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Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

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Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#1

Post by rogual »

Never used to have any trouble finding employment. But it seems as of recently my CV is toxic waste. If recruiters reach out, I give them a good time to call and never hear back. If I reach out to them, silence.

Did I do something recently with an unpopular technology? Did I piss off someone powerful? Did I get too old? Who knows!

Lots of coding experience; bosses have always been happy with my work. I've written stuff about programming online that has been well-received. Several personal projects under my belt, and plenty of OSS contributions too. Suddenly nobody wants to know.

Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Did you fix it? How?

CV in case some kind soul wants to take a look: https://foon.uk/robin-allen-cv.pdf

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#2

Post by wslh »

I am looking at your CV and have some feedback:

- You missed your work goals objective paragraph! Why are you looking to a job? What is your interest? LinkedIn and Internet in general are full of examples. Why do I need to hire you beyond your specific skills? How are you as a human? as a team player? How do you contribute to organizations beyond your formal work?

- I will not separate between full time work and independent, OSS, volunter. I will follow the typical reverse chronological order for work in a single column.

- Put a summary of your skills somewhere (Python, C++) and learn and experiment with Rust if you want to increase your chances!

If you ask me I would pay a few hours of someone to help you with your CV. It could be an average recruiter that has the hiring filters always present on his/her head.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#3

Post by lsofzz »

Nice. I don't have anything for you but maybe this will be useful:

My two cents: o Learn machine learning, artificial intelligence - fast.ai

o Learn Rust, Rust, Rust and some Go

o Scala is good. Keep it. All the stuff you learnt whilst using Scala and Python will be useful in _Rust_.

o SDE is huge. Try something other can webdev and gamedev.

No matter what others may say next frontier will be roughly these: - Artifical Intelligence - Quantum Computing

Get good at these. Now, is the right time.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#4

Post by fardo »

Loved your Hapland games as a kid.

Besides the standard callouts of “it’s an anomalously hard job market right now due to a recent layoffs flooding dev supply of interviewees, due to a post-covid hiring frenzy hangover, due to anticipated US tax code changes discouraging hiring, and due to high interest rates in the US currently discouraging risks including hiring” the thing that may be actually in your control is I notice is a lack of quantification of project deliverables and accomplishments on individual projects.

Looking at the first point as one example, it could be summarized “created app”. Especially as your most recent work, I’d want to see you go more into the experiences the app enabled - perhaps the user counts who were using it, what the experience was for them, any metrics you might have that you moved the needle on, or what your changes enabled people at the installation to do. Quantifying the impact of your work with each work item I think would go a long way towards making the CV better.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#5

Post by rogual »

fardo wrote: post #4

Loved your Hapland games as a kid. Besides the standard callouts of “it’s an anomalously hard job market right now due to a recent layoffs flooding dev supply of interviewees, due to a post-covid hiring frenzy hangover, due to anticipated US tax code changes discouraging hiring, and due to high interest rates in the US currently discouraging risks including hiring” the thing that may be actually in your control is I…

Hey, thanks for the response.

I'm in the UK so not sure how much the US situation is contributing, though there might be knock-on effects.

I appreciate your feedback about what details to add and about that most recent point. I agree, and will spend some time rewriting.

Again, thanks so much for responding and I'm happy to hear you enjoyed those games. Cheers!

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#6

Post by infinitedata »

You have an impressing background!

I think folks reading this are seeing that you are too technical and lack of business acumen (while maybe not true).

For the work that you have done in each company they may be interested in the results of you creating these not that you created those. Did you ever find out what was the impact of your software development on the actual business?

Make sure to include numbers, people love data and lifts in sales, reach, clicks, awareness, revenue, etc.

You can save so much space by summarizing your language skills elsewhere instead of in each company. It also sounds redundant to say Used X, Y, Z because of course you needed to Use some programming language to achieve that. Group all of those elsewhere for those that you feel you are an expert with.

Best of luck!

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#8

Post by dsattt »

> Lots of coding experience; bosses have always been happy with my work. I've written stuff about programming online that has been well-received. Several personal projects under my belt, and plenty of OSS contributions too.

That’s the problem, you know too much. People in charge of hiring don’t want to be outshined.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#9

Post by oumua_don17 »

My 2 cents: You have awesome 3D Graphics/Games development experience. The best way to leverage that would be to market yourself as a 3D Graphics SW Developer/3D Game developer (you may need to deep dive a bit into 3D Graphics principles, OpenGL). Almost every semi company (Arm, QC, BC, Intel etc) and even FAANG's have openings for 3D Graphics SW engineers and you are actually well qualified for those as background in games is highly valued for these roles. Note: you will miss working with GFX apps in these roles, but you will not miss the pay!!!

The problem as I see it is: are you a games/3D Graphics developer, full stack developer or AI/ML engineer? The lack of clarity in this difficult market may be one of the reasons.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#10

Post by rogual »

wslh wrote: post #2

I am looking at your CV and have some feedback: - You missed your work goals objective paragraph! Why are you looking to a job? What is your interest? LinkedIn and Internet in general are full of examples. Why do I need to hire you beyond your specific skills? How are you as a human? as a team player? How do you contribute to organizations beyond your formal work? - I will not separate between full time work and inde…

Thanks very much for taking a look!

I appreciate the suggestion of adding more "soft" human bits about me. As a dev my natural reaction to team-player stuff on CVs is "anyone can say they're a team player, who cares?" but maybe recruiters see it differently.

I've gone back and forth on separating the volunteer work. Having it all in one column I felt it looked like I was trying to pad out "real" paid experience with unpaid "filler", but again, appreciate the different perspective and will try chronological again for a bit.

I like Rust; done some OSS contributions in it. I'll try adding a section about that. Thanks!

Will also consider professional help (of the CV kind).

Thanks again for responding!

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