Ask HN: Getting back to the tech industry after a three-year break

This is going to be long, but please stick with me here..

My wife came to the US to do her MS in EE and graduated in 2011. After graduating, she started working at a company in the Bay Area, which wasn’t e-verified at the time, meaning that she could only work for 1 year on her student visa using OPT. To add to that, they botched her H-1B application, resulting in her employment with them terminating when OPT ended, which was by the end of 2012.

As a result, she was forced to go back to being a student for a year or so, after which we got married and she came back to the US on an H-4 visa. Thanks to the new H-4 EAD rule that was passed in 2015, she was able to obtain an EAD in September via my H-1B visa.

Now, she is legally allowed to work for any employer, but she just hasn’t been able to get any calls from any company that she’s applied to so far (both big companies and startups). All in all, she’s probably applied to 100+ companies over the last 6 months, but she hasn’t received a single call back.

Though she has an EE background through her MS, her work experience was in C++ and Matlab development, and she’s focused on sharpening her Java and Python development skills over the past year or two. She’s mainly been applying to Java and/or Python development positions, or just SW Developer positions in general.

Recently, there was an initiative by Braintree (http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=Job&j=owj61fwG&s=PPpage) that fit her profile to a T, but she received a reject from them as well.

At this point, we’re willing to try anything. Do you have any clues about why it is this hard to find a job? Is it the 3 year break? Her MS is from a decent school, she’s done several research projects and has a year of experience in the industry.. She also has a profile at CodeEval, and plans to continue solving problems there and keep coding every day.

Any advice and/or help will be sincerely appreciated.

Your wife should consider sending in an unsolicited resume to be a no-op and, instead, start meeting people who either a) are hiring managers or b) can refer her to hiring managers.

Her goal in achieving connection with the hiring manager is to secure a coffee date or other informal conversation. Her goal for this conversation is qualifying the company, impressing the hiring manager, and convincing the hiring manager to either invite her formal application or respond positively when she suggests moving to a formal application.

This is one of the huge knowledge gaps in the engineering community regarding getting jobs. Unsolicited applications are not how most people get hired. This is particularly true of smaller employers.

A website, an app, a repo on Github. If the answer to that question is 'No' then my assumption is either a) this person isn't interested in the work, or b) they don't know how to code in the real world and I'll be paying them to learn.

I'm constantly amazed at the number of people applying for dev positions who claim years of experience and have absolutely nothing tangible to point out.

I run a small operation so I can't comment on big firms.

TLDR: Build something recruiters can see, and preferably use. It'll put you instantly in the top 10% of applicants.

Also, make sure your online reputation looks good. LinkedIn (make sure to enumerate skills) and Github are probably the two that get me the most recruiter touches.

Best of luck!

[1] http://www.meetup.com/find/events/?allMeetups=false&keywords... [2] http://www.meetup.com/software/events/224734607/