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Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

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Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#241

Post by rogual »

abysmallytall wrote: post #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 respo…

Amazing reply, thanks so much!

Re: GitHub, you're right, it is kind of bad. I'm proud of some contributions I've made to other people's projects but you can't pin a PR. My own repositories are largely old or experimental. I'd consider not putting the Github link in at all, but I've had recruiters say it was vital to have it. I might make some private projects public just so I can show them off.

Also much appreciate the advice re. focusing on impact. Difficult to add hard figures retrospectively but I'll see what I can do.

Thanks again for taking the time to give all that advice.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#243

Post by [deleted] »

avmich wrote: post #193
stonogo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have over 200 resumes to go over this week for an open position. If I have to decipher your narrative it's going in the 'no' pile. Effective communication is a critical skill and evaluating that starts here. I'm not calling anything "wrong" but I definitely don't have time to have tea with your branding or whatever.

The whole web stands on each and every website being uniquely designed, however hard it is to learn how to navigate. If you want efficiency, work with databases, not people.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#244

Post by freedomben »

da39a3ee wrote: post #146
freedomben wrote: post #99

I do hiring in the US not the UK, but I'm only (I'm guessing) a few years older than you so you probably had the "keep it to one page" rule pounded into your head. I get a lot of resumes, and that is definitely not the case anymore. Two to three pages is perfectly fine. I would suggest: 1. Add a list of skills and/or technologies you're particularly good in. You can include stuff you've used but aren't current in, bu…

Yes but this is misleading and missing the point: there is nothing really wrong with this person's resume/CV. There is nothing about it which is off-putting and it does the job of communicating that this person is a very experienced software engineer who can communicate clearly, and has enough attention to detail and care to produce a nicely formatted CV and that they're obviously a reasonable candidate for pretty mu…

> Yes but this is misleading and missing the point: there is nothing really wrong with this person's resume/CV. There is nothing about it which is off-putting and it does the job of communicating that this person is a very experienced software engineer who can communicate clearly, and has enough attention to detail and care to produce a nicely formatted CV and that they're obviously a reasonable candidate for pretty much any programming job that's close to their centre of gravity wrt the technologies required for the job.

I agree there's nothing wrong, but (respectfully, truly) I think you're actually missing the point, possibly the is/ought fallacy? The point isn't to have "nothing wrong" with your CV/resume (which I agree OP has nothing wrong), the point is to get noticed. Generally speaking for most people, the whole point of a resume is to get you an interview. When you're competing against dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other resumes, standing out is hard, and failure to do so usually means no interview, which means no job, even when you are the most qualified candidate.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#245

Post by bitwize »

Work on your social skills. Past a certain technical competence threshold, social skills are 60-75% of the job. Companies no longer want good programmers; they want redundant arrays of average programmers, which means that if you are an average engineer who is oriented toward collaboration and communication you are on the fast track to success in this field.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#246

Post by gadders »

I'd echo what some of the other people have said in that "worked on" is doing a lot of work in your CV. I get that you want to be brief, but you could go to 2 pages and add in the necessary detail.

EG instead of "Worked on" have something like "Was responsible for module that did XX. Optimised the code to serve an additional YYY customers per day on same spec hardware" i.e. more detail on exactly what you did.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#247

Post by mjenkins65 »

foofie wrote: post #202
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…

> 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. That was my experience as well. If a candidate doesn't claim to have over 5 years of experience in a specific tech stack then recruiters just downrank of completely eliminate them from their short list of candidates. And I w…

I am finding a bit of a different outlook. I have had several people let me know that if I didn't have experience in their particular technology within the last 2 years, they were not interested in my experiance.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#248

Post by ZimbiX »

There's a lot of great advice here already on improving your résumé - I agree with pretty much all of it.

Something that hasn't been mentioned yet though is the typo quite close to the start - 'impariments'. That'd be a red flag for me regarding attention to detail.

In this highly competitive market, résumé optimisation matters more than ever. Mine's certainly not perfect.

Like you, I'm struggling to find a new job too; but as a Senior Ruby Developer in Australia. Godspeed in landing something.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#250

Post by jknight137 »

I too have had a lot of issues. Not sure if AI is filtering my resume. One thing is I do think I am Aging out. 5-10 years ago I was getting i terviews with my tech companies now nothing, even with more degrees and experience.

The other thing that’s killed me is short tenured jobs. Like it’s probably better to have a gap than a job less than a year.

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