Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious what you would consider an illegitimate career break?
Working for Oracle. ;)
Oh gods, and I misread it at first as "Legitimate career break". :O (Also Laughing Out Loud!)
Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
351–360 of 521 posts
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#3521. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. 2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. "I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team" --> is a desirable skill in and of itself. 3. Stop…
> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving. Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?
It depends entirely on the company and how many other candidates they have.
If I receive 200 resumes and 30% of them are picture perfect - Sorry, I can’t interview or even screen everyone. The resume with unexplained gaps isn’t getting sorted into the top of the pile simply because I have to be aggressive with filtering.
On the other hand, if I’m hiring for a difficult position at a less popular company and I’m only getting 1 or 2 okay resumes per week, I’ll take the time to screen resumes with gaps as long as everything else looks fine.
You have to understand that a lot of hiring managers simply couldn’t screen/interview everyone even if they wanted to. For those jobs, having unexplained gaps in an otherwise average resume could be the negative signal that moves you slightly down bellow the threshold.
But for a lot of average jobs: No, it doesn’t actually matter that much.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving. Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?
> Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise? I agree, and if they do? I'm not telling you to lie on your resume, but...have a good story to tell about what you during that time off. If that doesn't cut it, you're probably not dealing with a company with a good culture.
"I was driving a startup venture that failed..." ought to do it.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#3541. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. 2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. "I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team" --> is a desirable skill in and of itself. 3. Stop…
The option not on here is to move to a lead.
Tell the company that it's more than a one person job (should be obvious by the comments). Then pitch the idea of you being the lead and selecting the new team. You should be able to reduce your hours and get a raise. If not, then the comment above should work well.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving. Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?
I would agree for small gaps. But I think it's at least somewhat understandable why a significant gap would be a concern. With the pace technology moves at, if you have not been working for an extended period of time, it's reasonable that you might have fallen behind. Certainly this shouldn't be reason in itself to reject a candidate and it at least somewhat depends on what you were doing during that time, but I find…
No the real issue is not the gaps themselves but why so many different jobs that don't last long.
Tech evolves fast but in a week or 2 you're up to date if you've been away few months.
I have many gaps in my resume but I have many different jobs, which is a lot more problematic.
A question that pops up often is why did I left after X months and I need to explain all my choices.
It is fine because I either didn't like the projects/companies, I wanted to switch technologies ... they do ask why 6 month off and that seems fine when I tell them I've been travelling.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#356You literally asked the question that I wanted to ask. Read my mind and my life right now.
Thank you for your question. I really appreciate it.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#357Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you post " I don't know, maybe setting unrealistic expectations and telling everyone they are worth more which implies they are doing something wrong to not get that worth out isn't doing them favours either in the long run. " under a thread like this, you are acting supremely unempathic. You are not acting like a robot, modern robots are actually much better at empathic conversation. In fact, I asked GPT-3 "Write…
That is genuinely the most impressive thing I've seen come out of GPT-3. Granted, I haven't played with it much, but wow. Thanks for posting this.
Me too, like, you could start one of these agony aunt columns and nobody would notice. Maybe polish it a bit and you are good to go.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise? It's not that. Having a gap in your resume might mean that the candidate is trying to hide something. E.g. a job where candidate was fired and doesn't want to be asked to provide references. If you took a gap to pursue other things, put whatever this was on your CV, don't just leave a gap. If it was something interesting, it might…
Common gaps are for protected things (raising children) and can cause problems if put on CVs. The idea that employers need to treat every applicant with maximum suspicion is frustrating.
The concern is that someone was fired for cause or has a pattern of abandoning jobs.
Taking time off to raise children isn’t a big deal at most companies (at any big company, you’re more likely to find more parents than non-parents in hiring manager positions). Even gaps for things like travel aren’t really an issue as long as the candidate explains it.
You have to consider that hiring managers aren’t only seeing resumes of flawless candidates. There are a lot of candidates out there with things like anger issues, chronic performance issues, interpersonal issues, and so on that have already been removed from other companies for these reasons. It’s difficult to deduce it from a resume alone but small signals like unexplained gaps can be a hint that you need to dig deeper.
Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
#360You got good advice. I will pile on, splitting it into two separate buckets: what (setting your goal) and how (moving in that direction), which to me are worth separating.
What. As others said, do not underestimate your ability or put an artificial ceiling on your worth to the company. But you have to figure out what would make you reasonably happy at work. Working on specific areas (aerospace, bio, medical, etc.), specific technologies, team type, something else? Everyone is different.
In parallel, figure out how much money you will be happy with: more is better, but for many people serious stress builds up below a certain point (again, different for each one of us).
How.
1. Reduce your hours and get enough rest. You cannot get good answers on "what" unless you have both calmness and time. Get both. Build up a 6-month financial cushion, then set 40-45 hrs work goal; 50 hrs absolute max. If your startup asks you to go, so be it. Between your savings and unemployment benefits you will be fine for a while. After a month or so you might see where you want to go.
2. Develop a network with technical folks at companies you want to work at. Look at the problems they are trying to solve. Make a small project on github on one of those topics (X). Go to a conference where those folks are likely to hang up. Ask for advice on how to do X which they should be interested in. Or use another method. You may not get where you want to go in one step, but it will likely be a step in the right direction.
3. Buff up your resume and the linkedin profile so they do not look abandoned. Do some leetcode practice. People say "linkedin does not matter", but many would still look up a person before the interview as a sniff test and linked in is what usually comes up.
Good luck!