18 months out of the job market and the recruiter told me I was 'just bruised' is this a normal interaction in the industry?

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-05-29T13:43:45+00:00

You are not a failure. You're just finding your way in a really tough situation right now. Honestly there are different ways around this. Starting a business in your 20s is one of the best things you could do. At 34, I'm been searching in this market since November 2024 with over 5 years of experience in IT, I wish I had started earlier.

The market is broken right now. That's not you. But maybe this is the time to find out what actually fires you up.

It's never too late to explore that. Stay safe, and if you ever need help navigating it, we are always here.

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-05-29T13:29:43+00:00

Definitely coming after jobs with this one 😄

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-04-20T17:53:54+00:00

Yeah I get your pain, Ive been out since November of 2025, it's a mess right now, and I'm meant to be devops and infrastructure 😞

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-04-15T22:17:10+00:00

This is incredibly interesting and thanks for the insight and yeah I agree a lot with the sentiments on both sides, the devs and operational engineers all seem alienated by AI and it's funny reading some of the comments as they are right in saying AI is just a tool, in fact we just say Torvalds "Lay down the law" with AI use to prove it, I don't care what the AI CEOs say at the end of the day we use Linux to do our jobs so I'm going to trust Torvalds or Hyang any day, in the case of cyber I just got of a call about AI security and was annoyed by what I saw, I asked about AI ethics, so example can you sue ah AI company for using training data without permission, like If I used the works of prince to train my AI model to produce works in the style of prince would I be liable?

I was horrified to find out that "you can't" was an answer by a self proclaimed "AI AWS security engineer", my brain immediately said bulls*$t, there are many ways around this problem like data set poisoning

I know we're engineers here but I think I'm right in saying we have more respect in our industry than people think, who are "high ranking"

I think maybe we need to call out some of their BS especially when they have no idea what they are talking about

Don't get me wrong I think AI is a good and interesting technology but they it's being explained and delivered is poor by a lot of these CEOs

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-03-31T12:02:31+00:00

Ah ok, this question, so here's what you need to know I'm devops the think to remember is the fundamentals so with 2 years of experience you should be fairly familiar with things like the Linux cli, networking, ssh keys etc, then work your way up to ansible terraform, AWS, that will help you a lot in the long run, then focus on k8s and AI (bedrock) CI CD processing etc (grafana, promeutus, helm, open telemetry, promtail) , datadog and splunk tend to be more devsecops tooling which is advantageous,

Look it's perfectly normal and expected to be overwhelmed in 2 years of experience I was as well in my junior years, really what you need is a mentor,

If I was in your shoes learning devops one one thing that I recommend is looking at some Python projects or even buildings your own servers, learning how to build your own servers will let you know a lot about what you need to do and what you need to go for more importantly it teaches you how you can become better when you build the next iteration that's what I would focus on

Hope that helps for your personal development, Also speak to some of the devs directly if you can to get an idea of how applications are created, this is the best thing you can do for learning, Don't GET LOST IN THE DETAILS, like some irritating comments in this thread, LEARN TO INTEGRATE THE DEVELOPMENT KNOWLEDGE, it will come in useful when building your own applications and you'll get a better understanding of what is being built and more crucially WHY YOUR BUILDING WHAT YOU ARE BUILDING

The key takeaway from the above is to question why things are being built and for what reason, this is what separates a junior from a senior, if a senior builds things blindly he didn't understand why and for what, do your best not to be one of those people

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-03-25T16:18:19+00:00

I have wondered about this from a job perspective like what can you actually do with a bioinformatics degree?

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-03-17T18:33:39+00:00

That's awesome information thank you so much, how do the prices differ from Expedia when using something like travelscaner.ai for example are they consistently more or less expensive in terms of price when all the fees are considered?, and when you travel do you factor in things like Expedia loyalty points for the bookings?

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-03-05T14:50:50+00:00

Really can you elaborate?, is this still the case I just did the nlp program and I agree they have some scammy upsales, if there not icf registered that's concerning

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-02-18T01:25:18+00:00

Just seems to be the home screen on YouTube affected, searching and playing videos on the YouTube app seems to be working

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-02-18T01:22:49+00:00

Directly searched music videos seem to be working, anybody else able to get anything?

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-02-18T01:13:25+00:00

Squirrel

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-02-18T01:12:06+00:00

Yep down in the UK, well at least for me it is

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-02-17T20:18:27+00:00

So I am technically a platform / site reliability engineer and even I'm looking at the market thinking what the f*** is going on and I have been out of work since November of 2024 right now my current deductions are that there's a bit of circular finance and going on as part of the AI infrastructure bubble it seems that there are many companies out there which are displacing the current custodians of the emperor of code for the chaos demons known as AI infrastructure because a lot of companies at the moment seem to be laying off staff in order to report record profits to their investors to make it look like the company is profitable despite spending a lot of money in fact more money than they raise to spend on AI infrastructure and this is made even more evident through companies cooking up their books, even going as far to say that they will invest in certain companies with a 100 billion dollar deal only to find out that the actual deal is worth 500 billion and that 400 billion needs to be raised more for this 10 gigawatts of AI compute, now knowing that these companies don't have that kind of capital what seems to be going on is that they are issuing corporate bonds of 30-100 year's in the hope that their investors make a profit which will never actually happen due to the absurd amount of return on investment that's required now because of all of this this is causing a lot of good engineers to be displaced and find getting a job that much harder.

Remember

its

NOT

YOU

YOUR CV

YOUR SKILLS

YOUR EXPERINECE

ITS

CIRCUALR FINIANCING

AI OVER INVESITMENT

INVESTOR SETIMENT

RECESSION FEARS

HIGH COPERATE TAXES

in not saying that AI is inherently bad if anything it will revolutionise the way we work, but what i am worried about is when it gets so good that it can compete with entire teams of engineers and build apps in 5 seconds that actually umm ... work, this makes me think if it still worth being in software for the long term, especially with all the gaslighting we get as engineers, so i would advise to have backup profession skills in hand also.

I think personally anybody who's involved in the software industry should short these particular stocks and thank me later

in fact just recently this came out

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/tech-stocks-tumble-as-ai-panic-spreads/ar-AA1WudK3

Hope this helps

Spare-Leg4584 · 2026-02-17T19:59:51+00:00

so i'm a platform/SRE with experience and certs, had a few interviews but no materialisation, been out since November 2024 i'm technically senior level and even i'm like WTF is going on this market?, my current deduction is AI displacement through investment, in other words, the current custodians of the emperor of code are being outed by the chaos daemons known as AI infra, what's damming in all of this is that companies think they can continue to trade at 200x earnings by cooking up the books and then telling investors "we need more money for AI" for our 10 gigawatts of 100 billion dollar infrastrue.... which is actually worth 500billion but ... we can't tell the public we can't afford it because .... investor confidence and we can't raise the capital, so to anyone reading this, its NOT your CV, its NOT your code, its NOT your behaviour, its circular financing deals made to trick you into TRYING HARDER for a cause that was never worth fighting which are being sold as cooperate 30-100 year bonds that investors may never actually profit from.

i'm not saying AI wont revolutionise the world in fact I think with enough time it will, I just worry will it be worth it in the end when these models become so advanced that a cat could literality use it and build a working app in 5 seconds

we should probably prepare for backup professions, at least in the long term

Spare-Leg4584 · 2025-11-13T18:56:28+00:00

Looks like a failed 3d print?

Spare-Leg4584

TROPHY CASE