Out of curiosity… I had a look at the job situation at the moment … because let's face it, the writing is on the wall at my current position. I've been there 15 years and I'm an old fart by IT standards.

Most people by the time they've entered their second decade of experience of "being 21", they're management… but that's just not me.

I'm also quite an oddball, in that I am a part-timer now, quite conservative in the tools I use, and some would say, quite opinionated. For example, while the work laptop is running Ubuntu 24.04, I've set up FVWM3 as the desktop environment and my "IDE" of choice is gVim. I sic AdNauseum onto blocking Rovo out of Atlassian's UI frequently, and even went as far as using a TUI interface to Jira to avoid it. While conservative in the *style* of tools I use, I still believe in keeping things up-to-date. So while I might not use all the latest features, I do believe in keeping up with security updates.

At work I mainly code in C/C++ or JavaScript, and greatly prefer the former. At home, I will use whatever gets the job done: C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Bourne shell… and know enough SQL to be dangerous. I also do some circuit design (Kicad) and know which end of a soldering iron to hold. When I talk "full stack" I mean silicon to frontend. Not the world's best designer, but give me a design and I will try and find a way to make it work.

My home machine fleet are a mix of Gentoo, AlpineLinux, Debian, Ubuntu and OpenBSD machines, having been a Linux user since 1996. Windows is a legacy OS for playing games, and I'm past playing games these days.

Last job was found through Seek… so headed there. "Ohh no no no, you can't browse anonymously!!! We require you log in now!"

Well, F' you Seek. You didn't need that before.

Had a look on Gumtree, and well… it's a pretty sorry tale if you don't drive, don't have a construction white card or any real trade background. Plus, I'm over commuting for work: one position advertised as "Brisbane Area" covered pretty much everywhere from Springfield to Yeppoon, and as far west as Tambo!

Not sure if the newspapers have a jobs section. Job search like it's 1990 yay!

The "cushy" job though is over, and I may be door-knocking for work by this time next year.

#rant

@highvoltage Indeed… particularly a day job in the tech industry seems treacherous at the moment.

LLMs are going to mean "technology" will be mud for a long time investment-wise, which means getting work in that industry is going to be tough.

I only need to make it another 20 years. After that, who cares? By then, my parents and my cat will be gone… I'll have no one that needs my support, I can quietly *vanish*. The planet doesn't need every person on it to live to triple-digits.

I could probably make it with a frugal existence for the next 10… 15 would be a struggle, but I doubt I'd quite make it to 20. So quitting work and retiring isn't an option here yet. I need something that will carry me the next 5-10 at least.

Then I can think of early retirement.