And I was 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, (never had trouble finding work) …

Were you flexible with re-location or you were looking just at you current region or it is that bad no matter your flexibility?

The number of just straight out NO's I've gotten has been surprising and disheartening. I've been a developer for 20 years and genuinely don't think I've gotten an outright "no" before this year. Usually just no response. I've gotten maybe eight or nine actual rejections this year. It's honestly worse, emotionally. Ideally I want a job outside my wheelhouse to learn and move forward, but it seems like no one these days is interested in any sort of training. There have been two gigs I was really excited about that seemed more-or-less exactly what I have spent the past decade doing and they've BOTH actually replied that they didn't think my skills were a good fit. I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it. Before COVID I would regularly apply for jobs, almost always get them, and decline largely to keep my interview skills fresh. This last year …

Do you have a thesis for why that might be happening? Ageism? Overqualification? The next generation of hiring managers not knowing what to do with you? Past experience being deemed irrelevant to modern SWE problems? Is it all just a bad market? Your profile strikes me as the last one that would struggle with landing a gig.

> 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023 Name and shame, this should be the norm. People are too shy on this subject. Thank you.

Are you ready for great age of suffering? Because there will be no saving, no UBI, no plan B. This is it. This is the end of careers and beginning of centuries of misery. AI will replace everyone except around 3%. If you aren't one of those 3%, start accepting the reality of infinite pain.

Yeah, once you hit 50 the wall is real. You need to maximise your earnings during your 30s and 40s to be able to just do contracting, etc. then.

Being overqualified is indeed a real phenomenom. Employers can think your too expensive, or that your desperatem and that you might not stick around long. All valid concerns.

My brother who is nearly 50 and has worked in tech since the dot com boom, got laid off in January and couldn't find a job until last week. This job, too, was just a contractual position at his old Fortune 50 firm. He has an engineering degree from one of the top 5 engineering colleges in India, a Master's from one of the top 5 engineering schools in the US. He built some of the systems that form the foundation of the entire call center industry. And now he pivoted to GenAI and has dozens of very impressive public projects including some heavily starred open source repos And yet...nothing. Ageism in the tech industry has never been worse