I Say "Boo" To This Job Market

I loved making websites before I was sold on the future of programming. I made my first site on AOL Hometown, a WYSIWYG website editor. I remember it being very basic and outgrowing trying to make it work very quickly, but I built my first website on it regardless. It wasn’t pretty. It had a bright, textured background and animated GIFs with zero structure behind its content. I actually showed it to people.

I eventually graduated to Geocities and Angelfire. I made a lot of fan sites that you could imagine a teenager on the web in the 2000s would create. It wasn’t until I was on my 3rd Pokemon Fan Website that the light bulb went off: I didn’t want to manage these sites, I wanted to build them.

Years later, Google and other tech companies began worrying about a shortage of programmers. They began investing in programs at schools; they said it was imperative that Americans knew how to program so they could hire as many as they could. With tech layoffs in the age of AI, I can’t help but ask: where is the future we were promised?

I guess no one has a crystal ball and I am not one to blame others for my problems but the hellscape that is the current job market has left me wanting, toiling in my favorite past-time: dwelling on the past.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten ghosted by too many hiring managers or applied to too many ghost jobs but to this timeline: I say ‘boo’. I miss the old days of the internet, when people built things to build them and not turn them in to a side hustle.

I’m off to go watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film). Hack the planet.