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Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
721–730 of 875 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...You sound like a creep. Am I reading it right here, you spoofed your number to talk to executives? If the Op had a bit more credentials, and/or created something special, they might label it as "chutzpah" instead. I recall a story (perhaps apocryphal) that involved Steve Jobs that was similar.
It is not chutzpah. It sounds like that when people tell stories from own point of view they can frame as they wish. They sound cool when you listen to it as uninvolved poison. They are not cool at all when you are there in real life or in receiving end of it. It is the fantasy vs reality difference. As much as you imagine yourself creative when doing these, other people see blinking red flags and boundary pusher tha…
In pretty much every romantic comedy ever, there are probably "charming," "quirky," etc. behaviors that in the real world would be often/usually seen as creepy and stalkerish.
Re: Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
#723I feel similar. I have a CS degree and what I would consider a wide range of experience. I've created social media sites, a encrypted file sharing site, a site for watching videos and chatting at the same time, a site for cooperatively solving a rubiks cube at the same time. I have developed a large number of video game mods including full game modes. I have developed both custom server software and modded server sof…
You seem bright. I'd guess that you're failing on the social sides of the interview process. If you submit cover letters like this, you may be highlighting too many things that aren't applicable to the job so companies will reject you because they don't know where to place you.
Which part of the job hunting process are you failing at the most? Is it the initial application? Phone screen? Onsite interview? What types of jobs are you targetting?
Feel free to email me (in profile) if you want to go into detail more.
Re: Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
#724You need a portfolio of whatever it is you can do. I think both long and short term someone like yourself should probably work for themselves. Try contracting, build public facing apps, a public repo, etc to show what you can do so that people are so convinced they can overlook your more challenging attitude/personality.
Re: Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
#725As a hiring manager, the things that stand out to me in your post: - You said you quit a job at EA, quit a job at IBM, dropped out of college your freshman year. You may have valid reasons for leaving each of these, but you have to see this from the manager's perspective: You had 3 different great opportunities that all came to a dead end at the beginning of your career. You need an alternate narrative. - You talk ab…
I don't necessarily agree regarding FAANG. Once someone gets an interview it doesn't matter much what their previous work experience is.
I interviewed at Amazon.
Aced all questions, except the one that ALL of their inverviewers asked, that was how I had shown leadership solving a problem in a team situation in my past jobs.
See, in all my past jobs, I never been in a large team.
Didn't pass the interview, they have a policy to not tell you why but I can guess why...
Re: Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's spot on from the advice. I'll add that OP — Your biggest issue seems to be extremely high intelligence, paired with a lack of empathy and social functioning, which created a self-expectation of massive grandiosity. But you keep failing to deliver on it because you can't get your highly powered brain on the streets, leading in self-pity and depression. Not good, but salvageable. How do I know? My life story rea…
Sorry, but I think you're reading way too much in the OP. Their account is compatible with their biggest issue being "extremelly high intelligence" coupled with a lack of empathy, but it's also compatible with ordinary intelligence coupled with some bad choices- and the chances are that the latter is the right explanation ("extremely high intelligence" should only be the case very, very rarely, by definition [1]). I…
About your aside, while all of that is true, the inverse isn't. Not everyone thinks everyone else has EHI. So if you have a lot of people telling you you have EHI, then you can feel confident in your own assessment of whether or not you have EHI.
Re: Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
> companies are hiring people based on their capacity to actually do the job I think that's what honkycat was trying to say. OP doesn't sound like someone who actually has the skills for a dev job. So the only way they could get a dev job was if they somehow appeared really likeable so they would be hired despite lacking the required skills. (In my experience socially awkward people don't have trouble finding jobs if…
> OP doesn't sound like someone who actually has the skills for a dev job. If you pardon me, I doubt either of us have the senses to judge someone's capacity for dev job. He may not be very lucid at explanations, but it doesn't allow us to measure his dev capacity. Hopefully you'd agree we need slightly more to evaluate that.
The point being made is the lucidity of explanation is part of the dev job. We aren't all just code monkeys, typing out programs for 8 hours straight every day.
Being able to design, describe, explain, and critique in a way that doesn't make everyone at your company resent you is far more important than any dev hard skill.
Re: Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been a FAANG hiring manager and those rules were not rigidly enforced. There are other deterrents, however. As a younger manager I was keen to respond to such requests, but a significant proportion of unsuccessful candidates would then argue, sometimes quite vehemently, about the validity of the feedback. This curtailed my enthusiasm, and I've been rather selective since.
My experience too, it’s good to give a sentence or two out of courtesy but the arguing and sheer bullshit you get back sometimes, made me shake my head.
The other things is that far more commonly than sirens and alarm bells going off about something specific, is that someone just didn't wow me and I thought we could do better.
When we meet after an interview round "meh" is a much more common collective reaction than "run away now."
Re: Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
#729This is an easy one. You don't have a degree, and that means the types of jobs that will take you are the types of jobs that don't require one (like customer support or retail). Most tech jobs will throw your resume in the trash without a Bachelor's degree.
I would pursue at the very least a 2-year associate's degree from a community college as a starting point, and try to find a way to get a bachelor's degree. You might be able to go online, transfer credits from a community college, or find a night school at your local state university.
Re: Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't necessarily agree regarding FAANG. Once someone gets an interview it doesn't matter much what their previous work experience is.
I interviewed at Amazon. Aced all questions, except the one that ALL of their inverviewers asked, that was how I had shown leadership solving a problem in a team situation in my past jobs. See, in all my past jobs, I never been in a large team. Didn't pass the interview, they have a policy to not tell you why but I can guess why...
They weren't expecting you to be a manager, team lead, or to have worked in a big team.
They just wanted you to have shown some modicum amount of leadership skill. For a normal position, this doesn't mean that you have to act like a CEO. A simple case where you took the lead to solve some issue and maybe guided a colleague or even a customer would have sufficed.