How I Became Unemployable as a Software Engineer & What I Learned

Being a developer is a creative, highly-paid profession that can even be fun, but it’s also still a job. Here’s what you need to know.

Photo by Redd F on Unsplash

I’ll always remember when I became unemployable as a developer.

Life had happened, and I hadn’t had the time to code lately. That didn’t seem like a big deal, since I had been coding professionally since 2004.

At the time, I was working 45–50 hours a week at my full-time physical therapy job on top of 5+ hours every weekend as an Airbnb SuperHost.

Ironically, it’s Airbnb that got me so excited about coding again; their user experience was amazing, whether I was on web or the Android app.

So, in 2019, when I felt like I’d accomplished everything I’d ever wanted to in my sports medicine career, I learned about React 16.8 with Hooks.

This seemed like a much better way to build dynamic apps than what had been around before: ASP, PHP, WordPress, Drupal, jQuery, Angular, etc.

Within a few months, I was a React expert with 50 articles published on my blog, and that had even landed me a remote job as a developer!