After almost 6 years, I found myself on yet another sinking ship.

First time was back in 2014 when that internet media company went under and I found out they weren’t paying any employee social insurance despite deducting that amount from everybody’s paycheck.

Second time was in 2018 when DeNA sold off our game studio to a shitty JP offshore software development company and changed the whole management team to incompetent JP expats.

Now I find myself on the brink of the 3rd extinction.

During covid, my company’s parent company purchase another software development company in India. At the time, we didn’t pay much attention to it. Yet another M&A happening at the top level that us drones shouldn’t pay too much attention to, right? After all this wasn’t the first M&A they did. We never realized it was our death sentence. For the Indian center has many advantages that we did not: closer proximity to the UK (and thus better working time zone relative to the clients in the EU), they have an extremely high ratio of English speaking employees (English is still taught in school over there after all). Their staffs are far more open to learning new things and sharing that knowledge with the rest than the Vietnamese staff. We didn’t realize it at the time, but they were a friendly new colleague, they were a direct competitor with our company (since we don’t take on local projects after all, we depends entirely on the onshore team to feed us projects).

Ever since that acquisition, projects have gone dry in the S-shaped land. The management blame that on Covid, which is partly true, but we all know the root cause.

The Vietnamese staffs are just too stagnant.

Not only do we slow to adapt, we’re extremely resistant to learning new things. Even learning something as basic as English are considered a nuisance among the devs here. I keep telling them English is not only used for basic communication, with the recent breakthrough in LLMs model, it’s going to be THE most popular programming language soon. As a dev if you don’t want to become obsolete, you better haul-ass and get learning.

But apparently it wasn’t enough. Despite the management reassuring the staffs on every Town Hall meeting that everything’s fine, layoffs are being handed out left and right. More senior staffs that hold essential skills and can speak English well like me are being kept, but barely. It’s been 4 months since my last assigned projects, and things are looking bleak.

I’ve recently been put on secondary bench, which halved my monthly salary. If it was only me, it could still survive. But with my new baby, our family expenditure is exceeding $2,000/month. I don’t want to jump from this sinking ship, but as it is I can’t even make rent.

So for the first time in 6 years, I had to fire up my LinkedIn again. I’ve received no less than 500 offers during the last 6 years, all of which were respectfully declined. But now that I needed them, none are coming in. To be fair, they’ve been coming in less and less in recent years. I have no doubt it’s related to my age. People are skeptical to hire guy in his late 30s just to move rectangles around.

Most job postings these days require ‘a degree in digital design’ of some sorts. Most people won’t notice but that is a subtle way to limit applicants to the younger generation. In Vietnam, we did not have any kind of formal education in this field until maybe less than 10 years ago. Back in 2008 when I obtained my useless bachelor degree on Business Administration, I’ve already decided to follow graphic design, but no school in Vietnam at the time offered any kind of study program. There was only several courses related to digital illustrations offered by University of Industrial Arts, but they’re definitely not related to graphic design. I had to go halfway around the world to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and even that didn’t help much. With my luck, the stuffs that I learned (Macromedia Flash and ActionScript 1.0) soon become dead just a few years after I graduate. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration when I say 99% of the skills that I possess at the moment are self-taught.

Anyway, time to put the baby to sleep now. I’ll be back soon to talk about the job market landscape in 2024. Unlike 10 years ago, there’s barely any post looking for UI/UX designers that know everything under the sun including video editing, HTML/CSS/JS, Node.js. But it has other quirks which I’ll talk about in part 2. I signed up for Linkedin Premium just so I can get additional insights after all.