A sample third-person news article about my own search for a job.

When Austin Ballard got laid off from his software development job in February 2024, his first impulse was one of worry and dejection. His despair soon turned to hope and a renewed confidence, however, as he realized that this hardship could be just what he needed to break out of his professional rut and step firmly onto his dream career path.

Although Austin has enjoyed computers and basic coding logic since he was a teenager, becoming a software developer was not his first choice for employment. His true passion and talents were always in English and the desire to bring order to chaos.

Educational Exploration

Austin began his schooling at Brigham Young University–Idaho in 2010, where he declared an English major with an emphasis in creative writing. He had left high school with the dream of becoming a book editor, and he enjoyed writing stories as well, so he thought that it was a perfect fit. However, he soon realized that what a college calls an “English course” is very different from what he was used to in high school. “They really should call the English major ‘English Literature,'” he says. “I was expecting to learn about grammar and usage, but all I did was read old stories and be asked to prove whether they were good or not.” Austin found some enjoyment and experience editing as an English teacher’s aide and a writing tutor at BYU-Idaho’s writing center. However, after a year and a half of trying to make his academic courses work out, Austin had to accept that he had no future as a creative writer. What he really enjoyed was not poetry and prose, but language itself.

Austin transferred to BYU-Idaho’s sister school, BYU-Provo, to declare a Linguistics major. He was fortunate to easily get a job at BYU’s writing center, as the then-recent change in missionary age for the university’s owner, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had left it understaffed. With on-the-job experience and a new major, Austin felt confident about his new educational path and his prospects for the future; however, although he enjoyed his courses in Phonetics and the History of the English Language, one of his classes made him realize that his educational exploration may not have been over quite yet.

“I had never hated a college course in my life more than Theoretical Syntax,” he says. “It was all about what might be ‘theoretically’ possible to develop in human languages.” Austin describes himself as a very practical person, and Noam Chomsky’s theories in syntactic linguistics went right over Austin’s head in terms of usefulness. He described the lessons the professor taught as similar to “listening to someone try and explain the rules to an overly complex board game that they had just made up in their head.”

While his English major had been too far on the artistic side of literature, Austin now found himself too far to the other side of the spectrum in a major that was too scientific. He soon redeclared his major to English Language and declared a minor in Editing, finally reaching a balance between the two. For the rest of his college career, he was able to hone his editing talents, focusing on subjects like usage, semantics, grammar, and design.

Early Editing and Content Jobs

Austin was able to regularly use his English language knowledge in his job tutoring hundreds of students at the BYU Writing Center. He was also able to use his creative talents and enthusiasm for projects to design educational writing handouts, a weekly morale-boosting newsletter for his fellow tutors, and two video commercials that advertised the Writing Center’s services. “I’ve always loved projects, at work or in my free time,” Austin comments. “I love looking at something and thinking, ‘Can I make something like that myself?’ and then working on every detail to get it just right.” In the case of the promotional videos, Austin took upon himself many responsibilities to create them from start to finish, including writing the script, casting, directing and recording the narration lines, filming, sound mixing, and adding effects using Adobe Premiere. “One of the videos was a cheesy infomercial I based on one that I had fallen for, and the other was one of those hand-sketched videos that was really popular in the mid-2010s.”

As the spring semester ended, Austin applied to BYU’s on-campus publishing house, the Religious Studies Center (RSC) and was fortunate enough to get an offer for the job. Austin enjoyed finally putting his editing skills to use, and he was promoted to team lead after a year. Besides editing books, Austin also contributed to the Portuguese language translation of the RSC’s website and got to work one-on-one on a historical research project with religious historian William G. Hartley.

After graduating in June of 2014, Austin was hired at a local SEO marketing company called Boostability. It was around this time that he used his newly developed publishing skills to create a novel, which he wrote with his cousin, edited, typeset, designed a cover for, and self-published on Amazon.

Rather than producing long-form projects that took time to carefully polish and develop for publication, the editing department at Boostability (nicknamed “Boost” by its employees) was a fast-paced environment. Austin was assigned to edit a queue of many 300–500-word guest blogs each day written by freelance authors and optimized for SEO-building keywords. Austin took his work seriously and soon became one of the most efficient editors in the team. On days with an exceptionally large queue, the managers would periodically schedule “dashes,” offering gift cards to whomever could edit the most blogs within a 1- or 2-hour period. Austin was the primary winner of such dashes. “I was just so excited to be good at something,” says Austin. “I would turn off my headphones, get fully in the editing zone, and just crank through them at full speed.”

Austin’s skills were tested to their limit in 2015 when the queue became particularly large right before the holidays. In order to get through the hundreds of articles before Christmas break, the managers offered a bonus of $250 to every editor in the department if the queue was cleared before the end of the year. Austin’s breakneck editing speed was instrumental in clearing the queue, and his efforts won him the $250 as well as the Employee of the Month Award. “I edited upwards of 70 articles a day,” Austin says. “Roughly twice what everyone else was getting done. I even ended up with a repetitive use injury on my arm because of all the typing.”

For all his speed and efficiency, Austin didn’t sacrifice quality for the quantity of his work. Austin got regular praise for his precision and eye for detail when editing the guest articles. However, Austin’s efficient methods did not translate well in the company’s productivity metrics. He also became disillusioned with the company when a new hire was promoted over him purely because of her educational background. He relates, “I started to wonder, ‘What am I even working towards?’ If tenure doesn’t matter and results don’t matter, what’s stopping others with more educational background than me from getting promoted over me every time?”

Austin learned of a marketing project manager job at Boost, which came with additional responsibilities as well as a bonus structure that rewarded employees for harder work and stronger results. Austin got the job and immediately enjoyed the change of pace. Rather than editing blogs all day every day, his responsibilities varied throughout the week and included coming up with blog titles, assigning them to freelance writers, editing them, and then reaching out online to get them posted as guest articles on blogs. He enjoyed the organizational and project management aspect of the position, which involved managing several workflows at once as the guest articles went through various stages of development. He also enjoyed working on a smaller team and the easier camaraderie that came with it.

Although he was new to the team, Austin soon learned that creating a macro on Microsoft Word to fix common mistakes cut down the established editing process by 80%. This allowed him to publish more blogs and regularly get the highest tier of bonus money. However, the downside to this focus on quantity was that it depended on the amount of work Boost had available, and it soon dwindled. The workload became so low that at one point Austin says he was working for less than an hour a day. “You know that part on the film Office Space where Peter says he only did about 15 minutes of real actual work per day? I ran out of things to do quickly, and because it was an hourly job, I had to just sit at my cubicle and get paid to twiddle my thumbs.”

With fewer and fewer clients to write articles for, it became impossible to reach even the lower tiers of the bonus structure, and Austin realized his ability to sustain his family financially was rapidly declining. He reached out to other publishing houses and content companies seeking work, but by 2017, Austin came to a difficult conclusion: in order to feed his family, he had to give up editing.

The Reluctant Switch

Austin heard that there was a lot more money to be made in computer programming. He had always enjoyed coding and logic while using computers throughout his youth, so he enrolled in a local technical college called Mountainland Applied Technical College (MTECH) for a year-long web development certification course and internship. It was a long year of school and full-time work, but fortunately for Austin’s financial situation, in December 2018 his internship at Xactware became a full-time position, this time salaried instead of hourly.

Austin’s hard work had paid off. He could finally have a flexible schedule instead of being paid to be on the clock with an empty workload. “My kids had no idea what to do with me coming home at 4:30 every day,” Austin laughs. “They were so confused at seeing me come home before they were already in bed ready to be tucked in.” He comments.

Despite his internet application developer title and work duties, Austin found ways to use his editing and organizational skills to help out his team. When he found that the company wiki was outdated and in serious need of cleanup, Austin volunteered to clean it up: “My manager told me they had been wanting to update it for years, but that no one wanted to do it because it was tedious. I looked at him and said, ‘I love tedious!'” Austin also contributed to project documentation on the wiki, making it easier for new hires to jump into the existing projects and learn how to use them.

As 2019 ended, Xactware’s software development department was merged into another one, which changed the budget available for promotions. Only one promotion was available, and Xactware gave it to the developer with the most tenure: someone who had started working a month before Austin did. “It was just like at Boostability,” says Austin. “No care for results at all. [The other candidate] had even taken three months off for maternity leave, so I technically had more months of actual work experience. But someone higher up just looked at the list of employees and just said ‘Give [the promotion] to her; she’s been here the longest.'”

Austin was disillusioned by Xactware’s broken promises and once again felt like he was at a company with no future prospects. Austin and his wife decided that they needed a fresh start. Based on the cost of housing and other factors, they decided to move to Oklahoma. “That was toward the end of 2020, right in the middle of COVID,” says Austin, “and all the work turned remote. So that, at least, was perfect timing for a move.” Xactware was not registered to employ workers in Oklahoma, so in 2021, Austin accepted a fully remote software engineer position at a hospitality company called Sabre Corporation. With the new ease of working from anywhere, he made the move and settled in Oklahoma.

Although the work for Sabre Corporation was convenient, Austin had been hired under difficult circumstances at the company. It was experiencing growing pains from large number of developers and managers being hired in a small period of time, and the travel industry was suffering from the pandemic. “I had something like three or four different people I had to report to,” said Austin. “Sometimes I got conflicting instructions from two of them, and sometimes they didn’t even know what team I was on. Even the managers were just so new, and I had next to no onboarding.” After a year at Sabre and with no end to the confusion in sight, Austin turned to LinkedIn to seek a more stable job.

Luckily, Austin didn’t have to look long—The pandemic had opened many remote programming jobs online, along with many recruiters. One such recruiter found Austin a coding job with an office only a couple of miles away from Austin’s home: a software developer position at a legal company called TVC Pro-Driver. Although the position was a hybrid one, his team was largely remote, so Austin ended up spending most of his working time in his home office.

Despite Austin’s enthusiasm to be hired at a smaller company, it seemed that fate was destined to continue meddling in his career journey. The project Austin was hired for, an overhaul of the company’s member portal website coded in Angular, was continually put on hold as the company’s goals and priorities changed. In the meantime, Austin offered up his editing skills to TVC’s marketing team. They had been trying to set up a schedule for publishing content for their blog, and Austin turned out to be a good resource for setting up and streamlining their WordPress page. He was also instrumental in fixing several forms on the site that were coded incorrectly and were causing errors for users. “I was a good bridge between the coding and content side of their work,” he says.

A Foggy Future

Things seemed to look up for Austin in late 2023 when TVC Pro-Driver was acquired by Love’s Travel Stops. His benefits became much better, and after attending one Love’s onboarding meetings to welcome the new merged company, he felt like he was part of a company that valued its workers like family. However, a mere two months later, he was laid off. “It was sudden, but not surprising,” says Austin. “The project I was hired for in the first place never got off the ground, and the CEO even admitted that the position itself had probably been a mistake.”

Instead of looking for more development work, Austin decided that this was the perfect time to rebrand himself back to his editing origins and find a content-related job again. “I’m glad I could get the years of development experience,” he says, “but it’s clear to me that I had no future in the field. I want a job I’m good at and can grow in.” He also tries to keep an optimistic attitude about the past five years, hoping that his software engineering experience will make him more marketable and versatile as an editor, communications specialist, or technical writer.

Austin’s unemployment comes at a tough time. Despite hundreds of job applications, reaching out to hiring managers personally, repeatedly revamping his résumé, and asking for referrals from over 50 LinkedIn connections, Austin only got two interviews in the following 10 months of unemployment. Artificial intelligence-powered applicant tracking systems, as well as an estimated 36% or more job postings being fake, make the journey a discouraging slog. Aside from networking and applying daily to jobs, Austin strives to gain an edge in his job seeking process with a thoroughly decked-out LinkedIn page, an editing and writing portfolio website, and regular contact with tech recruiters.

More than anything else, this time spent unemployed has helped Austin reflect on what he values in a company and what all his experience has added up to over the years. “I just want to work,” Austin says. “I don’t have a lot of specialized experience, but my passion and drive to return to what I excel at have never been stronger. All I need is a chance, and I know I can be an indispensable asset to any company.” It’s been a long journey that as yet has no end, but Austin hopes to one day soon build the career he’s been looking for his entire life.

Austin is open to work in any industry as an editor or content project manager. You can contact Austin and see his full résumé of work experience on LinkedIn.