Pure fucking luck applying to an ad on Indeed. I was summarily fired from my previous job under deeply perplexing and seriously odd circumstances. Over the next seven months, I sent out over 800 tailored resumes and cover letters. Job applications were more work than a full time job. In the prior seven months, I had a grand total of 12 actual rejection letters, 2 ghostings, and 1 interview that never got past the first round.

I applied to an ad that popped up on a Saturday morning and the recruiter called me less than 30 minutes after my application. I thought it was a scam. Turns out the dude is just motivated and deliberately posts his ads on weekends to also find motivated people. Not sure I agree with that bit, but hey, I’m an engineer, not a recruiter.

So, yeah, the job market is really feeling like a sheer numbers game. FWIW, my whole 35+ year career, I have been accustomed to sending 1 resume or application and getting the job I want. Usually, recruiters, companies, or former coworkers poach me from my employer. There’s been some massive shift in things, and it feels like something intentional to disempowee workers.

It’s the enterprise level backend stuff, technical systems management for Outlook, implementing rules and policies, assigning account group memberships, reports, SharePoint administration, etc.

“On my own” inasmuch as anyone in society is independent. The longest part of any of these jobs is choosing and sourcing the components, even with the aid of Internet searches and online inventories. Locating everything took about a month.

But once I had all the components, it only took me about five hours. The bulk of that was cleaning up everything. And the actual labor time was only that long because I teaching the neighbor kid how to work on his bike.

They were acquired by Opta Group in 2023. Since then, the quality has declined while prices increased. And around the time of their acquisition, they started doing some shady stuff when claiming USB-IF compliance. The cables were blatantly not USB-IF compliant.

Another example: I personally love my Anker GaN Prime power bricks and 737. Unfortunately, among my friends and peers, I am the exception. The Prime chargers are known for incorrectly reading cable eMarkers and then failing to deliver the correct power. This has so far been an issue for me twice, but was able to be worked around.

This is absolutely by design. The corporate raider playbook is well-read. See: Sears, Fluke, DeWalt, Boeing, HP, Intel, Anker, any company purchased by Vista (RIP Smartsheet, we barely knew ye), and so on. Find a brand with an excellent reputation, gut it, strip mine that goodwill, abandon the husk on a golden parachute, and make sure to not be the one holding the bag.