Not to be reductionist of the genocide in Gaza, it is undoubtedly evil and both parties deserve to be labeled as such for supporting it, but to speak as though that’s the only issue in this world and the only yardstick we can use to measure both parties is itself reductionist. And the reason they maintain their power is that the system is so structured as to ensure it. And that’s not to say there is nothing we can do about that (for one, elimination of FPTP voting), but as of the 2024 election the reality was that only one of those two parties would win. And to claim that recognizing that in itself is the sole cause of it is silly.

In the US there are only two party choices that matter. We are forced to vote for evil and must choose the lesser. I agree with you in principal but Trump is an especially egregious choice.

LinkedIn and Indeed mostly, though I do check my resume against the listing using stuff like jobscan.co to play the stupid match-the-keywords game to rank myself as high as possible. The response rate sucks but I do get responses, and I think shitty response rates for applications via job boards is kinda common in general. In my area (both geographically and career-wise I suppose) there are also plenty of recruiters looking for people to get in the door, which gets you past the AI gatekeeper. Though recruiter activity has slowed down in the past year and it’s not a time of plenty anymore they’re still around.

As with anything YMMV. So many variables, and surely some luck has played a part in my experience.

That’s entirely dependent on experience. Low to no experience? Get certs. In today’s age of AI powered resume screens, even with experience if what you’re pursuing is a position lower on the totem poll then you will still need them to get through the AI. Probably want a higher-value cert than CompTIA if you wanna work in IT but don’t want to stay trapped in the help desk (I’m talking a networking cert, a cloud cert, ITIL, etc). The most common career path is through the help desk but one doesn’t need to stay there.

Once one gets a decent amount of experience certs don’t really matter. In fact, I climbed up the early rungs of the IT ladder by selling my experience with stuff in my home lab and selling my ability to learn. I don’t have a single cert and never have. I misrepresented nothing about myself, but I did need to eat some below-market-pay jobs at first to rack up real experience to sell. Nobody really cares about the cert, it’s a knowledge industry and what matters is what you know and what you’ve done.