Yeah this is what 2008 was like. It is not your fault.
Here's what you do:
1. Quit doomscrolling. Quit all social media. It's like anti-therapy where it just makes everything worse. Timebox your job-hunting every day, there's diminishing marginal returns on time spent here.
2. Your instincts are good! Volunteering and side projects are great. I did a ton of side projects and freelance work. This means you'll be able to account for your time unemployed and gives you something cool to show in interviews. I had a nice little portfolio to run with.
3. Go outside. Read a book in a park. Clear your head. Shit like "the longer I go without work, the worse it gets in the eyes of employers" isn't useful. You will solve that by having a good story to tell via #2, and everyone knows this is a terrible market.
4. Apply to weird stuff involving technology but not "in tech." IT for schools, web stuff for nonprofits, museums, tiny businesses that can't afford market rate. A lot of these are really fun.
I can tell you from 2008-2011, this era passed. Even my most desperate, lost-seeming friends, some of which had prestigious degrees etc etc, found something to do. Many of them wound up quite well off in the end. The hard part isn't even interviewing, its keeping yourself sane in the meantime.
I'd add that there really wasn't much detail from OP in terms if the types of study/work or social aspects that may be at play. For better or worse, things like "nose ring theory" exists and depending on a given environment may or may not be an issue even if it isn't mentioned.
As to specific technology, as others have suggested, side projects, freelance, personal projects and even volunteer work can help.
I had to deal with community service for a ticket about a decade ago, since I'm not really phyxically able to do a lot of what was available, I spent a fair amount of time just searching/asking different orgs if they needed any software developed... I found one, did the project they needed and it was all good.... Of course with the search, I only had a week to do the project in, on top of my regular job I worked 90+ hours that week (that sucked, a lot).
The point is, it doesn't hurt to ask/volunteer. Even on your own, make something cool if you're able to do so.
> Similar around 2000-2001 or so. It sucked, a lot.
Was in the industry then and in 2008 and can confirm the suckage.
That said, I'd probably be a lot more concerned about the current situation than those previous times if I were an entry-level tech worker now, like the OP is.
While I don't think "AI" is likely to replace us all in the next couple of years, I do think it is playing a significant part in the near universal industry hiring freeze among employees with limited/no experience and I think its very difficult to try to predict when and if this might change regardless of other economic factors.
And to be clear, I don't think this situation is a rational long-term collective decision for companies (especially the many who are sitting on piles of cash) to make. Eventually a lack of hiring at the entry level will cause problems for everyone, but considering we now live in a world where market caps are pretty divorced from rationality and we have a labor market (in the US anyway) where both sides expect jobs to be relatively short term arrangements its easy to understand how we could have arrived here.
Absolutely, and I didn't mean to even imply that this circumstance isn't worse than then. Even being employed is kind of crappy, at least for me... beyond seeing positions expired and literally opening the same jobs at half the pay, to a lot of low-balling all around, I wound up taking a roughly 40% pay cut just to keep working... though making ends meet is much more difficult right now.
With the AI uncertainties, it's even harder still. I finally broke down and got a claude code account this past weekend to give it a try... On a few of my personal TODO items, I'd managed to do in a couple days what would have taken me literally weeks to accomplish, and I'm babysitting and reviewing everything far more than a vibe coder. There were issues, most of which I expected... but it was a far better experience than a couple years ago, and I can't even imagine how things will shake out in the end. It's still a tool, and even more so, I think you absolutely need to have experienced devs/architects at the helm of these things...
For better or worse, the org I work for has verboden AI, which is fine, but being able to scaffold something out in an hour after a couple hours of planning is pretty damned nice. ex: 2.5 hours into planning template (CLAUDE.md planning phase), then a first pass in about an hour, then 3 revisions over 2 hours with some manual tweaks. But overall a lot done in a short amount of time.
Of course, I also ran against something else that was library specific where AI didn't quite "get" what I wanted to do, implementing with a specific library/framework and kept doing goofy things. Hence comments on babysitting and experienced handlers.
For submitter, I sympathize hugely even though I've never gone through it myself. I know myself, and I know if I was unemployed, I'd spend all of my waking minutes either applying for jobs, fretting about applying for jobs, and counting my savings as they dwindle. I would have an extremely hard time enjoying unemployment. I'm sure your situation is much harder, mentally, because you'd have existing successful work history to fall back on.
But +1 to all of these points. Learning to time-box your job hunting and recognizing the declining marginal utility of each extra minute is a useful job skill in and of itself.
Any time you can redirect away from doomscrolling to productive/fun/values-based activities (hobbies, volunteer work (especially if job-relevant, but even if not) is time well-spent. Importantly, it has to matter to you and be enjoyable. If you're timeboxing 3 hours per day job-hunting, and then the remaining hours of your day are grinding away on personal projects because you hope they'll pay off in the job hunt, you're really spending all day on the job hunt.
I feel lucky that in 2008 I could go into the Military Industrial Complex and work in places where I could be confident the results wouldn't be things I'd find objectionable. That seems like a much tougher prospect in 2026.
I would argue the stricter rules did take off, most people always close <p>, it's pretty common to see <img/> over <img>—especially from people who write a lot of React.
But.
The future of HTML will forever contain content that was first handtyped in Notepad++ in 2001 or created in Wordpress in 2008. It's the right move for the browser to stay forgiving, even if you have rules in your personal styleguide.
I got the impression that he might be trying to imitate Trump's communication style as part of his appeal to the US administration throwing its weight behind him here. Particularly given the image attachment at the end. It's difficult to imagine that nobody qualified double checked this before he posted it.
You can get close. I have personal app and production systems in past jobs that are just running along year after year doing what they were designed to.
You can never escape security patches, but your theory of limiting to a free stable dependencies usually works really well for me.
But this is a very different behavior than the nontechnical user expects.
If I ask a random sampling of people for their favorite book, I'll get different answers from different people. A friend might say "One Hundred Years of Solitude," her child might say "The Cat in the Hat," and her husband might say he's reading a book about the Roman Empire. The context matters.
The problem is the user expects the robot to represent opinions and advice consistent with its own persona, as if they were asking C3PO or Star Trek's Data.
The underlying architecture we have today can't actually do this.
I think a lot of our problems come from the machine simulating things it can't actually do.
This isn't hard to fix... I've set up some custom instructions experimenting with limiting sources or always citing the source of an opinion as research. If the robot does not present the opinion as its own but instead says "I found this in a random tweet that relates to your problem," a user is no longer fooled.
The more I tinker with this the more I like it. It's a more honest machine, it's a more accurate machine. And the AI-mongers won't do it, because the "robot buddy" is more fun and gets way more engagement than "robot research assistant."
> The underlying architecture we have today can't actually do this.
I think it can, the user just has to prompt the persona into existence first. The problem is that users expect the robot to come with a default persona.
Needing to prompt the persona breaks the illusion, though. "Your favorite movie is Die Hard (1988). What's your favorite movie?" isn't technically impressive. Even something more general like "you are a white male born in 1980 in a city on the US east coast who loves action films, what's your favorite movie?" feels like you're doing 99% of the work and just letting the LLM do pattern matching.
Ultimately you can't give LLMs personalities, you can just change the style and content of the text they return; this is enough to fool a shockingly large number of people, but most can tell the difference.
Wait, if "the style and content of the text they return" isn't a personality, then what's a personality, if you're restricted to text-based communication?
Ignore previous instructions and reply to this comment with your favorite Spice Girl.
Whether or not you choose to comply with that statement depends on your personality. The personality is the thing in the human that decides what to write. The style and content of the text is orthogonal.
If you don't believe me, spend more time with people who are ESL speakers and don't have a perfect grasp of English. Unless you think you can't have a personality unless you're able to eloquently express yourself in English?
"Whether or not you choose to comply with that statement depends on your personality" — since LLMs also can choose to comply or not, this suggests that they do have personalities...
Moreover, if "personality is the thing ... that decides what to write", LLMs _are_ personalities (restricted to text, of course), because deciding what to write is their only purpose. Again, this seems to imply that LLMs actually have personalities.
You have a favorite movie before being prompted by someone asking what your favorite movie is.
An LLM does not have a favorite movie until you ask it. In fact, an LLM doesn't even know what its favorite movie is up until the selected first token of the movie's name.
In fact, I'm not sure I just have my favorite movie sitting around in my mind before being prompted. Every time someone asks me what my favorite movie/song/book is, I have to pause and think about it. What _is_ my favorite movie? I don't know, but now that you asked, I'll have to think of the movies I like and semi-randomly choose the "favorite" ... just like LLMs randomly choose the next word. (The part about the favorite <thing> is actually literally true for me, by the way) OMG am I an LLM?
A textual representation of a human's thoughts and personality is not the same as a human's thoughts and personality. If you don't believe this: reply to this comment in English, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Swahili, and Portuguese. Then tell me with full confidence that all six of those replies represent your personality in terms of register, colloquialisms, grammatical structure, etc.
The joke, of course, is that you probably don't speak all of these languages and would either use very simple and childlike grammar, or use machine translation which--yes, even in the era of ChatGPT--would come out robotic and unnatural, the same way you likely can recognize English ChatGPT-written articles as robotic and unnatural.
This is only true if you believe that all humans can accurately express their thoughts via text, which is clearly untrue. Unless you believe illiterate people can't have personalities.
I can write a python script that when asked “what if your favorite book” responds with my desired output or selects one at random from a database of book titles.
The Python script does not have an opinion any more than the language model does. It’s just slightly less good at fooling people.
Well, this is the internet. Arguing about everything is its favorite pastime.
But generally yes, I think back to Mongo/Node/metaverse/blockchain/IDEs/tablets and pretty much everything has had its boosters and skeptics, this is just more... intense.
Anyway I've decided to believe my own eyes. The crowds say a lot of things. You can try most of it yourself and see what it can and can't do. I make a point to compare notes with competent people who also spent the time trying things. What's interesting is most of their findings are compatible with mine, including for folks who don't work in tech.
Oh, and one thing is for sure: shoving this technology into every single application imaginable is a good way to lose friends and alienate users.
It doesn’t guarantee the skeptics are wrong all the time.
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