One of the harshest truths in life that not very many people can hear, let alone incorporate into their lives, is that nobody cares about you without expectation. Nobody. Not your parents, not your spouse, not your best friend. I personally find this fact beautiful, and even my marriage has been improved by knowing we must continually choose to care about each other and earn the caring and respect from each other, because the moment it is taken for granted is the moment tyranny slips in and egos fight. This isn't about a marriage, but it is about a relationship with your employer that you have just as much control of.
Why Should I Hire You?
I have talked about value and how to think about it in our own lives, and I think it's eternally relevant. The same still applies to jobs. You aren't owed anything unless you have a contract and can get that enforced. Everyone can understand the concept of thinking about hiring from the perspective of the hiring company. They usually get it wrong, though. I don't care what your qualifications are, or your work history, or your skills. I will ask about those things, I will say they are important. They are important. However, the job is not your skills or work history. My favorite article in the world says it best: can you perform the surgery or not?
That's what we're trying to answer. Most idiots will say "yes" as if that's sufficient. "Oh! You said yes, well, please, step in and save my loved one!" That's not how this works at all, and you know because you wouldn't accept it if you were on the other side. That's sort of the thing people don't want to understand. What is it like to be a hiring manager? Well, you already are one. You have a hundred "jobs to be done" as the product design framework goes. You're hungry, how do you evaluate what to make or buy for dinner? Some rando shows up as you're getting in your car to go get your choice for the evening and says he'll cook you a free meal with the stuff he's got in this box. Now what? What about his viaual presentation, his box, and his pitch matters to you to let him do so? It's free! What do you have to lose? You notice he's covered in what seems to be blood, does that change things? What about how tall he is? Are you prejudice against height for cooks? Biology says you are, just not to what degree. Do you know? Can you account for it? Do you care?
This is what you're doing when you apply to a job. You are the cook showing up randomly. You're pitching. You're selling yourself. Don't want to play that game? Tough! You can't escape this, it's basic human behavior. You have to eat! Do you not want a job? That's fine. You now have to sell your services direclty as a contractor or a consultant, or a trade, or whatever else. You will sell, or you will starve. Maybe you don't want to work. Great, find someone that will feed you in exchange for the partnership you provide. Maybe you'll clean the house for sleeping on the couch. I dunno, but you will pitch that socially instead of in a job application. You will sell.
You must play the game, or leech off someone that is playing until they recognize that investing in you is stupid and now you're back to pitching. Learn it sooner rather than later. Oh, and now the market just tanked.
Tough Markets? Tough.
I've said it many times, but I started programming in the mid 90s, my first "job" was on a MUD, and it didn't pay anything but it was for a small company and it made enough to pay for server fees so we could keep the game running. It was still a short job. Anyway, my first adult version was in 2000 in Cupertino, CA and let me tell you, the dot com bubble was a wild ride.
This is being written in the wee hours of the morning in September 2025, and this market is so, so much worse. I ended up working at Target for 2 years as a stock handler and trying to go to school (I never got a degree, but that's a different story). This market is going to cause a lot of that. For a lot of reasons that you're probably not going to like. Everyone's ok thinking about it in the abstract, but applying it to the self is either emotional or impossible for most. Let me put it plainly: you're worthless. You already agree with me about everyone else because you're human, and your thoughts and statements to the contrary don't change that. Your child has to die unless you flip the trolley switch and kill 5 people. Does it matter that they're all doctors or whatever? Maybe you hate your kid or want to be altruistic or whatever. Great, you're just saying you already agree about everyone else including your kid.
Why would anyone care about you, then? You have to convince them. You have to sell. You can't sell? Nothing's changed. You're as worthwhile as you were without doing anything. Being worthless is the default of human existence. People hate it, but the louder someone protests, the more you learn about how much they hate people and don't want to face it.
Let me put it slightly differently. I love my children, but when they were born, they were worthless. I didn't stop caring about them because they were worthless, I saw potential and invested in them and tried to make them into productive members of society however they choose to be. What on earth is there to invest in and improve if I don't first recognize that the eat/sleep/poop machine isn't particularly useful as delivered?
Adults aren't different. You hope that most adults have had similar investment made into their lives, but again, worthless is the default. You have to overcome this default, and you have to do it over and over and over again to every audience you interact with. The market being tougher means you have to have a better pitch. I hope you were refining it all this time when it was easy to do so. Chances are, due to the law of averages, you have not, because it's all actually relative. You are as good as you are compared to everyone else in the pool. Oh how people hate that, but it's true, and again I have to stress that your opinions on this are meaningless because your behaviors as a human being already say you agree. I'm not saying this because it's my favorite worldview. I'm saying this because it's just true, and you need to face it.
Let's have a chat about newcomers, though, because they're particularly struggling right now. Nobody's going to like this part either.
Juniors Are Always Worthless
When's the last time you watch somebody new to an activity just absolutely crush it at an expert level? What we call talent is picking things up quickly or performing at a natural starting point that's better than most. That's it. There's no such thing as natural talent that makes you an instant expert. In anything. Movies about savants like Nintendo's extended commercial, The Wizard, where the weird kid is also just freakishly good at video games he's never seen before? Super fun story! Never true. Never. Not one example exists. It's always embellished. The skills people have that are freakish outliers are always parlor trick level utility. "I can make a basketball 9 times out of ten from this specific spot on the court." Amazing, but expertise? No. If anything, useless noise.
So Juniors are going to come with maybe some skills, but the chicken and egg problem is that until you've done the job, you're unable to do the job and must be trained. You have to learn how to apply the skills in reality, and someone has to teach you, or at least pay for the materials for your learning.
This has always been the case. I learned programming on my dad's 386 he brought home one day, and QBasic was right there. I was 9. That's a very, very small investment for learning that skill and applying it to real world things (my family and friends being my users or at least my audience). We have it pretty good in programming as far as investment to learn goes. I used to get a lot of guff about video games being an expensive hobby. I liked to bring up the cost of one year of soccer or golf or football. It usually shuts that down. Programming is even less expensive. It's better to give a kid an incredibly resource constrained machine to learn on. Constraints are required for creativity, and creativity is required for learning and exploration.
There's two main excuses I hear from newbies, and neither hold water. First, that jobs want specific skills. Specific languages, specific technologies. This is of course employer stupidity at its finest. So shut up and learn them? You aren't learning a whole workflow with Photoshop (which they famously had to let people pirate like crazy and give out at universities because of this exact same problem, if you want people to learn it, it has to be cheap to learn). You can bring up just about any tech system on any laptop in the world and learn it in an afternoon. You can start programming with any language and build an app with it in a weekend. Oh, you can't do that? Skill issue, grow up. Oh, you don't want to work in Javascript or C#? That's fine, as long as you're not culling too much of the opportunities and then whining about how nobody is hiring. You're a beggar. You can not be a chooser.
The second excuse is that hiring is broken. The patient is dying, can you perform surgery or not? This is a stupid, stupid argument. As if ranting about this will change all of human behavior. This is also a young naivety behavior, so it's much more prevalent with newbies just because they stupidly believe the world should change because they see a problem, but the solution never takes reality into account because that's not revolutionary. I get it, but it's still stupid. I was there, but when I was there, I was stupid and I didn't get better about it until I faced that fact. When you are a big important CEO of your own company, you can change your hiring practices and be the change you want to see in the world. Until then, play the game you're in.
Ask me sometime about my hiring loop. I hired 3 juniors in early 2024, and of the 45 candidates I had, I had 3 rejection responses thanking me for the experience stating in one instance (and I quote), "this was the most human interview experience I've ever had."
You will not get that experience in any market, specially not this one. Not even close. Play. The. Game. You're. In.
How to Get A Job in Tech
There's a lot more space to cover, and that's fine for another day, but I keep saying to play the game as it is. How do?
It's simple, and I'll save you some time. There are only two paths to a job in tech. Sideways, and through a graph.
Sideways is adjacency. You get a job in the mailroom, so to speak. Some of the best programmers I know started in tech support or customer service or in finance or as a janitor for example of the breadth. This is selection bias, because you have to be really, really worthwhile to get noticed and hired. It's like being a waiter to get your big break as an actor. Notice that I did not say you have to be really good. That's ambiguous. "Good" is always a stand-in for valuable. Worthwhile is the right term because you aren't valuable, you are potential. You can't do anything until you prove otherwise. Every hiring is a risk. Are you worth the risk?
The sideways path is always, always harder work. Always. You have a grueling job you don't want (by definition) and in addition you have to do extra work in addition to your main job to program and make things useful and find some place to help the devs at your job so they'll notice you and think of you when the next opportunity comes up.
The graph is what we call "networking." Networking is just being social in the community, but you have to be targeted. You have to work in the community on things the community finds valuable. This is less work, but harder to get right. Let me tell you about a recent example.
There's a junior dev I know. (I'm keeping this anonymous, so I know of 3 people this story will apply to that may think, "is he talking about me?" and they could be correct, and there's others that will also think that which I'm not thinking of, but alas. It's probably not you, though it might apply to you.) They are clearly very junior, but show promise. They can code, though I don't know to what skill level because they haven't worked on any of my projects, and what code I've seen of theirs has been junior but not egregious like a plaintext password in a database or something. They have two problems, that most juniors of this type do. First, they're working on things nobody gives a fuck about. "Cool toy" is not the response you want, though it's a good learning opportunity and a good community involvement activity. Showing that sort of thing off is what endears you to the community.
This is a down market. Why would I risk reputation for the cool toy? If I have another friend helping me on a project that matters, or is more relevant to the job market I live in which am I choosing to back with my reputational capital? Networking is hard, but it's basically a veiled attempt to work with people for social capital. It's like social media, but not "likes" as much as "I will literally get you an interview because my 'like' capability is real and valuable because we are adults now."
The other problem is their attitudes. I said that I get it when talking about tech interviewing being bad. I also get it when you work on something you think is cool and nobody cares. This attitude problem though is one I don't get. I've never wanted to play a magical fairytail game where life was easy and I didn't have to do anything I didn't want, so I can't relate to the attitude. There's people that want to work in a specific language, or avoid Javascript. I get that, I hate all languages, and Javascript in particular. I still program in Javascript. This attitude is a result of a mismatch in experiencial knowledge. Your tools are not your value. Your code is not your value. Your ability to deliver solutions people actually want is your value.
Bad attitudes range everywhere. "I want to use language X. I don't want to have to drive to an office. I don't want to write any hacks to meet a deadline. I hate LLMs. I am tired of getting rejection emails." All of this is bullshit of the highest order. I can see it, relate to it, and laugh at you for still thinking it matters at your age. Time to swallow your childish feelings and do what needs to be done instead. Your pride is meaningless in the face of it.
The Strong Survive
As always, you are in a cooperative competition. You want the best people doing important work, don't you? Or did you want the surgeon that flunked twice performing your kids heart surgery? The bar is less for a cashier at Wendy's, but you still would prefer the teengar that showered this morning to the face tattoos and missing teeth. Is that mean? No, it isn't. It's reality, and even you do it. Lean into it, that's the only way you can own it and work to move the needle for it.
We are all cooperating to both find the best and help each other become the best. I want the best landscaper that I can afford to do my yard. I want my neighbor who is a landscaper to become a better landscaper (and I have rules where I don't mix those two, but your rules can be different). That means I need to tell my neighbor if I see him fucking up. Kindly, but not nicely. It's not about comfort, it's about reality.
We are also all competing, because there's only so much work to do at a given time. Only so many positions. This is a tough market with just means competition is higher. The market is not saying you suck. The market is very specifically saying you suck compared to everyone else they've seen and that's an important distinction. No, you're already thinking about the wrong thing. Stop.
They're not talking about your coding skills. You can't show them your coding skills. You think you can, because you're an engineer who thinks they know things, but you can't judge someone else's coding skills at a glance. No. You can't. You have passed judgement on others coding skills, but you have never, not once, backed that up with $150,000 as a bet about who was the best. If you had, you wouldn't be reading this far, because you already know all of this.
I'm a big believer in "by their fruits shall ye know them" which is a religious quote and I'm not into the religion as such, but it's true just the same. People that are worth dating are dating. People that are worth hiring are getting hired. They're playing the game they're in. They're facing the reality of changing the inputs they give to get the outputs they need. Results matter. If you want different results, your whining is not going to help you.
The patient is bleeding. The patient is you, and the people you care about, and need to provide for. Can you perform surgery or not? If not, get out now. It's not going to get any easier.