> It sounds like you've been out of work for a year and you've fallen into a state of anger and despair.
I've had non-stop employment for the last 17 years.
I think you get the wrong idea. I am happily employed for the moment. I am lucky to be in a very senior (VP of Eng) position in a company that I helped start. I am also able to hire and retain engineers for my teams so, luckily, I am not at the mercy of risk-averse hiring managers "scared to work with me". My point is that not everybody is that lucky, and that now even great people with great skills like the OP are struggling to find employment, and it's not their fault, but it's the system's.
One of capitalism's great ploys is the: "suck it all up and grid, it all depends on you" attitude where all emphasis is on you and your skills, but no emphasis on the problems of the system iself. It's like lottery, somebody got rich playing it, so you must be doing it wrong.
- If you didn't make it, you didn't grind/hustle hard enough. Must be something wrong with you
- There is a great garbage island in the Pacific ocean. Must be that you, the consumer didn't recycle well enough. Totally nothing to do with the corps created non-recyclable materials that are cheaper to throw away than reuse.
- The cities are choking with air pollution. Must be YOUR fault for not using a bike, and not the government which didn't make the infrastructure for biking or quick and efficient public transport, nor the corps which didn't invest in alternative fuels when it was the time.
It's always the individual person's fault in capitalism, and all attempts to question the system are explained away with the individual sucking at it. Even individuals within the system are likely to turn on other and say: "oh, if you just did this harder or better, you'd be richer". There is a lot of survivor bias there and not understanding that success in that system is often based on pure luck, where you were born, and who your parents were. In reality, for the majority of people, unless you are very rich, or live in a country with at least some amount of social security (i.e not the US), they are one chronic condition or long sickness away from homelessness.
We shouldn't close our eyes and see how the world is for others, and realize that we are one of the few lucky ones. But we could easily, as you said, have been out of a job, despite a very impressive amount of skills, similar to the OP.
And while there are for sure things that they can do to get some employment, the fact that the OP is actually a legend in some communities but is still struggling to find a job, that should be ringing alarm bells for all of us. Because I don't think all of us here have the same or comparable accolades as the OP.