Last May, I submitted my resignation for a previous job. I wanted to quit a long time ago but kept convincing myself to stay because the job market is terrible and Austria is in its third year of recession. Without being fluent in German, my options were even more limited. I tried to find a job during my employment but felt like companies weren't really hiring but instead were interviewing candidates to get free consultation or labor. Everywhere, I saw posts about fake job listings, AI replacing software engineers, and people struggling to find employment for several months.

So I made what seemed like the worst move but felt instinctively like the right thing to do - I quit my job anyway. I used up all my vacation leaves so I can take most of June off. I uninstalled LinkedIn and blocked myself from the internet until 17:00 every day. I had many plans during this period, maybe make my own video game but I did absolutely nothing. Since I was on my notice period and was still getting paid, I didn't have much anxiety. I took this time to rest and think about what to do next. Anxiety creeped in by July and I started looking for freelance work. I got into stocks trading and ultimately decided to look for a full-time job around August to build up my capital. By September, I started working at my new full-time job.

Being a “Jack of All Trades” Is Not an Insult; It’s an Advantage

When I was in College, I had classmates who thought of me as their competition. I was a scholar and had good grades. During primary and secondary school, I had low or average grades. I even had the lowest grade in class at some point so there was not a competitive bone in my body. When I entered College, I was just relieved to find that most of the subjects were actually interesting to me. Getting good grades was just a side effect as I find myself curious and hungry to learn almost everything related to the course I chose.

I didn't care about the one-sided competition but there was one comment that stuck to me, "Jack of all trades, master of none." It was meant to be an insult by one of my classmates who made it a mission to prove that he can be more successful than everyone else who graduated with honors. He tried to get into every company I've ever worked for to prove that he can do whatever I can do. He saw how I changed tech stacks in some of them and after being rejected by these companies, he called me a "Jack of all trades, master of none". He focused on being a Database Administrator and he didn't change his stack much. Years later, he was finally able to join a company I worked for except just a few weeks later, the company's client hired me directly. It's been about five years since then. I moved to Austria three years ago and he has not been able to follow me since. I heard from another classmate that he still asks about me but has been stuck in the same company for years. He tried to find work abroad several times and failed there too.

“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

― William Shakespeare

That is the full quote but the latter part is often cut out. In the earlier years of my career, each role is well-defined, job descriptions were short, and people who don't dedicate their entire career into a very specific role or stack were viewed as less capable than those who do. The assumption is that someone who knows too many different things cannot possibly go deeper into one thing and be successful at that. But that assumption is wrong because you can definitely do both. This trait has served me well as I see the job market change.

• Learning Python while being stuck in a Java-heavy codebase got me a remote job in an AI start-up in Silicon Valley
• Learning Go while initially being hired as a Python developer for an airline company allowed me to take advantage of the scarcity of Go developers in Austria which got me a job as a backend engineer and a visa sponsorship
• My previous experience with with AI and Python got me a job at a start-up where I learned so many different modern tools in the field of AI
• My experience with modern AI tools landed me several interviews and jobs (both full-time and freelance)
• My combined experience with Go and Python gets me invites from clients looking to migrate their codebase to Go when they realise that for most of their use-cases, they really just need a very fast language to make API calls and not all the AI libraries that come with Python

The list goes on. Having different sets of skills and knowing multiple languages gave me several options. Had I stuck with one specialty, I would have struggled a lot when demand for that specific area decreased or became oversaturated.

Adaptability Over Principle

I hate "AI" and I still believe that it does more harm than good. But I'm aware that it's not going away and there's no escaping it so if it's gonna piss me off, I might as well make money out of it. Before I joined a previous start-up, LLMs such as ChatGPT were already popular but I never really cared. I took that job hoping to learn more about the technology and maybe change my mind. I was impressed for the first three months until the burnout hit. I walked out of the job a few months later disliking the technology a little less but with a new perspective - I can use this technology to my advantage.

Almost two weeks into unemployment, I found a client on a freelancing platform that requires full stack development and LLM knowledge. I'm focused on backend engineering and although I have dealt with frontend, it wasn't deep enough to consider myself "full stack". I also hated dealing with CSS and JavaScript. I accepted the job anyway and used Cursor, an AI-assisted integrated development environment. I'm on my fourth project with that client at the moment and he is satisfied with the outcome. I review the code that Cursor generates, of course, and I reject it or do manual modifications when needed.

I had several job interviews for full-time roles since then and eventually accepted one job offer. In many of these interviews, even those that are not AI-focused, they expressed interest in my previous experiences working with AI and I believe I earned additional points over other candidates because these companies believe that I have something extra that could help them in the future when they start integrating AI into their products.

Had I closed my mind about AI because of my (still) negative beliefs about it, it wouldn't have opened a lot of opportunities for me. Some people would say this is cognitive dissonance but principles have never paid my bills. Trading stocks from companies that mention incorporating AI into their products has also worked well for me. It is compared to the "dot com" bubble. Will the hype die down? For sure. Until then, I will use it to my advantage and when it's dead, I'll move on to something else and celebrate its demise.

Having Multiple Sources of Income Gives You the Power To Tell People To Fuck Off

I've always wanted to trade stocks but I needed a platform that automatically deducts taxes for me. When I saw an ad for exactly this kind of app during my midnight scrolls on Reddit, I decided to install it. I tried it out with 100 EUR at first then slowly added more capital. On my first month, I was up over 1000 EUR on a 1600 EUR capital. Maybe beginner's luck but since then, I've purchased some books and read everything I could about trading online - both technical and psychological topics. I remember my financial advisor telling me not to try trading and put it into ETFs instead because the people who manage those funds know better. I'm not saying I know better, I have little experience after all but if there's anyone who cares more about my interest, it's me. I think it's only right that I study the stocks that I put my money into. If it fails, I have no one else to blame. I have increased my capital since then. Made a few mistakes, learned from them, exercised patience, etc.

When I got back into full-time employment, I was more detached to the role itself. With my savings, ETFs, staked cryptos, trading, and now also freelancing, full-time regular employment became less of a mode of survival but more as a way to increase my capital. It's still my biggest source of funds but it's not the only source. This knowledge made me less tolerant of stupid "asks".

For example, during the first two weeks of the full-time job I got last September, my manager would just call me out of nowhere on Microsoft Teams. I find this incredibly rude and I've never worked with anyone who wouldn't message first before calling especially when it's for something that doesn't require urgent attention. Aside from the fact that I hate that app, it would really kick me out of focus because I'll be debugging something and all of a sudden, that shit flashes on my screen. Plus, it feels like he's just trying to catch if someone isn't working. One time, I had enough and asked him if this is gonna be a common occurrence. Surprise, surprise, he asked if we can have a call where he defended himself and said a bunch contradicting nonsense like "We trust you but of course, if I see you're available and you don't pick-up, I will get suspicious". I think he realised how dumb that statement was right after the call because I was prepared to quit on the spot if he did it again but after that, he actually asked me first if we can have a call and waited for my response.

Another example. A few days ago, the client for my freelance job asked if I could build him this elaborate research citation app. The requirements were ridiculous and incoherent. I could have clarified further but just by the first look, I knew I would not be working on that as a side job. I declined the job knowing that I would probably lose the contract. I've been working with this client for three months but with smaller and more realistic features. In the end, I didn't lose him. He just said he appreciated my honesty and gave me something else to work on.

If I had no savings and only one source of income, I'd be clinging onto it no matter what. I'll be saying yes to every request that a client makes and I probably wouldn't be calling out bullshit from micromanagers. When they know you're willing to leave anytime, they take your complaints more seriously.

Conclusion

I don't know how this new job will work out. I'm not sure about the future of my freelancing and trading would go either. Right now, all I can do is practice and learn as much as I can. If I find something interesting, I'll write it down. I became too lazy to write in the last three months but I should keep going as it helps me reflect on things I would have otherwise ignored.