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Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

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Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#231
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the relationship between individual things in what a developer do and financial results is not so easily measured. There are for example a couple of projects where I worked, that should I failed to do my part, the company could be fined, and even maybe arrested. Thing is, I don't fucking have idea of what those fines could be, and of course it was a multiple team effort and it would be hilarious for me to cla…

If you don't know, hiring managers won't know the number either. Just make some plausible sounding number up and add it to your resume. To be clear, I hate this sort of shit, but the game is the game.

Yeah. I see your point, and you're right. But is fucking hard to me force myself to actually do this. My parents were that old style working class folks that had this belief in a inherently fair world (no matter how much that same world fucked them over and over till their deaths).

Rationally I know how things work. But emotionally I am still the same as my parents and this is a fucking wall I am so far unable to cross.

Maybe I should consider therapy. Which would be kind of funny: Making therapy to become more of a sociopath and survive and thrive in a sociopathic society.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#232
While people are right to point out the down market, I think they're ignoring the obvious corollary. My theory is that you've been getting by with the weaknesses in your resume because the tech market hasn't seen a major downturn for awhile. From skimming your blog, it doesn't seem like you're an unskilled developer, but that's how your resume presents you.

Others pointed out that you don't mention impact, just responsibilities, and this is 100% the thing you need to fix. Apologies for the handwaving with somewhere (read this on my phone, replying on my desktop), but somewhere you said you were thinking like a dev and someone else backed you with a "we're not MBAs". I strongly encourage you to drop this dichotomy from your mental model. You should be curious about the impact of your work, whether it's to benefit the business, your coworkers, or some technical process. Your resume reads like that of someone who did what they were told and not a lick more. I've worked with people like that and I cannot give them ownership over projects. You're selling yourself as a liability.

But there's good news, judging from your blog you have had impact, so it just comes down to figuring out how to sell it. (sidebar: everyone is in sales, in this case you are selling yourself, this shouldn't make you uncomfortable, just think of it of making it easier for hiring managers to say "yes, I would like to take to this person / take a chance on them / think they will do well on the team).

Taking an example from your resume: "Wrote a server for participants to connect to and be given challenges to solve collaboratively in real time." How many participants? How much compute did you need to process this? What was the server response time? How would anyone look at this line and know you did a good job? Not just "well, they did the job, but was it good?".

Writing resumes for this approach is a skill. I'm guessing you will be a little unpracticed, but that's fine. I first switched my mindset on this about a decade ago and took 3 - 4 hours to learn the basics of LaTeX (I was tired of formatting in MS Word) and followed the advice laid out here: https://careercup.com/resume. You probably have enough experience where 2 pages might actually be fine. (it doesn't have to be LaTeX, I just gave it a try, found that I liked the end results, and have been slowly adding to my knowledge here or there)

Also, your GitHub profile is a mess. You're not putting a consistent good foot forward in your popular repositories. libtweak is pretty strong (imo, README could serve to have a "here's where I used it" section because I assume you used it for your games) but github-code-reviews is a much smaller scoped project. Pick your most impressive ones and figure out how to show just those. I've also found the advice listed here to be helpful: https://blog.boot.dev/jobs/build-github-profile/.

IMO, the two column layout has to go. Also, I'd separately call out your personal homepage and your GH profile. Expecting busy recruiters to click through GH and see your personal page is not a strategy for success.

tl;dr; you're presenting what appears to be good experience poorly, but the good news is that this is easier to fix than getting the experience in the first place

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#234

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, d…

I hate word docs, and used to insist my CV as PDF only. I have turned up to interviews only to see the other side having a completely mangled CV in front of them...

But intermediate recruiters love them as they need to add their header to it. They can export and import etc a PDF but it is much more effort so in a famine market like now a PDF is likely to be discarded for the 50 word doc CVs they also received for the same role...

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#235
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…

It's not shady at all. And there's a lot of things that describe me, but untransparent is not one of them. In fact, my transparency often gets me into trouble, in a sense, because people are not used to it and it seemingly weirds them out.

> Briefly explain each situation on the resume (i.e. "fixed contract ended" or "startup shut down due to loss of largest customer").

There's not room, and it's ultimately irrelevant to my experience and skills.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#236
post #209
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 am finding that more and more people are looking for extremely specific and narrow experience. Like, if you haven't used technology and worked in domain, they don't want to even speak to you. They'd almost rather higher a new grad who happened to work in than someone with experience in many languages and domains. It's really weird. I've been thinking a lot about how to make my own path, because it's exhausting tr…

I have definitely thought about it. It wasn't my "dream", if there's such a thing any more when it comes to careers, and I didn't even study it in school. I always say I fell into software, which is true. But I have also considered doing things with software that make me happy in a way that I could make a living from it. I haven't come across something yet, but I have a few ideas in mind that could work with a lot of initial work.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#237
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very short term thinking, which doesn't seem straightforward to me.

Why is it short term? Are employees less familiar with the technology they’re using day to day more likely to stick around? I’d guess the opposite?

It's short term because you will filter out intelligent and experienced candidates simply because they have happened to not use extensively in their career. It's short term because such a candidate will have used a plethora of other things and would likely come in with a fresh perspective given their experience. It just might take them slightly longer to ramp up on the language and its associated tooling and ecosystem.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#238
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…

It’s not you. Nobody is hiring. The ones that say so are in no rush. Executives are pushing hard on doing more with less and improving profitability. Things should loosen up when the Fed and EU announce rate cuts this year. Hang on. I know this isn’t the answer you were hoping to hear. Perhaps try your luck with contracting? There is more openness to that in this climate (lower threshold to commitment).

> It’s not you. Nobody is hiring.

Such a simple statement, but it does help. Thanks. :)

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#239

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…

This. I was a bit confused by the layout, and I thought the university was OP's undgrad uni.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#240
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. I initially thought there were a lot of gaps in work history. In today's tech hiring climate, if I were reviewing this resume along with a pile of others, I'd see the gaps (regardless of if they are really gaps), disqualify, and quickly move to the next resume.

Thing is, there have been gaps. I've sometimes taken weeks or months between jobs to travel, work on personal projects, play music, etc. Does this mean I'm bad at programming?

Gaps aren't automatically bad!

Maybe in some horrible organisations they do immediately disqualify you, but working with people that have gaps is often interesting and fulfilling.

Also, whatever you learned about life in the gaps can be very useful to your employer!

Maybe those gap-experiences make it easier to build relationships with coworkers and customers? Or gave you the confidence in life to reach out when a coworker is having a rough time personally? Or allows you to dare side-step hierarchy and get stuff that is important to customers done instead of getting bogged-down in endless meetings? Or allows you to bring a healthy culture of work-life balance to your employer?

All these things could have a big positive financial impact on the business.

I would include gaps on your CV and highlight what you learned or enjoyed during this time of your life.

Finally, if you tick the tech-checkboxes, recruiters probably unconsciously prioritize candidates that have an interesting life-story to talk about. I would rather talk about your gaps that all human beings can relate to, rather than about some random tech I'm not really all that familiar with.

Good luck!

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