A small percent of tech workers struggling to get a job doesn’t change the overall picture that most people working in tech are living relatively prosperous and comfortable lives. We are paid at a level that means we don’t feel stressed at the grocery store figuring out how to feed our kids or wonder how will we get to work when our cars break down. And as a bonus, we get to sit comfortably in air-conditioned rooms and spend a good chunk of our day thinking about things we actually take some enjoyment from.
None of this is true for the “underclass” mentioned above who have little to look forward to each day; the labor they provide is in various amounts boring/tedious/demeaning/physical, and doesn’t pay enough to give them the middle class lifestyle they feel entitled to (e.g. home ownership, healthcare, etc).
I and many people I know have gone through job searches over the last 18 months. Yes, it was more work than we’ve come to expect over the last 10 years. But ultimately everyone I know has landed on their feet. As an industry we are still incredibly privileged compared to most.
>I and many people I know have gone through job searches over the last 18 months. Yes, it was more work than we’ve come to expect over the last 10 years. But ultimately everyone I know has landed on their feet. As an industry we are still incredibly privileged compared to most.
it's 50/50 in my circle. And I got the losing coin toss. Pretty much everyone in my circle got at least a threat of a lay off at some point except one person (and that company is in a very special situation). some got jobs quickly, to various levels of satisfaction. Some got laid off and then went back to the same company when they happened to secure a new project. I'd mostly prefer some stability over how well off I'll be when I'm 65. I'm not even sure I'll make it there at this rate.
>None of this is true for the “underclass” mentioned above who have little to look forward to each day
it's all relative, which is why this is hard to contain to a long term chart of "tech is still better off". No one wants to be caught off guard, doing interviews as a full time job for a year a income dwindles (so underselling it as "it's more work than we come to expect over the last 10 years" is underselling it). And even for the tech workers willing to work in the "underclass" jobs, it's not that much easier getting a job. Especially in my area that seems to have a higher than usual unemployment rate.
Sorry you are having a rough search. I was part of a large layoff so I know plenty of people who’ve been through it recently, some more than once if they went into another company that then had layoffs. I’d say the average search in my circle for those actively looking was about 3-4 months, with people who were very junior taking perhaps double that. I got some rejections that shocked and upset me at the time, but now that time has passed I’m glad I’m not in those roles because I found something later I liked much better.
For myself, referrals were a huge part of getting a job somewhat quickly. As more people are looking, the slush pile of resumes gets bigger which causes employers to feel they can be more picky. So if you’re relying on a cold application turning into an interview, that will definitely have a very low success rate.
I know only one person who didn’t get a job for an entire year, one of the smartest people I worked with at my last job, but to be honest it seemed like they were having some mental health / mid-life crisis things going on and not actually applying much if at all. I don’t know you and your situation, and I’m not saying this is the only explanation for a long and fruitless search, but if you think you might be like this person then I’d encourage you to reach out to someone who knows you and get the support you need. Marinating in negative thoughts won’t get you anywhere. This stuff has to be addressed because attitude, emotional state, and overall vibes can bleed into the entire interview performance and undermine what is otherwise a solid showing.
>I was part of a large layoff so I know plenty of people who’ve been through it recently, some more than once if they went into another company that then had layoffs.
Yup. I was hit in one layoff, 3 months later thought I went into a studio that looked like it had a stable publisher, and then the publisher was in fact not stable. So 2 layoffs in 6 months. By layoff #2, the layoff trend was in full force and the market was closing in. I believe I'm now on month 10 of the job search (or 9, since I simply didn't bother searching in December and visited family).
>For myself, referrals were a huge part of getting a job somewhat quickly. As more people are looking, the slush pile of resumes gets bigger which causes employers to feel they can be more picky. So if you’re relying on a cold application turning into an interview, that will definitely have a very low success rate.
Well that's the frustrating part. It was super thin on January/February, but by April I was getting plenty of interviews. I have 8-9 years of experience and a well known company on my resume, so I can stand out if I get past the Automated Trash Systems. But the technical interviews have just became a free for all of whatever the interview wants to ask. C++ questions, software engineering questions, specific game engine questions, graphics programming questions (I haven't actually gotten a technical interview for a graphics programming position, but I sure have been asked how to render a triangle, oddly enough), leetcode questions, math questions...
I just simply don't know what to study for these days. I can answer all those questions well, but "well" isn't good enough these days. I need to be absolutely confident on on the top of the ball, but I can't do that for every single aspect of gaming. Too many topics to be a master of all ("master" in the context of an interview). At least if I wasn't getting interviews I could just accept the cold market and focus more on maintaining what I currently have.
>but if you think you might be like this person then I’d encourage you to reach out to someone who knows you and get the support you need. Marinating in negative thoughts won’t get you anywhere. This stuff has to be addressed because attitude, emotional state, and overall vibes can bleed into the entire interview performance and undermine what is otherwise a solid showing.
Well there's a lot to be bitter about in my industry, if we're being frank. Game studios are still shutting down or laying off everyweek, no matter how strongly their teams performed, and games are continuing to squeeze on the industry as they push more and more attempts at monetization without necessarily adding more value. No one is feeling very valued in this current state of affairs: not the customers, not the devs, not even the executives.
On a personal note, I did have 2 studios I went assumedly to the end of the process with (6 stages each + recruiter call), only to have no respose whatsoever after the last interviews. Only thing worse than a no at that level of investment is lingering in purgatory as an assumed no. Those would have been surefire offers had I applied 6 months earlier, but alas. I'm truly hitting all the branches on the way down.
Oh, and did I mention the ghosting? There are so many ghosts these days. I remember being contacted by a recruiter for a call, then the call got delayed 1 week, then 2, then cancelled. Never heard from them at all.
I'm usually one to place too much blame on myself, but these days I really don't know what to evaluate from this experiment. It just feels like a circus and I need to keep putting on the clown makeup and doing stunts until someone picks me up. Nothing really feels like it's evaluating my skills and taking my experiences into account past the HR call, so all I can do is throw the dice until something comes out the crapshoot.
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That's all to say: Sure, I'm bitter. But I don't really let that linger to the next inerview. Quite the contrary. Just a lot of numbness and apathy when beforehand I'd be excited at all the new tech to potentially work on, and all the creativity flowing. It all just feels so sterile these days. So artiicial. Interviews were always superfical, but it feels like no one even tries to pretend to do the motions anymore.
I still have a somewhat healthy social life, and I know how to play the part (I've done it several times before to success). But I definitely do feel interview burnout. one week I'll have 5 interviews where 2 ghost me (very haunting last years, I'll say) past the HR call and 2 others bomb at the technical test, and the week after I would simply just not take any calls. Interviews are way more exhausting than day to day work.
The more confidently people make blanket pronouncements, the less you should believe them. There are a lot of use cases for OAuth2 and OIDC that are not covered by “just use a web session”.
The real thing to push back on is the logout requirement. Everyone pretends they need this, when what almost everyone should do is just mandate appropriately short token lifetimes and revoke refresh tokens as needed.
Not as I understand it. When I've seen this discussed, a "logout requirement" has usually meant some stakeholder thinks they need a way to prevent previously issued access tokens from being used even though the tokens are signed by the trusted authorization server and not expired (i.e. still valid). This requirement asks that you find a way to instantly shut off access even though the auth server has previously issued access tokens that should entitle the bearer to perform actions against protected resources until the token expires.
Blocking refresh in the authorization server is trivial, but trying to implement the same on access tokens in the resource server at the point of use breaks the entire security model of JWT. It's unreliable, because now every resource server has to take on partial responsibility for authorization which multiplies opportunities for mistakes. As the OP points out, you need to keep track of some sort of block list and lose out on many of the benefits of JWT (i.e. a resource server being able to rely fully on claims in a signed token before allowing an action).
When people show up with this kind of requirement, in my experience, it is often because they foolishly configured a client with a very long expiration on access tokens (e.g. ~months/years instead of ~minutes/hours). This creates a problem when some aspect of a user's access needs to change (e.g. disgruntled employee was fired, customer didn't pay their bill, etc). You can address this more easily by pairing a short access token lifetime with a long refresh token lifetime.
Ah, right. Yeah, I've had people ask for that too. It defeats the whole point of the JWT though. You might as well use sessions at that point because that's essentially what they are if you want to be able to instantly revoke (e.g. check every request).
Yeah, we had a couple customers ask about this, but they were ultimately satisfied with dropping the token from the session to give the appearance of logging out (so they could log in as another user), and just decided to accept whatever risk goes along with someone copying the session token, hitting "logout", then running cURL commands for 4 more minutes.
I don't think this specifically is a great example of "being mean", but in the broader ecosystem it's definitely a problem that can wear down maintainers over time. I think it boils down to a widespread sense of entitlement from users of free software. It's amazing the demanding and disrespectful things people will say when the project you've shared with them, for free, doesn't meet their exact needs or preferences.
If something is provided free of charge and it's not working for you, there are constructive ways to engage and help nudge a project in a beneficial direction. But if you're not up to doing that, just move on.
It’s basically impossible to rent a place worth living in Boston without paying a broker fee. Even the listings you find yourself on craigslist won’t rent to you unless you pony up the fee.
When I rented a place in Cambridge in 2019, the rent was $3200/month. To get the lease signed I had to write a check for 4x that amount (first+last+security deposit+broker fee). $12,800 before even dealing with any moving costs.
The worst thing about it is that it increases the cost of moving very significantly. So people are coerced into accepting large rent increases as long as the increase is less than forking out another broker fee to move to a cheaper apartment.
This is the crux of the issue for me. I lost interest in even trying new Netflix shows because they developed a reputation for cancelling lots of good, not great, shows with loyal followings because they weren't pulling in blockbuster viewership numbers on the level of Stranger Things. This spray and pray strategy is fundamentally disrespectful to the audience.
And the ridiculous thing is, streaming services should be better for slow burning, loyalty building IP. It doesn't matter when your friend tells you about the thing they like, you can start from the start anytime.
The loyal fans will watch and rewatch the old episodes for years and years to come.
This cancel early and often model is the exact opposite of the business model streaming services should use.
I feel like mainstream TV wasn't much better at that. The vast majority of TV shows I got into seemed to get cancelled after 1-2 seasons.
While they seem to have a bad track record by public opinion, it's unclear how much worse Netflix was at this.
I did a quick google to see if I could find any statistics, I got bored looking for some better data but did find this article claiming that from 2009-2012 "on average, 65% of new network television series will be canceled within their first season.":
https://screenrant.com/tv-success-rate-canceled-shows/
Could be, I'm not really old enough to remember how linear TV dealt with new television series. Perhaps it is mainly a problem of perception. When you turn on the hotel TV and see a Law & Order rerun playing for the umpeenth time you aren't really thinking about all the other shows that never got beyond a pilot because they couldn't outperform a juggernaut like Law & Order and earn a slot in the schedule.
The way Netflix seems to drive every season into a cliffhanger ending and then cancel seems pretty short-sighted though. If they just let stories be a little more self-contained, then these one-season shows (dare I say "miniseries"?) would accumulate into a catalog of stories that are actually worth a damn for the audiences that find them later. Every piece of content in the library that they don't have to pay to license can earn back an ROI from a niche audience over a much longer period of time since they don't have to optimize the limited number of hours in the schedule like linear TV.
I think there is an emotional difference also that plays a role here. With traditional TV, people I think were maybe more accustomed to the idea of "you get what you get". Don't like what's on? You can change the channel, but you can't pick out exactly what you want, so you have to get used to settling for "good enough". So you leave Law & Order playing in the background even if, really, police procedurals aren't something that inspire passion in you. But with streaming, there is the illusion of infinite choice. The magic of it is getting exactly what you want exactly when you want it, and the magic fizzles the moment the thing you like and very much want to continue watching gets unceremoniously cancelled. It feels like having a choice taken away.
I find this difficult to believe; no matter how small your camera is, photography is about light. Art reproduction photography is surprisingly hard to do if you care about the quality of the end result. Unless you can surreptitiously smuggle in a studio lighting setup, tripod, and color checker card… sure you can take an image in secret, but not one that is a good representation of the real thing.
You could just build a stabilizer system and stand really still for 1 second. Then expose for a longer time. Photography is Apertrue, ISO, and exposure time. This will gather enough light to do a proper exposure even in a dimm lit venue. Anything darker and every viewer will have a hard time seeing the private art.
ANother thing would be to crank up the ISO and denoise it later. Its much more lossy but with this you could get lower exposure times.
It’s about number of photons and aperture. In principle this could be very hard to detect, especially once people get good at multiple distributed apertures that are coherent with one another.
I tend to agree. There’s too much room for subjectivity in this definition for it to be a useful statistic. Physical violence is relatively unambiguous and severe, but these emotional/verbal boundaries have no clear definition. My mother got insulted the other day when I added mayo to a sandwich she made for me because she finds it distasteful.
While verbal and emotional abuse are absolutely real, there are many parts of aging that inherently feel undignified. Are they really being talked down to or insulted in all these cases, or are they just being made to hear something they don’t want to hear? Like, grandpa, we love you but it’s best for everyone if you stop driving now. Mom, stay out of my bedroom (I’m an adult now and this is my house).
Of the people I know who got laid off in the last year, pretty much everyone got a job after seriously pursuing one for 3 or 4 months. By seriously pursuing I mean preparing, applying, networking, and interviewing for >20 hours per week. If you aren’t talking to people in your network to find warm leads and obtain referrals and introductions, you’re doing it wrong.
Things seem toughest for the very young. If you have <2 years of experience and get laid off, you are neither new nor experienced. That seems like a tough sell. Companies have a pipeline of new grads for junior roles and are hesitant to give bigger titles to people that are still relatively inexperienced. This goes double for anyone afflicted with imposter syndrome and unable to tell the story of their experience with a bit of salesmanship.
Also, even though more experienced folk are in great demand in general, finding the right role that aligns your interests and expertise with what a company needs and values is still a lot of work. You may be awesome, but you aren’t as interchangeable as somebody with say 4-8 years of experience. For leadership roles (staff+) hiring managers can get very picky and specific about what they want to see.
It’s best not to get discouraged by this but just recognize the rejections as a necessary step in the process.
> If you have <2 years of experience and get laid off, you are neither new nor experienced. That seems like a tough sell.
I'm experiencing this. I've run into multiple junior (or new grad) positions that auto-disqualified my application because I graduated over 2 year ago. I'm less qualified for a junior position because I have some experience.
If you consider that almost nobody gets a job without going through some rejection, it is. It's a stochastic process, and every interview is another roll of the dice.
I suppose part of the challenge here is that music and video content holds value much longer. Studios can invest in music and video content and see a return from the catalog over a long period of time as more enduring hits are produced and the duds fall away. But with news, they have to make the money on it now because yesterday’s news isn’t worth much no matter how expertly crafted.
None of this is true for the “underclass” mentioned above who have little to look forward to each day; the labor they provide is in various amounts boring/tedious/demeaning/physical, and doesn’t pay enough to give them the middle class lifestyle they feel entitled to (e.g. home ownership, healthcare, etc).
I and many people I know have gone through job searches over the last 18 months. Yes, it was more work than we’ve come to expect over the last 10 years. But ultimately everyone I know has landed on their feet. As an industry we are still incredibly privileged compared to most.