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:
- The Defense Industry (rebranded by Pete Hegseth as a War industry)
- AdTech (advertisement tech)
- A little FinTech (financial tech)
- 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. I never even heard back from them because, as my contact reported to me in a side channel, they didn’t want to talk to me due to a number I typed, which they made me put down like a shot in the dark. I never got a 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 help 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.
Reconnecting
The disconnection detailed above was sent to city councils of Loveland and Fort Collins. In Loveland, my Ward’s representative replied by CC’ing Senate District 15’s Janice Marchman, and the board of county commissioners Jody Shadduck-McNally, Kristin Stephens and John Kefalas.
A placation I have observed as common appeared: No business is required to use the ConnectingColorado database.
This is correct, and I made clear to them that the bleak adoption rate is the problem I am observing. No business seems to have heard of it, so I am not comforted at the lack of outreach to those businesses. No business seems to use it, so I am not satisfied with the database’s lack of value or incentive.
The board of commissioners, in doing their jobs, have been repeatedly quick to state that we can go find help in one of a number of support groups.
My observation is that support groups are wholly insufficient. I will go so far as to call them remedial.
In mastering the skills fostered in these groups, jobseekers remain completely stuck beneath a barricade forged by AI platforms and human distance. You can write the best resume and cover letter this side of the Mississippi and still not be seen by local businesses, because it all goes into the same garbage chute that AI is being trained to efficiently ignore.
Placement agencies
Recruiting agencies like TEKsystems are filling a gap, and keeping jobseekers pinned down as temporary resources who gain no health benefits for six months or longer. They proxy employment into local businesses who have wholly given up on working with job portals and doing their own interviews. The businesses which TEKsystems works with have barricaded themselves in and now trust TEKsystems to trawl these support groups for leads. When candidates get placed in a company this way, the success is gained by circumventing popular platforms like Greenhouse, Workday, LinkedIn, Indeed and more.
Success via placement agencies is further proof to me that the status quo systems being sidestepped are sick and failing. The TEKsystems model is a condom which lets employers trial employees without having to look very hard at them, making the employees pay for their own healthcare until the perceived risk of removing the employment condom is past.
I attended a NoCoNet meeting and found a full room of people stuck with the lack of opportunity. TEKsystems is there on Zoom to help, for certain values of “help”.
To date, the only answer that Larimer County has for job leads is to submit to TEKsystems.
I am concerned that the county is forcing us into a pipeline of one recruiting agency, which apparently maintains a better job database than anyone else by contractual agreement.
I should like to see TEKsystems divest their exclusivity with these local businesses, and for the county to provide tooling that enables these businesses to be visible to us directly. TEKsystems can supply interviewing infrastructure and talent acquisition, but they should not become our employer.
Workforce Development must not be reduced to stuffing TEKsystems with employees.
On paper, the TEKsystems mission is to graduate jobseekers into direct employment with one of TEKsystems’ exclusively contracted clients. But until it accomplishes that, we are being shoveled into businesses who don’t interview us themselves.
TEKsystems exists to quite nearly rehabilitate people into employment. It should not be the primary tool for literally every jobseeker to find leads.
Reestablishing
City Council
On January 6 2026, I gave public comment at my City Council, continuing my civil tirade against tech and private equity stealing away layers of public life. Alongside Flock and Verra Mobility, I called attention to ConnectingColorado.
There was a very large group at this particular council meeting, because Loveland’s council continually strives to vanish the homeless and there are many voices for and against that.
I bent this audience into listening to me for two minutes (shortened from three because that’s what keeps happening when Loveland votes on contentious issues and draws so many comments).
You pay them, and you give them our data. That is not the art of the deal.
SD-15 listening session
On January 7 2026, SD-15’s Janice Marchman held a listening session at the Loveland Public Library. I took notes.
Janice had been present at the city council meeting the night before, and recognized me right away when I entered the Gertrude Scott Room. She thanked me for what I’d said.
I wrote down my question for her on a paper, but we did not end up reading those directly. As a result, I raised the issue directly in the closing minutes of the listening session. I watched as two state candidates immediately wrote down the name eightfold.ai when it left my lips.
After, I spoke with Mackenzie, Janice’s campaign manager. I arranged coffee to discuss campaign experiences.
County Administrative Matters
On January 13 2026, I gave public comment for the board of Larimer County commissioners. Jody Shadduck-McNally, Kristin Stephens and John Kefalas were all present. Few others were there, because the meeting takes place at 9am on a Tuesday.
I began my comment by informing them that they had an email from me in mid December, and that I was contacting SD-15’s rep about it, on account of ConnectingColorado being a State Issue. All three of them nodded immediately, which affirmed to me that I was doing the right thing.
All three gave individual reply to me. A county assistant (forgive me if there is a better job title I did not realize) gave me the contact information for Mark Johnston, Director of Economic & Workforce Development, which is public anyway.
Immediately after this comment, I had that coffee with Mackenzie, and I prepared myself for what it would mean to go to caucus in a few short months.
Within hours, Janice emailed me personally with a confirmation that Jody Shadduck-McNally had re-forwarded my emails from December, which links to this piece.
Janice Marchman is scheduling a meeting with accountable groups, like Mark Johnston as Director of Economic and Workforce development, and the CDLE.
Kelly Folks, I’m coming for you. I don’t know if she has a say in anything at all, or power to recommend changes. I’d love to have an interview, though.
Recalculating
Colorado appropriated some $5M to give us what we have with ConnectedColorado.gov, and I am genuinely not sure I can make a well-formed list of what that is. I can describe what it displaced, but that is not a description of what it does. I can describe what jobs I want to find in Colorado, but the website does not orient itself to allow that.
We in Colorado paid for the creation of a site which, offense intended, isn’t impressive. It is rubberstamp tech with no supervisor in a multi-tenant database.
The $5M toy website is a me-too product with no vision statement except “eliminate interviews”. I’m not sure who led this in Colorado, but I’m noting for that eventual meeting.
The metrics for assessing this product implementation should be made public, and I would like to see the criteria we agreed to send them as a specification.
It strains my belief that a manager asked for what I see running on ConnectingColorado.gov. I would like to speak to your project manager, and my name’s Autumn, not Karen.
If any Coloradoan knows about the project/product design for ConnectingColorado.gov, I would like to speak with them about their experience.
Jobseekers did not benefit from this, so who did?
I would like to see the project documents because I know eightfold.ai is incompetent for our mission, but I need to know if our local officials are too.
A workforce platform in the state of Colorado must see the composition of our communities and the way DoorDash draws big boxes around you.
What Minecraft should have in common with Workforce Development is sandbox with choices. Games make it easy to scratch at our satisfaction for incremental progress. While jobseeking, progression is rare. I’d struggle to keep an honest list of top 20 companies I care anything for, but I have to send to 100 and more.
Instead of no-progression hell, Chamber of Commerce needs to innovate how to gain a voice with small business owners, using what they know of larger modes of business to do more.
They have wanted membership dues, and they’re collecting with larger companies. You can hear the Chamber of Commerce ads on the gas station radios in Johnstown, and its glossy production that advertise how to become a member. There really isn’t a pitch to win you over, just, become a member.
Fort Collins Chamber of Commerce is not a city-run org, and they’re immune to the feedback I’ve tried. They would first of all need to care.
They reportedly do not.
ConnectingColorado.gov should be a place where we see our communities come to life without ad spends with Google, Meta and on AI. Our site should be built on technology that we get to own and be proud of because it gives our communities the powers of Reflection, to see themselves without the toxins of Big Tech and advertisement.
Colorado Open Records Act has led me to look for literally any evidence at all of our local businesses in public records, and it is not rational to find businesses this way. It is so sparse that the most I can say is that “realtime” information in this category is limited to watching a year of restaurant inspection grades.
I’m not nostalgic for a phone book, but that would literally be better than what we have today, and what I’m telling You, All Of You, is that all ConnectingColorado.gov had to do was be a phone book and it would be more useful than this AI Slop.
What I see from eightfold.ai is the most vanilla boring thing any talentless software engineer would picture.
We possess tremendously poor powers of Reflection in our communities. Eightfold.ai’s product could not possibly do it. It is categorically unable. And so, I want to know about the project staff.
Who Wrote This Spec?
ConnectingColorado.gov
ConnectingColorado.gov needs to be about rigging us up in lights, with attention to detail that shows love for Colorado. It does not need AI, no expensive contracts for hyper modern backends. No comments or ratings or anything. No payments, and only accounts for our businesses. They can set job titles they want to give and how many. We see numbers. We go and meet people.
Again, the competition is a phone book, just a literal phone book.
We do not need to upload our resumes to a system like this, we need cubbies to keep our different resumes, where maybe the site makes it easy to print them sometimes. Maybe it handles a little appointment email to both parties if you click a button to go see the place.
ConnectingColorado should be a toolbox where every single business, consumer, and jobseeker can see something raw, real and rich about their area. Give it a map and let us explore our city and worry about watching leads we find interesting.
On-demand gig work has risen in prominence and is not gone. The appeal is that you can dip into it and it’s mostly always there. We need our business data to be flowing all the time, so that anyone can dip in and decide what they’re hunting for.
It should be our workforce weather map and everyone should recognize it when they see it.
I want it to be so good that we offer to consult on doing it in more states.
Economic and Workforce Development
Right now, Economic and Workforce Development shuttles people to a number of groups, and this faux wisdom is doing harm instead of good.
The department needs to be creating county-specific spaces where we businesses and we workers can make anything for ourselves from the ingredients we see. We should have choice paralysis, not choice scarcity. This often means going to them, not waiting for them to come to you. This is why it incenses me somewhat to know we are losing county staff roles with Tammy’s office, who should be thriving instead.
Even if ConnectingColorado.gov continues to lumber forward unchanged, Larimer County should be throwing enormous interest and support into detailing small businesses and making it possible for others to find us, without layers of Big Technologies shaping the process and demanding fees to exist.
Our businesses are absolutely mired in costs, and social media is pay to play. When I ask Google or Apple mapping tools to show me Local Restaurants, what I get is national chains pushed to the top. In a car console, the top few options are impactful.
The department should be kicking down our business doors to tease out interesting needs or openings we have for workers. We should know who is liaising us, and it should be someone we trust and know cares.
Small Business Development Center
SBDC provides advice to for-profit businesses. I am working on learning about what they say to businesses looking for employees, and whether that is like listening to sales pitch for using More Big Tech.
SBDC should be running their events in collaboration with the workforce map, and use face-to-face time to invite people to update their job opening numbers.
Economic and Workforce Development and SBDC are missing in action, at best like a sophisticated phone menu or glorified doorman on your way to somewhere else. They don’t need to run heavy programs to be effective. If they want to be a gateway to a Work Net for hiring people, that’s more useful than scraping the workers out of the way into support groups.
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.
