When I was in grade school, we had a music teacher who was blind from birth. If someone was jacking around in class, she knew where all the students sat and could identify the culprit by relying entirely on her hearing. It was impressive.
If you willingly gave money to a two-bit con-artist who is widely known for robbing or defrauding nearly everyone he has ever done business with, then you got what you had coming.
"AI" coding tools can offer some value. The problem is that they often generate tech debt with pay day loan level interest rates. What's made the interest rate so high is that now, not only do you have the actual code base tech debt. You also have a bunch of code that no one understands and the barrier to entry for software engineering has become so high that fewer younger people are actually learning how to be good programmers. Lots of organizations don't give a shit about their rapidly growing mountain of tech debt today but they're sure going to at the end of the week when the payment comes due.
What their "leadership" fails to understand is that any idiot can shell out code. I've seen lots of terrible programmers generate millions of lines of really shitty code that somehow, by the power of the dark Lord himself, manages to compile. That's not what a software engineer actually does though. Software engineers design operational systems with software. Writing code is a secondary function of that. There are currently no AI agents that can successfully design a software system with any degree of complexity because LLM's don't actually understand anything.
We have goldfish in a small decorative pond at our place. I was really surprised at quickly they breed. The first summer we got them we went trom 5 to over 20 in like two months.
I never have to worry about them outgrowing the pond since local predators seem to keep them in check.
As others have said, relationships are the key. The current state of the tech job market is bad. Probably the worst I've ever seen and it is still getting steadily worse.
I spent almost a year applying before getting my latest job. I was even getting interviews until the beginning of this year. Then they very abruptly stopped for some reason. Only reason I got the job I have now is because an old business associate happened to think of me and reached out to see if I was looking. I've been doing this for years and I've got a solid resume but it is tough out there.
That said, I'm not trying to discourage you. Keep at it and you'll find something. Working on side projects or contributing to open source projects can help give you accomplishments to put on your resume.
Just tacking on to your comment...
The Jackson's were aggressively exploited by most of the key adults in their lives from a relatively young age. Michael was like 10 when the Jackson 5 had their first big hit single. Joe Jackson and Berry Gordy recognized they had a "cash cow" on their hands and resolved to squeeze it for every penny they could.
Dealing with a relentless work schedule where you're harshly punished for your mistakes and then having your life shoved under a microscope for the entire world to see would break a lot of adults. It's no wonder Michael went off the rails.
Create custom functions. Excel has lots of built in functions. "SUM()", "CONCAT()", etc. You can use VBA to create your own functions that manipulate data within cells.
1998
...as much as it stings to type that.