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I once ran a hip hop blog. Artists flooded my inbox, hungry for a feature. Last week, I got rejected from a job. It got me thinking about who's hungry now.
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I loved hip hop ever since I was a kid in Taiwan in the 90s. American influence had a long reach. I had a boombox and practiced breakdance at recess. In college at Michigan I DJ'd for my fraternity, and being on an international campus really exposed me to the regional cultures of hip hop around the country. Detroit had its sound. Atlanta had its sound. The Bay, the South, New York. I was never without my earphones.
Hip hop blogs were big in the early 2010s. This was the discovery layer before streaming ate everything. 2dopeboyz, Fake Shore Drive, NahRight. Artists got discovered through these sites - Tyler the Creator, Drake, 2 Chainz got early plays through the blog circuit before they blew up. I remember the energy of that era. Turntable.fm let you DJ live with strangers, taking turns dropping tracks. Sirius XM had curators who shaped what people heard. Discovery felt human.
So when I got my career going, towards the tail end of that blog wave, I did something kind of crazy. I bought an established hip hop blog. With traffic. Tens of thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers. My own audience.
I hired a small team of editors. I became, technically, an editor-in-chief. One of the writers, Shirley Ju, ended up becoming a sizeable influencer in the space, which I'm still in awe of.
But what I remember most was the inbox.
Artists flooded it. Not looking for pay or deals. Just features. They wanted me to listen. They wanted me to write about them. They wanted to be discovered.
All these people trying to get a start doing something they love.
Something they love doing.
The publishing grind wasn't as glamorous as listening to the music itself. The experiment didn't last long. But I never forgot that inbox.
Last week I received a rejection letter.
I've been independent for a while now. Sometimes I bring my own team, sometimes solo, sometimes embedded in companies, sometimes on my own projects.
Every few years I check the market. Sense the shifts. Some loops end in offers, some don't. I do it to make sure my family can depend on me if things get dire.
This startup caught my eye because of what they were building. A paid discovery service for hip hop artists. Artists pay a small amount to get featured on streaming platforms, to jump the line, to get critiqued and get exposure. Basically a version to clean up and monetize that flooded inbox in the streaming age.
I applied because I got weirdly nostalgic. Working with artists and music product daily had always been a dream. I'd even dabbled in starting my own music startup once - live radio stations run by tastemakers. Communal listening. Human curation. The stuff streaming flattened. I was chasing that Turntable.fm feeling.
The founding team impressed me. What struck me was what good CS education looks like now, what AI enables young engineers to do, and how tuned in they are to the reality of social media and streaming. They're fast in a way that made me pay attention. Probably how the dot com guys used to see me.
I sent them a product teardown, interviewed, and talked about what I've been building.
They passed.
But here's the thing. The young founder gave me one of the most empathetic, most complete rejection letters I've ever received. He might have been gassing me up, but what came through was the time he spent putting it together. He treated me like a person, not a number in a pipeline.
I don't know if he does this for everybody. But it left me with a smile. I'd be happy to invest in them in other ways.
And it got me reflecting.
I've been on the other side.
Years ago, I got walked out of an interview halfway through. Major food delivery company. The recruiter came in, said it wasn't a fit, and I took the L.
That experience enabled something else to happen.
I was leading hiring at another company. Strategizing the pipeline, structuring interviews, optimizing. And one day a candidate came in, and after a couple of us interviewed them, I had them walked out. Said it wasn't a fit. They weren't going to pass the later phases anyway, I thought. I was optimizing for the pipeline. Saving engineering resources.
Another engineering manager stood up and said we shouldn't do this. The CTO sided with me. I said I'd seen it done before, that it was industry standard.
It's like what I tell my kids. Bullies bully because they got bullied themselves.
I regret it. And I respect that engineering manager who told me it wasn't cool. He was right.
Tables turn quickly in this industry. Sometimes companies beg to get candidates in the pipeline. Sometimes they don't have time for everybody. But the process should be dignified. That's why that rejection letter stood out.
It also got me thinking about that inbox again. The artists flooding in, hungry for exposure.
It reminds me of artists chasing social media engagement, trying to get their work seen. Drawing NSFW because that's what gets them paid. Game developers taking lower salaries because they're doing what they're passionate about, then churning through contracts as projects launch and end.
And now I think about software engineers.
The waves move. Who's hot changes. Right now AI specialists are having their moment. Some engineers are more valuable than ever.
But the math is different now. Post-pandemic, the talent pool went global overnight. Companies realized they could hire engineers anywhere. The kids coming up - Gen Z, Gen Alpha - they're not just computer native, they're AI native. They grew up with social media as a first language. They ship faster. They learn faster. And they're hungry in a way that's hard to compete with.
I see LinkedIn jobs with equity-only compensation driving thousands of applicants. I see engineers whose specialty aged out. I see junior engineers competing against the entire world for the same entry-level roles.
And I notice the rhyme.
Artists flooding my inbox in 2015. Engineers flooding LinkedIn in 2026. Same hunger. Same hope.
Maybe software engineers are the new artists.
Would we still be doing this if we weren't getting paid? It's still fun... right?
I know I teased "Market Size of 5" for this week. It's coming. Things come up.