Unemployable and Uninvestable
I have been mostly unemployed since the dot com implosion of 2000–2001.<p>I made a small packet of dot com cash that helped me in the early years. Not retirement level money, but enough to supplement cash from infrequent consulting gigs.  And enough with my spouse’s income to qualify to invest in startups either directly or via venture capital funds.<p>I’ve applied to hundreds of companies across the industry since 2002.  Multiple roles from low level programmers to mid–level managers and executives. I had been the CTO of a fairly large company in the 1990s.  None of my experience mattered.  There will be hiring managers from FAANG jumping in here saying “no, no, no, we absolutely look at your experience” and I’m here to tell you with one anecdotal data point that they don’t.<p>So I’ve withdrawn entirely from the industry.  Happy to sit back and watch companies repeatedly make the mistakes that I made and learned from in the 1990s.<p>In turn I’ve been building and profiting from my own businesses over the past decade.  Investors reject them as “lifestyle” businesses because they only earn a few million US$ in profits every year.  But that’s plenty for myself.<p>I have no investors to answer to, few employees to cater to, and it’s a lot easier than constantly trying to play catch up with whatever the rules are for either getting employed in tech (you’re not all FAANG companies, stop interviewing like you are) or invested in by venture capital (expecting every company to have unicorn returns is how you get Theranos and FTX).<p>Between the businesses I own and the investments we’ve made we’ll do fine as we slide into our 50s and 60s.<p>Build a small business.  Get it going. Hire a kid to do some of the work.  Grow some more.  Hire another kid.  Keep iterating until your “work” is checking in on people, then hire someone to replace you as the manager of the business and start another one.<p>Constantly killing ourselves to hit the big payday in tech is like spending every last dime on lottery tickets in the hope that you’ll get that one big payday.  It’s a lot healthier and saner to just spend the money on yourself or invest it in your own business.  It’s probably not going to be a gajillion dollar payout, but it’s going to be more satisfying.