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Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

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Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#101

Post by RadiozRadioz »

bamazizi wrote: post #61

Quick scan of your resume as someone who interviews 20-40 people/year (although not so much lately) ... I couldn't figure what you're actually great at. Strengths, passion and project type gravitation? FYI, your resume is shallow but still better than a lot I see each year. For someone like me to decide who to interview and spend that 1 hour on, comes down to info presented on resume intended towards the people readi…

I would advise against using Word doc format instead of PDF. I feel quite strongly about this.

1. PDF will render more consistently across platforms.

2. PDF can be opened in a web browser. Lots of orgs these days use cloud tools, you can't count on MS Office being universal any more. Also on a phone without additional apps, which is surprisingly common too.

3. Default PDF exports from most tools will include fonts, default Word exports don't. This makes opening Word docs annoying on machines with different fonts (or restricts you to "safe" fonts, which is probably a good thing, but this post is about formats not CV design)

4. Opening PDFs, there's less "junk". Opening Word docs in Word, you see all the squiggles under technical terms and non-Western names, draggable icons on tables, tooltips, etc. When I open someone's CV and Word throws up a bunch of popups about the document containing macros, "objects", fonts I don't have, it puts me in a bad mood for the next few minutes.

5. PDF can certainly be read by CV parsing engines. No question.

6. Having been on the receiving end, in my experience PDF is simply more common. Make the reader's job easier.

And you shouldn't use "doc" anyway, modern versions of Word use docx.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#102

Post by codingdave »

lowercased wrote: post #96
keiferski wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explaining how you’ve impacted the bottom line isn’t BS, it’s how business works. Failing to understand this is a common mistake made by technical people, unfortunately.

It's also difficult to put 'truth' on there when... you did something that you knew was stupid, and there was no positive or measurable benefit. "Argued with CTO about importance of X. Did X, against my recommendation. Delivered X early, tested, documented, fast, secure. X flopped, and company laid off 20% of staff, including my team". There may not have actually been positive benefits to everything that you did, bec…

I haven't worked on a successful product since 2017. But I have absolutely supported leadership who wanted to give an idea an honest chance by delivering the product they asked for. Their failure to find a market does not mean that my technical delivery was sub-par. So my work still offers value. So I say exactly what I did - "Delivered a new SaaS app.", "Modernized a legacy system to a new tech stack", etc. I did deliver what was expected of my role, and I can claim that regardless of the market success.

Now, would it sound better if those products succeeded? Of course! But there is still something that can be said for my work.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#103

Post by shrimp_emoji »

keiferski wrote: post #91
fuzzythinker wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read resumes and that "bs" gets one negative point. Another negative point and resume goes to trash bin.

Explaining how you’ve impacted the bottom line isn’t BS, it’s how business works. Failing to understand this is a common mistake made by technical people, unfortunately.

We're engineers, not MBAs. That's a good thing, and it should stay that way.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#104

Post by Volundr »

lowercased wrote: post #96
keiferski wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explaining how you’ve impacted the bottom line isn’t BS, it’s how business works. Failing to understand this is a common mistake made by technical people, unfortunately.

It's also difficult to put 'truth' on there when... you did something that you knew was stupid, and there was no positive or measurable benefit. "Argued with CTO about importance of X. Did X, against my recommendation. Delivered X early, tested, documented, fast, secure. X flopped, and company laid off 20% of staff, including my team". There may not have actually been positive benefits to everything that you did, bec…

Welcome to marketing :-).

But in all seriousness, in the scenario you describe above, I'd question if X belongs on your resume at all. If you did it, and it was worthless, is it something to brag about?

There are no doubt exceptions to this, where something is really technically interesting, but honestly, 99% of the time, what you did is just not that novel; you are better off leaving it off your resume and instead demonstrating your skills with something where you delivered value.

It's also worth noting that even where X flopped, you still hopefully contributed something positive. In your own example, you delivered X some (months?) early. That alone saves $.

I was once part of a Salesforce (god help me) implementation where we were moving all our analytics into this new Salesforce platform with the idea that it would be the central hub for all employees. When all was said and done, it flopped. It tried to do too much at once, be everything to everyone, and was useless for most. 80% of employees only logged in once. It was exactly as you describe, where from the beginning, I warned we were on the wrong path.

It doesn't usually land on my resume because, I mean, it's fucking Salesforce, but if it does, or if it comes up in an interview, I can talk about how I replaced our contractor's ETL with a custom one that ingested the data in 10% of the time making it possible for us to actually keep our data up-to-date, or how I was able to refactor the data model to take proper advantage of compression and save us around $30k/month in storage costs (Salesforce cloud storage is stupid expensive).

Sure, the whole thing was a major screw-up that literally cost the company millions, yet I can still talk about how I made that situation a little better.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#105

Post by elzbardico »

As someone else said, forget the one-page rule, you're cutting content that it takes some experience and good will to infer from what you wrote. Screeners receive a lot of resumes, and you don't want them to be left wondering if your experience is relevant or not, at least not on this market.

2 to 3 pages for someone with a few years of experience is perfectly acceptable in software development.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#106

Post by lowercased »

codingdave wrote: post #102
lowercased wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also difficult to put 'truth' on there when... you did something that you knew was stupid, and there was no positive or measurable benefit. "Argued with CTO about importance of X. Did X, against my recommendation. Delivered X early, tested, documented, fast, secure. X flopped, and company laid off 20% of staff, including my team". There may not have actually been positive benefits to everything that you did, bec…

I haven't worked on a successful product since 2017. But I have absolutely supported leadership who wanted to give an idea an honest chance by delivering the product they asked for. Their failure to find a market does not mean that my technical delivery was sub-par. So my work still offers value. So I say exactly what I did - "Delivered a new SaaS app.", "Modernized a legacy system to a new tech stack", etc. I did de…

The OP was saying "don't just say what you did - say what the impact was!" (in so many words). Well... the impact was that this thing I delivered went way over budget, and the division shut down because we ran out of money.

Or... what if the impact is "user subscriptions decreased, cancellations increased, revenue declined"?

I was pointing out that "impact" isn't always positive - adding it to a resume might not be all that useful.

This happened to me. Was told to convert a lot of stuff to an XML database, which... no one had any experience with. But the owner wanted to be in the XML space. They sold a deal which was based on the XML database tech, but it was so bad, and so slow, and didn't actually take customer needs in to account, that we burned over $1m over 6 months, and half the company was laid off.

So, yes, I can put "XML database conversion" on a resume, but there's no positive outcomes to add to it. This is what the OP was being told to do - add positive outcomes. They don't always exist, and yes, it's outside your control.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#107

Post by Scarblac »

keiferski wrote: post #59
weinzierl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying you are wrong, but when does management even know exactly which specific X caused how much increase in revenue, let alone a software developer.

It's not about saying you directly caused the specific increase in revenue, it's more about highlighting the value you can bring to a future organization – at least so you can talk about it in an interview. Remember, this game is not about determining if that increase was purely attributable to your work, it's about convincing an employer that you can add value. For example: you coded and launched a new feature, and…

> For example: you coded and launched a new feature, and that feature brought in 20% more users over the following year.

Even if I did, it was probably someone else's idea, someone else decided it would be worth adding to the product, someone else made a UX and UI design, I wrote the code, someone else tested it, maybe there were some iterations of those. It's all team work.

Someone claiming such a increase as their personal achievement is spouting BS and would not get an invitation here.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#108

Post by lowercased »

Volundr wrote: post #104
lowercased wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also difficult to put 'truth' on there when... you did something that you knew was stupid, and there was no positive or measurable benefit. "Argued with CTO about importance of X. Did X, against my recommendation. Delivered X early, tested, documented, fast, secure. X flopped, and company laid off 20% of staff, including my team". There may not have actually been positive benefits to everything that you did, bec…

Welcome to marketing :-). But in all seriousness, in the scenario you describe above, I'd question if X belongs on your resume at all. If you did it, and it was worthless, is it something to brag about? There are no doubt exceptions to this, where something is really technically interesting, but honestly, 99% of the time, what you did is just not that novel; you are better off leaving it off your resume and instead d…

The OP may not be constitutionally capable of finding little nuggets of positivity from the midst of huge failures.

Already responded to someone else, but the OP was told to add the outcomes, not just what they did. Sometimes there are no positive outcomes to list, and listing negative ones just drags everyone down. Putting "implemented $FOO" may be all you can reasonably put in writing.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#109

Post by brianwawok »

bmitc wrote: post #88

You are apparently in the UK, but the job market in the U.S. has similarly been very spooky lately. I was laid off and have received almost no interviews outside of a single previous employer. My resume was flat out rejected, even from places that I had previously worked or was made an offer from as little as a year or two ago. It was really weird. As in, previous contacts would not even reply to emails or LinkedIn m…

If there is a surplus of talent, a company would rather hire someone who has background in the current stack and can jump right in.

If there is a lack of talent, companies hire whatever is even close and trains the new stuff.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#110

Post by haspok »

I think one of the problems with your CV could be that I can't really tell who you are and what kind of a job you are really looking for, unless I read the whole thing (and even then it's a wild guess!). Sadly, "software developer" is not really a thing anymore. You'd probably want to mention that you are full-stack, have X years of experience in Python (backend), and Y years of experience in Javascript (frontend). Databases (SQL / Postgres) Z years. Looking for full-stack roles, preferably contract (etc).

And I have to concur with those who mention that you don't list titles next to your job assignments. Not sure why, but it looks... strange.

Finally, where are you based? Are you looking for remote stuff, or onsite?... And be sure to include a phone number when you send it to anyone, especially agencies - they LOVE to start conversations on the phone, in fact, I don't know any serious agent whose first step is not to call you and have a 10 min chat, to prove that you are not some kind of weirdo. (Ignore this if you just removed your number for the post.)

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