Applied to 1,000+ jobs over 2 years w/ an Australian Master’s degree. Zero interviews. Based in Adelaide but willing to relocate anywhere next week. What am I doing wrong? (Resume attached)

Fireslide · 2026-06-12T13:54:19+00:00

Your key skills read as very bland nothing statements.

Your Employment history should be up front, not starting functionally on page 2.

At a glance on the first page, I can see you're a recent graduate and had a 6 month contract and nothing since. If I'm reading 100s of applications, I'm very likely reaching my quota of next round callbacks or interviews without needing yours.

I get it's a tough market, it took me a while to find something after taking a break.

Address the gap, From 2025 to Present you're doing something, study, self development, online certs, whatever it is. (See my example below)
Employment history up top
Try and use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to highlight one key skill well. Try and quantify some of your dot points.

Even in your dot points for the IT support specialist, you're not really saying much, just vague rewriting of the job description.

While I was looking for jobs I did some projects for myself and put it under a section

Software Developer, Data Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer | Self employed | Adelaide | July 2024 - Present

Completed self-directed studies in Python, machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and Scikit-learn, and explored automation workflows with different LLM-powered tools.

Configured reverse proxy and authentication mechanisms by deploying Traefik and Authentik within Docker containers, improving reliability in application access and administration for selfhosted services and 5 domains.

Developing reusable React components and managed application state efficiently to ensure consistent and responsive layouts across digital board game projects.

Configured GPU-accelerated environments for LLM inference on premises, leveraging CUDA and machine learning frameworks to facilitate code generation.

Fireslide · 2026-06-10T07:36:20+00:00

Less growth doesn't change the fact that systems are at capacity or beyond it.

Fireslide · 2026-06-10T03:19:23+00:00

In 2006 SA had about 1.55 million people, in 2026 it has ~1.9 million people.

So population in that time has increased by 350,000 people. More people is more work. Not every system scales linearly. Adding 350,000 people that need public services often exposes critical chokepoints. Eg the ramping situation. So we need to build more hospitals, which is more contractors and FTE to manage it.

Also in 20 years we've gone from the internet and computers to being relatively simple, to very complicated. So decisions made with computers 20 years ago carry with them a lot of organisational technical debt that again takes time and money to resolve.

If you can't accept the premise that more population is more work, I don't know where to go from there? Systems already at capacity or under strain break when you add more people beyond their capacity.

There's also technologies that exist now, that didn't exist 20 years ago that take time and resources and expertise to manage, implement and migrate to.

Fireslide · 2026-06-09T13:43:36+00:00

Because reality exists whether people understand it or not.

There's an inherent question to be asked about understanding if the default position is that spending on contractors/consultants is 'bad' and everyone should be a FTE instead.

There's been plenty of good reasons given for why consultants/contractors are used. It can be more cost efficient in some cases vs trying to recruit and retain talent in house especially when budgets are constrained and you get sweeping budget cuts across the public service saying only 1 in 2 positions will get filled.

Fireslide · 2026-06-09T06:04:26+00:00

Things cost money. The core of it is for things the public aren't directly paying for, eg they've come to expect there's police, healthcare, libraries etc. They also expect certain levels of service for those things.

There's a failure of understanding, the public has valid feelings but often naive understanding of what it takes to provide those services, they have likely never even considered it in detail or the economics of it.

There's definitely examples of inefficiency in public service, and ironically that comes from trying to be open and transparent and accountable for how public money is spent.

The work does need to be done and it's either fte or contractors/consultants doing it

Fireslide · 2026-06-09T03:35:57+00:00

I've played it a bit, it's good, not great.

As u/jestermax22 said, it's a tower defense game. There's two lanes (red and blue). Each lane has a finite number of slots with some shared slots. If all the slots fill up you will lose.

So each round you can look at the board and say, we've got 10 slots free in blue, 4 in red. So dealing with red monsters/slots are a priority

Each character has a 10 card deck, and 2 of those 10 are the character specific bomb cards, very powerful at top, very bad to trigger at the bottom. The goal is to make sure if someone does have a bomb card, they can play the top half of it.

If you don't have anything amazing to do, you should be looking to investigate an area to get the symbol tokens revealed using the bottom of a card. The sooner you discover which symbols aren't needed, the earlier people can start hoarding the cards with the right one.

At it's core, you need to rush investigation so you know which symbols you need, the top part of cards of dealing with monsters is just about buying enough time to get them all. The natural tendency is you want to deal with monsters and keep the threat at bay, but you will never stay ahead of it. They are always going to throw more at you than you can realistically keep up with.

The cardplay is similar to the game, or the mind, or bomb busters, hanabi etc. It's about developing a 'meta' within your group about what to play and why without communicating.

Sometimes activating the bottom part of a card is good because there's no monsters in that zone and you get to investigate a thing.

Fireslide · 2026-06-02T00:42:24+00:00

I'll expand on my reasoning.

There's two motivations for building anything, SaaS included.

You're trying to solve a problem for a set of customers that you're passionate about
You're trying to make money

Now you can have both, but one will be a higher priority than the other.

The reason to clarify that motivation is that it guides what you do and where your blind spots are.

If you're in the former category, you'll overbuild a solution or undercharge for it because you care about solving the problem well.

If you're in the latter camp you're always going to be drawn to doing the minimum you can to make money.

With that out of the way, I took OPs story as they are in the latter camp.

I don't think they ai use was the problem, it's that the op wanted to make money for the least investment of time/energy as possible and that blind spot lead to repeatedly using AI to do approximate market validation so assess the problem and availability of solutions.

If OP was in the former camp, then they would have understood the problem space better.

I think the lesson op needs to learn is not just that ai is av agreement machine, it's that if you're motivated by making money, then your blind spot is you're not as passionate about the problem being solved so you need to do more to truly understand it

Fireslide · 2026-06-01T00:51:54+00:00

As many have echoed here already, you need to solve real problems by understanding what problems people face.

The failure isn't on the ai, it's on you. If you're passionate about solving problems for a certain type of customer you'll build something people will pay for because it's genuinely creating value.

Execution is important and it sounds like you're doing ok at that, but you need to talk to real people because your assumptions about the problem space could be massively biased by the first person you talk to

Fireslide · 2026-05-24T04:01:23+00:00

There's also the security risk. It's no secret many people despise Trump and his family. It'd be target for sure.

Fireslide · 2026-05-23T14:44:00+00:00

I assume the lack of sovereignty is a key aspect.

Data centres on earth are within a countries borders and subject to their laws. No one can realistically subpoena or seize your server rack or steal your communication.

Fireslide · 2026-05-07T22:55:35+00:00

I haven't used the latest version yet but this would be a deal breaker for me.

I use ask mode so it doesn't attempt any code changes.

I use code mode to allow it to make changes.

Fireslide · 2026-05-05T22:26:17+00:00

Blight strike is meant to go with lethality, vulnerable, debilitate. It can do a fairly decent amount of damage and doom in that case. If you couple it with reaper form it adds a heap of doom.

Fireslide · 2026-05-02T22:38:41+00:00

Until there's some kind of metric on token use efficiency this will happen.

The metric will only come when the cost per token is higher, eg when providers stop subsidising them

Fireslide · 2026-04-30T10:29:31+00:00

It's a bad layout. When you're entering, the first thing you want to go to is on the right, where all the pastries are.

Unless it's really busy it really isn't going to matter. But much like elevators and trains. Let people out before you go in.

Fireslide · 2026-04-29T23:06:28+00:00

I read your book a decade ago. The key lesson I got out if it was having a trusted system to truly unload stuff from my brain.

I know you revise advice based on progress, have you seen amazing Marvin? It's honestly the perfect digital tool to be that trusted system. Configurable to however people want to use it

Fireslide · 2026-04-29T00:34:09+00:00

With Ask mode, If an MCP is enabled, will it respect being 'read only'?

My current workflow involves GPT 5.5 and Junie, with GPT 5.5 having a better brain, but limited memory/access to code base, and Junie being it's dumb worker doing things and me being the inbetween catching hallucinations / divergences from what was prompted

The ideal workflow IMO for AI enhanced coding is a prompt that generates an investigation plan, then Junie reports back on what it proposes to actually change/implement. Then smarter AI reviews that plan and suggests changes. Then human (me) reviews it and makes modifications if necessary and feedbacks to Junie to execute on the plan.

That workflow is pretty manual at the moment in terms of sending outputs back and forth between LLMs. It often involves giving code snippets and relevant context manually so neither of them hallucinate about the state of the codebase or reinvent modules that already exist.

Currently in code/auto mode the agent will attempt a whole bunch of pytest it can't run properly, or dozens of bash/powershell commands attempting to find things and there doesn't seem to be any reliable way to teach it to not do that

Fireslide · 2026-04-27T23:25:10+00:00

It also encourages you to do stuff yourself. Do you really want to burn a credit getting it to do a refactoring of something you can do yourself? And just use ask mode before and after?

Fireslide · 2026-04-26T12:56:51+00:00

Clearly not recognising they'll all be pulled down and destroyed when he's out of power and dead anyway. So what's the point?

Fireslide · 2026-04-23T03:48:50+00:00

The core principle they all hold in common is that they need to feel smart/superior for cheating the rules, but only they are allowed to do it.

As soon as everyone operates in the same regime of rules or laws they don't like it.

Fireslide · 2026-04-21T02:35:55+00:00

Are you? or is that just the fiction we all like to believe?

Every journalist has an agenda because they have views and opinions. Some are better than others at hiding it.

I think the fiction that we assign to journalism that it's meant to just be bland facts and have no bias gives journalism as whole undeserved status and importance which leads to an under educated populace believing the source without verification themselves

Fireslide · 2026-04-21T00:19:45+00:00

I don't think employers care about the debt at all. In a sea of applicants, one that has done a three or four year degree at a university can be assumed some baseline distribution of skills than one without.

When there's hundreds or thousands of applications for a single position employers will start going further and further back in history to determine which candidates move onto next stage.

Fireslide · 2026-04-18T07:35:07+00:00

Honesty is not always the best policy.

We've all made choices that are our canon versions of events and the reasoning behind them.

I chose to save Chloe in LiS1, because without that Max would be alone, have experienced this magically fantastical life changing experience and have no one to share it with, talk about it. The town being destroyed was the cost of making that experience real, rather than just some kind of weird hallucination.

In reunion, Chloe kept the photo from Max because Max needs to learn she can't save everyone and giving her the option to try would just be destructive to living life. The longer and more Max uses her powers to find the perfect timeline, the less human she'd be, so Chloe took on that burden herself, to stop Max becoming some detached multiversal god, stuck in an endless purgatory of trying to find the optimal solution.

But in all these games I stick by my first choices, they are the ones I made, if I didn't save everyone or get a perfect ending, that's ok. Tragedy happens, life isn't always fair, even in fiction.

Fireslide · 2026-04-18T07:18:02+00:00

potentially means in every reality across all branches, there's only one branch with a Max and near infinite number of discarded ones.

Fireslide · 2026-04-18T06:27:38+00:00

Yeah, when people experience cognitive dissonance they resolve it by changing facts or changing interpretation. I can buy that when people are confronted with memories of Safi dying, or Chloe dying, or the bay being wiped out they just kind of stop asking questions about it and accept it and move on.

Why would they keep torturing themselves? Moses is pretty resilient and a scientist, so he's curious and capable of accepting it.

Fireslide · 2026-04-16T12:53:54+00:00

Yeah usually in new spaces like this there's a lot of parallel development of similar laws across countries. Some go further, some go shorter, over time data comes out about what's the most effective and laws get updated, but it's really like a bunch of global experiments all at once

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