I just want to vent, things are feeling pretty hopeless for me right now. I bought into the whole “learn to code” push that's been happening for the last decade and attended a coding bootcamp where I learned full stack development. After completing that I got an internship that went great. Shortly after that, however, my Mom was diagnosed with a very aggressive brain cancer. I abandoned my job search and moved home to take care of her during the last few months of her life.
This was in 2019, and shortly after she had passed and her affairs had been settled the pandemic hit and it felt like the world came to a grinding halt. I was unemployed for all of 2020, but I was fortunate enough to have her house to live in so at least I wasn't homeless.
In 2021 I found a job at a company in town. They were a locally owned software company and were well known locally for treating their people very well. Good pay, great benefits, generous PTO, lots of room for advancement, and so on. I was ecstatic, it felt like I was finally getting somewhere. In the interview I was told that everyone in the company starts in customer service to learn the business but that I would be moved into software development in ~6 months. Not ideal but the pay and benefits were still good and the job seemed pretty tolerable.
Then, on my very first day, the owner of the company announced he was retiring and selling the business. Maybe 6 weeks later the new owners took over. A bloodsucking private equity firm. In the following weeks they laid off about 20% of the staff, massively increased the subscription cost of the software without any kind of announcement to the clients, and began outsourcing all new hires to India.
I absolutely busted my ass for the first few months here trying to make a good impression and hopefully still get moved into software dev, but I've been all but straight-up told it's not going to happen at this point. The job has become such an unbearable slog. It used to be that the company would maintain staffing levels such that when a client called somebody would be waiting on our end to pick up immediately. Now it's gotten so bad clients are waiting on hold for 1-2+ HOURS for assistance with this software that is absolutely integral to their business. In addition to that the price they're paying increased by almost double for vastly inferior service. They're justifiably livid but they take it out on us and there's nothing we can do.
I've been sending out job applications for junior developer roles daily and working on my personal coding projects in my free time but I almost never hear back from anyone. It feels like my resumes just get dumped in the trash along with the thousands of other applicants who are probably more qualified or more experienced than me. I don't really know what to do at this point. I've lost 3 years of my 20s to being stuck in this nowhere town at this dead-end job and I don't see a way out.
TL;DR: Got a job at a great company with great pay and benefits, was promised room for advancement, on my first day the owner announced he was retiring and selling the company to a private equity firm who is bleeding the company and all of it's employees dry