Disheartened

I tried looking for software engineering work in Northern Colorado. I have a significant work history in the industry, and I’ve been paid well in the past.

Colorado has a lot going for it, but the oxygen for software is taken up by a few usual suspects:

1. The Defense Industry (rebranded by Pete Hegseth as a War industry)
2. AdTech (advertisement tech)
3. A little FinTech (financial tech)
4. student startups

Working locally is my dream. I was willing to commute to Denver, but I didn’t want to. I submitted to non-profits headquartered there anyway.

The non-profits are frightened of my work history and prior pay, and tune me out before they even interview me.

I came away feeling insulted by their lack of interest.

Barring local work, I wanted to make a difference in government. I solicited myself for hire via a personal contact at Tyler Technologies, which is a sprawling assembly of smaller tech companies that work together to build tools like what Fort Collins uses for their open data platform.

This company, too, refused to give a rational pay range and made me guess at a salary on their intake form, and I never even heard back from them because, as my contact reported to me in a side channel, they didn’t even want to talk to me because of the number I put down, which they made me put down like a shot in the dark. I never got a single phone call or email from them, until my application reached the 3-month end-of-life window and they sent a fake personal message promising that they’d looked real hard.

I came away feeling angered by their dereliction of interest.

I began seeking out local businesses where I could put myself in front of human beings.

Every single one abandoned the interaction without a shred of followup.

Local companies (who like to fire a random number every quarter) like HP, Oracle and more, universally ignored applications and let the clock run out before sending a form template email.

Distraction

It had been brewing in me for some time that one reason I loathed writing resumes and cover letters (despite loving the opportunity to shine by writing unique ones) was that I didn’t believe in the flimsy rush-to-IPO mission selected by virtually every tech startup.

I have worked in HVAC efficiency and home building incentives through local power utility programs. I have worked in the hiring pipeline itself (and our company got banned from accessing LinkedIn). I have worked in maternal telehealth benefits right as COVID hit the planet.

In each industry, I have witnessed software engineers who have no training and minimal respect for the regulations they are ostensibly under. I’ve witnessed work ticket orchestration that implemented GDPR removals by hand, instead of through automation, and I’ve seen errors. I’ve seen the apathy. I’ve seen everyone just trying to make their manager happy so that they don’t get another project stolen from their micromanaging co-director of engineer.

I have seen managers perform hostile takeovers of companies by bringing in hordes of engineers from other companies they’ve worked in, diluting the culture until it is just another IPO shop. I’ve exercised stock in such a company, and watched them fail to IPO for three years, despite all of their marketing and time spent on financial news programs talking about a coming IPO.

I’ve seen managers fawn over nepotistically selected ex Facebook engineers, by that credential alone. The red carpet comes out. No one asks hard questions of the techno-nepotism hires, because we’re drowning and just want superstars to help us by magic.

I tried to reform hiring pipelines from inside such companies, only for the nepotism directors to steal away projects because they didn’t understand how to build a sustainable culture inside. They couldn’t promote from inside. They couldn’t even hire junior engineers, because everyone had to be a rockstar like us, only for them to treat us like we were expendables.

Disillusionment

I worked a lot of remote jobs over the years, and it was always an asset, because I could work for small local companies who didn’t want to pay for office space. I know remote work inside and out.

The impact of COVID-19 on the software industry was not transient; Remote working has become the standard. These job postings refuse to put valid salary ranges, even when they’re superficially in compliance with Colorado law. They list pay range bands like $110k-$459k, but won’t elaborate on which part of that band is for who.

I shot an obscene number of resumes out into the world. I wanted to pivot to engineer management, or perhaps project management, because I wanted to help the engineers I saw struggling to organize all around me.

An astonishing number of rejections come from the same platforms, like Workday, which call themselves AI shops now. Their black box procedures make it impossible to understand who is looking at your application and when. The scarce employees using the platform don’t bother issuing rejections until the posting times out 3 months later, even if the job posting closed long before that.

The opportunities that I secured wanted to subject me to a pipeline of five interviews. This is a lot, but it’s no sweat to me. In one opportunity, I made it past round 4, and then got an impersonal no-reply rejection providing zero feedback about what they were looking for and why I failed out.

In one opportunity, I got rejected by the CTO himself who was doing first-round interviews with promising candidates. I could tell that I hadn’t given my best interview to him, but his reply had been earnest and, most importantly, it came from an address I could reply to.

When I did reply to this business owner, I gathered all my wits and courage and I made a second attempt to pitch myself, this time as someone who understood small businesses, and knew full well how crucial the management layer was to performance, that I was tuned in and cared a lot. I asked questions he wasn’t accustomed to hearing, and they were all pointed at what drove value for his company. I wanted a dialogue, and I wanted to be confided in, so that I could show him what I was capable of doing, that I wasn’t just a specialized cog.

That man scheduled a follow-up interview and provided no agenda whatsoever. A week after our first round, we got on a call with no plan at all, and he decided he wanted to use the reply email I’d written as a template for what to talk about.

It was one of the weirdest followups I ever slam dunked. I got that man wrapped around my professionally documented finger, and he told me he wanted me to meet their other executive staff.

He scheduled me for direct injection into the hiring pipeline. My first programming interview was with a young rockstar programmer who needed me to share my screen on my IDE, having provided no guidelines at all. I love these live coding backseat driving experiences, because I get to explain how I think and solve problems.

Unfortunately, this tech child saw my Copilot integration (which I keep on a toggle because I hate the autocomplete spam) and something changed instantly in him. He stopped being interested. He must have thought the entire weight of my 15 years of experience was a sham. That child had no idea that I’d been making Graham Dumpleton mad on his mod_python email list in the early 2000s, because this child was barely old enough to walk back then.

This child had no one shadowing them, took no notes, preserved no recording of our meeting. They were bad at asking questions. They got weird when I tried to solve problems, but couldn’t articulate what they wanted or what they were looking for.

This Child Failed Me Out Of My Interview, which I had earned for myself, because they were unaccompanied and inexperienced. No doubt this company relied on that child for some things, but it is to their detriment that This Child was allowed to sabotage the opportunity I had earned for myself.

Disenfranchisement

I began following the Small Business Development Center in town, and the Economic & Workforce Development for Larimer County.

I took a meeting with a councilor at Economic & Workforce Development, and I told them about the sum total of what I found so frustrating about looking for local tech work.

There was no doubt tech work here and there, but I needed healthcare, and my rent is insane. I had begun citizen journalism and used it to great advantage to network with a wildcard reason to ask anyone and everyone what they were working on, and what they needed help with.

No One Was Working On What I Wanted To Work On.

The workforce office advisor confirmed this for me. They had no leads. They had no names. They had no groups.

The thought had been fomenting in me now for some time: Maybe I was the leader, and that was why I had so much pain writing these cover letters for groups I didn’t believe in.

I told him about ://Reset.tech, who has a job listing page that has been empty for nearly a straight year. I told him about how I emailed them anyway, and then about how I’d asked to interview them so that I could boost their mission. I’ve never received a reply of any kind.

This advisor asked if I’d considered running for office.

I told him I had.

Dismantlement

Small Business Development Center

The Small Business Development Center quit advising non-profits in 2023. You’ll have to ask them why, but don’t expect a coherent answer. Nobody really knows. They told me to connect with the Poudre Libraries system, which had taken on the brunt of non-profit advising.

When I investigated these resources, it became clear that no non-profit meetings had taken place in over a year. The quarterly meetings were for existing non-profits to shake hands again.

FC Chamber of Commerce

I had asked the FC Chamber of Commerce for a citizen journalism interview. No reply. None. I followed up. Still no reply. I followed up again, and still no reply.

I walked into their office and met their front desk administrator. This woman thought it was her job to make me walk back out the front door, but I held her nose in the dirt until she finally checked her spam box, and confirmed for me how many small business owners were going to her spam box instead of to her inbox.

She didn’t seem to care. She gave me a card for Ann Hutchison, the President and CEO of the chamber. Moments later, from my car just outside, I dialed the number. The same administrator picked up.

I made her transfer me to Ann’s voicemail. I emailed Suzanne Miller through a contact form, and she followed up with one of the most disinterested emails I have ever read. The only information she thought suitable to type to me was that Comcast was their email provider, and that they weren’t a City of Fort Collins office. Neither of these mean anything.

Is Comcast responsible for checking your spam box for ignored communcations?

Suzanne dropped the communication and never replied again.

In the time since, in the course of my networking in town, I have encountered no fewer than four other business owners who all reported that Ann Hutchison ghosted them for meetings they had set up with her, or quit communicating altogether before a meeting could be established.

Economic & Workforce Development

I began following the Economic & Workforce office itself.

It had raised my curiosity that the job listings they used to curate were no longer being maintained at all, and had been removed from the site entirely.

I had begun going inside of local businesses to find out if any of them had ever in their entire existence been liaised with the Economic & Workforce Development office.

No One I Have Ever Interviewed About This Even Knows What I Am Talking About.

I noticed that the office’s phone menu dumps you into a voicemail basically no matter what option you pick, and that it was always the same person’s voicemail. The hours for operation ended before noon, so voicemail was the status quo. (I still don’t know what option 5 for “other services” is for, because it doesn’t expound and still dumps you into a voicemail.)

After two voicemails from me, being confused and a touch irate, I got a call back from a manager, Tammy Olivas. I expressed my frustrations and made apologies for the premise of my tone.

I asked what was going wrong, and how I could them. I asked if they would hire me to liaise with local businesses.

Tammy said they couldn’t. Why? Because the county had fired all of her staff but one.

Tammy said that the state was cooperating to make ://ConnectingColorado.gov, and that it was out of her control. I had no specific questions about ConnectingColorado, but she immediately began saying apologist things about how ConnectingColorado had been off to a rough start. She called it a “maturing” platform.

I pressed Tammy for details about who I could network with, and Tammy was frightened by this. I asked who her own contacts are with ConnectingColorado, whether to report feedback or to interview them. This frightened her more. She refused to name a single person who supplies training, be it digital or in-person.

I pressed harder. Tammy decided to Google for ConnectingColorado’s governing leaders, and gave me the name Kelly Folks. Tammy didn’t know the name without Google’s help. Kelly Folks probably doesn’t even know who Tammy Olivas is.

ConnectingColorado

The state-backed site is a cookie-cutter job board with no innovation in it at all. It is deployed by a service called ://eightfold.ai

The future works here.

Every candidate deserves to be heard. Eightfold AI Interviewer screens candidates and elevates top talent, so you can focus on final decisions, not first-round interviews.

This site is a horrifying oversimplification of the workforce development mission. It deliberately squashes candidates so that only top candidates stand out, and no one has to focus on first-round interviews.

Furthermore, this website issues emails to me with multiple “matches” for work, and every single one they have ever sent me is for Oracle, a multinational company who needs no exposure at all.

There are virtually no local businesses in this database. It is a platform that signal-boosts Giantism Corporations with no regard for local workforce development.

The only way to provide feedback At All to this site deployment is via a Google Form. I left my comment in ALL CAPS, telling them that they should be ashamed of themselves for doing this to us.

Disconnection

Our leaders are failing us. They Are Hellbent On Doing No Work For Us. They are destroying our platforms, destroying our networks.

Our leaders are destroying our communities. We are not allowed to know the names of those who lead us, because they seek to disconnect us from themselves.

Our leaders are trying to stop us from talking. They hide behind their LinkedIn profiles. They block us. They communicate with silence. They obstruct our most genuine inquiries.

Our leaders want nothing to do with us.

If you or someone you are in contact with has a line to Kelly Folks, you should give her my information, or this page, which offers an email address to reach me.

There is no trust remaining, but if you hire me, I will change your city for the better. I will do the work you refuse to.

If you don’t hire me, you will find yourself in competition with me.

In the Spring of 2026, I will set loose tools for locals to find each other without these horrifying platforms. Our local businesses are closing, failing and drowning.

Our leaders are failing, and they should be losing their jobs instead.

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.