17 ms·

When the job search becomes impossible

• DaveZale 1y ago
  Hate to say the obvious, but it's all about supply and demand. The field I was working in 30 years ago was "hot" and the hourly wage has dropped at least 5x since then. Sure, in the last 20 years I did "development" work which was related but more advanced (24 hours a day stuff, it's always in your head) - but once those efforts were complete, so were the jobs. My field was laboratory science and I still take solace in the fact that 200 years ago, only the rich (or minimally subsidized) ever got a chance to to touch this stuff. But solace doesn't pay the bills. Maybe take on volunteer work? Once you get involved, it leads to stories and sharing and new perspectives. I've done a few thousand hours over the past 15 years. It feels good. You chose to do it. You see results and have new ideas. Maybe even a new business.
  • insane_dreamer 1y ago
    This only works if you had a good job and a decent amount of savings and no family to support.
    • DaveZale 1y ago
      or a dual income household. My wife and I have taken turns on who has the jobs with the benefits. Maybe you're right, maybe we're an exception. But I know educated guys around here whose wives work, and stay home with the kids, run volunteer .org in their spare time.
      • insane_dreamer 1y ago
        Right that works too. But only if a single income is high enough to keep the boat afloat for a while.
        • DaveZale 1y ago
          Yes but the flip side, is that we lived in Indiana for a while. Very cheap living there. So, keep your expenses low, with no debt. Freedom.
          • insane_dreamer 1y ago
            Very key point.
          • hiring-manager 1y ago
            TLDR: No Debt Lots of savings Single-income able to support family WIN!
            • insane_dreamer 1y ago
              You forgot “low COL”
  • tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    >Hate to say the obvious, but it's all about supply and demand. Presumably the computer science departments will continue to churn out more supply for a while yet.
• pm90 1y ago
  Throw into the mix any immigration concerns and you have a perfect cocktail for stress :) Something seems really off about this system. At least in tech, I see a lot of open recs and hiring. Im even seeing some teams struggle to fill open recs. It should be possible to build a system that matches workers to jobs without going through this dumb and stressful process.
• kevinleary 1y ago
  "Sometimes the best way to search is… not to search." Last line of the article and man... it hits! All while applying and going through multiple interview processes, I was taking a break: traveling, fishing, and reading. I was in the job search after leaving the GOV for about 3-4 months. I had received offers but they were all less pay or less flexibility than before and I wasn't willing to compromise. All the "big and sexy" start-ups required 3+ interviews, most I had was 7, and they still ended up deciding I wasn't a fit. I reflected often that I was in the wrong line of work... not being able to get what I had wanted. With some rationalization and imposter syndrome gone, it ended up being LinkedIn and my connections that had saved me. Living proof that network and connections out last technical prowess unless you're the best-of-the-best at something.
  • iberator 1y ago
    It's all fun when you have money... otherwise it's a recipe for disaster
  • sylos 1y ago
    And unfortunately if you don't have a network for whatever reason, you're essentially screwed. Networking is basically the only way to get there, but I don't think most of society can handle the networking requirements to be stable.
• us-merul 1y ago
  I think the benefit of the “weird path” need not be monetary but instead a way to stay afloat of the burnout and find motivation to keep going. While I agree with many things in the article, I found in my experience that these feelings are not responsive to rational arguments, and rest doesn’t help after 6+ months when recruiters’ first questions to you are “what have you been doing since your last position?” That’s why I think the “weird” route can be a good way to answer by keeping up with new projects, etc.
• SamoyedFurFluff 1y ago
  This essay just makes me feel so hopeless about our society. I don’t feel it’s right that employment has such weight in people’s lives that the search causes psychological damage.
  • afpx 1y ago
    It's tough to watch the change when not too long ago a software developer with decent skills could literally submit 5 resumes and end up with 3 good offers.
    • fuzzfactor 1y ago
      The only way for anybody to have any good jobs at all is for millions to have none, and/or have nothing resembling formerly respectable pay. And it's got to last years or there will be no recovery for shareholders from what they've already suffered with a stagnant economy. In the 1970's it ended up 10x this bad or worse, in most technical fields at the time as well as non-tech. There was nothing else that could be done except recognize it was a crap shoot. There will be plenty of millions who do not lose their jobs, some will not even lose much momentum. There will be nowhere else for the "new normal" to coalesce around, after nothing else resembles the old normal for so long. As before, only the relatively unscathed will write the economic history of these years, and many less-fortunate millions are slated to be forgotten. The only other alternative is for everybody to take a steep pay cut, and all upwardly-mobile climbers to halt all momentum. What are the odds that could happen this time? And that still wouldn't allow hiring as many early-career professionals as there will be available for quite some time to come. Don't worry, employment is not where all the negative outcomes will affect future generations . . .
    • dakiol 1y ago
      I'm not sure, but that's still happening. At least it happened to me this year. I consider myself a decent developer (in every job I have landed, I was always considered the "best" in the team after not much time in the job). I'm not faang-silicon-valley level, though. I haven't written a compiler or an OS, or contributed to the linux kernel. I have read all the popular tech books out there, I do more or less know what companies (and interviewers) want to hear, and I'm easy to work with. I'm in western europe. I think the situation in the US is way different, though. Also, for juniors (or people with less than 8-10 years of experience) is much harder, that's true.
• usgroup 1y ago
  I think more often people cast the widest net and then filter what comes back based on “is this better than what I have”. I’m not sure that the process the author describes is all that common in practice even if it is eminently sensible.
• TrackerFF 1y ago
  I've been thinking about job searching lately, maybe a bit too much. I'm employed, so it is not any immediate concern for me, but one has to think ahead. Between age discrimination that starts after 50, and how difficult the job search seemingly is...some people will have to work at least until they're 70. That's a solid 15-20 years more, after the job hunting is an uphill battle. If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that? Me and my partner are doing everything we can to achieve some minimum level of FIRE, just in case. I've also accepted that sooner or later, probably the next 10-15 years or so, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm going to end up in a lifer position. If FIRE can't save my ass, I simply can't afford to hop around.
  • jackcosgrove 1y ago
    It was always my understanding that software careers are shorter than other technical careers, and the higher wages compensate for this. More than compensate, if you invest early. If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • icedchai 1y ago
      Most people don't have the temperament for FIRE. You have to live below your means, save a double digit percentage consistently, and invest. And you have to do it for decades. You need to be able to tough it out through the worst of times (like the dot-com bubble, financial crisis, covid, and random political chaos like tariffs.) You have to tune out the noise and always remember that on a long enough timeline, the market only goes up. And if you think it's "different" this time, it won't be for long.
      • monkeyelite 1y ago
        And all of that is made easier by having more income.
• pizzathyme 1y ago
  > "You’ve spent several months sending out scores of carefully tailored resumes and cover letters for jobs you know you are fully qualified for and would excel at." People should not do this. It is causing so much suffering. In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site. It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral. A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person. I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere. It seems like many people are suffering from thousands of applications, and it makes me sad.
  • mschild 1y ago
    This might work if you already have a network, but otherwise good luck getting through to people on the phone. HR will answer the generic questions, but tell you to apply online. Cold "calling" people on LinkedIn is a shot in the dark. Some people don't mind you doing it, most will ignore you.
    • pizzathyme 1y ago
      If you just graduated college or have no network, you can reach out to alumni and mention that connection. Or, you can ask personal friends/family for contacts (will probably be local companies, which may be a first step job). Or you can reach out over social media. "Hi there, I follow you on X and am just getting started in the industry. Do you mind if I ask a few research questions?" A friend of mine just used this technique to land a role in an industry where he had no contacts. If the situation is "good luck getting through to people on the phone", then that probably means this person is not a real friend of yours, they are a stranger, and you shouldn't try. You should be reaching out to people who actually know your name, or you have a mutual friend.
      • nitwit005 1y ago
        Reaching out to alumni works in some cultures, but in much of the world they will universally ignore you.
• josefritzishere 1y ago
  This is genuinely well written. Anyone know who Jeff Wofford is?
  • 3D30497420 1y ago
    His about page: https://www.jeffwofford.com/?page_id=464 https://www.jeffwofford.com/?page_id=464
  • mcswell 1y ago
    His story here https://www.jeffwofford.com/wp/?p=2227 https://www.jeffwofford.com/wp/?p=2227 probably tells you a lot about him.
• kfk 1y ago
  I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. Forget that, they even refused to maintain good relationships with decision makers (and I did this too, but only once in my carrier), left jobs in bad ways, focused on chasing salary increases every 6 months. And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
  • the_real_cher 1y ago
    > It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. This is straight up agism and should be banned. It's like saying black people can't code as well as white people. Carmack and Torvalds would disagree with you.
    • the__alchemist 1y ago
      Would you say, broadly, concepts you disagree with or find uncomfortable should be banned? Do you think that's sufficient, or should they be criminalized as well?
      • the_real_cher 1y ago
        False information targeting a group should be banned in my opinion.
        • dolebirchwood 1y ago
          Or just counter bad ideas with good ideas and let the up/down votes take care of the rest.
          • 1y ago
• marstall 1y ago
  So for an (employed) developer like me, who is dreading the next job search, what's a "hot" profession I could train myself on so my experience in the job market over the next 15 years could be like it was in the salad days of 1996-2022? (I'm making a pass at "learning AI" but don't feel 100% certain that demand for that will be sustainable at a high level over the next decade ...)
  • rwmj 1y ago
    Well, I'm currently having a hard time finding a good electrician, and the ones who I have employed in the past earn pretty generous hourly rates. (I say this half-joking, but also I know a DBA who retrained as an electrician and was happier than ever. It's the fact he retired - early - which has put me in my current predicament.)
• the__alchemist 1y ago
  This feels like the dating market right now too.
  • kypro 1y ago
    Dating is unbelievably easy in some ways though. I'd argue the problem with dating today is that people don't do the hard things and instead look for love on apps and other bad places. Dating is just a numbers game. Roughly speaking it's about maximising interactions with potential partners and taking a shot in as many of these interactions which go positively as possible. You can game dating in your favour with a bit of strategy. Unfortunately job searches are much harder to game since you can exhaust the number of active positions for your preferred role quite rapidly. The only advice I can give on job searches is to keep your skillset as broad as possible. Specialising is good if when you find work you want to be paid well. Being well-rounded is good if you want to find work as easily as possible.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • neilv 1y ago
    And the analogue of the exceptionally good-looking STD super-spreaders would be... the resume-driven-development self-proclaimed "10x devs" who job-hop every 6 months, leaving a wake of disasters?
    • Der_Einzige 1y ago
      Statistically the majority of STDs spread by sexual activity are spread by gay men.
      • neilv 1y ago
        For purposes of the analogy, I was referring to the familiar meme/belief about how interest is distributed in straight dating. In hindsight and in the future, I would phrase the point differently.
• tcrow 1y ago
  Sometimes you just need to look locally. Chances are there are positions available close enough to your home that its worth the following effort. I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me. I show interest, they show interest (generally, and even if they are not hiring). This has lead to much improved chances of getting an interview over just filling an application or email through a network. People like to see and get a feel for the people they might end up hiring. Face to face puts you ahead of the pack. This technique is critically underutilized. Obviously, if your only interested in remote positions, this won't work very well. If the org is big enough, you can try to locate a nearby satellite branch or office to find a person who can tap you in.
  • drivebyhooting 1y ago
    Is this in America? I can’t imagine walking anywhere, nor being able to get past security, if indeed there is even a human manning the gates.
    • mixmastamyk 1y ago
      Reminds me of Netflix in Hollywood. Can't get inside the gate outside without a notarized electronic certificate prepared beforehand. There is no front door, only a security post at the parking garage entrance.
  • neilv 1y ago
    > I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me. This is surprising to me. Unless you last tried this long enough ago that the manager said, "I like the cut of your jib, young man, you've got grit" in a transatlantic accent.
    • ryandrake 1y ago
      "Just walk up to the president of Google and give him a firm handshake! That's how I got my mail room job in 1948!"
• phoenixhaber 1y ago
  There are no jobs. I'm being stalked and fucked with in San Francisco. Constantly. Everyone here is insane and most people are sick. Life is pointless. I'm just waking up and doing something and then going to sleep in a shelter again. They give me sick to their kids as some sort of sick joke and wait for me to die. I had someone put fentanyl in the coffee they served at de haro church while I was lugging fifty pound bags of potatoes to give to the poor. Cool way to fuck up someone's back. Because they're insane and murderous. It's like that shit everywhere unless you have money and can hire private security or a group of you and your friends have a secret way to poison people. I've asked construction workers if I can do shift labor for cash and they always say no. Fucking bonkers. I hurt all over more or less all of the time. There are people that have had their entire bodies melt from disease from being exposed to weaponized sick here. There's absolutely no point in giving a shit about anything anymore. I'm just waiting to die truth be told.
  • firefax 1y ago
    No offense, but maybe they're narcan-ing you because you because you're nodding out in public? I am not doubting you have been fucked with -- I once got into a 2v1 brawl on the Mission and 16th BART that only ended because I sent one flying into a pillar and told the other if he kept coming, he was going onto the fucking tracks.These guys kept going over to a homeless guy who was just... sitting there... trying to get a rise, hoping for an excuse to "defend" themselves. And when I told them to quit being bullies, they tried to jump me. So trust me, I believe you, and I get that trauma can have an impact on your life. But if you are using narcotics, it will impact your search. If you want help getting clean, I could send some resources to the email on your profile -- on the technical side you sound like a better coder than me and if you had that part locked down I suspect you'd quickly find work.
    • nerdsniper 1y ago
      Where did he say he was getting "narcan'd" ? I only saw something about his coffee getting spiked with fentanyl, which would be the opposite of getting narcan'd. I'll be honest though, I had a lot of difficulty parsing that and some chunks of it are beyond my reading comprehension abilities.
• _dain_ 1y ago
  Jobs are aggregated into gigantic boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, and the market is national or international. You can choose among thousands of companies, but you're also just one potential applicant among millions. The cost of applying tends to zero -> number of applications increases. The only way to succeed is by sending out an absurd number of CVs. Numbers that would have seemed inconceivable a generation ago before everything moved online and globalized. It's normal to send out hundreds or thousands before getting hired. Economists look at this and see only an improvement in market efficiency, but they're ignoring the emotional toll. Reject, reject, reject, reject, drip drip drip every day like water torture. It's the same thing on dating apps. No wonder people give up.
  • lovich 1y ago
    That’s before getting into the jobs that are functionally not real, even if the employer in question believes they are honestly looking. Seeing bog standard senior engineer positions still advertising for the places that ghosted me 5 months ago means the job posting is fake for one of the n-teen reasons companies paste fake postings or the company has gotten unreasonably picky with how much labor is on the market
    • 64d032fe 1y ago
      To your point: You could make a fake company with a fake job posting in probably 15 minutes, and use it to easily waste hundreds of hours of time in people's lives. Edit: Maybe it could be used to start some sort of unemployed software engineer fight club?
• hiring-manager 1y ago
  How do you reconcile your experience with the common narrative that there is a huge shortage of tech workers in the US and, hence, the H1B/H4 programs?
  • bigolnik 1y ago
    Is there actually a huge shortage of tech workers in the US?
    • basscomm 1y ago
      I don't think there's actually a shortage of tech workers in the US. I think there is probably a shortage of tech workers in the US that are willing to work for the wages that companies want to pay.
    • kypro 1y ago
      Experienced tech workers? Yeah. One of the "problems" companies have is that it's hard to find skilled workers in the US with good experience who are not demanding SF wages. And recent graduates aren't that useful so while they might technically be "tech workers" in the sense they would like to fill open roles, companies don't really want them. So for most companies if you want to hire the most experienced and qualified for the role, and do that at a reasonable cost, you'll need to consider the H1B route.
      • hiring-manager 1y ago
        How do you reconcile that with developers over 45 finding it impossible to find jobs, are all of them asking for "unreasonable" pay? I mean, if you are senior, you probably have a family and possibly kids. Even with a part-time RTO position that means more than a three-roommate setup, you need a house or 2b/3b in SF/SEA/NY. That works for industries where you dont need to be in the most expensive cities, but how does it work for tech workers with families?
        • kypro 1y ago
• loserGuy412 1y ago
  What nonsense. Does he really think his friends are sharing the full extent of their difficulties? There is an exquisite feeling of shame, guilt, fear, and anger that goes with being jobless for the first time and making zero progress with the job search. When your savings is gone, when your credit cards are maxed and in collections, when you're selling your stuff to pay for food and electricity, when you're about to be evicted (and have no idea what to do with your stuff because you can't afford storage) - and you have to keep trying. Keep a smile on your face, act confident and happy because no-one wants to hire you if you're a drag. You revise your resume, you apply to tangential jobs - but you don't get any response, no interviews and no offers. The one you do get is a disinterested indian guy at a bank who is clearly not even hiring right now. Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started. Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump. There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
  • calepayson 1y ago
• forducks 1y ago
  Oh how I would love to just stop looking for jobs for a bit and leave it on rest. Unfortunately I am selling things off right now to not go homeless and refusing to apply to jobs is an admission of defeat to me. Said as a (former?) tech worker.
  • atemerev 1y ago
    Was at your place two weeks ago. Was selling things. Found a job finally by a sheer stroke of luck within my network (cold applying never worked for 7 months). I wish you all the best and hope you find a job too.
  • apwell23 1y ago
    is the job market really that bad for tech workers :( . I got laidoff on paternity leave last week. I am so scared. Hope you find something soon !!
    • leptons 1y ago
      It's as bad or worse than the 2000 dot-com bubble burst right now. We had a covid bubble for a while and that burst. The AI bubble is next to burst.
  • SCUSKU 1y ago
    Read through your comment history and it sounds gnarly. I hope you find something soon. I was unemployed for 6 months in 2022-2023 and it was horrible. I guess I learned something from it, but I hated it. That said, I became employed after applying to a role by emailing the CTO after they posted on the monthly Who's Hiring thread. I've had 2 jobs from HN since. HN has been huge for my career personally, so I made this site to help make it easier to find stuff that's good for you: https://hnresumetojobs.com/ https://hnresumetojobs.com/ Sincerely wishing you the best of luck.
    • brandall10 1y ago
      Just for clarification, you've had 3 jobs in the past 2 years? Were some of these contracts? Otherwise oof, that sounds like volatility only worth dealing with if one really needs an income, esp. considering the signal for prospective employers.
• ilaksh 1y ago
  The thing that bothers me so much about this post is that it reeks of privilege by treating unemployment as if it were mainly just a bad trigger that you talk to your expensive therapist about once a week. For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
  • titanomachy 1y ago
    I think "most people in the real world" have at least a few rungs between their current situation and true homelessness. Many people have some sort of family or other community that they could lean on, even in America where family ties are weaker than any other place I know. I have a couple friends who haven't had steady work in years, and they still eke out a pretty reasonable existence living with friends and family because they are kind and considerate and people don't mind having them around. A lot of street homeless have mental or substance issues that make it hard for them to coexist with other people.
    • roadside_picnic 1y ago
      "Homeless" is not the same as "living on the street". People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless. Plenty of Americans are much closer than this than you might think working in tech. 50-60% of Americans currently live 'paycheck-to-paycheck' which means the second work stops they're on a timer for missing bills to start coming in. I've had the luxury, working in tech, to have lost a job and had the opportunity to take a few months off before searching. Even this was incredibly stressful in practice, but I never had to worry about losing my place of living.
      • titanomachy 1y ago
        > People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless. You're right. But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"? And yeah, the paycheck-to-paycheck stat blows my mind. Somehow the standard American experience has become the latest model iPhone (financed), a new car (financed), a rented home, 4-5 meals out weekly, and almost zero money in the bank. And all this in a country with some of the weakest social security in the developed world. I'm sure the half-trillion dollars spent on advertising every year has something to do with this.
• NetOpWibby 1y ago
  How many of us are in Phase III right now? The struggle is real.
• kstrauser 1y ago
  My most recent job search had 30 interviews with 21 companies (you read that right) in 24 days. Rent was due and there were mouths to feed. Unemployment simply was not an option. I consider myself exceptionally lucky to land where I did, and yet still would not care to do that process again.
  • friendly_deer 1y ago
    Can you share a little more? Because this is outside the norm I’m hearing and I’d like to know more.
    • kstrauser 1y ago
      I'm not a PM, but I PMed it very aggressively. I made a Notes.app personal wiki tracking every company I spoke to, with a timeline in reverse chronological order of every contact I'd had with them, like: Foo Corp Recruiter: [Jane Smith] * 2025-09-15 On-site prep call with [Joe Brown] * 2025-09-13 Coding screen with [Pat Doe] I kept a "pipeline" note with companies in each stage, like: # Leads * [Adam Albert] at [Bar Corp] # Initial Contact * [Brenda Baker] at [Qux, Inc.] # Recruiter call ... # Phone Screen # Tech screen # Onsite # Rejected * [Shifty Corp] (they gave me the heebie-jeebies) And then there was a separate Interviews note, which was a lot of the content from the Pipeline doc, but ordered chronologically and with more detail: # 2025-09-15 * On-site prep call with [Joe Brown] from [Foo Corp] * Recruiter screen with [Chris Carter] at [Deluxe Pinkies] # 2025-09-14 * Reference check with [Arctic Drilling and Waste] And I replied to every recruiter I talked to, even if just to say "thanks for reaching out, but I'm looking for something more like ... right now", which often led to followups like "ooh, I have another client looking for that! Want to talk to them?" Hyperorganization is one of my superpowers, and I leaned into it. Every morning I'd review the pipeline and timeline docs and ping every recruiter or company who I should've heard from but hadn't yet: "hey, it's me! Thanks for the chat the other day. Hope your Maltese, Mr. Pickles, feels better! Here's a picture of my cat waving to Mr. Pickles!" A lot of times that'd nudge them to respond and move things along. I'm looking at my timeline right now and seeing the day where I had 2 recruiter screens, a tech screen, and an onsite. It was busy. But I was ready and willing to work, and at the end I turned down 3 pending offers to accept the one I most wanted. Again, I count myself as exceptionally lucky. That said, half of "luck" is putting yourself in the right place, in the right condition, to jump on a good opportunity.
• neilv 1y ago
  A colleague, who is very accomplished in tech industry (but not rich, for good reasons), said he would be in town, and asked to meet. He strangely didn't say why (not even "to catch up"), so I thought it was probably that he had a new startup or executive role, and he was going to pitch recruiting me again. But immediately after sitting down in the cafe, he said he was looking for work, and asked for my advice. I hope I didn't laugh. Since I was in a similar boat, after a startup got disrupted. I wasn't seeing hardly any good job opportunities, so I wasn't feeling like someone who should be asked for advice on job-hunting, except as a cautionary tale. Quickly moving forward from there, we had a good talk, exchanging thoughts and ideas, but neither of us had direct opportunities to give. What's really dumb is that the world has capable people who spend huge amounts of time and downtime, simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillsets. It's grossly inefficient and unpleasant. We know some of the reasons, but it's still dumb.
  • arcbyte 1y ago
    > simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillets I dont think its this. I think its just brutally hard to earn a return on investment right now. For whatever reason, innovation has disappeared from the market. There's a lot of things changing with generative AI right now but very few actually valuable ideas have come out. The real challenge today is finding problems to solve that people will pay money for.
• Havoc 1y ago
  I'm genuinely thinking it may be time to batten down the hatches and stay put for a year or three. As genZ would say the vibes feel off
• sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
  Last time I was unemployed for an extended period I thought I would put my skills to good use by hunting for bugs and contributing fixes to open source projects. Only to mostly be ignored, bugs closed as WONTFIX, or finding out many open source developers aren't really interested in fixing bugs, rather some self-aggrandizing labor of love. That's when I learned to stop working for free.
  • jcalvinowens 1y ago
    I'm sorry you had that experience, I can certainly empathize. Open source isn't working for free, it's working for connections instead of money. I find this way of thinking about it useful: my first order goal is not to fix a bug in the project, it is to do a favor for the human being(s) behind it. If you're really contributing and aren't getting the reward, by all means, walk away and hack on something else. But it's also important to have some humility, and recognize that most of the time you don't get that reward, it is because you simply aren't being helpful. The hard truth is that nobody is going to help you figure out how to be useful. They're just going to say no.
  • nradov 1y ago
    If you don't like how an open-source project is run then you can fork it, or start your own competing project from scratch. That's the beauty of open source.
• jofer 1y ago
  As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified. The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified candidates right now due to the various layoffs at government labs. We actually _do_ want folks with an academic research background. I am quite certain that the applicant pool contained a lot of those folks and others that we really wanted to interview. However, in practice, we couldn't find folks we didn't already know because various keyword-focused searches and AI filtering tend to filter out the most qualified candidates. We got a ton of spam applications, so we couldn't manually filter. The filtering HR does doesn't help. All of the various attempts to meaningfully review the full candidate pool in the time we had just failed. (Edit: "Just failed" is a bit unfair. There was a lot of effort put in and some good folks found that way, but certainly not every resume was actually reviewed.) What finally happened is that we mostly interviewed the candidates we knew about through other channels. E.g. folks who had applied before and e-mailed one of us they were applying again. Former co-workers from other companies. Folks we knew through professional networks. That was a great pool of applicants, but I am certain we missed a ton of exceptional folks whose applications no actual person even saw. The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism. If you don't already know someone working at the company, your resume will probably never be seen. I really feel hiring is in a much worse state than it was about 5 years ago. I don't know how to fix it. We're just back to what it was 20+ years ago. It's 100% who you know.
  • rubidium 1y ago
    It’s pretty much always who you know… at least to get a showing. It’s rare in history to find counter examples. And in a LLM fueled world it’s going to be more important. Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview. So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.
    • 1y ago
• jongjong 1y ago
  The worst part of this demoralization caused by the struggle to find a job is that it demoralizes your colleagues whilst putting a lot of pressure on them to 'appear' extra hard-working. The tech industry has turned into some kind of beauty contest of who appears to be doing the most work. I suspect the reason why it's more about 'appearance' is because deep down, they are demoralized - They are only pretending to be motivated, they are not actually motivated to improve anything. They're motivated only to keep their job. They are laser focused on that goal. The rewards are small, the punishments are big. It makes the work more competitive and stressful, especially for those who aren't used to keeping up appearances and actually want to get stuff done. You kind of have to play the game. It feels like the current job crisis is artificial and specifically intended to lower people's salary expectations and increase their work output but I feel like it's mostly backfiring. People are burned out. I was shocked to realize that even immigrants from developing countries who come to my country are feeling demoralized in the tech sector. 10 year ago, they felt they were on a career fast-track, now even they don't really see the light at the end of the tunnel. I've met some of them with master degrees who feel like they walked into a trap by leaving their home countries. They're feeling the high cost of living. The cost of living (and salaries) also went up in their home countries, the remittances aren't what they used to be. Meanwhile, cost of living here is sky-high. Doesn't feel like success anymore, for anyone. I'm very good at software development and I enjoy coding but even I've had thoughts of changing career to something more essential like plumbing or construction, to stop the feeling of powerlessness and systemic manipulation which seems to be the core of this industry. I need more control over my destiny. I'd like a career where skill determines outcomes with high reliability and doesn't require permission from gatekeepers. Unfortunately, the country I live in is not very good for bootstrapped software developers and raising money is impossible unless you have a certain pedigree.
  • 64d032fe 1y ago
    "It feels like the current job crisis is artificial and specifically intended to lower people's salary expectations and increase their work output"... bingo.
    • jongjong 1y ago
• pessimizer 1y ago
  I have no idea why governments refuse to deal with matchmaking the unemployed and employers. It would be at least as productive as highways, but a hell of a lot cheaper.
  • 64d032fe 1y ago
    Employers do not want this, and they have a very big say in the government.
  • morkalork 1y ago
    From someone in a country where the government does get involved: The entire system is overrun with bad actors and blatent abuse.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Employers don't want to have this dictated to them
  • lotsofpulp 1y ago
    All US states I have lived in have government employees that organize job fairs and connect unemployed people with businesses that need employees. https://www.worksourcewa.com/ https://www.worksourcewa.com/ https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Job_Seeker_Information/ https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Job_Seeker_Informati... https://www.worksourceoregon.org/jobseekers https://www.worksourceoregon.org/jobseekers https://dol.ny.gov/career-centers https://dol.ny.gov/career-centers https://www.nj.gov/labor/career-services/ https://www.nj.gov/labor/career-services/
• andy99 1y ago
  In my recent experience (20 yrs experience so ymmv) - basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR - everything is optimized for engagement, not outcomes, so there are lots or meaningless things to do (basically anything on linkedin). You might as well do some of them to stay sane but they'll never get you a job - what's valuable is networking and getting the opportunity to speak to a real person who might want to work with you. There are always lots of jobs, even when there are no jobs, but there are trust problems, process and bureaucratic issues, and incompetence (all of HR/talent) that need to be navigated - sort of redundant, anything that's easy (like Easy Applying to a job) is useless. Hard, uncomfortable prospecting, involving real people, increases your chance of success
  • chaosharmonic 1y ago
    This disaster is why I've built a whole side project automating the act of doomscrolling through job boards, so I can focus on actually talking to people when I find something that does interest me. (And can track the results in one place without repeatedly running into duplicates.)
  • shagie 1y ago
    > - basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR When I was looking (a while back), my experience was that the big sites are a dozen or so of consultancies and head hunters reposting all the jobs as "an opportunity for a client." FooCorp (a real company) would post a position. Then headhunters and contract to perm style consultancies would repost it. This way, you'd get 1 + 12 job postings for the same position (assuming that the company even posted it there in the first place). Next, applying to a position (other than the real one) on that set would get you ghosted (they're collecting resumes to send on and will pick 100 that they feel have the best chance of getting hired before contacting back). Sometimes, they'd call you back with a different position that "you'd be perfect for". Often, the resume that they send on to the actual position is significantly doctored from the original (to the point where its "this person isn't the one on the resume"). In today's world, the "this is an AI fake" is sometimes the transformation that the head hunter does to your resume. So its not so much run through the company's HR, but run through the head hunter's filter trying to find the "best" ones to send on and for that filter, even though you applied it might not get to the hiring company to consider. (Anecdote: when I was unemployed looking for a job a number of years ago, I tried some headhunters. One interview that I got they were asking me really odd questions about technologies that I knew nothing about. When it was pointed out that "I should know about these things, its on your resume" they showed me the one that they got that had my name on it... and it didn't match the copy that I brought with the exception of when I got my degree and what university it was from. They thanked me for my honesty and we both agreed that I was not a good technical fit for the position.)
• zippyman55 1y ago
  We were looking to employ someone with experience in server experience in the field of High Performance Computing. We got a resume for a bartender with server experience. I so wanted to interview them. Also, the number of junk resumes, where I take a resume block and post it into a search engine and it comes back with an exact match of the text. I write up a caustic response as to why not to hire the person… and they still slipped in!
• ericdotlee 1y ago
  I honestly don't know what I would do if I was fresh out of school today or over 40. That said, grinding through middling startup jobs also sucks. The ability to get vc attention seems incredibly cliquey - not a game I really want to play again. On top of just wanting a normal / decent salary as a founder.
• ezekiel68 1y ago
  I've lived through the recessions of 1990-91 (in my 20s, not tech), the Dotcom bust and the Great Financial Crisis. I can tell you that it's always been this way when its' a "buyer's market" and the employers can afford to be picky. I can also tell you that this is not some game-changing phenomenon[0]. The jobs will return when it is once again a "seller's market" -- which it surely will be. This applies to non-tech job markets as well. During the DotCom bust I ended up getting a taxi license in NYC and driving yellow taxicabs on 12-hour (standard) shifts for over 18 months. During the GFC, I got trained in HazMat handling and joined contracting companies as an employee cleaning the beaches after the BP oil spill for a year. In both cases, I re-entered the software engineering market as a high-demand candidate and made even more in base and total comp than I had previously. I am over 50 now. I never transitioned to a management position. Still, I do plan to re-enter the software engineering market when the current winter ends and spring next arrives. [0] I work with agentic AI on my own projects. Due to limited context windows, even the best models like Claude Opus or Alibaba's Qwen-coder require much more expert handholding than people let on. Even with good context engineering and memory tools.
  • myahio 1y ago
    What could potentially put an end to the current hiring "winter"? We have an increasing amount of immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job, in combination with the tech sector shrinking, as well as companies as a whole being much more careful when hiring. There would need to be some explosion in the amount of tech jobs, in order for everyone to be able to get one. However, I just cannot see what could cause something like this in the near future.
    • kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
      > What could potentially put an end to the current hiring "winter"? April 18, 2017; EO 13788: Buy American and Hire American (H-1B reform) Still waiting on that one. Just need a favorable administration back in office.
      • myahio 1y ago
• foxfired 1y ago
  This past year, I noticed people reaching out to me whenever my employer is hiring. These seem to be new graduates, and there is a pattern in the way ask for a reference or a job: - "Hey, I applied, could you hire me?" - "I have a compsci, I'm qualified, I sent a resume" - "can I use you as a reference?" These are people I've never met, yet they are so direct to the point of being rude. But to the best of my knowledge, they are real people. And what it looks like is that I'm contact #258 in a spreadsheet, because they have to cast an extremely wide net to hope for a single response. When I respond, they are lost because they don't even remember which of the job I was a contact for. I don't envy anyone looking for a job right now.
  • ipnon 1y ago
    It is a generational difference. Zoomers have a tendency to communicate like Jordan Belfort. Oftentimes it seems scammy but it is prevalent because it sometimes leads to new opportunities.
  • scorpioxy 1y ago
    I'm guessing it is due to the advice that getting a job is a "numbers game". When I was hiring somewhat recently, I talked to a worryingly high number of people that didn't know what role they're applying to, had perfect resumes and were taking the fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude to its limit. I mean I get there's a sales aspect to an interview, in a way, but this was pushing it way too far. It was a very frustrating experience. A lot of the recent advice has pretty much destroyed the hiring process, in my humble opinion. It swings from solving hard computer science problems to testing trivia to being a political round-table. I keep on wondering how much worse can it get before a reset is needed.
    • arccy 1y ago
      tbh a lot of roles are pretty similar where it doesn't really matter that much...
  • biophysboy 1y ago
    This is why I honestly think it would be better if the popular job boards limited the number of applications you could submit per day. The game theory of the job market incentivizes spray and pray.
• cahoot_bird 1y ago
  I've been working in a non-tech role the past couple years hoping things would improve. Reading stuff like this, doesn't seem to be happening and makes it difficult to plan long term (but I haven't been actively applying).
• strathmeyer 1y ago
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• aakresearch 1y ago
  Disclaimer: I've been navigating the job market for almost a year now, and have practically given up. An acquaintance of mine—he was the owner's/CEO's deputy at a place I worked—now runs a team-coaching-turned-recruitment business. I saw a question from him on social media the other day, something along the lines of: "Some businesses in the industry are receiving over 5,000 applications for advertised roles. How do you effectively screen that many applications?" I didn’t respond, of course—I have neither credentials nor experience, nor any real relationship with this guy—but I formed an opinion nonetheless. My intuition was simply: you don’t. If your candidate pool’s fitness function is normally distributed, you’d likely get approximately the same quality of candidates from a randomly selected 50 out of 5,000. The distribution will be practically the same, and the maximum will be indistinguishable from the true maximum in any practical sense. As I recently explored—prompted by some statistical curiosity—this, of course, is modulated by the mean and standard deviation of the distribution. A higher standard deviation calls for a larger subset, while a higher mean dramatically shrinks the number needed to screen. But I also think nobody really knows their "true" fitness function, much less its distribution across the applicant pool—simply because businesses have no means or resources to actually measure or research this aspect. That doesn’t stop them from pretending they do. I also felt the urge to respond with some snark: maybe they don’t really understand their own business, at least the placement/recruitment aspect of it. If they’re recruiting mid-echelon personnel—software devs, BAs, testers, other office roles—it makes sense to publish an ad and gather applications. But it doesn’t make sense to expect that pool to include extraordinary candidates from a fitness perspective. Sure, we’re all extraordinary in some sense, but in roles like these, businesses are simply not in a position to materially benefit from that extraordinarity. Nor are they able to detect it during hiring—and I don’t even mean that as snark; it’s just the nature of things. In a natural distribution, the second-best candidate is not materially better than the top-best, and the third is almost like the second, and so on. Businesses that set their hiring threshold—whether explicitly calculated or intuition-based—too high will simply go out of business, because in this echelon you need to rely on mass hiring. Relatively speaking, of course, but you still need to be able to fill multiple positions with readily available candidates. So, the question posed by my ex-coworker doesn’t make sense. But as I see it, it doesn’t make sense even for hiring in the top echelon—C-suites and so-called "rock stars." The strategy for top-echelon hiring is well established. It’s widely used in business, show business, and sports alike, where "fitness" follows a power-law distribution. It’s called "scouting" or "headhunting". You don’t throw a job ad over the fence and wait for a torrent of applications. You meticulously maintain a rolodex of potential candidates, watch their careers, court and dine them, and try to snatch them when they’re poised to make a move—or even just before it becomes obvious. You don’t wait for them to apply to you—you apply to them. You don’t ask "Why do you want to work for our company?"—you shower them with perks and sign-on bonuses if they show even a hint of hesitation. The "agents" in this echelon work for candidates, often on retainer—not the other way around. It’s a completely different world, where you’re never in a position to screen a pool of 5,000 in hopes of finding an extraordinaire. In that world, hiring the second-best can have a humongous negative impact on company performance compared to hiring the top-best. For better or worse, that’s reality. So I found my guy’s question quite unsettling—an indicator that yet another "recruiter" doesn’t really understand what they’re recruiting for. I was able to fish out a useful metaphor from the LLM-generated word soup: "talent brokers vs gatekeepers." Over the last decade, recruitment agencies and internal departments have been universally rebranded as "talent acquisition." That rebranding feels disturbingly phony and hollow. Now I know why. Despite pretending to be "talent brokers"—scouting for talent—the reality hasn’t changed. They’re still the same old "gatekeepers", applying selectivity to boatloads of "talent" that come to them. As industries and their associated keyword-spaces have grown dramatically—and AI tools have proliferated—such selectivity has become increasingly diluted. In my opinion, it’s now indistinguishable from random picks, yet still cloaked in the illusion of validity. For someone like me, swimming deep in the muck of the mid-echelon and with no ambition whatsoever to strive for oxygen-deprived heights of top echelon, it’s deeply disturbing.
• adonese 1y ago
  Worth to mention is do reach to your friends and network telling them you were let go of / looking for a job. There's no shame in that, and in fact, it can help a lot. Another small points: reduce your expenses. Basically plan for the worst in terms of budgeting. Widen your search space. There are other younger markets in global south you can also approach. Theres this expression i couldn't exactly translate to English. It goes along the lines of loosen up your body (literal translation), but it's more about yielding to the flow and less about physically doing so.
• catherinebrigg 1y ago
  [flagged]
• hodgehog11 1y ago
  Four months? Six months? Is that supposed to be a long time? I know people that have been in this situation for nearly two years now. Forget hopeless, it's a bottomless pit of despair. I don't know how to help them, and neither does anyone else. But they keep trying and doing whatever they can. The argument of "have hope, almost everyone picks themselves up eventually!" doesn't work when you're the one who is actually homeless.
  • hackable_sand 1y ago
    1.5 years for me Still searching for some reason!
  • e1tq4w3ccm 1y ago
    I've had about six or seven months of temp work in the last four years. It's uncanny when people talk about having a couple months of unemployment being rough. The article points this out. > Tell them you’re unemployed, what do you get? “Oh yeah I was unemployed one month ten years ago boy that sucked.” Yes, friend, yes it does suck right now six months in, and unlike your little story there I don’t know when or if it will ever stop. This is on point, but then the author completely misses the mark a following paragraph. > How often have you known somebody whose life was really, finally wrecked by unemployment? I don't know anybody in my situation. The people I know send one job application, get an interview, and get an offer. I don't know how they do it. They don't know how they do it. People look at me like I must not be trying very hard because it's trivial for them to get a job and infer that it must be for me as well. The author says > It won’t turn out as bad as you fear. And continues by asking how many people does the reader know go homeless from being unemployed? > I’m talking about who do you personally know who’s had it go that badly? Homelessness is just a weird way to frame that. A family friend is the only other person I can think of in a similar situation to me - mid 30s, university educated, very unemployed - and they're living with their parents. That doesn't mean they're not having a really bad time. Or that its not bad for society in general when we waste human capitol like this. She had motivation enough to travel out of country to get her degree. She is educated, but had no place in society, no career or family of her own now. That isn't fine just because she isn't homeless. My savings are gone and even when I lose my home this year I will have social support structures, like living with family. I won't go homeless but that doesn't mean my career isn't over or that things aren't that bad. I'm not even worried about being homeless. I'd sleep in a tent if every day I woke up to doing what I loved. I am worried that every day for the rest of my life will be worse than the day before it because nobody will work with me and nobody wants me on this earth.
• graycat 1y ago
  From the comments here, now super tough to get a job. Much different when I started, and can draw a lesson: Started my career as a "physicist" at the NIST in research on the "Lamb dip" in the wavelengths of He-Ne lasers, got into the numerical analysis of ill-conditioned matrices, and, thus, got a career in scientific computing. For a job, just look in the 'Help Wanted' section of the Washington Post, send a few resume copies, get a few interviews, and get 1-3 offers, all in less than 2 weeks. No problem. The DC area was awash in organizations trying to get into computing and were desperate for anyone who could type in code and have it run. A guess is that there was a larger plan: Some Big Shots in US National Security were really big on getting the DC area really moving on computing so pumped in big bucks with the theme, "If they look like they have aptitude and interest, then make them an offer they won't refuse and have them learn on the job." I.e., the Big Shots tweaked the supply and demand curves -- considering the money they were spending on military hardware, getting young guys into computing was small potatoes with a big gain. Soooo, from the posts here, now we are at the other extreme: Way too many people and way too few jobs. Part of the problem is the concept "geographical barrier to entry". E.g., there around DC, the Big Shots wanted to hire people already in and around the local area of DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland and, thus, the employees had for competition a "geographical barrier to entry" -- no one outside that local area would compete. So, I got a good career going, Camaro with 396" engine, the best restaurants, fancy food cooking hobby, violin practice on a decently good, new violin, a sack full of Nikon camera equipment, self-study in math, furniture, clothes, wife in grad school, in computing with also, crucially, some math, Fourier theory, numerical analysis, Navier-Stokes equations, etc. With that success, to improve that career, got an applied math Ph.D. -- ruined my career, never recovered. My brother warned me, "Each year in your Ph.D. program will leave you 1 year behind in your career" -- CORRECT. Now, with the Internet, often no barriers to entry. Curiously, people mowing grass, removing trees, installing roofs, repairing driveways, installing HVAC, electricians, plumbers, painters, real estate agents, insurance agents, ..., do have a small geographical barrier to entry. E.g., in my neighborhood, a guy mowing grass has two, nice, new 4-door pickup trucks with some nice trailers for the equipment. They have useful tools, e.g., pickup trucks, riding mowers, leaf blowers, wrenches, saws, volt/amp meters, etc. and are good at using them. Now there are computers, useful tools, with people who know how to use them. Sooo, find some uses with some barriers to entry. Uh, can't not notice, that looks like it's time to move to the other side of the table, be an employer instead of an employee.
• monajonna 1y ago
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• user1999919 1y ago
  > OR maybe you have what experts call saying nothing while typing many things (SNWTMT) High and low you search for the words but lo and behold you're served nothing from the highest plateaus of the your top mind
• AndrewDucker 1y ago
  I don't understand why LinkedIn haven't stepped in to this market more strongly. They can verify if people are real. They have the information on what experience people have. If I was them then I'd be saying that your LinkedIn profile was your CV, and persuading companies to make LinkedIn be their route to applying for jobs. (Not a shareholder, don't really use LinkedIn myself, just feels like such an obvious step for them to take.)
  • sieep 1y ago
    This is an interesting take. I think they are heading down this path, especially with the 'Easy Apply' button which is essentially what you're talking about. If I have to guess, the current business model is likely profitable & any deviations too far from that could hurt their bottom line. Incrementing slowly overtime to LinkedIn replacing the CV seems to be the play, mainly to keep the current cashflow going.
• bob1029 1y ago
  I started working on shipping a game to Steam after I realized how broken the market was. I realize this might sound even more stressful than a job search for something like a backend role, but I feel like I have a better chance than average based upon cattle-like, low-effort trends in the space and my willingness to endure certain kinds of suffering that most indie game developers aren't even aware of. Worst case scenario, this provides something interesting to talk about in subsequent job interviews. You can often delete large portions of a resume when you have a fully published product live on a platform like Steam, even if it's very mediocre and selling like trash. In any reality, this is way better than working in the domain of boring bullshit banking and suffering the miserable personalities that inhabit the space. I feel like I might cross the "never going back" threshold with that entire industry within the next few months. If I reframe this, it is really stressful but it's also quite liberating. If I hadn't walked away from that job last year, I would have had zero time to think about these alternative paths.
  • eleveriven 1y ago
    Even if the game doesn’t take off, just having a shipped product under your belt is a signal. It shows follow-through, creativity, and self-direction
    • riku_iki 1y ago
      the question is if this signal will go through all job market clutter (fake resumes, AI in all places, etc)
• eleveriven 1y ago
  Really appreciated the honesty around rest, not as laziness or avoidance, but as an actual, necessary part of healing from burnout. Feels like we don't talk enough about that
• csoham 1y ago
  [self promotion alert] the "you are not alone" point really resonated with me. When I lost my job, I was alone, helpless and not sure what the next steps were. This is why I tried to create a community of people willing to support and be a listening ear for people going through job loss and this tough job market. It's at layoff.supprt. honestly I have not been supporting it for a while but of you find this helpful and would like more features then do let me know!
• triMichael 1y ago
  My wife is on phase 3. She graduated with a computer science degree in January, and then her dad passed away. The estate was a mess so she ended up spending time figuring that out. Then, we found and fixed a medical issue that had been draining her energy. She's doing a lot better now, but as a result she has an 8 month gap on her resume. She also never took an internship so that she could finish a semester earlier with summer classes. So now she's absolutely screwed for phase 1. She switched to phase 2 recently. She got a hit for software support. She got rejected, but the person was like "Why aren't you applying for programming jobs, since you like programming?" They set her up for an interview for an actual programming job, and said her lack of experience wasn't an issue because they had a lot of pull, and that they would offer her a test where she could prove herself. She spent the next several days preparing non-stop for the interview, only for the same guy to be angry at her for not having multiple significant projects on Github and refused to even give her the test. After that we thought about continuing phase 2, but we both felt like it was just a waste of time, especially after the last experience. She's had previous experience tutoring and I've written some instructional books, so we've now just decided to ignore the job market and form an LLC related to teaching. She'd be a great programmer, and it's really stupid that no one wants to give her a chance, but at some point you just figure the job market is so irrational that we should be able to beat it by doing it ourselves.
  • putzdown 1y ago
    You may have given up too early. For me the key part of this story is that she made a personal connection willing to guide her through and to overlook technicalities (like not having enough experience). The fact that she then reached a different person who was a jerk is a matter of chance. I’d you find a way to keep making these personal connections, she’ll get a job eventually. Also: it sounds like you’re very supportive and invested: good on you. She’s not alone.