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I can tell you from my own experience that the "negative unemployment rate" comment is false. I have been unemployed since March, and I've had no less than 12 i

I can tell you from my own experience that the "negative unemployment rate" comment is false. I have been unemployed since March, and I've had no less than 12 in-person interviews, some out of state, and countless other contacts all resulting in rejections. These were positions I am qualified for, and that I know I would have succeeded at. I've been told it would take me 6 months to start contributing to a Python codebase even though I have significant experience in the language and the problem domain for that project. I've been told I have too little experience mentoring a team despite doing just that at my last job. I've been told I don't have enough JS experience for a position that did not ask for any JS experience. The market right now is poor for a developer without a fancy CS degree, or one without the luck of a golden pedigree from a previous high profile company.

gherkin0 10y ago
There's also a bias against the currently unemployed. It took 6 months of hard work for a friend of mine to find a job after he quit one after 3 months without anything lined up, because it was such a bad fit that it was making him depressed. Up to that point, he had zero problems finding a job, the only difference was his employment status while job hunting.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  Yes, I think that has contributed to it as well. In retrospect I should have started lining up interviews when I saw the company might fold, but I had never had any issue finding employment in the past so I didn't prioritize it over trying to right the ship.
- 1138 10y ago
  2 years ago I moved to SF from a shithole city. I had taken off like 3 years to work on my own projects. It was more difficult than I expected to find a job without any connections. Took about 3 months after moving here. I think there's at least some bias against people who have taken time off because they appear comfortable not having a job and therefore the company has less leverage over them.
  - gherkin0 10y ago
    I think the bigger bias at play is the just-world fallacy. Employers assume that everyone who is unemployed must be unemployed justly because something is wrong with them (e.g. they're incompetent, slackers, toxic, etc.). That's the problem my friend had: the company that eventually hired him admitted they spent a long time trying to figure out what was wrong with him, even though they liked him.
- dba7dba 10y ago
  I concur. Any gap looks bad.
linkregister 10y ago
I'm trying to tread carefully to avoid insulting you. You are very likely more talented than I am, so please take my input as just one data point. An outsider perspective: 12 in-person interviews is a high amount of interviews without receiving an offer. I've failed my fair share of interviews but never that many in such a short amount of time. If I were in your position I would try to get as much information as possible why you weren't accepted. Anecdotally, Austin should be a promising location for tech hiring. It may be a personality clash or a lack of preparation. I have bombed several interviews because I didn't take the time to practice Google-style interview questions. It took me 2 months of practice before I was ready to interview successfully in SF, coming from the East Coast. Fancy CS degrees and golden pedigrees get your foot in the door. The technical interview is up to the applicant to pass or fail. It looks like you get your foot in the door pretty well. Now it's time to focus on what you can do to convince these businesses that you will help make them money.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  No offense taken. I fully admit to underperforming on some of the whiteboard sessions I was subjected to. I also don't think I performed so poorly on all of them to get nothing but rejections. I am not a rockstar, but I am competent at what I do - but what I do is not whiteboard code toy problems. I always ask for reasons for the rejections, but I rarely get a response. Some will give insight (as I stated in my original comment) but the vast majority will not tell you any reason. I am just offering a piece of data to refute the "negative unemployment" claim and its ilk.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    I appreciate your contribution to the discussion. Different opinions make HN special. I empathize with your situation; getting hired while unemployed is much more difficult than under better circumstances.
  - magic_beans 10y ago
    I wonder if there is something in your personality that turns people off? Are you overly aggressive? Do you seem unfriendly? Honestly, it sounds like you just might need to sharpen your people skills a little bit! Those are important too :)
mathattack 10y ago
Hang in there! It took me closer to 25+ in persons during my last search. Of course once you get the social proof ignore offer everyone else gets in line. :-)
dimino 10y ago
"It would take me 6 months to start contributing to a Python codebase even though I have significant experience in the language" - Python, specifically, suffers from its own "ease of use" when it comes to hiring and "years of experience" listed on resumés. A hacker who happens to use Python to automate some tedious task but has no clue about how to actually write idiomatic, well tested and maintainable code can claim "4 years of Python experience", for example. To sum, it's very easy to write and maintain truly shitty Python, and "years of experience" mean especially little.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  I agree, which is why I always make a point to go into specifics about what I did in Python, what the product does, and that it is still used at the company I created it for.
  - dimino 10y ago
    This might be part of your struggle, perhaps, as those kinds of things ("product did x y and z, I wrote it by myself, it's still in use", etc.) fall into the "solved a problem" category (valuable, don't get me wrong) rather than the "built a clean, maintainable system" category ("100% test coverage, followed sem ver and git flow, maintained a 7+ on pylint, used these design patterns", etc.). Folks in the latter category don't need 6 months for any Python-based system. Folks in the former category are useful in certain ways, but difficult to plug into a larger team, and if companies know enough to know they need a "Python" developer, that's because someone technical already picked Python, and the position is to work with at least that one other technical person. It's likely similar with JS, Ruby, and other "newer" languages that have reputations for being "easy to pick up".
cortesoft 10y ago
After my very first job, all my subsequent jobs have been to work with people I have worked with before. Do you have any connections like that? People who you worked with, who know you are good, and want to work with you again? It is a lot easier to find work when the people hiring know that you can do the job because they have seen you do it before.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  I do, but it is relatively small. I've worked at smaller companies or smaller teams since I've been in Austin. A few of the interviews I mentioned were through people I know and who personally vouched for my capabilities. It didn't change the outcome, unfortunately.
kafkaesq 10y ago
The market right now is poor for a developer without a fancy CS degree, or one without the luck of a golden pedigree from a previous high profile company. Or "pedigree" in the form of recent experience of certain high-value technologies or frameworks (as if most of these weren't trivially learnable). I also have the sense that there's a "J-curve" of sorts with regard to demand: certain categories of developers are deemed "hot" and are in very high demand, for certain reasons; for others, it might as well be the mid-2000s, for you -- especially if your skillset reads like it would have been "hot" in that era. And as usual, should you have the misfortunate to be unemployed for whatever reason, for any lengthy of time -- you're fucked, of course.
manyxcxi 10y ago
Getting reasons for why you're not getting hired from companies is basically not an option- even if they tell you anything it's likely safety speak BS unrelated to why. As a guy who's been on both sides of the metaphorical table I know what it's like to bomb but it's almost worse when you feel like you did well and then really have no clue, so I empathize with you for that. From the other side, I implement an everybody says yes hiring scheme. If an interviewer says no we talk about why. We've had most technical no's overturned when the other interviewers relate a positive interaction in a similar technical area and we come to a conclusion that it was as simple as how the question was asked, or maybe that is a specific weakness made up for in another area. The no's that are almost never overturned are the ones where an interviewer just didn't seem to like the candidate personally. I don't expect everyone to be friends, bristly people are fine if they're generally capable of some team play, but if someone walks out of that room saying I couldn't stand to spend more time with that person than my family, that's it- we're not going to hire. I don't want everyone on the team drinking from the same kool aid, and we don't have to be friends or even that friendly. We have to be able to work together and get shit done, and if one of my employees I trust enough to do interviews says no, then even a very talented developer isn't going to join the team. With all that being said, I don't know what kinds of teams you're interviewing for, it may be a niche thing or it could be they don't like you- it's a relationship though, you will eventually find a decent match. If you want to do a trial run through with me with a no bullshit no PC response as to my opinion on it I'd be happy to carve out some time. Message me on Twitter @ashurexm and we can set something up. You've got to have pretty good skills to get 12 in person interviews in a shortish amount of time.
- bigtunacan 10y ago
  @jakebasile, Whether you take manyxcxi up on this or not; I think s/he is making a great suggestion here. 12 interviews and zero offers is a lot of interviews. A few feedback style interviews with some candid feedback might do you some good. Technical skills aside it is possible you just are not interviewing well. Also a couple of somewhat related questions. 1) How well are you at reading the interview outcome? Do you leave these interviews thinking you will be made an offer or do you leave with a pretty good idea that a no is coming your way? 2) Rather than waiting for a rejection and then asking "why not", have you tried asking for the "why not" during the actual interview? At the end of almost every interview someone will wrap it up saying something along the lines, "Do you have any more questions?" I have had plenty of candidates ask me (and I myself ask if I'm the candidate), "What do you think I could have done differently today to improve my chance of success with your organization?" This is usually met with a more honest feedback than the ask after rejection for numerous reasons. 1) Less HR cover my ass BS; after the rejection companies are worried anything they say could be used to sue them. 2) More people in the room so you may get more than one perspective. 3) You haven't yet been rejected so you may also hear some positives; "Well you really impressed us on X, but you could focus more on Y." This can help you to play to your strengths in the future as well as areas you need to work on.
asimuvPR 10y ago
How do you market yourself?
moses_the_red 10y ago
I was unemployed for 10 months recently. I think a lot of it is the new "100x developer" mentality. Companies have become insanely picky. I've had lots of interviews, many of which went really well that never panned out. I've completed significant projects for companies, and I have some open source software out there too. Companies have become convinced that 99% of developers are as valuable as a pile of dog shit they just stepped in, and its changing things. If you're bad at marketing, you're in for rough times ahead.
youngButEager 10y ago
Consider Supply and Demand. The probability of being hired depends on available supply of applicants. Graduated from UC Berkeley, Regents Scholar, Computer Science. Depths of the 1989-93 recession, I graduated in 1991. Had 4 job offers! All 4 were scut work jobs. But I got my foot in the door when the rest of the economy was AWFUL. "Dang, I was the top of my class in CompSci (software) at Berkeley, yet I cannot get a better coding job offer than these 4?" LATER I REALIZED: The recession started in 1988-89. By 1991 when I graduated there were a lot of HIGHLY EXPERIENCED and TALENTED software engineers looking for work. The Supply of engineers was high; and demand was low. So yeah, I got 4 scut job offers because firms had their pick of great, experienced talent. The fact is, I was lucky in 1991 to have gotten 4 offers at that time; George Bush the 1st lost the election in '92 because of the bad economy. The 1989-93 recession was BAAAD. Not as bad as 2008-09 but lots of homes in foreclosure, hiring was zero. When 1993 rolled around, the supply of talent had been TAKEN, the tech economy was hiring. It became MUCH easier to switch to an area of software completely unrelated to my old job. But then 1999 rolled around -- the big crash, the Dot-Com Bubble Burst. Now, despite 8 years of experience, again the supply of engineers was very high and it became difficult to get a position. If the Supply of Talent looking for work is High -- 12 in-person interviews and no job is MUCH more likely than in boom times. Take off the blinders people. If it feels like it suddenly has become more of an effort to get a job, MAYBE the supply of talent on the market has increased. When I hire and the talent pool has swelled, I can sit back and be picky. I have the leverage. I am the Demand for talent. You are the Supply of talent. If it seems harder/longer to get hired all of a sudden despite what you've described -- "highly relevant experience" and a few years in the industry -- it's quite possible that you're competing with MORE ENGINEERS for that position just now. And as I hiring manager, I know dam well the resume quality has jumped and there are more quality resumes than I've seen in the recent past. "Ah-HA! I finally have some leverage over the applicant pool! I'm gonna be picky!"

gherkin0 10y ago

There's also a bias against the currently unemployed. It took 6 months of hard work for a friend of mine to find a job after he quit one after 3 months without anything lined up, because it was such a bad fit that it was making him depressed. Up to that point, he had zero problems finding a job, the only difference was his employment status while job hunting.

jakebasile 10y ago
Yes, I think that has contributed to it as well. In retrospect I should have started lining up interviews when I saw the company might fold, but I had never had any issue finding employment in the past so I didn't prioritize it over trying to right the ship.
1138 10y ago
2 years ago I moved to SF from a shithole city. I had taken off like 3 years to work on my own projects. It was more difficult than I expected to find a job without any connections. Took about 3 months after moving here. I think there's at least some bias against people who have taken time off because they appear comfortable not having a job and therefore the company has less leverage over them.
- gherkin0 10y ago
  I think the bigger bias at play is the just-world fallacy. Employers assume that everyone who is unemployed must be unemployed justly because something is wrong with them (e.g. they're incompetent, slackers, toxic, etc.). That's the problem my friend had: the company that eventually hired him admitted they spent a long time trying to figure out what was wrong with him, even though they liked him.
dba7dba 10y ago
I concur. Any gap looks bad.

linkregister 10y ago

I'm trying to tread carefully to avoid insulting you. You are very likely more talented than I am, so please take my input as just one data point. An outsider perspective: 12 in-person interviews is a high amount of interviews without receiving an offer. I've failed my fair share of interviews but never that many in such a short amount of time. If I were in your position I would try to get as much information as possible why you weren't accepted. Anecdotally, Austin should be a promising location for tech hiring. It may be a personality clash or a lack of preparation. I have bombed several interviews because I didn't take the time to practice Google-style interview questions. It took me 2 months of practice before I was ready to interview successfully in SF, coming from the East Coast. Fancy CS degrees and golden pedigrees get your foot in the door. The technical interview is up to the applicant to pass or fail. It looks like you get your foot in the door pretty well. Now it's time to focus on what you can do to convince these businesses that you will help make them money.

jakebasile 10y ago
No offense taken. I fully admit to underperforming on some of the whiteboard sessions I was subjected to. I also don't think I performed so poorly on all of them to get nothing but rejections. I am not a rockstar, but I am competent at what I do - but what I do is not whiteboard code toy problems. I always ask for reasons for the rejections, but I rarely get a response. Some will give insight (as I stated in my original comment) but the vast majority will not tell you any reason. I am just offering a piece of data to refute the "negative unemployment" claim and its ilk.
- linkregister 10y ago
  I appreciate your contribution to the discussion. Different opinions make HN special. I empathize with your situation; getting hired while unemployed is much more difficult than under better circumstances.
- magic_beans 10y ago
  I wonder if there is something in your personality that turns people off? Are you overly aggressive? Do you seem unfriendly? Honestly, it sounds like you just might need to sharpen your people skills a little bit! Those are important too :)

mathattack 10y ago

Hang in there! It took me closer to 25+ in persons during my last search. Of course once you get the social proof ignore offer everyone else gets in line. :-)

dimino 10y ago

"It would take me 6 months to start contributing to a Python codebase even though I have significant experience in the language" - Python, specifically, suffers from its own "ease of use" when it comes to hiring and "years of experience" listed on resumés. A hacker who happens to use Python to automate some tedious task but has no clue about how to actually write idiomatic, well tested and maintainable code can claim "4 years of Python experience", for example. To sum, it's very easy to write and maintain truly shitty Python, and "years of experience" mean especially little.

jakebasile 10y ago
I agree, which is why I always make a point to go into specifics about what I did in Python, what the product does, and that it is still used at the company I created it for.
- dimino 10y ago
  This might be part of your struggle, perhaps, as those kinds of things ("product did x y and z, I wrote it by myself, it's still in use", etc.) fall into the "solved a problem" category (valuable, don't get me wrong) rather than the "built a clean, maintainable system" category ("100% test coverage, followed sem ver and git flow, maintained a 7+ on pylint, used these design patterns", etc.). Folks in the latter category don't need 6 months for any Python-based system. Folks in the former category are useful in certain ways, but difficult to plug into a larger team, and if companies know enough to know they need a "Python" developer, that's because someone technical already picked Python, and the position is to work with at least that one other technical person. It's likely similar with JS, Ruby, and other "newer" languages that have reputations for being "easy to pick up".

cortesoft 10y ago

After my very first job, all my subsequent jobs have been to work with people I have worked with before. Do you have any connections like that? People who you worked with, who know you are good, and want to work with you again? It is a lot easier to find work when the people hiring know that you can do the job because they have seen you do it before.

jakebasile 10y ago
I do, but it is relatively small. I've worked at smaller companies or smaller teams since I've been in Austin. A few of the interviews I mentioned were through people I know and who personally vouched for my capabilities. It didn't change the outcome, unfortunately.

kafkaesq 10y ago

The market right now is poor for a developer without a fancy CS degree, or one without the luck of a golden pedigree from a previous high profile company. Or "pedigree" in the form of recent experience of certain high-value technologies or frameworks (as if most of these weren't trivially learnable). I also have the sense that there's a "J-curve" of sorts with regard to demand: certain categories of developers are deemed "hot" and are in very high demand, for certain reasons; for others, it might as well be the mid-2000s, for you -- especially if your skillset reads like it would have been "hot" in that era. And as usual, should you have the misfortunate to be unemployed for whatever reason, for any lengthy of time -- you're fucked, of course.

manyxcxi 10y ago

Getting reasons for why you're not getting hired from companies is basically not an option- even if they tell you anything it's likely safety speak BS unrelated to why. As a guy who's been on both sides of the metaphorical table I know what it's like to bomb but it's almost worse when you feel like you did well and then really have no clue, so I empathize with you for that. From the other side, I implement an everybody says yes hiring scheme. If an interviewer says no we talk about why. We've had most technical no's overturned when the other interviewers relate a positive interaction in a similar technical area and we come to a conclusion that it was as simple as how the question was asked, or maybe that is a specific weakness made up for in another area. The no's that are almost never overturned are the ones where an interviewer just didn't seem to like the candidate personally. I don't expect everyone to be friends, bristly people are fine if they're generally capable of some team play, but if someone walks out of that room saying I couldn't stand to spend more time with that person than my family, that's it- we're not going to hire. I don't want everyone on the team drinking from the same kool aid, and we don't have to be friends or even that friendly. We have to be able to work together and get shit done, and if one of my employees I trust enough to do interviews says no, then even a very talented developer isn't going to join the team. With all that being said, I don't know what kinds of teams you're interviewing for, it may be a niche thing or it could be they don't like you- it's a relationship though, you will eventually find a decent match. If you want to do a trial run through with me with a no bullshit no PC response as to my opinion on it I'd be happy to carve out some time. Message me on Twitter @ashurexm and we can set something up. You've got to have pretty good skills to get 12 in person interviews in a shortish amount of time.

bigtunacan 10y ago
@jakebasile, Whether you take manyxcxi up on this or not; I think s/he is making a great suggestion here. 12 interviews and zero offers is a lot of interviews. A few feedback style interviews with some candid feedback might do you some good. Technical skills aside it is possible you just are not interviewing well. Also a couple of somewhat related questions. 1) How well are you at reading the interview outcome? Do you leave these interviews thinking you will be made an offer or do you leave with a pretty good idea that a no is coming your way? 2) Rather than waiting for a rejection and then asking "why not", have you tried asking for the "why not" during the actual interview? At the end of almost every interview someone will wrap it up saying something along the lines, "Do you have any more questions?" I have had plenty of candidates ask me (and I myself ask if I'm the candidate), "What do you think I could have done differently today to improve my chance of success with your organization?" This is usually met with a more honest feedback than the ask after rejection for numerous reasons. 1) Less HR cover my ass BS; after the rejection companies are worried anything they say could be used to sue them. 2) More people in the room so you may get more than one perspective. 3) You haven't yet been rejected so you may also hear some positives; "Well you really impressed us on X, but you could focus more on Y." This can help you to play to your strengths in the future as well as areas you need to work on.

asimuvPR 10y ago

How do you market yourself?

moses_the_red 10y ago

I was unemployed for 10 months recently. I think a lot of it is the new "100x developer" mentality. Companies have become insanely picky. I've had lots of interviews, many of which went really well that never panned out. I've completed significant projects for companies, and I have some open source software out there too. Companies have become convinced that 99% of developers are as valuable as a pile of dog shit they just stepped in, and its changing things. If you're bad at marketing, you're in for rough times ahead.

youngButEager 10y ago

Consider Supply and Demand. The probability of being hired depends on available supply of applicants. Graduated from UC Berkeley, Regents Scholar, Computer Science. Depths of the 1989-93 recession, I graduated in 1991. Had 4 job offers! All 4 were scut work jobs. But I got my foot in the door when the rest of the economy was AWFUL. "Dang, I was the top of my class in CompSci (software) at Berkeley, yet I cannot get a better coding job offer than these 4?" LATER I REALIZED: The recession started in 1988-89. By 1991 when I graduated there were a lot of HIGHLY EXPERIENCED and TALENTED software engineers looking for work. The Supply of engineers was high; and demand was low. So yeah, I got 4 scut job offers because firms had their pick of great, experienced talent. The fact is, I was lucky in 1991 to have gotten 4 offers at that time; George Bush the 1st lost the election in '92 because of the bad economy. The 1989-93 recession was BAAAD. Not as bad as 2008-09 but lots of homes in foreclosure, hiring was zero. When 1993 rolled around, the supply of talent had been TAKEN, the tech economy was hiring. It became MUCH easier to switch to an area of software completely unrelated to my old job. But then 1999 rolled around -- the big crash, the Dot-Com Bubble Burst. Now, despite 8 years of experience, again the supply of engineers was very high and it became difficult to get a position. If the Supply of Talent looking for work is High -- 12 in-person interviews and no job is MUCH more likely than in boom times. Take off the blinders people. If it feels like it suddenly has become more of an effort to get a job, MAYBE the supply of talent on the market has increased. When I hire and the talent pool has swelled, I can sit back and be picky. I have the leverage. I am the Demand for talent. You are the Supply of talent. If it seems harder/longer to get hired all of a sudden despite what you've described -- "highly relevant experience" and a few years in the industry -- it's quite possible that you're competing with MORE ENGINEERS for that position just now. And as I hiring manager, I know dam well the resume quality has jumped and there are more quality resumes than I've seen in the recent past. "Ah-HA! I finally have some leverage over the applicant pool! I'm gonna be picky!"