I was a working adult through the .com bust, 2008, and lost my job during the pandemic. I knew a lot of people who did things like half-ass two remote full time jobs, even in the early aughts. You know how many are successful in the long run? Zero. Still hustling the same tired patch of ground while their peers moved on because they only got better at hustling and didn’t mature as professionals. The people on top are on top because they either started on top or were extremely lucky. Hucksters that find themselves one step in front of the curve, trying to claw themselves a double portion of scraps will always do better than their immediate peers in the short term, and almost universally think they’ve figured out some grand secret to gaming the system. But gaining depth and credibility is what makes people actually successful in the white collar world. We’ll never be on the same battlefield for many reasons. Good luck on yours.
No grand secret, just sharing info with the guild. Wield these tools and become powerful.
All my work is homey network, no corpos needed. See how far your white collar net goes when hiring freezes continue into 2026. I agree that your network is extremely popular.
I knuckled under during COVID with one job and was rewarded with layoffs, while our CEO made record profits. I will no longer accept this as the deal. https://layoffs.fyi
I deliver. It is as simple as that.
If you're here, we are peers whether you believe it or not. You're certainly right.
Used to be peers. Unless you start making very precise physical objects out of metal for the aerospace industry, our professional lives are very deliberately several degrees of separation apart.
You'd be surprised! I was a custom microscope parts maker during my time in academia, mostly one offs but a couple fun things that we shared with our collaborators. Surely not at your level of precision, but I did my tour of duty in academia for ~10y, and was none the richer for it. I can only imagine the toys you have, We had a great machinist who was an ex-tool and die guy in our department, was a dream to work with. This work was my first love, but the American student debt system caught up with me. So it goes.
