Insight into a tech career.

 So, with this guy who I know from grad school who got into a hot tech career that was hot not too many years ago, I had been seeing him online quite a bit, and he had bounced around jobs back to a state where he had grown up and looked like where he was aiming to be, and then back to the state where he had gone to grad school, and then he seemed to be online quite a lot, where he was writing long essays on business-think and the roles of his job etc., like one a week, for quite a while.

Then, he announced that he had a new job after 6 months of unemployment, that it was “rough out there,” and that he was happy to help anyone else with a job search.

Honestly, so much time to switch into that career, and then you don’t even have stable employment?

Because, to be quite frank, it’s not even clear how long this current “job” of his lasts.

And, he’s actually the **third** person I know who took on what was essentially long-term, indefinite, unremunerated writing projects, in order to credential up and secure a basic entry-level job.

The first was a friend of a friend years ago who does some basic admin and corporate comms, who back when I was checking out that potential path back in the mid-2010s, told me that the best ticket to a job was to start covering online local events that weren’t ticketed, do that enough to where you could talk your way into tickets, and then after covering those events on your own website that was getting buzz, you’d have enough to set yourself apart and sell yourself to jobs and get your foot in the door.

The second was another guy who I went to grad school with, who stalled out in a low-level consultancy gig, and especially because everything is remote, no-one knows who you are anymore and so there’s no-one to promote you, and so the thing to do now is to start a podcast about intricacies of your job, and that will show your knowledge and get your name out there and get you advanced, which it did, for him, but only now he’s like, “What now?”, since he’s stalled out once again, and he already did the podcast trick.

And of course, this tech guy was doing an essay series on biz-think, where he spouts the platitudes like they’re profound in little LinkedIn McNuggets, and which I doubt that he believes in or has internalized, which almost makes it worse, since it’s like you’re doing extended groveling like “Oh please, Mr. Capitalist, please pick me, look at me, please pick me, please,” just to get a job where you basically eat shit and don’t get anything really there, either. Just what appalling heights of self-abnegation that must entail, to be in that mindset for absolute months… It really must do something to your soul, it's degrading, and to that I say, f*ck that sh*t.

And, what I want to know is, has any baby boomer *ever* done *anything* remotely like that to get a job, let alone an entry-level one? And have they ever known a single person to have done that, let alone two, or three?

The answer is clearly NO, and is yet another reason why they never know what they’re talking about, when they try to tell you about the economy nowadays.