A View from the Gallery
our relationship is not predicated on me caring what you think or feel — if you like my work, you like it precisely because I do things you don’t know to ask for and you could never think of
so yeah hello there. i write words so you don’t have to.
if you haven’t figured it out, this site is a playground for experimenting with balances between technology and art and the past and the future.
anyway, people had opinions on a thing I wrote from a couple weeks ago.
Within a couple minutes of the post going live, it started being submitted (by others) to comment sites then spun out of control from there. Haven’t had that happen in at least 8 years.
Let’s look into some feedback and repercussions of such a post!
foreground
do you want to see what my entire web analytics stack looks like?
Most of my posts end up getting less than 20-50 human views per week, so my general mindset is writing weird stuff knowing nobody will ever read it.
$ grep "GET /cyborg" matt.sh.access.log |grep -vi bot |grep -v OPR |grep -v Owler |grep -v Go-http |grep -v YaBrowser |grep -v InfoPath |grep -vi spider |grep -v i686 |grep -v Vivaldi |grep -v AMPHTML |grep -v appengine |grep -v Fetcher |grep -v 2228 |grep -v feedi |grep -v google.co.uk |grep -v reader|grep -v miniflux | grep -v newsboat |grep -v CFNetwork |grep -v adbar |grep -v undici |grep -v requests |grep -v Crawler |grep -v omgili |grep -v monitoring |grep -v RSS |grep -v "Intel Mac" |grep -v GoogleOther |grep -v "Firefox/66.0" |grep -v codex |grep -v crawler|grep -v http.rb | wc -l
> 522but sometimes, it do pop off as they say.
$ grep "GET /panic" matt.sh.access.log |grep -vi bot |grep -v OPR |grep -v Owler |grep -v Go-http |grep -v YaBrowser |grep -v InfoPath |grep -vi spider |grep -v i686 |grep -v Vivaldi |grep -v AMPHTML |grep -v appengine |grep -v Fetcher |grep -v 2228 |grep -v feedi |grep -v google.co.uk |grep -v reader|grep -v miniflux | grep -v newsboat |grep -v CFNetwork |grep -v adbar |grep -v undici |grep -v requests |grep -v Crawler |grep -v omgili |grep -v monitoring |grep -v RSS |grep -v "Intel Mac" |grep -v GoogleOther |grep -v "Firefox/66.0" |grep -v codex |grep -v crawler|grep -v http.rb | wc -l
> 181308(compare: versus no user agent filtering)
sure those simple user agent filters don’t take out all the AWS and GCP and azure and dozens of other crawlers traffic, but it’s close enough.
Overall, I’d say the post got around 150k to 170k unique views with the remainder being undetected bot traffic.
One thing I didn’t account for: I had my CDN set to “high quality, high performance” mode and, at the end of the busy inbound-traffic day, CDN sent me a $50 bandwidth bill. sigh.
opinions
Here are some unattributed comments I received over email. Out of the dozens of emails people sent, only one was outright negative, so pretty good ratio there.
Sometimes things I write go “a little wide” and it’s always the same response ratios: 20% of people hate what I write and want me dead, 60% of people get really confused and their confusion makes them angry but they don’t know why, and 20% of people seem to really enjoy my writing flow and feel a purpose in the ideas.
A couple people decided to tell me to write better or shorter or more concise, but that’s predicated on some assumption I’m trying to impress you in the first place or assuming you are my superior or something 🤷♂️ (though, it does also imply they liked it enough to want to consume it, but they found the consumption process difficult, which is understandable, but also, skill issue)
These days my writing is too wordy and “too complete” because I write as if I’m going to die after I send something, so things I write have all past, present, and future meaning discoverable inside of it if you care to. Of course, you should always read by skimming and finding your own interesting parts. If you want to torture yourself by reading every part of everything then that’s your own fault? Also I intentionally repeat myself across pages because I assume people are both: skimming content and aren’t keeping up with the entire accumulated historical “matt lore,” so content needs multiple on-ramps to the primary infohazards sprinkled around.
Overall, nothing really changed. A couple people tried to do interviews, but, kinda as I pointed out, I don’t really do interview styles where you treat people with 20+ years of experience as if they are students taking an exam to prove themselves. like, look at my work, you chuddle dollops, right?
The other weird part of “technical interviews” (i.e. student-themed condescending exams) I can never get past: they aren’t judging your professional work output, they are live, in real time, judging your thought process and your internal self which isn’t something I’m comfortable with. I almost never just sit down and “write code” top to bottom. I outline, I review docs, I run ad-hoc tests in REPLs, I test syntax, I review things again, I write test loops, I restructure test loops into usable systems from using the in-progress projects, I then decide where to add concurrency and self-bootstrapping usability helpers and testing and logging and observability and performance improvements based on where it matters… that’s how real work gets done.
You know what else companies and interviewers hate to admit? You shouldn’t actually hire the smartest people who “just do things right the first time” because they aren’t actually thinking, evaluating, considering design, considering user experience, considering users with different abilities, considering different cultures and sensitivy aspects of products. You want somebody at 80% efficiency in 10+ different areas so all decisions are weighted against all competing interests. Nobody likes software created by “too smart” people who, because they know everything personally, don’t consider other people have different experiences or knowledge levels to use the product. 🎓 You have to find a balance between not hiring unproductive people versus also not hiring exclusively “elite value capture” people who want to make it illegal to work in the tech industry unless you are 28 years old with an AI PhD from stanford who took 8 classes in “crushing the coding interview” from their in-group-funds-in-group social cliques.
anyway, nobody else seems to believe in my work process. I must have paid outsourced contractors to write all my public hundreds of thousands of lines of code on github for the past 15 years. People seem to only want to judge and criticize “your thoughts” and “your mind” instead of the actual end result collective work output (which they are restraining from being created due to restrictive interview environments).
countdown to running out of funds and purpose and everything then just jumping in a trash compactor: about 5 weeks. As always, if you are a real company not playing hiring tricks (or are just a helpful rich individual), reach out and pay me for stuff in multiples of “monthly living expenses:” https://github.com/sponsors/mattsta
I asked my apartment owners if there’s a way to get out of their $8,000 combined lease cancellation fee, but they said nope, you’re responsible for all of it. Can’t afford to leave, can’t afford to stay, can’t qualify for a cheaper place with no income, so…. we just rot in place until ????
le comments
all these comments are great and hugely appreciated. on the other hand, as always, github stars and nice words don’t pay for rent or food. 🫠
Matt, I saw your post. Very interesting and informative read.
I am struck by the fact that movie making may have the exact same pitfalls per easy money retraining people into people who do not know how to tell a story.
Hey,
There’s possibly a typo in Panic! at the Job Market.
https://matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-market
“the founders can just collective passive income forever”
Thanks for the article. Still reading
Yeah man, 100%. I’ll add this:
I have ALWAYS been uncomfortable with the cloud. This bias no doubt in part comes from formative experiences working at a bigtechco that had a huge aversion to using others’ infra except maybe at the very edge (and up until oh IDK some time when things started to shift a little). And avoided making its own infra into a biz product itself, although they could have done that. It NOT totally BIZARRE to outsource knowledge about who knows how to make, run, and operate systems, until we look at WHAT COMPANIES this means doing business with. I will not apologize for forming long-standing distaste for EACH OF THE BIG THREE US CLOUDS. And nothing to do with the clouds themselves necessarily. But really? Don’t get me started on how silly those companies are! And introducing a final-leg dependency on a “high availability, high-performance” GATEKEEPER service? Is that a joke? It’s not, and I get why it exists. But I can say I was right to have an aversion to all manner of cloud and microservice stuff. Yes, it has a story and a place, but too much of that is in the BS JOBS realm, and I choose to carve a harder path toward providing actual, human value, thank you very much. IMO the problem has been people afraid to think. This has left me doing everything the hard way, and it is sorta painful in this cloud-centric market. Are the cloudheads just laughing all the way? I think most don’t know how silly it all is. I’m still processing it all. Thank you for your article. I think in short if you have no principles it doesn’t matter. Unfortunately I got these silly principles reading Slashdot and Digg comments for many formative years PRIOR to working in bigtech and have a hard time shaking them off. YIKES!
Hey Matt,
Just read your blog post https://matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-market and thought I could share my 2 cents since I’ve been having similar but not completely identical thoughts myself.
I’ve made same observations as you, but not being lucky enough to be working in the USA I thus have observed mostly European, primarily UK, and remote markets.
Basically my main conclusion is that if you see a job on the Internet/god forbid LinkedIn/advertised to you by a recruiter then you’re already too late to the party and for all intents and purposes that job is not real. But job market has not collapsed and doesn’t panic IMO, for people still get hired and job gets done, it’s just that recruiters and HR and 10 rounds of interviews are red herring.
Actual people are hired through networking™. Oh how I hate that word, I very much prefer calling it past colleagues, maybe not from your immediate team but from wider organization that one fruitfully interacted with, someone that you know or met in a pub or something.
Even a forum or a reddit post in the relevant community qualifies. My experience of being hired and participating in hiring suggests that this “networking” approach works whereas recruiters specifically are just hell and disappear randomly and completely.
I also share uneasy feelings about contemporary interviewing practices. For me it basically boils down to the need to prove to the interviewer that you’re worthy to get the job. Oftentimes one’s being asked to prove her worth without offering any possibility of $10k/day compensation, as you put it, so the exercise seems just insulting.
My conclusion is that best bet out of this cursed cycle is to make your own company or product. Just recently I’ve read a book called “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis which I cannot recommend enough. I don’t want to push it too hard but it’s a. not like other bullshit books like “5 habits that will make you 10x better at poking your nose” or “poor dad, wealthy dad, no matter since book’s author is bankrupt”, b. written by a person that made his own money starting from nothing in an industry other than writing books about getting rich, c. actually tries to argue for you to not go this route of getting rich while shining some light on what the road looks like.
And ultimately the fourth reason to read it is that book’s chosen road will invariably involve building a company. It tells what an owner of a profitable private company thinks about keeping it afloat and recommends others do the same. You may perhaps find that many companies do opposite (while some companies to exact opposites) of what the book recommends with the (surprising to them) result of going out of business and closing.
If you understandably don’t want to read it then I can recommend one idea from the book retold succinctly here https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Dj_1ZLHBhvA. Though it’s by no means the main message and probably not relevant but maybe this perspective will intrigue you into picking it up.
Having not followed my own conclusions (i.e. I still work for someone else) I feel contradicted writing this email, but maybe you will find my perspective valuable, or if you just read it it would be enough.
Kind regards,
One of the most compelling things I’ve ever read, written in a wonderful style, and super relatable.
Hi Matt,
I haven’t done this in years, but I’m emailing a blog author to say thanks for writing a post that struck a much-needed chord. The room, as an astute observer recently quipped, has been getting a bit crowded with elephants lately.
I’m on a different deck of the same boat (product designer, 10+ years of experience, laid off 2x in under 18mo, currently on month 4 of unemployment). It was quite sobering to read your profile of the “initial growth company” and realize that describes my entire career so far, including all five layoffs. So sobering, in fact, I think I need a beer.
Your post has inspired me to return to my own blog and at least attempt to funnel my present inchoate misery into a companion piece from a product design perspective. If nothing else, maybe I’ll write a product designer version of the Everything Bagel job description.
Cheers,
Matt,
Thanks for writing this. This is the same sort of pain and confusion I’m running into as an out-of-work developer, but you put it into words better than I could have. I’m a bit angry now, but also a bit encouraged in a “so it’s really not me, it’s them” sort of way.
Also, what’s the song in the How To Get Hired section? It’s amazing and I need more of it.
Regards,
Hey Matt,
I’m sure you’re getting bombarded with stuff from HN, not sure if you’re used to getting front page or not but I read your recent post on “Panic at the Job Market” and while I am even more junior in my “career” than you, I sadly cannot alleviate your employment woes.
It seems only my sympathy I can spare. I resonate quite deeply in agreement with your market analysis and job process frustration - In words I think are as true to form as you put it: the interviewing process is beyond humiliating and is utterly moronic. i will say no more in relation to the bulk or piece that you didn’t already state and I won’t say again.
But I found one of your throwaway footnotes particularly relevant to me too. Notably #6. I too am accused of being too cynical (depressed too, maybe) and blamed for a poor diet, sleep, exercise or some other silly triviality. As if someone with a shred of self-awareness wouldn’t have considered that first… as I’m sure you do. And much like you, I too would be very able to beat the living shit out of whatever pansy could accuse me of not taking care of my body or mind - and blaming an otherwise astute analysis on something so obviously wrong if they were to simply lay eyes on you, or follow along your routine.
Nothing to add. No “action items” or other BS. Just agree with your venting and stay in the gym. Try as they might to take your soul, they can’t take away your body and mind.
Cheers,
Hi,
I am very annoyed at your article because I was supposed to go to bed a half hour ago and had to keep reading until the bitter end.
Other than keeping me up past my bedtime, though, this is a fantastic post and I look forward to reading more of your work in the near future. I felt seen.
Many thanks,
Hey Matt,
You don’t know me but I read your post. I don’t agree with all of the points you made, but I am grateful that you wrote it, it made me think a lot. The Rent! References were simply brilliant.
My main disagreement was the part about behavioral interviews. I don’t know why I was so triggered by that part. I think it goes back to a few jobs ago where I championed the creation of these behavioral interview questions as a part of our interview cycle because the other people in the panel kept asking completely irrelevant and subjective questions that made it very hard to make good hiring decisions. Instead of citing examples of why someone met some specific criteria they would say things like “Oh, I just felt that they were empathetic” or “they seemed to be really good at champion building” based on nothing but vibes.
Thinking about it some more though, I think my reaction to that part is kind of overblown because it misses the overall point of the post. In addition, even if I am a fan of the idea of behavioral interview questions, I can certainly agree that most companies and people in charge of interviewing suck, have no idea what they are doing, and make the experience terrible for both candidates and colleagues.
Someone on HN correctly pointed out that this isn’t an academic article discussing the pros and cons of behavioral interviews, its “a fucking blog post” on a personal site, and a damn good one. :D
It was uncanny to see the references. At first I thought it was a coincidence, but by the time I got to the end I was just filled with glee to see the easter egg.
I actually think about Rent all the time because its this thing in my life that is proof that I have become a different person and I don’t always know how to feel about that.
I first saw rent in like 2003 and became instantly obsessed. I think by now I have seen the show a dozen times live, and listened to the original soundtrack at least 1000 times.
When I first heard it I was an immigrant kid, with a very poor family, going to shitty school in a shitty neighborhood in ████████ ██████, ██. I dreamed of being an artist, I was on the side of Mark, Roger, Mimi, Angel. I felt their struggle and I was rooting for them.
But then somehow over the last 20 years everything changed. I joined the military and then afterwards started a career in tech. And although I’ve spent most of my career so far in either Nepo Company or Speculation Company (in your terms), I’ve been incredibly lucky and have built a very comfortable life for myself. But all this means that I’ve literally turned into Benny. Mimi and Roger are the people I walk by and ignore in Soma on a regular basis. How did it happen? Its fucked up!
Do you know who probably has hot takes about behavioral interview questions? Benny.
I just read through your article, fantastic stuff mate
I thought I’m fucked living in a 3rd world country but people in developed countries have it just as fucked albeit at some points even a worse experience
I don’t think I’m getting anywhere with asking questions about, when do you think this will end? Or what do you think I should do?
So I’ll leave you with, I thoroughly enjoyed your article and I’m looking forward to future ramblings
Has the right to do with it as he pleases.
Hi, I read your whole essay on the job market and VCs and it made me feel really normal for a bit. I also liked all the RENT references and the Narnia reference.
I am based out of █████ ██████████████ and I am sort of a sheep in wolfs clothing, in that i look and talk a bit like a product manager because of my stint in retail, but I have a computer science and political science background so I’m critical and smarter than I’m supposed to be.
I’m not quite smart enough, at least not yet, but you are.
Anyway, if you’re interested in chatting with someone who shares a visceral dislike of VCs, who read your whole page and sang all the rent snippets in my head, and who also read your mpreg readme (its a data fabric right?) Hit me back. I have some ideas.
It’s not reprogramming the MIT virtual reality equipment to self destruct.
Hi Matt,
I found your blog because it was linked by the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog and wanted to mention that the United States Patent & Trademark Office is looking to hire thousands of patent examiners who are familiar with artificial intelligence and related software (e.g., databases and security). As is probably unsurprising, there’s been a surge of patent applications in these fields, hence the hiring push.
The good part about the job is that it’s super flexible, fully remote (but you need to be in the United States) and has the security and benefits of the federal government. The downside is that the skills are not transferable.
The patent office insists on starting people at salary grade GS 9 (or so) so I think we start people with experience (such as yourself) at step 8,just under 100k - https://www.opm.gov/special-rates/2024/TABLE057606022024.ASPX
If the person gets the hang of it, there are annual promotions to the next grade level, so in about 5 years you can be a GS 14 at just above 150k. Not many make GS 15.
I’ve been at the USPTO for 10 years, let me know if you’d like to know more.
Hello
I liked your article, it’s interesting.
I feel like you wrote this out of legitimate anger. I am on antidepressants, unemployed and I am fine about it, and if you’re going through a difficult time, try to go to therapy or talk to a doctor. Don’t neglect your mental health or go into burnout, writing software is a very sedentary activity that can be stressful.
You should clean up some things that are out of the scope of the article, like Apple software problems or project ideas.
Try to maybe re-organize the article a bit and make it shorter, and stay on point. Ventilate your paragraphs and remove unnecessary long parenthesis if you can.
Are you aware of the antiwork culture (on reddit and others)? Graeber also talks about “BS jobs”, and to me software is concerned in some way. If you did not read about it, that would help to see things with another eye.
regards,
Congrats, you actually managed to have the HN crowd not read your article and instead discuss something entirely off some mad vibe about the current economics of our industry.
So you were part of the culture that invented stupid little games to keep people “less capable than you” out from lucrative job opportunities? You’re probably one of those people that shilled the whole “u need a github repo with code” BS to college students ~2012 as well. You invent all these stupid little boxes we need to tick, raising the bar, and now that more intelligent and cut throat people have come along and finally raised the bar above your skill level, you’re upset?
You had the chance to cultivate a different mindset when it came to interviews and yet you were happy to take advantage of it when you still could profit from it. Bc of people like you, we all now have to suffer through ritual hazing to get a job and given the current economic trend, it’s only going to get worse.
Regards,
Really laughed hard at your most recent post until my iPhone’s text to speech ran out of battery… I’m of a similar age/generation/background (OSS, Python, distributed systems, optimization, etc) - it breaks my heart that nobody knows (or cares) how computers work anymore (“client: if we use Spark to process our 300 MB dataset, it’ll be faster, right? me: no it’ll be slower. client: but it’s distributed”)… I’ve avoided most of the company drama by being a consultant for the last 15 years (which brings its own particular set of joys & hells - most recently having my business killed by LinkedIn).
Just wanted to reach out and see if you were up for a chat to commiserate/swap stories from the trenches… I’m in the early stages of starting a company that could benefit from your skill set and I think would fit well with your outlook on this fucked up industry we find ourselves in (I refuse to say “align”, alignment is for memory access, not people).
Matt,
Just came across your writeup “Panic! at the Job Market” and boy, it’s so on target!!
Having, too, joined the Internet-era on-ramp from the BBS days, I almost get the feeling that the gist of the content might just be lost on some of the newer and more recent folks – those who’ve on-ramped onto an existing and shiny Internet. The kind that [full-heartedly] believe that the only way to create a “webapp” is by downloading 2MB+ of Javascript libraries as a prerequisite. I’m not saying that as an “old-timer” or as an “elitist” (I’m neither of those) – but it seems to be reflected upon the look of some, when they realize that for a simple task, a small shell script can achieve equal, if not better, results as their fully packaged Python [or NodeJS, or whatever] app!
Sadly, I’m kind of in the same boat: 20+ years of experience, have zero to little issue tackling most tasks (software, systems, networking, etc.) – but get jabbed at for not having completed an Leetcode problem in the 30 minutes allotted to it (like will a custom array swap algorithm really be needed in Golang, when the language already provides that functionality natively?!)
In any event, I just figured I’d throw some fodder into the echo-chamber here – hopefully try to empathize a bit… I wonder what the future holds for individuals that might have a lot more depth and breath and don’t fit into a non-existent – actually, not-attainable – cookie-cutter mold … Are those individuals and their skillsets being rendered obsolete? Or is the system just too broken to recognize what that experience might bring? Or perhaps the need for such skillsets and experience has been so consolidated (by some of the big cloud providers, etc.) to the point that if you’re not in the club, you’re just not in the club and just someone’s old baggage … ?
Here’s to wishing that the crystal ball shed some insights!
Best,
Matt - thanks for writing this. Lots of great points. I think many people have this on their minds and you managed to put it into words. Forget the haters - if they’re lucky they’ll come back to your post in 5 years and mutter under their breath “hmph. this dude was so right.”
Thanks for the entertaining post. Sadly I have nothing to add other than this validating email. Nice to see someone out there not getting head faked.
Sincerely,
Hey Matt,
I love it. I’ve been writing software about as long as you, and have observed exactly the same changes (to the point where several of your Field Reports have also happened almost exactly to me.)
I’ve spent nearly my whole career in early stage VC funded startups. I laughed and disregarded leetcode “invert a red-black tree from scratch on a whiteboard while I stare at you” type interviewing, because I correctly thought it was silly waste of time status-mongering peacocking that is irrelevant to actual job performance. While we were correct, we also paid the price for “being actually right” while others were either ignorant, or merely indifferent and willing to go along with the happy social fiction that algorithms trivia is all it takes to be a great engineer… and then they got to rake in millions at FAANG every year, for doing less work than us.
In retrospect, I should have dropped everything to spend two years grinding leetcode fulltime in 2006 or so. Alas.
The whole industry has been taken over by Google cargo-culting and bootcamps. The VC market is frozen. There hasn’t been a big new enabling technology since smartphones in 2006. Everyone is trying to push for the Next Big Thing to be AI or blockchain, but so far, that’s been a lot of vaporware with little delivered in the way of “actually useful” product.
I can go on and on, but I’m sure you already know the gist of what I’d say.
So, what do we do now? I don’t know. If anyone’s offered any useful practical feedback, let me know!
Great article.
Best,
Great article! A great read! Your Resume is awesome!
Hi Matt,
Found your Panic… on HN and enjoyed the post. Very spot-on wrt tech, job market, recruiting practices, etc. I miss the good ’ol days, which does make me sound like an old tech veteran, and probably part of the reason why people like us don’t get hired (some age discrimination, which isn’t well represented in D-E-I initiatives.)
Of course, looking back on my █████████████████ days - in my “youth” I didn’t give much heed to the older generation as I knew “everything” and was hell bent on the usual build stuff, break things, hypergrowth, etc. Of course, maybe back then the older generation hadn’t really grown up around computers / internet, etc. Whereas today’s older generation built the cloud for most intents and purposes.
Anyhow, in times like these (and with the possibility of AI playing a factor - not 100% sure here, yet) seems like you just have to take matters into your own hands and find a way to be the founder and bootstrap a startup / play the VC game (especially so if AI ends up displacing a lot of developer jobs.) With all the “enshittification” in the industry right now, maybe that signals some great opportunities down the road, but on the other hand, maybe it’s just not the battle we want to fight anymore…
Thanks for the post, have a good weekend,
Hi,
I enjoyed your writing as it lines up with everything I’ve seen in tech in the last 8 years.
Part of me was beginning to feel like I was crazy because no one else seems to be saying anything about it, or rather, is actively rejecting the idea that anything is wrong. (“That’s all well and good but let’s just make do with what we have, by continuing to do the same things that got us into this pit of despair. Dig faster! Dig deeper! Dig!”)
Thank you for the temporary reprieve.
Hi Matt,
I just read your post on the Job Market and very much agree. Nice post and I find myself in a similar situation.
Hey Matt, just wanted to tell you I loved reading Panic at the Job Market.
It was really funny, with the right levels of indignation IMO
I’ve met other people who are super gloomy & doomy about the state of software jobs in general, and I get it. But at least you were super, super funny and insightful about it.
I’m 29 and I haven’t worked for over a year now; I actually turned down a job offer recently (the only real one I’ve had since May 2023) to stay in ███████. I’m running on my savings, but I made a conscious intentional decision to be in ████████████ because I’m investing in the kind of future lifestyle that I want to live.
My last job was at a startup where I had a manager who was very… not good for me. I spent most of the last 4-5 years since graduating working at a Mortgage bank; It wasn’t an exciting job by any means but I had cool coworkers and the job was nice. Eventually I wanted to leave to make more money and learn more and found myself in some startups who were overhiring in 2021 (sound familiar?) that I wasn’t a good fit for, but hired me anyway. I didn’t last very long at those startups (due to different reasons, some having to do with me being a goofball) and went back to the Mortgage bank with my tail between my legs because I didn’t want to NOT be working.
A lot of stuff over the past few years killed the passion that I had for my career in the first 1-2 years of it (where I was making a lot of money and had an upwards trajectory). I’ve since been trying to find the passion for life by getting closer to G-d and embracing more of my █████████████ identity (religion solves the purpose problem, career does not).
Anyway, just wanted to tell you that I really appreciate your post. I don’t think I have the same level of inherent problem solving and love for tinkering that you do, but thank you for writing what you wrote.
Hey Matt,
As per subject line, I just finished reading your article. I hadn’t come across your posts before (HN, of course, brought this one to my attention), but it was a fascinating read and I couldn’t help but reach out and ask you a bit more about it.
I hear your frustrations well. I’ve had similar experiences coming up (although I’m only about 11 years in to the career so far) and working out how to best manage those frustrations and find a good enough solution took up a lot of my time and effort for quite a while.
I’ve been various things in the past decade. Mostly an IC climbing the ranks, but also an engineering manager and Principal Engineer (which in my case just meant “a manager, manager of managers, and also a tech lead”), and I’ve seen the same type of situation that you express in your article and I dealt with myself: an intelligent individual; not well trained for the social environment in which they find themselves; longing for a social past that no longer exists and partially never did exist; determined to see “meritocracy” flourish when their version of it only existed in the fantasies of like-brained individuals; their particular combination of personality, talents, background, network, etc. leading them into particular situations which they generalise from and see no hope of escaping; (the list could go on but you get the point).
I spent quite a lot of time and effort helping myself and then certain reports of mine deal with this situation, and I think I came up with some decent possible solutions. I now work in a tiny company focused on organisational collaboration problems so I find myself thinking of these problems still, and interested to reach out to those who are dealing with them and don’t have solutions.
So, if you’re keen to problem solve, let me know. I might be able to offer some useful perspectives.
I’m ████, ██████████, live and work in ███ █████████. So probably an outside perspective for you, and that’s often useful IMO. For one, the situation for software engineers you describe is not one that rings true to my experience.
The last thing I’ll say, to kick off some thoughts is: you’re refusing to accept the rules of the game, therefore playing wrong moves, and getting annoyed when you don’t win. If you pretend you’re playing chess when you’re playing Diplomacy you’re not going to be very happy. So you can self-righteously play a game that doesn’t exist or you can play the game. And if you want to have any chance of positive change in the game you have to learn to play, play it well, and then make change.
Anyways, whether you do or don’t get to this email, or this far in it, I wish you all the best in the world, and hope you find some peace and prosperity. It’s a challenging bloody game this, especially for those of us for whom change does or used to bring very difficult emotions. It’s no wonder you have your struggles.
All the best,
Thanks for getting back to me Matt 🙏
It’s really interesting to hear your thoughts on all this. I read a lot from Americans, and especially people in the Silicon Valley sphere, but I’ve never engaged in dialogue with anyone from there before. It’s useful to hear it in that form.
You’re expressing things that many of us outside the US associate with Americans - and forgive me if you’re from elsewhere and just live there, we all make assumptions and if I have to qualify everything I try to say we’ll be here forever - but often see as maybe played up and not true on the ground. It’s interesting to see them as part of your model of the world.
There’s this thing of you focusing hard on what exactly makes how much money for what, and then comparing yourself to that, as if the only thing worth defining yourself by is a number with a dollar sign in front of it. Whatever we are, we’re a lot more than a monetary value. But the system you grew up in is all about monetary value so I can see why you’d become focused on that.
And then there’s that expression, in your last paragraph, that the American Dream of working up from bottom to top doesn’t work in California and you have to dominate. Both very stereotypical views. Both come from interesting historical and psychological origins but are ultimately bullshit. It’s propaganda. It ignores the truth and the numbers. Sure, either of those approaches have worked for some, but they’ve not worked for many more. It’s all Survivorship Bias. Your Paul Graham’s and Peter Thiel’s I think are sincere, but they are just twats trying to explain their own success such that it avoids the obvious truth that they were privileged and lucky. That’s usually the truth, but it’s not as fun and enticing as “even the little guy can become CEO with years of hard work and grit!” - it’s all utter bollocks. None of it stands up to scrutiny.
I’d just like to suggest that there are alternative strategies and tactics than can and do work, but you might have to look outside your existing frameworks to find them. (And maybe understand where your current ones come from and identify which are reasonable and which are bullshit).
To pick up on your comment that “there is no game”, I find it fascinating that you say that after clearly identifying the rules of the game. And in identifying what the rules aren’t. I’ve faced this same dilemma so I empathise strongly, believe me.
The rules of the game I was taught were this: if you’re smart and you work hard within the visible system you’ll get all the things life has to offer. - UTTER SHITE
Turns out you just can’t teach kids and young adults the real rules, because of various social conventions. Whether this is deliberate or not I don’t know.
But I now work in organisational behaviours and analysis, trying to understand why people behave as they do, what works well, what doesn’t, and how to fix it. I never understood why the fuck anyone does anything so I’ve been trying to make sense of it since childhood - neurodivergence and all that. I also grew up in working class outer-█████ where little neurodivergent boys aren’t allowed to go off and be weird by themselves in the ways I’ve seen in my colleagues from London and other cities, and my US friends, do. And I’ve been desperate to understand how it all works, with the privilege that I was forced to be social competent through years of violence so I have a strange kind of access to places I don’t feel I should.
So! (I will get to a point among the ramblings, and I apologise profusely for not being able to find shorter routes there) I feel like the game finally makes sense. And it’s somewhat obvious, it’s exactly what you described: be smart, work hard in intelligent directions given the world around you (with as broad a view as possible), and most importantly develop long term social connections to get you all the places you want to go.
I don’t know about you, but they never fucking taught me that in school or anywhere else.
As far as I know now, having posh English friends who went to private schools, there is an emphasis put on it among the elite, but not for most people.
I think the people who benefit from this either know it and don’t say, don’t know it and assume everyone has it, or don’t know it and don’t think about it because why would you?
Why would Peter Thiel write a book called “All My Friends Who Helped Me Along the Way”? That would diminish him, that would completely go against the mad libertarian shite that seems to infest Silicon Valley, that would go against the old American dogma of every man for himself and make it on your own or your no better than the dirt you’ll be buried in. (Which comes in part from my ancestors btw, and for that I apologise. I traced the history of Protestantism from Germany through its various iterations and especially the crazy Scottish ones which took root in America. That’s a large factor in this dogma of working harder and harder being the way to the promised land).
So people like you and me just try to work harder, and harder, and do more, and do what the rich guys say because it worked for them, and it doesn’t work. And we get miserable, and defeated, and we think it’s all our fault. (I’ve certainly been in that dark hole before).
Turns out, after studying human systems for long enough, that story is bollocks and the work we do is useless. We spend too much time grinding on software when we should grind on human connection (with enough software knowledge to see us through of course).
That’s the game I’m talking about.
That’s what you need to work on. Not your strong suit? So what? Why only work on what you’re good at? Use your brain and your knowledge and crack that fucker of a puzzle. Trial and error. There’s lots of people out there to practice on. There’s lots of good books on it. There are many roads to Rome, but I recommend starting on that journey and hammering at the fucker until you see progress.
Don’t excuse yourself because of neurodivergence. Our whole industry is neurodivergent. It’s just another system to learn about and work within.
Software engineering is a team sport. Many of us come into it as outcasts and loners and solo sport players, and that transition to team sports is hard. But if you’re smart enough to write good code you’re smart enough to learn to play this game. If you can get over yourself enough to take a punt and try.
Like you said it’s all politics. So learn to play that well. Which means not playing it superficially. It means that you have to care about others and get involved in their lives, but you can choose such people tactically.
Anyway! Let me take this soapbox of mine away and stop pretending I’m a pastor.
People tell me I talk too much, but I like talking and I can only apologise when it’s annoying. Maybe there’s something useful in there and maybe there isn’t. Let me know though, and tell me if I’m totally wrong or talking shit! I’m just a guy trying his best, and trying to be helpful if I can. (I love a debate so call me an idiot if that’s how you feel and I’ll happily take up that challenge).
All the best man,
Your “Panic at the job market” piece really articulates my sense of dread .. I am at a dying company which is being fleeced by private equity, and am pretty sure our collective necks are on the chopping block. The real kick in the nuts is that my career track is not nearly as pedigreed as yours, and seeing what I am about to be up against in the near future .. makes me want to change careers entirely.
Great writing. Keep’em coming .
Hi Matt,
Just finished reading your post https://matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-market and it is one of the very few things I read on the internet and can agree to it wholeheartedly.
It was long but it was worth it, but I suspect if people nowadays are even reading long form writing anymore. What you said about the broken hiring hit so many chords with me that I might as well be a piano.
The companies no longer hire for potential, or how one can scale. I started without a college degree in India and with almost no knowledge of programming. I am competent enough now for most jobs except may be some advanced math included stuff. I felt like I’ve hit the ceiling in my current company and want to move, but all these coding interview shit hurts my brain so much.
But I don’t have a choice, so preparing with cracking the coding interview and system design books.
Thanks for writing what many of us like me can’t write and still be employable or desirable by the upper management.
It was a great read.
Conclusion
The world is expensive, the places with money aren’t providing ways to be productive for income, and there’s no help anywhere anymore.
for a self-esteem destroying comparison: as best I can figure, sam altman’s net worth is equivalent to him having made over $700,000 per day, every working day, for the past 20 years. what’s the point in anything when one day of his life is worth years of your own life? what’s the point in anything when a week of a single person’s passive-wealth-accumulation is worth more than your own entire lifetime of productivity building high performance products and services and helping people?
people with multiple $100k cars and multiple vacation properties complain “they have it so hard” while people with over priced california apartments, costing more in a year than a house in half the country, also say “they have it so hard” while also a single teenage parent living in a shelter says “they have it so hard.” everything happens so much.
yet, we must continue to find truth somehow. what happens when temporary problems stop being temporary? what happens when your entire industry decides every company should just buy 40 different $200/month SaaS packages instead of hiring 80 employees costing $20k to $40k per month to do the same work? what happens when companies only hire for problems they think they have while ignoring problems they don’t see? what happens when the decision makers don’t have enough experience to make good decisions, but they also ignore any ideas they didn’t have themselves?
-Matt — ☁mattsta — 💰 fund fun funds
Hey Matt,
Ran into your site on hacker news today and upon seeing your article “Panic! at the Job Market” I wanted to see what else you write about, but I ran into a problem.
I had the window a bit shrunk on the left of my screen, so I couldn’t find the navigation. It turns out that your navigation is hidden on smaller screens, so it might be a good idea to add a clickable header, or some navigation that is always visible at the top of the page.
Best wishes,