Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

In my case I was a 15 year full time JavaScript developer. After years of frustration watching children run the daycare crying about needing more frameworks, not knowing how to program, and hyper insecurity I could not go back to that kind of work. I largely made myself unemployable. If AI eliminates the need for framework junkies who cannot be bothered to write original code maybe I will give it another shot. In the meantime I am entry level data science and enterprise API management now.

Here's what I emailed you - putting it here as all general advice that might be useful.

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First impressions are that for 13 years experience you CV is a bit short. I would not be concerned about letting your CV go onto multiple pages, there's nothing wrong with a long CV when you have sufficient experience to fill the space.

You don't have anything about who you are on the CV - just a few paragraphs to give the reader a broad brush about what it is you do and what you are bringing to the table can really help.

For each company I generally include something brief about what the company (or the part of the company I'm working in) does - you want the reader to think "That's an interesting business - I bet this guy learnt a thing or two there". People are trying to pattern match against what they are looking for. So anything you can do that will trigger thoughts like "I bet this guy has seen the same problems we have" or "We're going to hit similar things to what this guy has seen" etc..

What's the impact what you've done had on the business and users? For example the recent work you've done sounds like pretty important stuff - rather than listing it as a bunch of technical achievements try and reframe it as impacts on the business and users. E.g.

"Created a set of user friendly administration tools for trial staff that allowed them to easily monitor participants’ progress, and generate statistical data. This allowed them to focus on blah blah blah blah..."

Think about why you were hired for each role - what is it about you that made them pick you and then try and express that in the CV along with how you met those needs. e.g. in the recent University job you were probably hired because of your expertise in software engineering and you probably brought a lot of experience to the role on how to leverage technology to get the job done.

I always try and remember that the person doing the initial read of the CV is not going to be technical - you need to get someone excited about the problems you can solve in the business.

Everyone has a list of technologies they've used on their CV - so you need to stand out from them.

Picking one at random: "Worked on frontend and backend systems for this health tech company." OK... and what impact did your work have? Can you cite a qualitative improvement on the business due to your work? If not, can you at least cite quantitative facts like: "Released 6 updates to the product."

I'm going to make a suggestion that sounds negative, but is intended to help you realize if your bullet points read well or not -- For each one, imagine a hiring manager at an interview asking you, "So what?". Then throw out your original bullet point and instead type in your answer to that question.