I'm Begging for Work

Probably because of the needlessly aggressive pile on heir getting.

They make a reasonable point: first stage of hiring is filtering out people; this blog post will to some emoyers be ideal signal to cause OP to be filtered out; it might be an good idea to try a different style when looking for work.

Off the cuff, I agree with you, but I also wonder if it isn't an approach only used by a minority of people involved in hiring, primarily those with a technical background. This is the sort if matter on which I would love to see an empirical study based on real data from the industry, not stimulated hiring experiments, unlikely as it may be to happen.

I'd like to donate some money and I am sure other people would do that as well, how can I donate a few $$$?

After having kids and be broke myself in the past I really feel for you.

Is it worth it to go to a photographer? Or does that signal narcissism?

OP, I have been in a similar boat as you.

Back in 2013, my daughter was born and within 2 days I was laid off from my position as IT Manager at a small MSP in Dallas.

No college degree at the time, no savings, wife and I were not working. The one thing I did have though (fortunately) was experience in the industry - about 8 years of IT experience (dev, systems engineering, architecture, management).

I freaked out initially - the stress of a new kid, no money kind of ate at me. For not only was I a dad (a young one at that), but also now my family has no income (wife was on maternity leave).

The first thing I did was head to a local coffee shop and busted out my laptop.

I hadn't edited my resume in a few years. I deleted everything and started over. I knew this crappy employer wasn't going to dictate my families future. I also knew what I was worth.

I immediately got on LinkedIn and started connecting with everyone I knew/asked for references and then started connecting with hiring managers at prospective companies.

I created a burner phone number (google voice number) and used this on my resume - then created a Monster, Dice and Careerbuilder accounts (to attract headhunters) and filled out those profiles entirely.

Having not spent a lot of time in a few years looking at salaries in different segments of IT, I spent a few hours figuring out what in the hell I wanted to do - and what would make me some $$$.

I found that in the Dallas/Fort Worth area (at the time), Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and VMware were heavily searched terms by recruiters on LinkedIn and Indeed.com.. I started looking at what I could do to leverage my current knowledge/skills and find a lucrative position.

After spending a few hours researching, I found that I could leverage my systems (Windows/*Nix) administration experience and help developers deploy their code. I was pretty good with Python and was interested in learning Ruby.

Bingo - DevOps!!

I found what interested me - the best of both worlds and I started targeting my job searches/applications towards that.

By the end of the day, I had a call from a local recruiting agency looking for Cloud and DevOps engineers. By the next morning I was on the phone with the hiring manager - and by the end of the day (3 phone interviews later) I had an offer in my inbox ($90K more than my last job).

In summary: What you went through completely sucks. Don't beg. Show people that you can get shit done. Do the work, be the prize.