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Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

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Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#151
I’m hitting the same thing with first round technical interviews, which prior to the end of 2022 almost always used to lead to further rounds, now I’m getting summarily rejected at that early stage.

There’s so many reasons coming to a confluence which are causing the higher bar.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you suggest instead?

Rather than expressing frustration at the less experienced developers you are working with... as a hiring manager I would prefer to hear something more constructive, like that you are able to understand the common pitfalls a team of less experienced developers are likely to run into and proactively lead/wrangle/herd them towards success.

Stop the madness. If you are the manager then it is up to you to set the pace, tone, and direction of the team. If you are in charge then take charge. Don’t pawn that off on some powerless senior developer and cry about optimism, because you are setting that senior developer up as a center of animosity for junior developers who need to redirect attention away from their own failures.

If you want a strong team that optimistically works well together then set supremely high standards with risk of failure. When risk of failure to deliver becomes probable spread the tragedy across all team members. This is when your senior developers will step up to guide the juniors. Failure to do so results in whiners who throw each other under the bus.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#153
I've hired a maybe 10 devs in the last couple of years at a variety of levels, and this CV doesn't help much - it might get to a maybe pile, but there are a bunch of relatively small changes that I think would help:

1. Where are you? You should at least have your town or city on the CV unless you're in transit -- we're open to candidates that are moving, but local candidates usually get bonus points as things are just easier.

2. The CV is so compact it's hard to pick a career progression - it all looks static, and I'm not seeing any evidence of moving from entry level coder to picking up SW design skills to mentoring - it's all just 'created'. Some position titles might help here, plus some little details on how the role worked, not just the technologies (which I'd incorporate into each bullet point, rather that list at the end).

3. A summary that says in 25 words or less what sort of person you are, and what sort of role you're looking for - you might need a couple of variants for creative vs square jobs.

4. From 2 & 3 above, I'm not getting a sense of your personality and how you'd fit into a team.

I'd go for a 2 page CV with a little more room for extra things.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#154
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…

I was looking for 8 months until I found something. Most of the time, I wasn’t even making it to a tech screen.

Similar to you, I chatted to companies who were looking for concrete experience doing exactly the one thing they were currently working through. And the rug was pulled out from underneath me a few times.

It’s brutal out there, and it will fill anyone with self doubt. The only positive thing I can say is that interviewing for my new role felt normal and nice—the way I thought it’d be. That at least made me feel a lot better about myself.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I bring up this uneasy feeling of everything feeling like it's going to crumble soon, I get employment data hurtled at me and the stock market thrown in my face. Maybe Canada is worse due to how insane housing is but for the average person life does not feel anywhere like it used to pre pandemic at least.

While the numbers for the macro economy may be pretty good - for the tech sector they're terrible.

Recently surfaced here: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/08/700_it_jobs_us/

Basically, USA probably has much more new graduates of CS a year than net jobs in tech added last year. Many would say it's like a statistical error; anyway, it's a low number.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#156
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally put months on your CV - it's not clear if your most recent role was 12 months or 1. I've stopped doing that because it gets tiring why I changed so frequently in recent years. It's not my fault places go bankrupt, startups do layoffs, or teams just up and dissolve after you join, and it gets tiring explaining that rather than discussing my experience, skills, and interests and the role at hand. It was a tot…

At least you got the CHANCE to explain before. Now you can't even do that because your resume is not passing the screen. You're handicapping yourself with the lack of transparency. It just comes across as shady. Why are you worth the risk compared to the overflow of excellent candidates in this market? You need to suck it up and share this information. Briefly explain each situation on the resume (i.e. "fixed contrac…

> Why are you worth the risk compared to the overflow of excellent candidates in this market?

Because your resume is better?

You really saving time by filtering those to whom it's important. Those who contact you would mind less about those missing months.

Yes, when you need every possible contact, you might be interested to approach things differently, but the question isn't how to match best the screening algorithms. And it's very sad thing to have to explain those months.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#158

The worst thing about your CV is the non-chronological layout and the second item the "University of Bedfordshire" A lazy recruiter will see that as a watermark as your education and assume the rest is amateur stuff. This makes it look like you have less than one year experience. For some companies/recruiters they often like to see month and year for each position. It can be a red flag as it looks like hiding of care…

> The worst thing about your CV is the non-chronological layout

CVs used to have a choice of layouts, you write in a form you prefer. What's wrong with non-chronologicals now?

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#159

I've hired a maybe 10 devs in the last couple of years at a variety of levels, and this CV doesn't help much - it might get to a maybe pile, but there are a bunch of relatively small changes that I think would help: 1. Where are you? You should at least have your town or city on the CV unless you're in transit -- we're open to candidates that are moving, but local candidates usually get bonus points as things are jus…

Plus - I don't know about your area, but every so often I try to staff a Django project, and people with more than superficial knowledge are like hens' teeth, so maybe lean into that.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

It's also often outside of your knowledge. You just too often don't have anything close to useful statistics which you can refer to. Say, replacing one message queue solution with another, because the first was considered - you may not know or agree with all the details - too slow or too unreliable. How does it help if you don't have enough knowledge about how often the previous one failed? The new one has better performance, but you don't have enough traffic to feel the difference - then what? All you see on the justification side is several logs where the error is present and maybe some obscure post on the Internet complaining about similar issues, and then you have a decision from above. And such situation could be quite typical.
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