Looking for work is a major drag. It’s a job in itself.

I have tossed around my resume’ left and right, trying to find that rock solid forty hour a week job with bennies and stability. As it is, I make my living as a professional nerd by hustling contracts and short term jobs, usually helping people with their websites, especially people with WordPress websites.

My official title is Web Application Engineer, but as an independent contractor I’ve had to become a Jack-of-All Trades. I’ve done HTML work, I’ve done a lot of database work, I’ve done tons of CSS wrangling, and I’ve even edited photos and written content.

I am not a content writer, I am not a graphic designer, and my official title has absolutely nothing to do with databases, but nevertheless I have had to work in all of those realms. On occasion I will work with another professional, but that is rare. In my early career I did work in teams: I was the programmer, then there was the web designer, and a content writer and a database Jedi, and maybe even one or two more people such as a project manager to make sure we were all on the same page.

I have had to wear so many hats mainly because most no longer wish to hire a team of people, rather they would prefer to hire one person to do the work of three or four people. I was turned down for a job at a software company because I had not worked with one particular database platform, despite the fact that the position was not a database position.

It is true that a lot of people and some smaller companies who hire me cannot afford to hire a whole team of people or a firm to work on their projects. That’s more than understandable. But when companies do it, when businesses who have financial resources to hire more people try to cut corners by sweating the few professionals they have, that just puts more pressure on their employees and the work suffers. It works much better if each engineer can work on their realm, just keep a steady eye on one facet of a project. Stressed out and put upon people tend to make more mistakes and not do as a good a job. Indeed, having to debug a script at the same time as you’re trying to get your CSS to finally wipe out that annoying zombie gap is stressful and inexpedient.

There are other factors to getting a job in the software industry: It is fairly incestuous, but to single out the software industry for that is a bit unfair since that’s true of many industries. (Michael Keaton got cast as Batman because he’s friends with Tim Burton.) It’s also easier to get a job in the software industry if you already have a job. Moving from company to company is something a lot of professional tech people do, which makes it more difficult for outliers such as myself to break in.

Also, I would put good money on a bet for this perspective: My best guess is that the software industry is one of the most ageist industries in the United States. Even Mark Zuckerberg was unapologetic about his disdain for older engineers. I wasn’t born yesterday, and most firms prefer hiring younger engineers. Walk through many software companies and you will see that most if not all of their employees look as if they just got out of college, which is true in most cases.

There are good reasons to hire younger engineers: They are trained in the most current technologies, and they’re already in tune with the most current technologies, but that’s not why most software companies hire them. Younger people are willing to work for peanuts. Older and more experienced engineers want to get paid what they’re worth. Younger people just want to get a foot in the door, so they are easy hires. And they get hired because software firms want to save a few bucks on personnel costs. The problem with younger engineers is that they lack experience, ergo a lot of software out there is badly written, which is why a lot of software ends up slowing down your computer, or crashing, or just has an interface that’s making things way too confusing.

But there is also one more problem in finding solid software work: I once found an opening at a large and prestigious software firm, a job position that I was perfect for. It was as if that job listing was written for me. I went to it to apply, only to find that the listing had been closed. It had only been open for a short time before they closed up the offer, less than a few hours, simply because they had gotten hundreds of applicants in that short time. There are a lot of engineers looking for work, which makes individual chances of landing that job even more precarious.

Indeed, I have been on the other side of that fence. Once, for a client, I had to hire a web designer. I wrote a carefully worded ad giving all the details of the short term web design project and then posted it on a job board for tech professionals.

I took it down an hour later because my inbox was flooded with responses. I had nearly two hundred emails from independent web designers and web design firms, all pitching themselves for the job. As I went over the emails, it was clear to me that a lot of them had not thoroughly read the ad, or perhaps they had not read much of it at all. Indeed, I couldn’t find one response that succinctly addressed the parameters and issues I had outlined in the ad. It was obvious that many of them had shot off pre-written responses, and most provided portfolio links to examples of their work, almost all of which were examples of small business websites, especially restaurant sites, and that’s not the kind of site or web work we were looking for.

Basically all of these people and companies were, apparently, desperate for work. And here I was, a single person, deciding who amongst all of those clamoring designers and design firms pinning their fervent hopes on a two to three week contract, would get the win. I would decide who got the job, who got some extra work, who was able to breathe a little easier because they were going to get some extra money in their pocket, even if it was just from a short contract.

It was quite a perspective, having that kind of power, even if it was just for that one moment in time. It was empowering and depressing all at once. Indeed, I once knew an engineer who was asked if he wouldn’t mind interviewing potential new engineers for his company. He readily agreed, and then a few weeks later he asked to be taken off the task. He said he had engineers practically begging him for a job. He even had one applicant start to tear up because he was so desperate for work.

So goes the job market. Nevertheless I march on, trying to make my way in this problematic world.