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Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when hunting for a job?

12 points by tombert 1y ago

For reasons that are economic and personal, I've had and lost many jobs as a software person. I am in the job hunt again. In this hunt, I think I've applied to about six hundred places thus far, and have gotten about a dozen interviews, and all of those have turned into rejections. I think it's largely due to 2023 being a horrible year for me that ended with me having to change jobs three times, which looks bad. While I know that it's not personal, it's just business, it's hard to not start taking these things personally and develop a bit of an inferiority complex. I don't think humans are meant to spend months at a time trying to prove themselves to other humans constantly. It has started making me a little depressed. What do people here do to avoid getting depressed upon waking up to dozens of rejections every morning?

TheMongoose 1y ago
Anecdotally even folks with great resumes listing recent FAANG experience are having a hard time landing roles currently. They've also coined the silly term "The Great Hesitation" for the market currently where everyone is "waiting to see" instead of hiring. Mostly I channel my depression and anxiety into spite which I then use to fuel other endeavors. If working for the stupidest, most short sighted, group of humans that we have yet developed through decades of corporate nonsense is no longer the way to have steady employment then it's time to find something else.
- tombert 1y ago
  That's mostly what I've been doing too, and that's helped a bit, but the last few days the depression has started getting the best of me. I got rejected for a few jobs where I genuinely thought I aced the interviews, and it's put me into a really foul mood. I am sure things will eventually improve, and maybe this is a sign that I've tied far too much of a my self worth into my career, but it's sometimes hard to stay optimistic.
  - TheMongoose 1y ago
    How anyone reasonably expects me to not tie self worth to a task that I enjoy doing, and perform a minimum of 8 hours a day 5 days a week is a mystery to me. The same goes for the folks that think the environment that I spend that time in should somehow not have an effect on my well-being. The best I can do is understand how deeply broken the hiring process has been for a while now, and that we have still found a way to make it worse in the past few years. It also probably helps that while my personal endeavors have so far generated $0 and I'll need to address the cash flow situation in some way soon, they have generated more genuine satisfaction than my last job. Which is surprising because I generally liked the work in my last role.
    - tombert 1y ago
      I've been working on a project that eventually be something I could parlay into something that could make money, though unless I'm able to convince a VC to give me money I find it unlikely that that will actually happen, and I have absolutely no idea how the hell I would go about pitching this to a VC in the first place. I probably would need to befriend someone with business acumen.
      - TheMongoose 1y ago
        I wouldn't VC anything personally, that'd be just trading one leash for another.
        tombert 1y ago
        That's fair. I think I can deploy a fairly minimal version of what I'm doing on a relatively cheap cluster of servers on DigitalOcean or Hetzner or something. Only issue I have is that I have absolutely no idea how to promote the stuff I'm working on.
    - scarface_74 1y ago
      There are billions of people on earth that work everyday to support their addictions to food and shelter. I wake up in the morning, walk over to my office in the next room, work 8 hours, shut my computer down and money gets deposited into my account.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  An ex-FAANGer could be the last person I want to hire for a startup.
  - TheMongoose 1y ago
    I'm curious what the point you're trying to make is. It's not like ex-FAANG folks are the only ones reporting an endless stream of soul crushing rejection letters.
  - sherdil2022 1y ago
    > An ex-FAANGer could be the last person I want to hire for a startup. It depends on the person and not where they last worked or didn't work. Never write anyone off till you have at least talked to them, 'interviewed' them and given them a chance
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      (1) Unfortunately when the job market is the way it is right now hiring managers don't feel they can talk to everybody and will look for quick heuristics to eliminate people. Myself I have left experience off my resume which I thought would make me look overqualified and it's worked. (2) Of course FAANG is not all the same. There's the story that AMZN is an awful place to work but I know some people who are happy and productive there who I'd love to snap up if I could. I've debriefed numerous ex-Googlers and they all seemed broken to me, a common story was "I thought I could have impact there, I thought I could learn something" but they couldn't. [1] I actually have a few cases of before and after interviews where I'm inclined to say "I told you so" I can't say I've really sampled Facebook, Apple or Netflix though. [1] Google is less a company that does things better than other companies than it is a monopoly that doesn't have to do better on any metric, the one metric that matters is earnings, and they can always tighten the screws on their ecosystem to take a little more.
      - tombert 1y ago
        I've thought about taking experience that makes me overqualified off my resume as well, but I don't know the way to explain the gaps in my resume for that. What do you do?
vouaobrasil 1y ago
> What do people here do to avoid getting depressed upon waking up to dozens of rejections every morning? One of the things I did was apply to less jobs. I know it sounds paradoxical, but I realized I was applying for dozens of jobs that weren't really a great fit for me just because I needed a job. And I even interviewed at a place I was fairly certain would reject me after the interview. Gotta keep a cool head and rule out the ones that aren't a decent fit – and you'll get less rejections, too.
- tombert 1y ago
  Yeah, that's something I've very recently started doing, basically only applying to jobs where I think there's at least a chance of getting it. Though the rejections for jobs I'm wholly unqualified for don't bother me that much. A little, but when the job is paying like $500,000/year, I don't get too depressed because, like, yeah, they probably get thousands of applicants for that, at least some of them are probably more qualified than me. The stuff that gets under my skin I'm rejected for jobs where I'm reasonably confident that I am one of the more qualified applicants that they've gotten for that position. At that point, it's hard to not start feeling a little bad about myself.
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
    > The stuff that gets under my skin I'm rejected for jobs where I'm reasonably confident that I am one of the more qualified applicants that they've gotten for that position. At that point, it's hard to not start feeling a little bad about myself. Gotta keep in mind though that job seekers aren't looking necessarily for the most qualified people. Sometimes they also look for people they think they'll get along with more, which could just be because the other guy put he likes rock climbing in his interests. Totally random. Or because they're trying to fill a quota, etc. Just say ** them in your mind and go onto the next.
    - tombert 1y ago
      Yeah, I know, but there's knowing this and there's "knowing" this. I've interviewed enough people to know that people get declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, so I'm aware that it's really not a slight on my character that some middle manager at a company doesn't think I'm smart enough. But it can be easy to forget that too. I prepare for the interview, I do my best to answer a bunch of technical questions, I try and be polite and straightforward with my answers, I try and be the very best version of myself, only to get a rejection two days later. It's just exhausting. They'd be so much easier if I were allowed to be actually be honest with these things. I wish that I were allowed to answer the "why do you want to work for Company X?" with "because I need to exchange money for goods and services to survive and I am hoping that if I provide some of my time and expertise you will provide me some money", instead of trying to explain how I think that working on a website that generates AI videos of cats dancing will somehow save the world, which is what they actually want to hear. I think I am a bit too autistic to really get it; they know I'm lying, I know I'm lying, what's the point of making me go through that song and dance? I realize it's just the hoops that everyone has to jump through, I get it, but it's just exhausting.
creer 1y ago
I suggest mixing projects and deliberately splitting time between the various demands but also opportunities: (a) answering job postings but only a half share of that: I feel the normal job pipeline is seriously disfunctional, (b) seriously working a network: people you have already been in contact with and others met at presentations, trade shows, HN, anywhere - current contacts and ongoing network development, (c) working on a personal project - whether business or hobby, (d) working out, (e) enjoying the time off for whatever it is that you do - because the thing is, we rarely get to enjoy large slices of leisure time. Because like you say, spending months on just courting depression - is not good. Deliberating splitting time gives you something to look forward to in the morning - and time for stuff that realistically you don't get to do otherwise. Not enough anyway.
austin-cheney 1y ago
It has been 2 years since I was laid off. I was upset to lose a job but looking for the next job was even more depressing. JavaScript employment is such a race to the bottom. In hindsight I really don’t miss JavaScript employment even though I absolutely love writing applications in the language. Fortunately a corporate recruiter found me at this incredible small employer. I was able to get out of the JavaScript nonsense and do something else. I was unemployed for 6 months and now love my current employer. I would never trade my current situation for a much higher paying job in JavaScript.
- chistev 1y ago
  What language now?
  - austin-cheney 1y ago
    MuleSoft
AllenRen 1y ago
I chose to be an independent developer and published my own product website: https://kontextflux.com https://kontextflux.com
luke7711 1y ago
Get realistic, take a small job and keep upgrading your skills at home. Try to understand what you are missing that companies want. Unfortunately no one is going to tell you. Maybe you need to focus on an adjacent area that has open opportunities.
aluviaio 1y ago
I am sorry that you have to wake up to rejections every morning... When I type 'every morning' or see you say 'every morning', I am rejoicing over that, because it means we are still alive every morning! Is that an amazing thing? We still wake up to another new day, I think that is the best thing! What is the point of holding a job if I am dead? We have an English saying - "There is no point in being the wealthiest man in the graveyard." So, friend, celebrate that we are still waking up in the morning. And our whole being shouldn't be defined by whether we have a job or not, how long it takes us to get a job, etc. I understand it is easy for me to say because I am not in your shoes. But stay positive, my friend! Life is seasonal, which means you won't always stay in the same season. We are in Spring, Summer is just around the corner, hold in there!

PaulHoule 1y ago
While the part that I left off happened a long time ago so I didn't have that problem. In general gap problems are tough and need some combination of hard work and luck to overcome. I had two times when I had gap problems. For the first I was still processing my separation from physics, had spent two years as a nearly full-time activist (a bit unplanned) and had trouble with depression and chronic pain. I networked very hard and managed to get a new position created for me after about eight months of busting my ass. For the second I'd spent a few years trying to start up my own business together with a salesman who couldn't sell anything. I gave up in December 2016 and rolled my car on the 31st, I created a workflow system that processed job listings and applications with plans to AI enable it. I saw a listing for a company that was doing something similar and was pretty sure I'd get the job and sure enough I did. They liked the story of my workflow system, and funny enough that code has been through various revisions and become an RSS reader and image sorter.
- tombert 1y ago
  I'm not sure what looks worse: short stints at companies or gaps. I've tried the A/B test with my resume but the result are inconclusive. I really hate the software industry. I like writing code, I like building stuff, I like math, I like a lot of my fellow engineers, but the entire industry is pretty insufferable at this point.
creer 1y ago
Do gaps matter these days? If anything, everyone knows there have been layoffs; there has been job hopping; there have been startups named "Yo"; weird platforms and languages; political jobs; volunteer gigs... Is a resume that just lists enough experience relevant to a position that bad of an idea? (and skips the noise?) Did you try A/B testing that by any chance?
- tombert 1y ago
  I have not. Worth a shot.
  - creer 1y ago
    Hmmm. In the case of submitting resumes in response to job postings, there is the issue of the software that ingests these resumes. I have always wondered if some keywords were toxic with some of these. Or whether they latch on (parse) some resume features which then eliminates you if you mess with them. For example, does deviating from "standard" resume formats disqualify you? Does listing some specific tools, platforms or hobbies run you head on into a keyword-specific scoring bug? Of course any such problem would be poor design, but we know how little that means. I keep my eyes open for people testing HR resume ingestion software, publishing findings or even side by side comparisons. And I have never seen useful reports. Anyone knows any, please let us know!
    - tombert 1y ago
      I have noticed a lot more jobs are requiring you to post your LinkedIn now. A small part of me thinks it's an AI automatically filtering for these things now. I thought about buying a domain name that looks similar enough to a LinkedIn URL shortener and writing a thing to track the data around it (like Grabify) just so I might be able to see where it's actually being ingested from.