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Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

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Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#101

Post by czbond »

cmckn wrote: post #56
jedberg wrote: post #34

For those of you feeling down about being ignored, keep in mind this is the slowest hiring time of the year, with holidays and vacations, and end of year budgets. Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office. Hang in there!

You’re totally right; but I’m nervous for my laid-off friends that will burn through 80% of their severance over the holiday season. :(

After that there is unemployment insurance for a while. They'll be fine.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#102

Post by fhd2 »

jedberg wrote: post #34

For those of you feeling down about being ignored, keep in mind this is the slowest hiring time of the year, with holidays and vacations, and end of year budgets. Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office. Hang in there!

Having hired hundreds of engineers, it's the same feeling on the other side as well: The recruiters will tell you that nobody wants to switch jobs around the holidays, so you shouldn't even try. Odd.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#103

Post by giomasce »

turdprincess wrote: post #72
kristopolous wrote: post #37

Let me show you the backdoor: Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required. I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicid…

Curious if you have done this yourself

Not GP, but I have and it worked. Pretty happy of the job I have, working of free software in a great environment.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#104

Post by [deleted] »

kristopolous wrote: post #37

Let me show you the backdoor: Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required. I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicid…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#105

Post by MattDemers »

Garbage. I'm looking for marketing/communications/social media work. Those industries aren't really hiring right now, and despite changing/improving my resume/cover letter three times now (with help from a hiring manager friend, and a career coach), I'm still not getting any kind of non-automated response. Been searching for 6 months now.

Strangely, I had one place basically self-flagellate at how bad they were at their response time (again, in an automated response), and never followed up again.

I feel like part of my problem is that I worked in an industry previously that inflated my titles. I'm applying to entry-level/associated positions with "Director" on my resume, mostly because I'm trying to upskill things I didn't get to learn, in an environment where I'm not managing the whole department.

It's disheartening to see LinkedIn say "Yeah, want to see how you stack up against the 100+ other applicants?"

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#106

Post by throwaway20382 »

kristopolous wrote: post #37

Let me show you the backdoor: Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required. I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicid…

This is exactly what my gardener did. One day someone went to my home and started mowing it. I watched. After 4 months of free mowing, he started doing my hedges. I started to talk to other people in my house: "hey we should hire this guy". My wife said "wtf for, he is free? right?" Eventually, I was worried he would start doing free work somewhere else so we hired him - but not for much. He is a great gardener. /s

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#107

Post by krn »

ricardobayes wrote: post #88
krn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"? It's not that hard to accomplish for those who can be(come) location independent. For instance[1]: > You would need around 2,582.16$ in Budapest to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,700.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities). [1] https://www.…

Budapest is a very weird place unless you live in an expat bubble in the 5th district downtown or in a villa in the 2nd. The city is basically a parody of itself, for example they didn't have money to keep up the mental hospital so they just released everyone on the street. Even a good few years after the fact, the city is still full of visibly mentally ill people, who act completely random. You never know when you'l…

I agree with most of your points, even though I never felt unsafe in Budapest during the 3 months I spent there, including many many long walks after midnight.

I picked Budapest as an example because it's a well known international destination with very high level of walkability, great public transportation, and affordable prices.

Prague and Krakow are two other similar options in Central Europe, only much less "weird" (and, as a result, a little more "boring").

There are also plenty of pleasant and affordable cities in Southern Europe, such as Valencia and Porto.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#108

Post by KronisLV »

300bps wrote: post #20
that_guy_iain wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not been laid off either. I'm currently taking a break from jobs. I'm starting to think that it's time to go back to full-time employment. But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. Let all the companies that are going to do layoffs have their layoffs and then join a company still looking for new devs in a few months.

>But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?

> I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?

In my case that'd be:

  - living in a relatively affordable country (Latvia), where rent and other expenses aren't too high
  - having an okay income by local standards, e.g. I make around 2000 Euros after taxes, which is in the upper 10% of salaries locally https://www.algas.lv/en/salaries-in-country (many earn more)
  - saving and/or investing for many years now, I have about 37k Euros saved up, which isn't much for someone in US, but with monthly expenses between 500 to 1000 Euros, they might last me from 3 to 6 years (though less in practice, due to inflation)
  - having additional factors that make things easier, such as sharing a residence or living with parents, having solar panels or one of those energy efficient homes if in the countryside, having reasonably affordable ways of heating if in the countryside (e.g. firewood with central heating), not having too many subscription services and so on
But then again, I live a fairly frugal lifestyle: don't use expensive cloud platforms for development (though I pay for JetBrains tools), only occasionally get video games (or other entertainment) on sale, don't have a car and routinely save about 50% of what I earn, if not more.

For people with higher living standards than mine: probably earning more than I do, even relative to their expenses.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#109

Post by rootusrootus »

300bps wrote: post #71
est31 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there is a lot of space between "has savings for 8-12 months" and "is independently wealthy, i.e. can live off interest of their own savings". Former is extremely easy to achieve if you can save significant portions of your salary. If you can save 30%, you can achieve it after 3 years. Latter takes a bit longer.

Yeah there is a lot of space between "has savings for 8-12 months" I think there is a mentality difference here. I have savings that would easily last me 10 years of not working. But... that's kind of my plan. I will be retiring some day. I don't want to use up even a dime of that money by not working in my prime earning years.

A good friend of mine spent his life being pretty frugal. Saved up a nice chunk of change, too -- his wife is also a software developer, they both made good money. Got cancer early last year and was dead 10 months later. 55 years old. Ugh.

Not saying you should run out and spend your nest egg. On the other hand, I'd be reluctant to suffer too much during my prime working years scrimping and saving for a retirement that might actually not happen. I'd rather have jobs I really enjoy, and frankly, if I enjoy the work well enough why would I retire? Just take longer and longer vacations and work part time. So I'm willing to use a bit of my saved up funds when necessary to get out of a work environment that is unpleasant.

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