

Honestly have to agree. I was skeptical on your take until I read his blog post. I see zero reflection on it. Instead I see blame and anger, and yes frustration.
Look, the market is trash, but there are jobs for those willing to learn. He mentions php. Php hasn’t been relevant for new jobs for a while. The only time I mention my php knowledge is it it’s in reference to an older project I did. He mentions he’s kept up on AI by “reading HN and articles” and then saying he has 5 projects he has essentially vibe coded it sounds like. That’s not keeping up with AI from a software engineering standpoint. That’s just using AI tools and reading articles. Keeping up with AI from an engineering standpoint to me is using their apis, running models, training your own models. Go under the surface, show curiosity.
We work in a field where a fundamental requirement is to keep learning. It’s very easy to get comfortable in a role and not learn anything new, but you’ll get stuck there. If you have unemployment learn every library you can. Learn Rust, Go, random languages. Choose the packages you don’t know very well to build your app. Deploy your app yourself, learn CI/CD and infrastructure. Don’t stand still.
I’m a dotnet engineer now. Right now that means I’m 40% dotnet, python, nosql, kubernetes, and React. 5 years ago I was Angular. 10 years ago I was php and webforms. You can’t just say “I learned to code, I’m done!”. In this field it’s never done.
Edit, I also want to call out two other red flags from him. He’s unemployed but the thought of in office was a red line for him? I prefer WFH of course, but if it’s door dashing or an office, it’s a no brainer. Then also if you have that many connections on LinkedIn and no one will vouch for you, that’s a moment of introspection. I won’t say all or even a majority I would expect to help out for me, but I have a decent network. You have to keep that up
From the forum post:
Yikes the copium here. Reviews are meant for users of the app, this is so incredibly biased and in bad taste. I have had my shittiest companies ask us to leave positive reviews on Glassdoor. The shittiest ones.
Maybe their big redesign that no one asked for isn’t doing well, and this is a self preservation thing, to get more people to download it. Maybe CEO asked them to. Maybe they’re just over eager. All are excuses and not valid reasons to give a rating on your own company’s product