About

 

Matthew Manning


I am a senior member of the Software Engineering industry, a career that I cherish and enjoy. Engineering is not only something I am passionate about, its embedded into my human operating system. I've been writing code since I was in elementary school, long before coding was really integrated into a typical child's life.

After I was affected by a layoff in November of 2023, I began to search for my next opportunity to only discover one of the worst Software Engineering job markets in history had been just starting to get worse. Thousands of job applications, dozens of interviews, and one bad experience after another, I was still unemployed over a year later. In the age of AI, and with the changing political landscape, Software Engineers like myself have been struggling for respect and employment. I had hit my boiling point, and I started posting on LinkedIn about all the things that needed to be said and no one was saying, only to find that I was hitting post limits and comment size limits, without getting the entire message out. And out of all that frustration, the Maverick Debugger was born.

The main purpose of this blog is to get another voice and perspective out there and sidestep the ebb and flow of the content management within LinkedIn. So many of the issues facing the Software Engineering industry are argued about like there are just two sides to the coin, except most of the issues this industry is facing and a culmination of multiple issues. I plan on using this blog to dig into the deeper reality of what is happening, stuff that even mainstream reporting tends to miss.

So, if you want to read a blog about a cranky Software Engineer talking about the issues facing their career field, you came to the right place. As they say on YouTube videos: "Like and subscribe" or whatever the equivalent is.


The Maverick Debugger

LinkedIn Profile | Resume | Professional Overview


Popular posts from this blog

My Professional Overview

(Est. Reading Time: 4 min)     I've been out of a job for over a year, and I have been applying to over 1000 jobs during that time. I lost count, seriously, but I noticed a trend. When I see less job postings, I get more job ghosting when I apply. Alternatively, when I see more job postings, I get more rejections. During this time, I had over 16 different companies I've interviewed with, and almost all have been setup by recruiters. The thing is, recruiters are not doing well in this job market, either, and there are a lot of scammers out there messing everything up. So, to even the score a bit, I wanted to inject more humanity into my hunt. Job applications today are a form with 5 to 10 blanks, half of it being demographics questions at the end that I've answered so many times, that I can almost recite them word-for-word from memory. How do you add more humanity to that? Add a "Are you a robot?" captcha to them? No, I needed a "cover letter" to add to m...
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Technical Interviews Are Getting Insulting

(Est. Reading Time: 5 min)   ( Don't have time to read? Listen to the Podcast version ) The higher the level of the role, the more that technical interviews start to become insulting. And now I cannot wait to read all of the comments explaining how wrong I am. I have over 9 years of Python programming experience, almost 10. Asking me to do a "coding challenge" is an insult to my experience and skill level. But I have to put up with it, because that is the unfortunate norm in Software Engineering today. To dig into this deeper, though, we need to talk about Software Engineers. An engineer is a problem-solver who applies scientific and mathematical principles to design, build, and optimize systems, machines, and processes that improve daily life. Whether inventing new technologies, refining existing ones, or ensuring safety and efficiency, engineers combine creativity, technical expertise, and strategic thinking to turn ideas into reality. What separates engineering discipl...
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Ghosts!

(Est. Reading Time: 18 min)      ( Don't have time to read? Listen to the Podcast version ) It is a quiet Monday evening, and you are up late, worried about finding your next job. Everyone else is asleep, the house is a little dark, and you are curled up under a blanket and cozy on your sofa doing one of your least favorite pastimes: job searching. When all of a sudden, you hear absolutely nothing. Crickets. Wait, what kind of ghost story is this? Hold on, it gets scarier. You don't hear anything for days, weeks, even months. You come to realize you are never going to hear anything at all! You've been ghosted! AHHHHHH! Unfortunately, if you have experienced this, you are not alone. A ghost job is a job that a company posts with the intention of never hiring for the role. Ghost jobs quite often lead to ghosting, which refers to never hearing back from a company after applying or interviewing. To be fair, there are ghost jobs that you actually hear back from, too. " Alth...
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