It could be burnout

Two years ago, I moved back to Florida for family reasons; a year in, I mused on the changes, both good and bad, that the move brought.

Now two years in, the most obvious life change is, (probably) unfortunately, employment. The executives at the company I’d been working at for over five years, remote full-time for over three, issued an edict declaring that remote work was no longer acceptable. Having moved three thousand miles away—with permission, to be clear—was no reason to grant an exception. Moving back to Silicon Valley wasn’t a realistic option, so I “quit” in December. (That absolutely requires air quotes. Yes, it was technically my “choice” not to scramble to find a way to move myself and my mother back to the most expensive metro area in the country, but come on.)

I’ve applied to a few companies since then. The closest I’ve gotten was with a company which I think I interviewed very well at. They assured me that my lack of real Kubernetes experience wouldn’t be an issue, since they had other technical writers who didn’t have any when they started. But, at the last minute I was told, no, actually they wanted a candidate with more Kubernetes experience. Well, then. None of the other companies moved me past the recruiter screening stage.

I won’t lie; this has been a mild shock. Not that long ago, companies you have assuredly heard of pinged me about job opportunities fairly regularly. I didn’t follow up on them because my job paid stupidly well. Now that I actually want to hear from them, the pings have largely stopped.

Is it just the soft tech job market? That can’t be ruled out. Tech writers don’t face quite the same bias that engineers do, but it can’t be completely ruled out, either. Is it the fact that recruiters have a documented bias for currently employed candidates, because obviously, anyone who’s been out of work for six months must have something wrong with them? That possibility seems disturbingly high. Are companies that were hiring for tech writers now assuming they can create docs with Generative AI and not hiring? No direct evidence of that, but put a pin in “AI”; I’ll circle back shortly.

Also, though: it’s possible that I’m not trying very hard.

I have, on the surface, good reasons. First, I wanted a break for a month or so. Then, I knew I was going off on an already-planned vacation to Texas in March. Later, I had an opportunity to return to a two-week residential writing workshop in Lawrence, Kansas, at the end of June. So I told myself to be selective, to only apply for companies I thought I’d really want to work at.

This approach lines up with what the best-selling job hunting book of the last several decades, What Color is Your Parachute, prescribes: figure out what fields and positions truly call to you and then figure out how to put your best foot forward, even if you’re not obviously qualified. Of course, I haven’t really worked through all of that, because the truth is that it’s genuinely damn hard to follow that advice. I tried a quarter-century ago and got the assessment that I should do what I’m good at—writing, (basic) web development, desktop publishing—for wildlife or environmental nonprofits. You know what? That’s hard to break into, and I didn’t have any real connections there. So I ended up staying in tech, doing tech things.

This is not the approach the rest of the job-hunting industry has. The most common advice you’ll find on LinkedIn can be paraphrased as:

Apply to everything all the time if you’re not applying to ten positions a week you’re a laggard better yet ten positions a day but still customize your resume and your cover letter for each one and figure out how to write each one so they get past the AI scanners also have you considered standing outside hiring managers’ homes playing “In Your Eyes” on a boom box for Christ’s sake GO GO GO GO GO

I’ve always found job hunting tiring, and I suspect I’ve grown too complacent from the perception that jobs would mostly come to me now. Also, I have a strong suspicion that the hiring system, such as it is, has gotten worse over the last few years, as both jobseekers and job posters try to game things out in ways that don’t truly reward either side. The skill of optimizing résumés to get them past automated screeners is, in nearly all cases, unrelated to the skills employers are actually looking for. And if you are one of the 7 in 10 hiring managers who thinks posting fake jobs is morally acceptable, I mean this in the nicest possible way: go fuck yourself with a rusty fondue fork, you soulless bottom-feeding pond mold.

So as I was saying, I wonder if I’m just a little burned out.

Some of it—maybe most of it—is shifts in the tech industry itself. I won’t pretend that there haven’t always been flimflam artists and fads, but the desperation has gotten palpably worse in the last few years. We’re no longer claiming the Next Big Thing will merely be a Big Thing; we’re claiming it will revolutionize everything, that whatever it is will surely be bigger than the iPhone, or the internet itself, or the entire microprocessor revolution. What is this incredible thing, the biggest thing since sliced bread and/or fire? Why, it’s virtual reality, of course! No, wait! It’s cryptocurrency! No, it’s NFTs! No, it’s AI!

It’s not just the fads, though. It’s the politics. Again, this isn’t new; there have always been companies with toxic cultures (Uber) and actively malicious raisons d’être (Palantir). But the gravity has drifted from a sort of left-leaning libertarianism—anti-regulation but socially liberal—toward a weird neoreactionary techno-authoritarianism coupled with passive hostility to anything that smacks of “wokeness”. In 2014, startups got money by aspiring to be Facebook for dogs; in 2024, startups get money by aspiring to be Chick-Fil-A with LLMs. I miss the naïve complacency of not having to give a damn about Marc Andreessen’s politics, of not fretting that startup engine Y Combinator is now run by a technofascist troll.

So, all this is to say that I feel like I might be at a crossroads, a turning point, a belabored metaphor about personal change. I’m not actively looking to leave technical writing, but I think I’d like to find other venues for it. Indie software developers looking for documentation polish. Smaller companies that want manuals or internal documentation. Heck, wildlife or environmental nonprofits needing writers for…something? I know how to research and review and be moderately entertaining. None of that is to say that I wouldn’t take a full-time job with a tech startup, assuming there are any left that won’t slam the door in my face after reading this article. But I’m not sure how much energy I’m willing to invest in pursuing full-time jobs with tech startups at this point. Unless they’re very interesting. (And don’t slam the door in my face after reading this article.)

Beyond work, life is…good? The question mark comes, of course, from politics again. Florida’s political climate hasn’t improved since last year. Neither has Florida’s climate, for that matter. As I write this, it’s before nine in the morning and already 78 °F—with 96% relative humidity, for a 77 °F dew point. 25.5 °C and 25 °C respectively, for those of you who don’t want to do the math. And, both political climate and climate climate contribute to Florida being in the middle of the largest Covid-19 surge in the country, something it feels like we’re studiously pretending isn’t happening. (Granted, most of the country world is pretending along with us.)

Despite all that, both greater Tampa Bay and Orlando remain appealing, vibrant places. I’ve mostly made my peace with what is (and isn’t) available within a 20-minute drive, accepting that I’m going to put a couple of hundred miles on my car each Saturday on excursions. A revival of one of the original tiki bars, Don the Beachcomber, opened its first location in Madeira Beach and a smaller bar in downtown Tampa.

I’m getting a lot of creative writing done on various projects. None of this is likely to become serious income (as I joke, I’m making tens and tens of dollars on fiction), but who knows. I was able to make it to a two-week residential writing workshop to get serious about rewriting a messy fantasy novel. (The first time I attended that workshop resulted in my first completed novel—and, generally, getting me to figure out how to write novels well, period.) I have a software project in mind that I may eventually manage to get to, which also ties into creative writing, even though part of me wonders whether I should be trying to just write it as a plugin for Obsidian.

And the truth is that financially, I’m doing okay. The decade of higher-paying tech writing that I got in hasn’t set me up for early retirement, but it’s set me up with a pretty big safety net separate from the IRA and 401(k).

I do hope to get more written for this weblog, although the vague sense of burnout makes focusing on tech articles more difficult than it used to be. Ed Zitron has the market for profane tech rants largely cornered. While I’m still a mostly happy Mac user, it’s increasingly despite Apple as a corporation rather than because of them, but I haven’t felt like I had much to contribute to that conversation, either. (Sorry, anti-Apple folks, I still find Windows and Linux worse for my personal tastes, and still find a lot of anti-Apple rants to have a distinctly performative look at how I am not a sheeple subtext to them.)

In the meantime, I’ll keep too-selectively applying at jobs, try to figure out if there’s a way to reach those ones and ones of indie software developers looking for documentation help, plug away at my creative writing projects and possible software project, and keep on keeping on.