It’s time to call it. Pour one out for my career in tech. It’s dead.
It was killed by the one-two punch of layoffs and the worst job market I’ve experienced in my entire professional life. At my former employer and across the tech industry, uncaring executives are desperately trying to limit the damage they inflicted on their companies through reckless spending and over-expansion during the ZIRP era, and professionals like me are suffering the ongoing consequences.
I loved my job. I loved the company, the mission, the leadership, the work, and the coworkers. For most of the past 18 months since it was unceremoniously taken from me I have been searching for a decent replacement. I wasn’t naïvely thinking that I would find another dream job–just a place to work where I can make enough money to pay the bills and feel marginally good about what I’m doing. Unfortunately, after many hundreds of applications, a very small handful of interviews, and an endless stream of rejections and ghostings, I’ve come up utterly empty-handed.
This job market has left me defeated, dejected, and demoralized, and I’ve decided that I’ve had enough. I’m done spending hours a day searching for jobs that align with my skills, writing enthusiastic cover letters, fine-tuning my resume, filling out applications, and sending cold emails to hiring managers, all for literally zero return on my substantial investment of time and emotional energy. It’s time to move on.
Of course, I fully realize that a post like this is likely to turn off some potential employers, but apparently I’m already unemployable, as evidenced by the past 18 months, so I don’t really have anything to lose now, do I?
To be clear, I’m still open to gainful employment. It would be great to have a paycheck, paid time off, health insurance, and all that. If you are someone that I’ve worked with in the past and you have a job that you think I’d be great at, by all means, drop me a line, let’s chat! But I am done with the endless, hopeless, fruitless cycle of searches, applications, and rejections.
Barring some deus ex machina resolution where the perfect job just falls out of the sky into my lap, what does the next phase of my career even look like? Well, that’s still TBD. Obviously I’ll continue to work with my wife to make our little retail tea and spice shop Chai Cupboard successful. In fact, we’ve just launched a number of new initiatives on that front. If you enjoy tea, check out the website at ChaiCupboard.com to learn more. But that’s still a long way off from paying the bills for our family of four, so I’ll be launching another new venture in the very near future.
This was originally posted on LinkedIn.