I Spent Months Looking for a Job. Then I Said No to One.

I’ve been working in the industry for almost a decade, mostly under the title of iOS Developer. For most of that time, I was continuously employed. I had a fixed salary, benefits, taxes handled by the company, and the comfort of knowing that another paycheck would probably arrive next month.

That security made life easy to plan around. I travelled, bought things I liked, satisfied the weeb inside me, and went back to Japan more times than I probably should have. I had built a comfortable life around being employed.

Then, for the first time in almost ten years, I became unemployed for months.

And suddenly, all of that certainty disappeared.

Five months of "Unfortunately..."

For around five months, I applied to company after company. I got some interviews, but most ended with some variation of "Unfortunately, we won't be moving forward." Others simply disappeared.

It was exhausting.

I tried applying beyond iOS too. Flutter, React Native, backend, even roles closer to DevOps. I've always been confident that I can pick up unfamiliar technologies when I need to. I genuinely enjoy figuring things out and making systems work.

But that's difficult to put on a resume.

You can't really tell a recruiter, "I don't have five years of experience with this, but give me the problem and I'll figure it out," when another applicant already has those five years written on theirs.

After enough rejections, I eventually stopped applying.

Learning the thing I blamed

During that period, I also spent a lot of time learning something I partly blamed for what happened to my career: agentic coding.

I had already used GitHub Copilot for more than a year, but mostly as glorified autocomplete. I didn't realize how far these tools had progressed until I started experimenting properly.

Eventually I went from Copilot and Replit to tools like OpenCode, Claude Code, and Codex. Now they're part of my daily workflow.

I don't manually write nearly as much code as I used to. Instead, I spend more time thinking about architecture, integration, CI/CD, infrastructure, APIs, deployments, and how the whole system should fit together.

Maybe that's dangerous for my coding skills, so I still try to study fundamentals and understand what the AI is producing. But pretending I don't depend on agentic coding anymore would be dishonest.

Oddly enough, the technology I once blamed for threatening my career also pushed me into exploring what I might want my career to become next.

Somehow, I started working again

Eventually, an old boss gave me some work. Not as a regular employee this time, but as a freelancer.

They already knew how I worked, so they were willing to trust me with things I didn't necessarily have years of formal experience doing. That kind of trust is hard to communicate during a job application.

I'm also involved in a side project with a friend of a friend. We're trying to turn it into something real, although there's obviously no guarantee that it will succeed.

So technically, I'm not exactly unemployed anymore.

But there is still no fixed salary waiting for me every month. The gigs could disappear. The project could fail. Income isn't guaranteed.

That uncertainty is uncomfortable.

But something else happened too.

I started feeling free.

Then one of the companies that rejected me called back

Just recently, one of the companies I had previously applied to called me.

They asked whether I was interested in a mobile developer position for one of their US clients. The potential salary was higher than what I used to earn.

A few months ago, that was exactly the kind of phone call I was desperately waiting for.

There was one problem: it would mean working night shift again.

And I said no.

I'm still not sure whether that was a smart decision.

I could have tried. Maybe I would have gotten the job. Maybe I just turned down a much more stable and financially comfortable future.

But I'm already committed to the freelance work I have now and to the project we're trying to build. More importantly, after years of scheduling my life around work—especially night shifts—I realized that I didn't really want to go back to that yet.

Freedom has a cost

I don't want to romanticize self-employment.

Employment gave me security. I knew when I would work, how much I would earn, and roughly what the next few months would look like.

Right now, I don't have that.

What I have instead is more control over my time. I can work during the day. I can choose what I want to study. I can experiment with different technologies. I can spend time building projects that may or may not become something.

It's strangely peaceful while also being incredibly uncertain.

Maybe in a few months I'll start applying for permanent jobs again. Maybe I'll miss the stability enough to happily return to employment. Maybe one of these projects will succeed. Maybe my path toward DevOps, systems integration, or eventually solutions architecture will work out.

I don't really know.

For almost ten years, I always had a fairly simple answer when someone asked what I did for a living:

I'm an iOS Developer.

Right now, the answer is messier.

I'm freelancing. I'm building things. I'm learning. I'm using AI heavily. I'm studying infrastructure and systems. And I'm trying to figure out where all of this leads.

For the first time in a long time, I don't know exactly what comes next.

That's scary.

But for now, I don't think I want to give up this freedom just yet.