My dad is in his 60s and is still landing interviews (even in big tech) with his resume and no networking.

Are you actually up to date on your skills and in a tech hub?

Are you expecting remote first? If so you have to change your expectations - remote first is only for known entities now.

Edit: You live in Russia. No one will hire you out of risks of sanctions. Your only option is to leave like other Russians in your shoes.

Edit 2: The risk of secondary sanctions for Western and Dollar/Euro transacting businesses only began in 2024-25.

This is why I don't buy many of the "woe is I" stories on HN. Dig a little and massive red flags come up.

Edit 3: "mixmastamyk"

You're in SoCal. Not a tech hub.

Tech is now back to being clustered in the Bay, Seattle, NYC, and Austin with 2-3 days in the office being expected.

I worked a general public facing job that I will not describe in detail lest I doxx myself, but you can imagine it as basically tourist facing retail. I did this for 10+ years. I was already deeply cynical by the time I went to school for CS, and yes, it was for money, and I still prefer it to the alternatives.

The world of menial jobs is absolutely miserable, depressing, and will grind you to a pulp - it's nearly impossible to get out of, by design.

> In reality it is all about profit, and selling products.

All business endeavours are about profit and sales.

I don’t know why people in tech keep thinking they are special in this sense.

There is the widespread meme about getting out of IT and going farming or sone variation of that. Do you think farmers actually live free of the thoughts of profits and sales?

It’s not even about cynicism… it’s just reality.

Your knowledge and experience is super valuable. Your bosses and the typical parasites running the typical SV tech company do not have the knowledge and experience you do .

You shouldn't be discouraged just because they don't understand or value your skills and expertise - you can build a product and/or company from the ground up by leveraging your skills and using AI to fill in the rest. They cannot do the same thing.

Time to stop worrying about the fact that you can't serve these clowns and time to start building.

I think that the author's doom was probably taking a career break to get a hobby degree.

There's nothing wrong with self-cultivation and education, but such breaks are risky even if you're doing them as part of an approved sabbatical. You need to go into them with a backup plan just in case the job market collapses while you're out (switch careers, lean on a strong social network, FIRE, etc.)

Live below your means and max your savings and investment to FIRE out of the workforce as soon as possible, because you have no control over when you will be made permanently redundant by your age or employers unwilling to hire. The fix is a permanent jobs program to offer jobs to those who want one who cannot find one in the private market, will that fix come? Unlikely. If you cannot find a job, you're simply SOL in the current socioeconomic and political system configuration.

Assuming the above, best case, you work as long as you want to work (until retirement and/or death). Worst case, you're not in poverty when you're no longer able to find work. "It is what it is."

Don't live in the UK nor take extended career breaks without an explicit and formal sabbatical.

The reality is the author worked in PR and Comms in the UK.

Very, very few people are going to have a social network that does more than get a foot in the door.

Typically, referrals have positive impact like making sure your application gets looked at by a human and possibly tips a "maybe" into the candidate's favor for scheduling a phone screen or moving to the next round of interviews.

There are plenty of very talented people with large networks of former coworkers who will attest to their capabilities and give them referrals, who nonetheless are still struggling to find work.

But obviously this only works when your network has jobs to offer in the first place.

I am a well networked person and I cannot offer any help to the numerous people (who are all great, many former colleagues or even alumni who could slot right in and help us) who are reaching out to me for even just a referral.

My employer has seen record breaking quarters and years and we have nothing open in engineering or even IT or support. In fact, I can already smell the blood in the water from the layoffs that are surely coming, probably shortly into 2027.

The kind of nepotism that gets you a job via your friend is mostly gone. I’m sure some high up executives or the ceo or board can still do that for their network but the most people can do nowadays is give you a referral and that barely even counts for anything nowadays.

I had two friends refer me for bog standard senior engineer positions with a stack I had experience with and they ghosted me with no explanation to my friends.

My other friends in faangs say if they refer someone they’re not allowed to be involved in the hiring process at all.

In other words, autistics should simply go away.

It is very hard to hire in the UK.

Good part of it is because the salaries are too high because everything is crazy expensive. The second thing is that people do put many restrictions. We had a position that we had a bare minimum bar but we said that we needed the candidates to understand well few topics and they simply said they wouldn't. I am not saying like "become specialist in Fortran in 3 weeks" But more like, learn SQL and database well enough to not make a 1 Million USD query and we heard, more than once, that they did not want to learn SQL and if they needed they would just quit the process.

It sucks for everyone folks. This AI bubble will soon burst. People are already seeing diminished returns with each new model and AI is not returning value as everyone promised.

Now it is the hard part which is a bunch of suit guys trying to excuse that no one could foresee it was going to happen like everyone said it would

Not if you disable JavaScript.

There will not be any universal income. That's a discourse so people don't act early on it despite the hundreds of problems already found.

Will AI create abundance for everyone though? I can certainly see how it would benefit both business owners (no more annoying office employees!) and blue collar workers (cheap professional services for everyone!), but it's hard to see how it would benefit most white collar middle class folks, who spend most of their time moving information around.

My guess based on previous transitions is that the "net new jobs" will benefit the next generation, not the current one.

That's delusional.

2 days ago I wrote a piece about how we think about jobs: starting with translators, then programmers then mathematicians, see https://rudolf.observer/en/posts/i-was-not-a-programmer-afte...

Not to mention how naive it is to think UBI would work.

OP's issue isn't an AI issue though - it's a "working in PR&Comms in a relatively stagnant economy" issue.

Healthcare is still considered a "communist" opinion for a significant percentage of Americans. There are politicians in the current administration that think children shouldn't have free lunch at school.

But, somehow, they will implement UBI.

The owners of these companies would be the ones taking hammers to the machines if UBI was ever more than a wild pipe dream being suggested by unpopular political aspirants.

They are addicted to wealth and aren’t willing to share.

The covid experience for corporate is that they can save money by downsizing the office, reducing leases and maintenance costs. In my experience this was followed by increased in-office requirements, such that you are then competing for space.

There is always an internal tension between what works and what they can cut. They will tend to err on the side of cutting too much, in order to meet cost reduction goals, and then correct in order to meet production goals. In control theory we recognize this as not optimal.

Most remote workers will also tell you they do not hate on-site. Being at the office, meeting co-workers is great for mental health.

What's not great is schools end in the afternoon, young children can't be left alone at home. What about a sick kid at home? These are real problems that our society has washed it's hands off expecting people to 'figure it out'.

Also spending an hour in commute is no fun, more so if you are a family person.

The point is making sausages. Making an extra building and adding an extra car to rush hour has to be worth it.

Around me everything is at least hybrid, with nobody complaining if you want full time on-site. More and more companies are moving back to on-site full time.

Here on HN we're definitely a minority, but in the real world, saying you want to be in the office isn't that weird.

The vast, vast majority of RTO doesn't include any sort of office. You're lucky to get a permanent desk these days. The new hotness are hot swap desks. Just grab the first available work surface in a completely open office environment so you can take your Teams calls and still not interact with anyone in the office.

Is it because companies have scaled down their office space do you think?

That's not weird.

Most of my Gen-Z colleagues feel the same way. They hated the isolation of the lockdowns and want to be able to go into the office and meet people every day. Some of them are terrified of working alone because of phobias developed during the lockdowns.

Amongst the older crowd, those with families prefer remote schedules but otherwise the preference is for hybrid for the balance between social interaction and freedom.