Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#281

Post by sleepytimetea » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 8:15 PM UTC

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.

Not me - if I don't want like a website's design, I am going to close the tab.

Similarly, as a hiring manager (mainly software engineers), I come across some very "unique" resumes which I do look through out of curiosity but the maverick-factor is quite high with these candidates, and they usually are a disruption with their constant "unique" approaches to working with the team.

They would want to rewrite large modules your way and take forever to do it, then never actually contribute any productive code in any area...we made some hiring mistakes like that, and rather than wasting just that one engineer, these mishires ended up wasting other people's time, which is much worse.

Sometimes, it helps to be conformant (another brick in the wall, so to speak) to the standard protocol/format to have maximum compatibility.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#282

Post by sleepytimetea » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 8:19 PM UTC

I had a quick glance through the unusually formatted resume, and saw big glaring gaps in employment. Also, seems like you just graduated from University a couple of years ago ?

Those 2 things would just make me close out the tab and onto the next resume tab.

Looking again, I see the gaps are "filled" in other random spots on that resume, like initially, it looked like before 2015-2016, you worked only in 2008-2010 - thats a big 5 year unemployed gap ! Then, I found the missing parts on the left side, in arbitrary order.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#283

Post by bruce511 » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 5:31 AM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #280

bmitc wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ecosyste…

I live in a small town. When I hired a developer locally, I basically posted it as: * 2-3 years in Vue, React, Angular, or any modern JS framework When I posted it for remote only I advertised * 2-3 years of Vue experience There are _SO_ many applicants for a remote job (1000s), that I can be picky. So I will cut to the 500 that have the language I want, vs a slog through 5,000 that can maybe someday do what I want.…

As an employer I totally get you. I don't think that most people get that your goal is to reduce the number of interviews by any filter necessary. You could limit by height and you would still get too many applicants.

Once you are not filtering for location, other filters are necessary. You can't interview 1000 people.

I totally get that from an employee perspective, skills and domain knowledge are valuable and transferable. They absolutely would be perfect for your position. Vue experience is arbitrarily irrelevant.

What they don't get us that you don't want to interview 1000 people to find the "best one". You want to interview 5, and pick the best of those.

The trick (for hopefuls) is being one of the 5. -thats- the problem they have to creatively solve. Relying on your CV is the -least possible way of standing out-.

So I say this to all you bright folks looking for work - show some creativity, do something different, make my hiring easy. You can be great? Cool - prove it. Because there are thousands in line with you, and a CV is the least you can do.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#284

Post by lemme_tell_ya » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 6:24 AM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #251

The main thing is the "work from home" movement. At first employers hated the idea of employees working from home. But then employers got used to it, and then they realized that they could outsource most work to a Third World country. Because once work leaves the office, there is no reason for the work to remain in the USA or Europe. It might as well as go some place cheap, like Brazil or India or Vietnam. Mentally,…

I think it's a culmination of things:

- Like you said: once work leaves the office, there is no reason for the work to remain in the USA or Europe. I witnessed this at a company I was working at in 2019-2021. I was managing a small team, my team and others were drowning, the workload was so absurd we had several people quit over the span of a couple of months (making the problem even worse!) I finally got a 1-1 with a VP asking what the hell we were going to do about the situation. They told me, in confidence that they'd just let most of the developers quit on their own and start outsourcing all the projects to a company in another country (I want to say somewhere in South America.) They had been in talks with this company for months...

- Ghost jobs. The company I work for has a couple of jobs on their careers page that I know with certainty we're not actually hiring for. I looked at my old company, and same thing there (still have friends that work there and know they're not hiring for those roles.)

- Tons of people seeing the salary of folks in tech and pivoting into it (and a fair amount of them are just not well suited for it.) Software, Networking, Infrastructure, etc just aren't for everyone. Just like how cutting open a human on an operating table is not for me! We've all worked with that one person that just couldn't code themselves out of a wet paper bag and they've all tried to hop on the hot tech bandwagon when everything went remote due to COVID.

- Years (decades?) of VC backed companies that have hemorrhaged money since exception and gasp actually need to make a profit, and can't are going belly up.

- AI, hype or not definitely having an impact and mixing things up. Maybe not entirely in tech but I see AI generated artwork everywhere I look now.

- We thought it would be a good idea to shutdown the country (due to covid), but then had to print and pump money into the economy to get it started again, now we're paying the price for it.

- The R&D tax credit going away.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#285

Post by mgkimsal » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 3:04 PM UTC

Volundr wrote: post #115

lowercased wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, I have one 6 month job where all I can reasonably list is "implemented audit logging across all our projects to ensure HIPAA compliance." It was the most demoralizing job I've ever had, and I'm grateful that I WAS laid off (easy to say now that I have a new job). Making every line on your resume a banger may be impossible. But if you've got job after job of "implemented SAAS app in Django", it starts to say som…

> vs the guy who "reduced the processing time on our main data warehouse from 24 to 2 hours, allowing us to provide real-time analytics to our customers".

I reduced a 25 hour process down to 30 minutes. Someone else at the company took that 30 minutes and reduced it to 25 and put "15% reduction in import processing time!" on his resumé. But... he was also the one who was insistent that there was nothing to be done about the 25 hours in the first place. It was "impossible" to get it faster, supposedly.

In the past, I've put that 25 hour reference on my resume, and I had a couple recruiter folks tell me it smelled of bullshit, advising me I'm not supposed to exaggerate that much. What do I do? It's the truth, and if I explained it to someone who understood the state of the art at that time, the 'fix' would make a lot of sense (not magic, just... a deep understanding of what the tech stack is doing under the hood).

Last year I fixed a report screen that took 50 seconds to load up; brought it down to .5 seconds. But the company had already told the client it would require a big rewrite to 'fix'. And I 'fixed' it without the big rewrite. FWIW, the rewrite wasn't necessarily wrong, but also wasn't necessary. Or at least the ordering could have been reversed - give short term saving up front to keep users happy, then provide the rest of the support for that shortcut in the rewrite ('refactor').

Anecdotes like this can get you filtered out of some places that think it's BS. And... it might not hurt to avoid those places in the first place, but... you can't always know ahead of time.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#286

Post by tmaly » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 9:59 PM UTC

I would not say it is you, it is the general market right now. Companies are uncertain about the economic outlook.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#287

Post by sage76 » Fri, Jan 19, 2024, 12:01 AM UTC

a2code wrote: post #249

sage76 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing yet. Just studying things that interest me. But I have to figure out something in the near future. It just can't be software development.

What interests?

Maths stuff. Pattern recognition and machine learning by Bishop.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#288

Post by DecentRecruiter » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 11:42 AM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #235

DecentRecruiter wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 irrelevan…

It's relevant to the decision-makers: the people reviewing your resume.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#289

Post by DecentRecruiter » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 11:46 AM UTC

avmich wrote: post #156

DecentRecruiter wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 algorithm…

I can't speak to his skills - but in the eyes of a Hiring Manager reviewing his resume, it's worse than the majority. There is too much great laid-off talent out there.

It's not fair, but it's true.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#290

Post by lsofzz » Mon, Jan 22, 2024, 9:32 AM UTC

cardanome wrote: post #62

lsofzz wrote: post #3

Nice. I don't have anything for you but maybe this will be useful: My two cents: o Learn machine learning, artificial intelligence - fast.ai o Learn Rust, Rust, Rust and some Go o Scala is good. Keep it. All the stuff you learnt whilst using Scala and Python will be useful in _Rust_. o SDE is huge. Try something other can webdev and gamedev. No matter what others may say next frontier will be roughly these: - Artific…

There are barely any Rust jobs outside of crypto stuff at the moment. Not sure if this is good advice. While I agree that getting the basics of machines learning under your belt is a good idea, the "AI" field is pretty hype driven so one should also have plans for another Ai Winter and not solely rely on it. I don't think hype chasing is is good career advice.

Hmm. There are "plenty" of Rust jobs outside of crypto stuff. They are:

- Your typical service driven stuff (aka full-stack/backend/microservice et. al)

- Tons and tons of opensource projects from AWS (investing), Microsoft (investing) and Google (yes, investing) to name a few off the top of my head.

- Startups have so to speak started embracing Rust https://corrode.dev/podcast/

- Embedded Systems traditionally.

- Rust ecosystem is maturing faster than anything I have seen in the past (ok, maybe Go's ecosystem was fast as well).

Regarding AI and ML stuffs: While I do agree that chasing such hype may be intangible in the very short to short time frame. No doubt, the AI winter may follow a typical curve and follow up with a AI "summer". _Every_ major technology in the past 20-30 years has followed a V curve. AI/ML probably won't be an exception.

I understand that the OP may have hobbies outside of "learning" but making a dedicated time outside of it will yield by leaps and bounds. Always be learning (make time for it) - that's the gist in short without going into the nitty gritties.