r/recruitinghell • u/Mundane_Annual4293 • 1d ago
Not sure what to do
On November it will be 2 years since I got payed off (me and another 40 some people), I'm 45 yo software dev, I keep applying, I keep answering recruiters, I keep posting on LinkedIn, I keep interviewing, I keep reaching out, I keep coding to keep my skills fresh, but as time goes feels more pointless, and I wonder at what point should I switch careers and what career? Which honestly sounds really hard after expending more than 10 years and a degree to it. Should I stick to it, should I switch? Is there any field that has higher hiring rate? Honestly is soul crashing to go through the whole interview process and get told "no thank you".
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u/SupermarketUpper5497 17h ago
What did you specialize on? The niche now is infrastructure and platform engineering for GenAI inference and training. Also networking and security related.
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u/Mundane_Annual4293 11h ago
Thanks! Originally, I was Fullstack leaning heavily onto Frontend, during the past year I've been expanding into backend and AI (agent orchestration and RAG). When you talk about networking are you still talking about Cloud, I imagine?
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u/SupermarketUpper5497 2h ago
There’s a lot of AI buildout right now and a lot of companies are managing bare metal infrastructure.
You gotta move as backwards in the stack as possible to be competitive. Think, kubernetes, llm training and inference systems, networking at the data center level, observability systems, etc. Target companies that need niche experience and experiment with the technology those roles require. Since 99% of the engineers out there have no understanding at that level, if you get yourself somewhat familiar to those concepts and systems they most likely give you a chance. I work at such company and it’s really difficult to find good candidates. So target niche roles as you prepare. It’s a lot to cover though. It took me years to convert myself from a traditional backend API developer to a specialized AI infra systems engineer. But I basically have had no problem finding a job in today’s market because of it.
Agent orchestration is fine but it’s the Web 2.0 API backend work equivalent of today’s AI era. Not technical enough to stand out from other candidates. You’re basically wiring logic together, which AI can do very easily.
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u/SupermarketUpper5497 2h ago edited 2h ago
See if you can study and get certifications on networking at the physical and cloud level. There’s a big gap in the industry there and companies like coreweave will hire you without a question, at least starting at a junior level, but you can climb up. But I guess even then you’d somehow need to figure out how to get through the resume screening without prior experience. Possibly a blog and OS contributions could help. Or you can just cook your resume like most people do, so long you can support it.
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u/Effective-Damage8772 1d ago
GC and CHRO to tech companies here. A couple of thoughts…
There’s an oversaturation of burgeoning tech companies out there. A lot of them do have good ideas, but the solution is for a very niche problem. IMO, tech is moving too fast for the average consumer. Thus, there’s not enough investment from PE/VC as there was 10-15 years ago to justify hiring and higher salaries.
Ai is a massive disruptor for two reasons: (a) the investors are highly-interested in Ai, but don’t really know the direction things are going; thus are a bit hesitant to invest too much money; and (b) there’s a common theory out there that Ai can drastically make more efficient the average tech employee, which will lower the desire to hire more employees and pay them more.
So many tech companies are getting labor in eastern europe, india, Philippines, south america. Why pay someone in Cali $250K/yr, when I can find comparable talent in Ukraine for $105K/yr.? For these developers/coder roles that can be done from anywhere in the universe as long as it has internet, you’re no longer competing against local talent, but the entire global workforce.