I start a new job in a couple of weeks, and this will hopefully be the last unemployment update for a while.
In total, I applied to 54 jobs over the course of two months. Of those, I got phone screens with six recruiters. Four went to the next round, and two progressed all the way to employment if we are including my part time job at the library.
My parameters:
I never did the “I’m looking for a new role!” post or turned on the OpenToWork banner on LinkedIn.
I did not apply to jobs that had anything to do with AI or defense.
If a job required me to record a video of myself or an AI interview, I did not respond.
I haven’t written much about my actual career on here, but after working remotely since 2010, the job I landed is five days a week in the office. It’s also outside of the tech industry, in a sector that’s at least a little less unethical, and therefore I’m taking a pay cut. I also have to quit my job at the library if I have any hope of seeing my family. None of this is ideal, but I felt a lot of pressure to take what I could get.
All things considered, my ratios aren’t terrible compared to the folks I’ve seen posting about unemployment on LinkedIn. There are lots of posts on my feed right now from people who have been unemployed for over six months, who have applied to hundreds of jobs. Nothing is ideal.
a couple of things about the state of the market
First, I’m convinced all “remote” job postings are fake, or worse, data harvesting operations. I should have known this, as even the company I was just laid off from stopped hiring for fully remote positions over a year ago.
Second, LinkedIn has never really been useful to me as more than a job board, but right now it is in a hilarious spot as a social media network. My feed is full of posts I could not imagine divulging in an actual professional setting. Mostly other unemployed people giving TMI about their job searches, fielding sketchy advice from other equally unemployed people. But also a lot of recruiters complaining about candidates (don’t work for those companies), or talking about how the hiring process is broken, which makes me think LinkedIn is just a bunch of recruiters and robots talking to each other.
Third, everyone is hurting. Not a single layoff-proof job exists in 2026, and probably never will again as long as our society values capital over people. Working conditions for everyone in every sector are terrible and unilaterally getting worse.
All that is to say that most career and job hunting advice is bad and unhelpful. Landing a job is mostly luck and locality, and there’s not much else to get around broken hiring methods, broken hiring managers, and broken companies. If you’re unemployed for a very long time, it’s not you — it’s literally everything.
the future of work
Most companies don’t care about the quality of their products anymore, as they have no incentive to care (for more on this, I highly recommend reading Enshittification by Cory Doctorow). The robots will eventually eat up my job, and likely will eat up the jobs of all other information workers as well. When there’s no value placed on quality or accuracy, it’ll just be easier for the CEOs not to care.
The average age of new hires in 2025 was 42 — literally my age. I have a masters degree and over 15 years of experience in my field, with my last two positions at the Staff level, and I had a recruiter tell me last month that their hiring manager didn’t think I was experienced enough for their Staff-level position. The ideas I was raised with around career — about putting time in and getting ahead — don’t exist anymore.
I’m starting to hate the term “pivot” but I’m facing the reality that I’m going to have to find something else to do if I intend to be alive past the age of 50. I can’t even advise my kids, who will soon be off to college. I don’t say this out of fear or nihilism, but out of absurdism.
Nothing works the way our parents told us it would. So maybe we need to throw out all those rules and start something new.