I'll bite: 15.5 years tech experience across SRE, SWE, PM, PGM, & strategic initiatives-adjacent things. Last roles was Director/Principal level. Last projects were driving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of portfolio acquisition integrations (successfully) at a $5B public company. NYC metro area but I've been remote for 13 years. No degree, self-taught, first real tech role acquired when I was recruited after hacking a company back in 2010. Laid off in Feb, though garden leave ran through April.
I've had mixed results overall. Primarily looking at senior+ TPM, TPGM, SI roles. My network is hard to leverage due to being remote for so long. Lots of cold applications. 25% of applications got recruiter responses within a day, 25% within a week, 50% blocked at ATS, ghosted, or hiring being re-evaluated. Not as many direct recruiter outreaches as I've received in the past.
From the JD side, salaries seem to be more stratified and requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before. I've seen quite a few requests for 10+ years experience for mid-level PGM roles. In loose convos with friends, everyone wants a big name on a resume but no longer will pay a premium to get it.
No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching. Being a generalist also seems to be more of a risk but I'm sure that's at least partly a fault in my own framing. I do not play the LinkedIn game well. My major contributions have been either inside a company (internally-focused, hard to share publicly or company-specific), mildly popular open source dev work (>100 stars), or things actually used everywhere but no one cares because it's not "real" dev work (created puppetlabs-firewall module, 10M+ downloads, adopted as part of Puppet Enterprise, used globally, no one cares). Without a strong public profile in a specific direction, I've been told I read as too hard to quantify.
Overall, it seems "bad" in that everyone is battling uncertainty about where things are going and being more vigilant to avoid the wrong hire. Credentials and resume pedigree seem to matter more than ever and roles are much more vertically aligned than I've seen them in the past. If you're good, with some amount of credentials, and a lot of vertical ownership then you'll probably be fine though it might take longer. If you're a generalist who's hard to pin down, you might be in for some pain.
No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching
Anecdotally during late '25/early '26, I didn't seem to see an increase in sr. engineer roles with explicit requirements.
I did have one surprise rejection during a screening call due to the fact that I had 4 years of compsci but no degree. I don't recall that happening before in ~30 years. I don't believe it was listed as a hard requirement, else I wouldn't have applied.
requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before.
My (small sample size) experience was that the "nice to have" lists of keyword soup got larger, but companies remained pretty flexible about them. Probably because for most roles, LLMs can help developers paper over these experience gaps.
ie - React shops were cool with my recent Vue experience as a substitute, since I was primarily a backend guy anyway
Not rejecting your experiences, just adding to the anecdata
This is probably more common than you think. VMs are expensive, both in resources and cost (if you’re using something commercial). OS-level isolation (shared kernel, cgroups, namespaces) is used pervasively
Modern VMs, e.g. using Firecracker shouldn't be that expensive. I think it's crazy that Kubernetes doesn't use a VM per pod model, especially since it was started by security conscious google.
I landed on near the same thing. I also went too far the other way at various points: ed as editor, weirder shells (posix sh, rc, es, rush (ruby shell), pdksh), suckless everything (even on MacOS, where possible). I found my healthy balance between using more modern tools and learning the defaults to avoid too much configuration. I still have 281 lines in dotfiles (according to `git ls-files | xargs cat | wc -l`), along with my dwm.tmux[0] as window manager, but I feel like I can generally operate in most environments as long as base tools are present. If others haven't tried it, I recommend giving it a go. Try being bravely default.
Oh, I've used some awk too. My favorite (and most ridiculous) application was using the qawk from The AWK Programming Language[0] book to make a flat-file relational database of CSV files. Ultimately I just moved to sqlite but I learned a lot about awk in the process!
The video claims the smell is not "entirely unpleasant" but that's a lie. It is the most disgusting smell I have ever encountered. And I used to have to shovel manure and clean chicken coops growing up. Once I even had to dig a dead racoon out of the guts of a square baler after it got run over and jammed up the machinery and then sat for a few days in the summer heat. Garum smells worse.
Fish fertilizer is the worst smell I have ever smelled. Similar to how our dogs smell after they've rolled in rotting salmon carcasses on a stream bank.
On that note, the easiest way to get your hands on some protease is to buy digestive enzymes sold as food supplements (most often they're made out of dried pork pancreas).
You also don't need much equipment: scales and an immersion circulator should do the trick.
For fish sauce definitely, assuming you also use the guts so you can get the enzymes. If you want to make with a protein source that doesn't have the enzymes present, like mushrooms, you can add them separately. Whole fish just fills the protein and protease slots with a single ingredient.
I've been wanting to make my own fish sauce for years at this point. I even found a huge crock to do it in. I've just never gotten it together to go to the fish market super early and source fish. What species do you use?
I've made a few batches of salmon garum that turned out nicely. Just make sure you use raw and not cooked, as the cooked fats will taste rancid. It tastes different than asian fish sauce or colatura but still of use in similar contexts.
The National put out a official 'bootleg' recording of two nights of concerts using the Mike "the Mike" Millard method, called Juicy Sonic Magic[0]. Only physically released on triple cassette though I think you can stream it. Sort of tangential to this conversation but it really captures the energy of a live show in a completely different way. Highly recommend checking out if you're a fan of the band, old bootleg recording techniques, or live recordings in general.
Technically TRS only has one ring (Tip Ring Sleeve) and TRRS only has two rings (Tip Ring Ring Sleeve). It does have four separate contacts though, separated by bands.
Through this project I realized that there's just some limitations to a plain tmux config. I eventually had to switch over to calling out to shell in order to get around those issues.
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