u/Winston_Wolfgang

I have 3 YOE as an engineer at a large non-FAANG tech company. We hire a lot of ex-Amazon people if that's any indication of our prestige and comp (I'm pretty sure Amazon pays more than we do but we don't require people to work in office like Amazon does).

I don't really get interviews from big tech companies, I've worked on my resume a lot so that's not it. I've gotten a lot of startups offer to interview me and I've done well in interviews, but never gotten offers. My suspicion is that it's because I went to a kind mid school (T50 and ranked higher for CS, but nowhere near actual top colleges obviously) and everyone I see at these startups went to UCB, MIT, etc.

I also don't apply to the bay area, I'm on the east coast and have no interest in leaving the east coast. I'm willing to move, I would move to another city or even outside the US, but I am not moving to the bay area, dear god no.

I THINK what's going on is that most hiring is only in the Bay Area now and most companies want people with 5+ YOE for mid level roles. And people from top schools. And until this restructuring ends, which would probably take a few more years at a minimum, this probably won't change.

I've done a lot of stuff to improve my looks, more than just working out, I'm not gonna go into it but it was years of effort. I'm definitely above average looking. Women sorta notice? They glance at me and stuff but that's about it. But I don't really find them all that attractive either? I've maybe seen one actually attractive woman in the past few weeks, it's incredibly rare. Most women are faking their looks incredibly hard, not just with makeup but also leggings and outfits designed to make their body look way better than it actually is. And even then, they still obviously just look mid.

I notice so many more flaws now and it's all just so boring. I've stopped pursuing women (I never really did that hard) and mostly just focus on getting better and better looking. But obviously like everyone I'm limited as to how good looking I can truly get. I get that.

That's the only thing that could possibly get this industry and maybe the entire US back on the right track at this point. The period after the 2008 recession was eventually the best decade to be a SWE, 2010-2022. But it didn't last and now here we are.

The real issue isn't even AI, I mean RIGHT NOW it definitely cannot replace us, except maybe the most inexperienced juniors. It really cannot even handle basic tasks without being heavily monitored and it's obviously producing mountains of tech debt the more we use it for development.

But the expectation is that with enough investment, it eventually WILL be able to do all those tasks autonomously, which it never will. It will just keep generating slop and costing more money than it makes.

However I worry a recession can't happen anymore. Much has changed since 2008. I worry investors will just keep finding more ways to fake the numbers and keep pouring in capital and wasting money. I worry the US government will just print money to keep this machine moving and deflate our currency and never raise interest rates to where they need to be to stop this insanity.

I worry there's no stopping this runaway train, there's zero guardrails and the SEC clearly does not care about stopping it because the government has far too much to gain from this. Think of the magnitudes of capital gains they stand to make, how almost every major politician is heavily invested in tech and AI stocks.

The only thing that could possibly stop this is other countries refusing to lend to the US and they're already beginning to raise the interest they want finally. But even if they stop entirely the fed could just print money and enter us into a deflationary debt spiral.

Promotion at my job means a very small comp increase (a friend who got promoted last year got 2%) in exchange for a ton of groveling and building a promo packet and trying to show "impact" to a bunch of managers who don't understand what you do and even if they did, would forget because they're in constant meetings with upper management and there's constant reorgs.

I interviewed with a bunch of other companies the past 6 months but never got any offers, my suspicion is that basically no one is getting hired anywhere good without an internal referral right now and I don't have any or any way to get high. And I can accept that.

My problem is my direct manager now wants me to get promoted (probably because a ton of other people he managed got moved to another manger and if he can't get someone he manages promoted this year it makes him look bad) so he wants me to "show impact" and build a promo packet again. I actually did this a year ago when I was still trying to get promoted and got passed over so I stopped caring and tried to switch companies but wasn't able to.

Just to be clear, I do complex work all the time and build out entire features, management just doesn't care or know who I am which I can accept. I get to be remote and I don't have to deal with any of them in person.

One of the higher up engineers recommended I start spamming people with more AI slop tools which is definitely what the guys who care about getting promoed are doing but it just seems really dumb. If there was actually a significant comp increase from promotion I would probably care but at least in my case there definitely isn't.