I Am Schrödinger’s Engineer

Too Much and Not Enough at the Same Time

This may sound strange or contradictory, but I am dealing with a curious problem: the fact that I am simultaneously overqualified and underqualified. I am Schrödinger’s engineer, both too much and not enough, depending on who’s looking. I’m overqualified for a junior or mid position, but underqualified because I’m not current enough on any one of dozens of new frameworks, languages, or concepts. Recruiters aren’t sure where to place me. I exist in a quantum state until observed by a recruiter or automation, at which point I collapse into the wrong category.

What recruiters, ATS, and AI don’t see on a resume is judgment. It leaves clues there, hidden amongst the decades of work condensed into bullet points and keyword-optimized wisdom, but it’s largely invisible. Apparently, I should have been collecting frameworks like Pokémon. It might’ve gotten me past the gatekeepers to an interview where judgment could finally be seen.

The difficulty for older engineers like myself in this hiring market is having to re-justify ourselves constantly. It used to be about learning to improve ourselves and now it’s about learning to stay eligible. If you’ve learned to think logically, the language or framework doesn’t really matter. It’s just a tool to execute the logic.

But, in order to “play the game” and get our foot in the door, we have to chase frameworks and performatively fill our resume with buzzwords, optimizing for filters rather than humans. I’m not a Luddite. I do enjoy working with computers more than people a lot of the time, but there are times when this introvert just wants to talk to a human to explain what a computer can’t yet grasp.

I am not resistant to learning. I have always been the curious sort, so I love it. But, with limited time to learn and so many options to choose from, we take our guess as to what’s going to be trendy and hope we’re right. My skillset should already speak to the fact that I can and do learn what’s needed for the job. I shouldn’t have to prove it every eighteen months.

Constant rejection, because your 95% match to the job listing isn’t good enough, quietly erodes confidence. That missing skill can make you feel incomplete. This isn’t insecurity talking. It’s a response to evaluation criteria being unstable. It used to be that 95% could get you an offer. Those days, in my experience, seem to be largely gone.

In this job market, I’ve actually come to appreciate rejection emails. At least I know where I stand. At least I’m acknowledged, instead of ghosted and invisible. Automated or not, a rejection email signifies someone at least cared enough to set up their systems to acknowledge those who signaled interest, whether or not they got an interview. I at least know I was evaluated in some form, even if I apparently was deemed wanting.

The interesting thing is that we automated to remove human bias in hiring, only to find we’d removed the humanity as well. The fallacy is that automating doesn’t really remove bias at all. We’re left with broken filters, recency bias, and any other bias that was programmed into the automation. We’ve just removed human eyes from the equation.

I have always focused on outcome rather than motion. Motion can deceive because not all motion is progress. Novelty, in the form of new frameworks or languages, can be great if it improves outcomes, but if it only replicates the same thing, stability is better. Stability is sometimes harder to quantify, however, as it means systems didn’t fail, decisions avoided catastrophe, and incidents never happened. I’d rather my resume show what worked instead of what changed.

What’s really at the heart of the struggle of older engineers at this point in time is that much of our portfolio leaves no artifacts. We de-escalated bad ideas, saw failures early so they didn’t propagate, chose boring solutions on purpose because they worked and were less complex to maintain. There’s no screenshot for something that didn’t happen, no metric to indicate how very wrong something could have gone had we not prevented it. People who prevent fires often don’t get credit because nothing burned.

That brings me to, in my opinion, some of the absurdities of the modern interview loop. It favors demonstration over judgment and often doesn’t replicate the actual work environment. It favors fast recall, recent syntax, and performative confidence. What it often doesn’t reveal is how someone decides trade offs, assesses risks, or focuses on long-term decision quality. And as I said earlier, stability is harder to quantify, and even harder to demonstrate in an interview loop.

I may be less flashy, but I’m not less capable. Experience finds the pitfalls before you fall over the edge. It asks “should we” instead of “can we”. It restrains and constrains. It plans ahead to avoid the last minute course corrections that throw everything into disarray. But that is not glamorous. It’s considered being behind, being resistant, or being outdated if you don’t have the latest shiny object on your resume.

What employers often don’t understand is that rejecting older, experienced engineers has a long-term cost to, not just to that individual, but, their teams. You’re not investing in someone who can build more stable architectures. You’re not hiring more resilient engineers who’ve been through the battles. You’re not investing in mentorship for your younger engineers.

What’s being lost isn’t “the old ways.” It’s durability, judgment, and continuity. The system simply can’t see certain kinds of value. That doesn’t mean that value no longer exists. We’re not failing. We’re being measured incorrectly. And when someone finally chooses to measure what actually matters, we’ll still be here, steady, capable, and ready to do the work.