The reverse job applicant

I'm not saying this as a way to gloat. I've met plenty of students who are as good, if not better, developers than I am in my department. I've met plenty of them who have better GPAs, more letters of rec, do more extra-curricular activities, have won more awards, etc., yet I basically landed a job because it's the job I wanted, and they're sending resumes to basically anyone that could potentially offer them a job and are getting no where. There has to be a disconnect here. They have to be "doing it wrong."

Build something, freelance, work on a few open source projects (or start your own), found a non-profit, start a club. The barrier to entry for all of those is shockingly low. Hell, if you're living at home, start a company. Chances are it will fail, but it will be something that makes you stand out from the crowd. I would imagine that most startups would be much more willing to hire a fellow entrepreneur, even if that business didn't pan out. And if you get really lucky, you'll never have to find another job again because you'll be your own boss.

I've suggested this to several of my peers that are having trouble even getting someone to call them back, and hardly anyone ever takes the advice. I think the simple reason people don't actually go out there and do something, even if it's just physically walking into somewhere they want to work, is that's a lot harder. It's easy to write a cover letter, stick it on your resume, and send it jobs@somecompany.com. You never face outright rejection or failure; you simply never get contacted. By the time you realize that company isn't going to respond, you've already sent off another 20 resumes.

Narcissism is the new "N-word", but it's not a bad thing. It's really a fancy way to say "self esteem". Psychoanalysts, since the 1960s, have come to see that postmodern people don't (usually) have the Oedipal problems that Freud talked about, but instead they have trouble with self esteem. There are a number of causes for this, but one of them is the massive exposure we get to the mass media. We all see people who are fantastically talented and successful (Bill Gates, Payton Manning, Jerry Garcia, etc,) we get massive doses of the "pornography of success" but we don't get realistic role models growing up. A lot of the people who read HN were people who "knew" they were smarter than anybody else in their peer group, but were in the shadow of Einstein, Bogart and Warhol. Bright and talented kids often don't feel like they have comparable peers, so they compare themselves to inaccessable superstars.

Narcissism isn't bad, it's just a part of your mind, just like your heart is part of your body. However, Narcissism can malfunction, and a common form of malfunction is another preoedpial phenomenon called "Splitting", where you perceive things as all good or all bad. One day you feel like you're the best in the world, and really special because of that, then the next day you feel like the worst in the world and you're special because of that too. It can really mess up your head and make you miserable and ineffective. I'm not a professional, but I think this guy is experiencing splitting... He puffs up this big image of his self-importance because he also feels like he's small and unimportant.

His process of healing and growing up means that he's got to integrate his feelings of "I'm awesome" with his feelings that "I'm worthless" and develop a realistic appraisal of who he is. Unfortunately, that's a very difficult task in the postmodern age.

Anyhow, sending out resumes is a crappy way to get a job, particularly in a down economy. You really do want leads to come to you, and there are a few ways of doing that. I really like Neal Schaffer's approach to using LinkedIn, which is all about "digging your well before you are thirsty"

http://amzn.to/c4B7RP

My experience is that arrogance is an absolute killer in the job hunting process. I had a time, years ago, when I had a crappy resume, and just getting interviews was a challenge. After a while I had great experience, and I'd get interviews for maybe 50% of the applications I sent in... I'd just blow the interviews. I looked at why I was blowing the interviews and I found that arrogance was a big factor, so I made a point to tone it down.

My issue now is that I feel programming is a dead end and I'm more interested in a management role. In my area, there's definitely a problem of "too many indians and not enough chiefs"; software projects often have nobody leading them at all, or if somebody is driving the bus, they're second-rate salespeople, experts in entomology, or otherwise people who don't understand the issues of IT management. People around here are much more interested in hiring junior developers who will go screw up their projects than they are in somebody experience who can help a team get the little things right consistently.

My answer? Start my own business. I'm old enough that I'd only apply to Y Combinator as a prelude to filing an age descrimination lawsuit. However, I'm learning to combine my programming ideas with some very hard-nosed business ideas and bootstrapping something that, someday, might become really awesome.

I'm not the normal person without a degree, but the time I didn't spend in college/university was spent learning about computer security. I didn't blame anyone for things not turning out how I wanted, I did something about it.

Someone once told me that there are only two ways to change a situation: you can change the conversation you are having with people or you can change the people you are having the conversation with. You have to be in the conversation though.

http://www.toastmasters.org/

edit: It is also good for networking.