several jobs. But I think that lawyers will also have there aces up the sleeves to keep their business running. Nonetheless, working as one isn't very healthy as well as you always are under pressure to gather enough billables... Niche is always a solution to the mass grinding. Secondly, an advice I once received: looking back at your past jobs, was there something you enjoyed doing besides your main tasks and clocked voluntarily some extrahours, because you were passionate about it? Like the controller, who stepped forward and got a health and safety training, without being paid extra for it, the controller, who wrote a small software tool for easing work processes, the software engineere, who created an onboarding portal for new employees.. Sometimes, people realize, that they already did something, they really enjoyed but never thought about to make it a focus and not just somethin "useful, besides no one else takes care of it"... This hint really helped me to realize, what I was actually good at all the time even though it had nothing to do with my day job and my previous roles.

I wish you all the best in this current situation and hope, things will fall in place quite soon.

Why can you not pass tech screens? You mean leetcode questions? I know a guy who just made youtube videos solving them and eventually he got good enough to get a job at Google.

Regarding law school, I would point out that law grad salaries are bi-modal. If you get in big law, you would start at $210k, if not you will start at a lot less. Presumably, with your background, your easiest pathway to big law is patent litigation, but I would say there is still a lot bias favoring EE degrees over CS, but less so than in the past (as I recall from interviewing a long time ago that was true, but at my firm, I think its less of issue, but your experience may vary).

Law school is expensive and I don't think there is a cheap option in the bay area (even the state school is expensive but in other locations, it can be cheaper), but they do give out scholarships.

I wouldn't choose law school unless you think you could do well in the actual legal career environment. I don't know what you mean by "good contacts for law school," but if that means you know people in the field, I would suggest talking to them about it. Get as much information you can get.

Any worries that law is not going to be a viable career with AI seems farfetched by me, particularly in litigation.

Look into computer security. A good portion of our team are former developers. There are many opportunities to code. Either making internal tools, one off tools during projects or tools for public use.

From your comments, it seems like there's a lot of internal and external issues you're dealing with. Internally, your sense of self worth is very much tied to your compensation/wealth. The recent rejections have triggered anxiety / negative self-reflection. The lack of a job/income is really straining your confidence.

Externally ...

1) It's actually a shit job market.

2) Your startup experiences don't really help signal your skillset as an employee. There's a sorta "founder tax" you're paying.

3) COVID, remote work, and new supplies of CS grads have changed the labour dynamics to depress wages. The top 20% may be doing ok, but the bottom 80% are getting diluted.

If I were you I'd consider a few things:

- Really think about what's a good/meaningful life to you. Volunteer/do something useful for other people (ex. a non-profit) to build up confidence again.

- Recognize your technical skillset may not be as "senior" as you think, since you had to expend valuable time learning other skills as an entrepreneur. It might mean more learning, building, leetcode grinding, interview prep, etc, before you can land the role. Concurrently, you can think about how to better communicate all the other useful things you've learned at a startup.

- If you enjoyed the startup experience, but concerned about the grind, then you don't have to build high growth businesses that require the 996 mentality. Boostrapping and organically growing a niche product may be more aligned with your skillset/goals.

Though my academic background is in computer science, I've spent years working in other sectors such as translation and education (areas that are fortunately easier to pivot into without years of rigorous accreditation like law or medicine).

I derive a great deal of personal satisfaction from working in these fields, but given your relatively high salary prerequisites, they'd likely be nonstarters for you.

It's honestly a bit difficult to give any concrete advice without additional specifics into your situation:

- Do you have a formal degree in computer science or an adjacent field?

- Is your resume only populated with your startup businesses?

- Have you worked for an existing company in a tech-related role for at least two years?

etc.

Good luck with your search!

I've read all the comments in this thread and I will be frank with you.

You are arrogant and entitled. You are not as great as you think you are. If you were, you would have what you want. But you don't. And even if you were great, you (or anyone for that matter) shouldn't be arrogant or entitled. It's a terrible way to live. Insulting those who are trying to help you by calling their advice "boomer cope" is beyond asinine and just the topping on the cake.

Your problem is that you think you deserve something. You don't. In the strictest sense what you "deserve" is exactly what you have right now, which is nothing. "Deserve" is meaningless word anyway. As if there is some universal objective truth about what the state of your life "should" be.

If you want to get out of this rut, humble yourself, get whatever software job you can get (assuming you want to stay in this industry), and slowly work your way up over the coming decades. That's reality.

It's also clear that you have no true sense of ownership or responsibility. You have a victim mindset. It oozes out of everything you say. Some examples:

Q: "Why can you not pass tech screens? You mean leetcode questions?"

> I don't really know, none of this was a problem when I got my last job in tech (as a non-founder).

Who cares what the state of the world was when you got your last job? Clearly you're not cutting it today. Does living in the glory days of your past put food on your table now?

> My best guess is they thought my skills weren't advanced enough for my age or found it weird I was bald.

No hiring manager cares that you're bald. That's just you blaming them for your lack of skills.

> I'm legitimately going to just move to another country if one more boomer tells me I just have to "wait for the stars to align" one more time.

You won't have to wait until another "boomer" tells you that (how do you even know who is a boomer, and why does it matter if they are?). Your current crappy attitude will all but ensure you will fail and be forced into such a situation.

All that aside, I hope you fix your attitude and improve your life. Good luck.

If you think SWE is hard, the market for JDs is even worse. Never take on debt without a plan!

Been there after the dot com bust - in my case I eventually got hired by a startup where I aced the brain teasers and 6 months there gave me the tech stack to get hired at a big company that carried me through to retirement. Six months of 996 may be the price to get back on the ladder.

Maybe you need to lower expectations. If you aren’t passing the tech screens for the $150k jobs, lower the bar to get your foot in the door, then work on getting promoted over time.

Take a gander here, https://www.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1o7fcfc/nobody...

I'm really torn, TBH. Plenty of people do, indeed, get on with F/MAANG/whatever out of college and make that 150. Plenty don't. It's jut bleh

If you want to be employed in a tech space then you'll need to work on passing those tech screens. Silly as they may be employers makes the rules in interviews.

Or found another company then you can make your own rules.

> law school

Given how rapidly the current administration is tearing up the legislative rule book and AI excelling at big chunks of it, law is not a space I'd want to be in

Gonna pile on: you really really really have to go all in on coding exercises. These infuriating and stupid coding assessments are just that. But you absolutely will make it past that hurdle.

And if you're gunning for senior positions, you'll have to suffer the system designs as well.

Keep practicing and don't let a single day slip by without training. If you need a change of pace, code something on the side that's genuinely fun and zero stakes. It will all come together eventually.

"real career (earns more than $150k per annum)"

"make a decent salary and work 50hr weeks"

You sound incredibly privileged and entitled. I this just a ragebait post?

The one thing they taught me about jobs and the future in the C.A.C.C (California cadet corps) was that the more you help out/volunteer the more likely you are to get a job over someone else who didn't do anything this can also apply to stuff you did in high school depending if you did stuff in high school or not could also help :p

Back when the dot com bubble burst I ended up in the same position and had to switch careers in order to keep the rent paid, and programming became just a hobby instead. I kind of prefer that as everything I've heard about modern commercial software development sounds like hell (especially if, like me, you have no interest in web stuff). Being able to work on what I want to, at my own pace, in languages I like, is nice

I definitely miss the paychecks that come with tech jobs, though.

> and founding two companies

What's the story here?

> Fortunately I have some money to show for it

Are you in a rush to get back to work?

> when I get interviews I just flat out can't pass tech screens anymore

This sounds like the issue to me? You’re getting opps but you’re biffing the tech screen. Can you just slam leet code for 2 months and then ace the screen or is it something else?

in the bay, same position. i found a part time job at a struggling startup for the time being (my salary is under $40/hr). but it feels like my personal life is on hold til I find something more permanent. hope you figure it out

1. Four months looking for an job isn’t a long time in today’s job market. You aren’t in giving up or changing careers territory yet.

2. Focus on making your job acquisition process a full time job and treat it as a different skill set entirely. For example, applying for jobs doesn’t cut it in today’s market. You need to be reaching out to real live people with messages that offer value. Keep bothering them if they don’t answer, on average it takes 8 contacts to get a response from a cold contact.

2. If you can’t pass tech screens, study tech screens. Put the work in. There’s no excuse for you not passing them.

3. Consider a different role than software engineering. Since you’re a founder, and you’ve started companies, maybe you are a better fit for something else.

4. Expand your reach outside of the Bay Area tech industry. Everyone has software engineers. Look at other industries that aren’t explicitly tech companies. Healthcare comes to mind.

5. Don’t get a law degree. You want to work fewer hours, not more.

6. Get out of the Bay Area. Software engineers don’t work 50 hour weeks in the Midwest. California work culture is toxic, and you’ll get your own house for the price of a VCR in the Midwest.

7. Reset your salary expectations (see also #6). The median income of the USA is so much lower than $150k.

Don't worry about the money too much. You're trying to solve multiple equations at the same time. Focus on getting your foot in the door somewhere in a job you like. It would have been great if you could have picked up 150k/year job as easily now as in the past, but the market has turned south.

It is easier to get a job when you have one already. You don't have to solve all the problems at once.

Man, I feel like my "Ask HN" post from a few years ago isn't too different from your's besides me being 15 years older than you. The result I got from it was a HN user contacting me, where we got coffee and he explained to me how to be successful on Upwork.

Being a freelancer was never my intention, but it's where I ended up, and right now I'm very thankful for it. I don't make much money, but I can say that I make my living as a software developer. I have clients who think I'm their golden goose, and I ended up landing an internship at Akamai, yet I still feel completely un-hirable in the traditional sense, but I also feel like once the tide does turn, I'm in a much better position to market myself, and get a real job if I desire.

I know this sucks, but man, what I'd give to be in that position in my 20's instead of my late 30's.

I'd say 150K is shooting for the stars depending on your skill set. It can happen in good times but sometime you gotta revalue your times worth.

As far as leaping out, yeah there's a ton of opportunity while keeping a "tech" base: CCTV Installer (Commercial IP Security Cams), VoIP (Business Phone Systems), POS (Point of Sale Restaurant and Retail).

Back up a second. You've missed an important question. What do you WANT out of your time in this life? Where do you actually want to be in ten years, or twenty? $150k p/a is not an answer, or at least not a very good one. You clearly have means enough to start businesses, so a lot of non-conventional doors are open to you. Why do any of it?

We're in similar times to the 2000's era "dot com bubble burst". I got caught out in that fiasco, couldn't get a full time programming job for about 4 years. I scraped by freelancing, but I also had generosity of friends to help me out with rent. It was a long hard 4 years, every month was difficult just feeding myself. Then things turned around. I don't really know if it's going to turn around anytime soon this time, and the AI bubble is going to make it a whole lot worse when it pops. "AI" is screwing up the world, and it's going to take people waking up that it's not the magic thing it was billed to be, and the world needs real developers, not only tin cans.