My Life Has Gotten Fucked Into a Cocked Hat

After 5 Months of Searching I'm Still Unemployed

Prologue

I lost my temper today and took it out on a sandwich. I’m not much of a cook but there are a few things I do kind of well. Two of them are basically the same - grilled cheese and bacon and tuna melt. I spent so much time in NYC diners as a kid that I guess I picked up a few things. (I also worked in a Jewish deli for a brief period but all I learned there was how to piss off the owner.)

Anyway, my wife loves when I make her a Jack Benny (diner ordering - GAC = Grilled American Cheese; Benny = bacon; on a raft = plate with french fries; and float it = to go) or a tuna melt. It’s the simplest fucking thing in the world. I don’t have a flat top but I do have a decent sized frying pan and a smash burger press. I do it cheap and simple - white bread, American cheese. My secret is using a shit load of bacon and a fuck ton of butter.

Today I was lazy. My wife’s not here, she’s back in Hong Kong at the moment. I didn’t want to have to do a lot of cleaning up. I did the bacon in the microwave instead of the frying pan. I did the bread and cheese in the toaster oven instead of the frying pan. No butter.

I put it all together and I put it on a plate instead of a cutting board and when I tried to cut it in half, the knife wasn’t going through the bacon and the cheese was schmearing all over the plate and eventually I took the knife and chopped the living shit out of the sandwich. I have never done that before.

It’s because I’m so fucking stressed out and don’t seem to have any other way to get it out right now.

I’m almost constantly in a bad mood. I’ve put on ten pounds since I stopped smoking. Sometimes it takes an edible or a shot of bourbon to get me to sleep.

Do you think I’m depressed? No shit Sherlock. I’ve been out of work for 5 months. I expected to have a job within 3 months. It didn’t happen. It’s still not looking good.

(I’ve been writing this piece on and off for several weeks now. I want to get it out there although it is too long and perhaps a bit jumbled.)

I’m Too Frank

A friend sent me a message on LinkedIn. “Hi Steve, I noticed that your posts in LinkedIn are very frank. I’m not sure that’s a good thing when recruiters are viewing your profile. 😅“ I know this person well enough to know that he was sincerely trying to help. He’s that kind of person. I’m not sure I agree with him but I understand his perspective and have been giving it some thought.

That’s the thing about job hunting. Almost everyone needs a job to survive - but you’re not allowed to act as if you need a job. Then you’re seen as “desperate” and no one will want to touch you.

Well, I need a job. Even though I’m beyond what is seen as a traditional retirement age, I need a job, and it’s not just for the money (although that’s certainly one reason why). I’m one of those people who believes that retirement is bad for your mental health.

And yes, I need income as well. Especially with the convicted felon tearing apart the very fabric of our society. We are on the verge of a recession, possibly even a depression. I could go on, but I’ll save it for another time.

I’m still operating at the top of my game. I was doing bleeding edge-ish technology work well enough to get converted from contractor to employee within a year after being hired. Company management told me I solved problems that stymied multiple predecessors and that I was considered “mission critical” - though they took their time in terms of letting me know when the mission changed.

So, friends, pour another cup of coffee, crank up the music, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, here we go.

I Saw It Coming (But Not This Fast)

It’s 5 months since I was laid off from my last job. I loved that job. It was one of the best jobs I had in my haphazard career. But there were signs that it wasn’t going to last as long as I wanted it to.

In the last two years I had four trips to Beijing (and two to Germany and at least eight to company HQ in Redmond). All of those trips were great. I loved getting back to Beijing again after so many years.

But those trips gave me an idea of just how much trouble Volkswagen was in.

I remember my first trips to China decades earlier. Back then, Volkswagens ruled the road. (Anti-Japanese sentiments meant that Japanese cars like Toyota were not popular.) In those days, China accounted for as much as 50% of VW’s global revenue (US$350 billion in 2023). Now that was going away.

In Beijing in 2023 and 2024, I almost never saw a VW on the road. Almost every ride I took (using Didi, China’s version of Uber) was in a China-made electric car, and some of those cars were fucking fabulous. Taxis were no longer VWs, they were Chinese-made electric cars.

Anyway, to cut a long story short(er), VW was in trouble globally, not just in China; in fact they were having the worst year in the company’s history. They were talking about closing factories in Germany, something they had never done. I heard about the huge cutbacks in China.

The thing is, the EU and China have all sorts of laws protecting employees. It is very difficult to fire someone there. But the US favors the corporations and not the people. It’s something called “employment at will” and the bottom line is if someone doesn’t like the color of your socks, you can be shown to the exit good luck to you.

And then, to make matters worse (for me and my co-workers), VW announced that they would be investing more than $5 billion in Rivian, giving them access to that technology and software. I saw that as very bad news for myself and everyone else in my division. Management never addressed this in our monthly “town hall” meetings and I’m guessing that everyone was too nervous to ask them about it.

I survived two rounds of layoffs in the US but knew there would be more coming. Looking at various project timelines, I figured that I was safe until the end of March 2025, maybe even the end of June, definitely not beyond then.

In September I updated my resume and my LinkedIn profile and started applying for jobs. But it still came as a complete shock to me when they cut another 30% of the US staff in October, 2024, and I was one of the people who got cut.

And Now I’m Fucked

A number of people suggested that I should retire and return to Asia - my wife first to say it. That chorus got louder following the election results. But I don’t feel ready to retire. The brain still works, the body still kind of works, I had a fucking blast on the last job, what would I do if I stop working?

Once the shock of the layoff subsided, and when the severance amount I was going to get was way more than I was expecting (given the amount of time I’d been an employee and not a contractor), I looked at my options and decided to remain in the US and search for another job. I knew that my age would be a strong negative factor but I felt that would be balanced by my recent successes, my global experience, and several promises that had been made to me.

First I did a few things to downsize as much as possible. Simple things like cancelling most of my subscriptions. Bigger things, like moving to a much smaller apartment in an Austin suburb. Bonus - they were offering 10 weeks free rent on a 12 month lease. This effectively cut my rent in half.

The Job Hunt Commenced

I know that at my level, the average job search can take 6 to 12 months but I felt confident going to be the exception that proved the rule! I already had an interview lined up with one of the so-called FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google/Alphabet) and I had a verbal promise of a job from a global consulting company.

Five months later and I’m nowhere. The FAANG company rejected me after 6 interviews. The consulting company ghosted me. A former colleague’s brother’s start-up dicked me around. Dozens of interviews with staffing agencies that say they are submitting me for positions and then I never hear from them again. An interview with a bank that turned into a “we don’t have headcount, we’re just talking to people.” A similar interview with an automotive company.

I have applied for over 300 jobs and I’m nowhere. (I only apply for jobs where I feel I am at least a 75% match.) The only consolation that I have, if you want to call it that, is that most of the people who were laid off at the same time as me also haven’t found new jobs yet - and these are all smart, world-class people.

Why the Job Market Sucks

Everyone is saying that they have never seen a job market like this one - and they don’t mean that in a good way. On the one hand, sites like LinkedIn, GlassDoor, and other job posting consolidation sites have made it easier than ever to find relevant job postings. On the other hand, because it’s easier than ever, companies get flooded with applications as soon as they post an opening. Everything I see on LinkedIn is something like this: “Posted 2 hours ago, 476 people applied.”

How do companies deal with this massive influx of applications? Software, specifically an “Applicant Tracking System” (ATS) that more often than not is using AI to scan the submissions. 95% of the applications will never be seen by a human. There are hundreds of companies making ATS software, which makes it very difficult to game the system.

You fight AI with AI, right? Feed the job description into ChatGPT. Have it analyze the job description for what it thinks the keywords are, then have it check your resume for the presence of those keywords, then have it suggest what you need to change or even do the rewrite for you.

Good, right? Yeah, it would be, if I was the only person who knew that trick.

Too Much Experience? Too Senior?

I’m looking for work as a Program Manager, and I suspect I stand a better chance of getting a contract position. No one is going to look at me and ask, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” No one thinks I’m going to take a job for the long haul.

But these one year contract jobs, they all say the same thing. “Five to ten years of experience.” I have more than 30 years. I try to hide it. Some versions of my resume only go back twelve years. Which actually kills me, because that means I’m not mentioning Barclays Bank, Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, Warner Bros., and I’m not mentioning the ground-breaking work that I did for (most of) them.

There’s another aspect of my job history that might work against me. Even if you just look at the past dozen years, my titles were Director, Vice President, “Head Of …”. I know there are people who are going to look at my resume and think, “this guy is way over-qualified to manage my modest little projects” and reject me. Others might think, “oh, sure, if I hire this guy he’s going to come after me and my job.” I don’t know how to express within a resume that I no longer want to have C suite or Director level of responsibility; I just want to have a job where I can make an impact and a contribution.

But, being someone who over-thinks everything, it has also occurred to me that if I downgrade my previous titles - removing VP, Executive Director, etc., then someone’s going to look at my resume and think, “How is it this guy has been working so long and never risen up the ranks? There must be something wrong with him.”

Missing Asia

Austin has never felt like home to me. I’ve done my best to fix up the apartment I live in. It’s large, bright, modern, comfortable. But because I was working remotely and don’t go out much (beyond restaurants, supermarkets, and the like) I don’t know many people here. I go weeks where the only people I talk to in person are waiters and cashiers.

I should have gone to San Francisco or New York. I didn’t, because the rent would have been more than double and the taxes would have been much higher as well.

Hong Kong was always very, very good to me. I’ve lost two people I considered “best friends” in recent years, and that’s weighed heavily on me. But the wife and kid are (mostly) there and aside from them, I still know plenty of other people and have something resembling a social life.

I don’t miss the Philippines anywhere near as much. Yes, I have a house there - and all of my CDs, DVDs, and books. I miss the lower cost of living there. But traffic makes getting anywhere next to impossible and the person who was my best friend there died last year. We are planning to sell the house and move away from Manila, but that’s going to take time.

Where Do I Go From Here?

When the time comes, I’ll return to Asia, but I don’t think the time has come yet. Getting out from my apartment lease and selling off my car at this point will cost me more than I’m willing to spend, but if I make it until December then that cost drops almost completely.

But it doesn’t make sense for me to stay here until December without a job. My unemployment checks will end in April and I think I’ll have spent all of my severance pay by end of April as well.

So if I don’t have something by April, it means selling off almost everything I have here (furniture, TVs, appliances) and donating or throwing out the rest. It’s very painful to contemplate.

(It also means that the almost $7,000 I spent to get my wife’s green card will be wasted, because once I sell everything off and leave, we probably wouldn’t return.)

I had an interview on Monday. I had three headhunters call me on Tuesday. I’ve dropped my asking price by almost 40%. I’ve told recruiters I will relocate to other parts of the US at my own expense. I’m doing everything I can do to hide my age (I don’t think I look my age, I think I look 60. I only go back 10 years on my resume and not the 35 that I’ve worked in IT. And so on.)

How long can this streak continue before I catch a break?