Yes. I have 15 years experience of mediocre web development, project management, and product management experience. Most of my development work was building the same CRUD apps over and over in greenfield projects and at small scale, so I never really had professional experience to "level up" and be a better candidate as a developer. Obviously in this job market with lots of other unemployed people with a more clearly good track record, it's very difficult for me to get an interview at all.
I saw an interesting post on X the other day: someone was saying that when people get a degree in something like... music, and they're bad at playing whatever their chosen instrument is, it's not surprising when they don't find employment. For some reason we do have an expectation that even bad or mediocre programmers will get jobs, which was maybe historically true simply due to the high demand for those skills at all, but maybe we're seeing the shift where it no longer is.
I think there's more at play too: many people are more productive in their roles thanks to AI, people are maybe clinging to their jobs more knowing what the job market is like, and companies are probably not spending money like they have been for the past decade due to interesting rates/uncertainty/whatever else.
One anecdote I'll add about foreign workers: my last employer was a software agency/consultancy, and they had probably twice as many developers in a country in southeast asia as they did in the US. I am not clear what the root of the issue was, I think it was probably several things, but that employer did struggle a lot with the results and output of the teams in that country, to the point that their entire office in that country closed down and I think the entire team was laid off. I think the problem was a mixture of poor management on the American side, poor hiring practices on the foreign (I don't like that word) side, cultural differences between expectations in work, communication barriers in terms of them understanding the details of the work that needed to be done, and mismanagement on both sides of the ocean causing poor morale.
I will add, that agency framed the use of foreign workers as a necessity for cost reasons, which I believe to be true. There was work they did with extremely small margins and even with foreign workers, was often times unprofitable. Small businesses just really do not have the budget for teams of software developers to make custom software, and especially not when the development process is an inefficient as it sometimes was at that agency.
disclaimer: really lovely, amazing people all around. great humans. had some understandable flaws. i don't like the use of the word foreign because i don't want to otherize anyone but not sure what other word to use
I saw an interesting post on X the other day: someone was saying that when people get a degree in something like... music, and they're bad at playing whatever their chosen instrument is, it's not surprising when they don't find employment. For some reason we do have an expectation that even bad or mediocre programmers will get jobs, which was maybe historically true simply due to the high demand for those skills at all, but maybe we're seeing the shift where it no longer is.
I think there's more at play too: many people are more productive in their roles thanks to AI, people are maybe clinging to their jobs more knowing what the job market is like, and companies are probably not spending money like they have been for the past decade due to interesting rates/uncertainty/whatever else.
One anecdote I'll add about foreign workers: my last employer was a software agency/consultancy, and they had probably twice as many developers in a country in southeast asia as they did in the US. I am not clear what the root of the issue was, I think it was probably several things, but that employer did struggle a lot with the results and output of the teams in that country, to the point that their entire office in that country closed down and I think the entire team was laid off. I think the problem was a mixture of poor management on the American side, poor hiring practices on the foreign (I don't like that word) side, cultural differences between expectations in work, communication barriers in terms of them understanding the details of the work that needed to be done, and mismanagement on both sides of the ocean causing poor morale.
I will add, that agency framed the use of foreign workers as a necessity for cost reasons, which I believe to be true. There was work they did with extremely small margins and even with foreign workers, was often times unprofitable. Small businesses just really do not have the budget for teams of software developers to make custom software, and especially not when the development process is an inefficient as it sometimes was at that agency.
disclaimer: really lovely, amazing people all around. great humans. had some understandable flaws. i don't like the use of the word foreign because i don't want to otherize anyone but not sure what other word to use