Having taken 3 months last year to get on top of the fatigue issues, I’m now in a position where I feel physically and mentally able to get back to work. Unfortunately I’m unable to actually get a job; the Wellington IT job market has tanked due to a number of factors :

• The NZ Coalition Government chose to take an axe to the public sector to reduce spending, banning contractor hiring and cutting budgets, with a lot of workers in “job hugging” (holding onto their existing job at all costs, even if they hate it)
• Organizations adopting Agile / DevOps ways of working, which has completely rewritten most IT job titles and responsibilities – “Chapter Lead”, “Product Owner” and “Site Reliability Engineer” are just word salad to me – which means my work experience in Senior Infrastructure Engineer roles don’t map very well to the new roles and leaves me struggling to convince hirers that I have the required skills
• Very cumbersome decision making in New Zealand agencies and businesses, with the recruitment process taking weeks to make progress waiting on one person to come back from leave and approve something.

The worst damage to the recruiting process though has to be the increasing prevalence of AI. It’s causing absolute havoc in the IT industry in general, polluting social media platforms with AI slop, much of it intentionally whipping up enthusiasm for deploying AI or FOMO to scare executives into action. The companies behind AI are losing billions of dollars every month, having rushed to build environmentally-damaging datacenters around the world, so must aggressively recoup that investment. The trouble is it’s mostly hype with little detail into what benefits it can bring. (In fact a report this week on The Reg suggested less than 30% of AI deployments return the expected benefit).

Concerningly there is very little online debate as to the societal harm this revolution and subsequent mass unemployment will cause – the tech bros are in charge, with politicians suspiciously (deliberately?) taking a back seat. This lack of regulation is incredibly dangerous when Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies, announces they have created an AI so dangerous it can’t be released publicly. What The Actual Fuck are we doing here? Has nobody in power ever seen a Sci-Fi film?!

AI is also corrupting the hiring process by encouraging candidates to pay for AI services that spray hundreds of employers with optimized (read: manipulated to the point of lying) CVs and applications for jobs they’re not remotely suited for. This results in a massive influx of applications for every job, forcing employers to deploy ATS services to scan CVs for key words, reducing the human beings trying to find work to a set of bullet points. It’s a catch-22 clusterfuck that can only result in poor decision making.

I tried the (AI?) advice on social media to rewrite my CV to match the job being advertised (some of which don’t even exist, but that’s a separate gripe) but that made little difference. I’d either be ghosted or get an automated “sorry you didn’t make the shortlist” email. Worse, I felt a nagging sense that those tailored CVs weren’t an authentic representation of who I am and what I can offer – it was just meaningless business bullshit and box ticking to get past the automated filtering.

I’ve gone back to “human-made” and rewritten it to focus on recent history and detail of technology and skills used in each role, hopefully a bit sharper and more instructive. We’ll see.

Something I haven’t endured yet is the new phenomenon of the “AI Interview” where you have a video meeting with … nobody. The AI asks you a series of STAR questions (don’t even get me started on that HR bollocks!) and transcribes your results, marking your suitability for being put through to a human being. It’s like the reverse of Blade Runner and I don’t know if I would be able to sit through one of these without my soul leaving my body. Utterly dehumanizing and humiliating, but that’s the whole point, to show you how small and powerless you are in the New World Order.

Another factor working against me is age, as ageism is a massive but unspoken issue in New Zealand employment. I’ve removed my mugshot and date of birth from my CV and limited my work experience to the past 10 years, but suspect most organizations choosing between me and a Gen Z’er will opt for them over me. Not to profile a whole generation but good luck expecting them to stick around and fix an issue after 5pm or stay in employment for more than a couple of years, when they fancy heading to London for an OE.

I’m still checking the job sites hourly and staying in touch with the recruitment consultants that I trust to try and foster some leads, but I’ve given myself a hard deadline of the end of April. If I haven’t found a contract or had a positive interview for a permanent IT role by then I’m going to give up fishing in these waters and try to find something else that will bring in some money.