Oh how I would love to just stop looking for jobs for a bit and leave it on rest. Unfortunately I am selling things off right now to not go homeless and refusing to apply to jobs is an admission of defeat to me. Said as a (former?) tech worker.
> (former?) This hurts. As someone who's been unemployed, struggling with mental health issues, for far longer than I'd care to admit in such a forum, I struggle with the question of when it's just been too long to realistically get back into it. I wish you luck
When the job search becomes impossible
241–250 of 469 posts
Re: When the job search becomes impossible
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a PM, but I PMed it very aggressively. I made a Notes.app personal wiki tracking every company I spoke to, with a timeline in reverse chronological order of every contact I'd had with them, like: Foo Corp Recruiter: [Jane Smith] * 2025-09-15 On-site prep call with [Joe Brown] * 2025-09-13 Coding screen with [Pat Doe] I kept a "pipeline" note with companies in each stage, like: # Leads * [Adam Albert] at [Bar…
Awesome work! Really nicely built funnel. Great to hear people doing it the right way.
Re: When the job search becomes impossible
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "most people in the real world" have at least a few rungs between their current situation and true homelessness. Many people have some sort of family or other community that they could lean on, even in America where family ties are weaker than any other place I know. I have a couple friends who haven't had steady work in years, and they still eke out a pretty reasonable existence living with friends and famil…
"Homeless" is not the same as "living on the street". People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless . Plenty of Americans are much closer than this than you might think working in tech. 50-60% of Americans currently live 'paycheck-to-paycheck' which means the second work stops they're on a timer for missing bills to start com…
How is that actually defined by whoever measured it?
Re: When the job search becomes impossible
#244The thing that bothers me so much about this post is that it reeks of privilege by treating unemployment as if it were mainly just a bad trigger that you talk to your expensive therapist about once a week. For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
The median household net worth in the US is $193,000. The rate of home ownership is 65%. I don’t think the median American is at risk of becoming homeless during normal unemployment. Maybe you mean that the article isn’t as relevant for a global audience which is fine, but I would think that the median American lives in “the real world”. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table... https://www.nahb…
Re: When the job search becomes impossible
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the requirements of every single job are impossible, people will lie. Several people have been recommending candidates to lie for IT-related jobs for a long time now, and honestly, I think the vast majority of positions have such a crazy set of requirements that they only get the lairs.
Amusing Idea: Advertise three vaguely-similar positions, only one of them real. Specify impossible-for-honest-humans requirements for the fake two. Then discard all applicants for the real position who also claimed to be qualified for a fake one.
If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy.
I'm not going to address either the morality or advisability of being "dishonest" by this standard. I've just seen too many people sell themselves short, when in fact they are exactly what the company is looking for, it's just that the recruiter wasn't able to spell that out in the job description. And it's not necessarily because they were stupid either; if they only put the true minimum necessary criteria into a job post, then (1) they'll get flooded with underqualified candidates who don't even come close to what they need, and (2) they may very well miss out on good candidates because the job looks lame.
Source: I've been on both ends. As a candidate, I mentioned during the interview that I actually had no experience in the required technology X but I had related experience. The interviewer just laughed; it was obvious to both of us that it didn't matter. As someone offering a job (not the hiring manager but sort of), I talked to a couple of people who were hired into other roles in the company and asked why they didn't apply for our position, they seemed perfect for it (to me). Several of them pointed to some specific line item under the requirements that disqualified them. Sometimes it was an item that we'd removed later because we weren't getting enough people in, even though strictly speaking it was part of the job. We would sometimes push the recruiter to add "experience with X, or willing to learn X", but they would push back and honestly I'm not sure I know better than them. They were the ones who had to be the front line filtering through the noise resumes, after all.
Re: When the job search becomes impossible
#246In my recent experience (20 yrs experience so ymmv) - basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR - everything is optimized for engagement, not outcomes, so there are lots or meaningless things to do (basically anything on linkedin). You might as well do some of them to stay sane but they'll never get you a job - what's valuab…
When I was looking (a while back), my experience was that the big sites are a dozen or so of consultancies and head hunters reposting all the jobs as "an opportunity for a client."
FooCorp (a real company) would post a position. Then headhunters and contract to perm style consultancies would repost it. This way, you'd get 1 + 12 job postings for the same position (assuming that the company even posted it there in the first place).
Next, applying to a position (other than the real one) on that set would get you ghosted (they're collecting resumes to send on and will pick 100 that they feel have the best chance of getting hired before contacting back). Sometimes, they'd call you back with a different position that "you'd be perfect for". Often, the resume that they send on to the actual position is significantly doctored from the original (to the point where its "this person isn't the one on the resume"). In today's world, the "this is an AI fake" is sometimes the transformation that the head hunter does to your resume.
So its not so much run through the company's HR, but run through the head hunter's filter trying to find the "best" ones to send on and for that filter, even though you applied it might not get to the hiring company to consider.
(Anecdote: when I was unemployed looking for a job a number of years ago, I tried some headhunters. One interview that I got they were asking me really odd questions about technologies that I knew nothing about. When it was pointed out that "I should know about these things, its on your resume" they showed me the one that they got that had my name on it... and it didn't match the copy that I brought with the exception of when I got my degree and what university it was from. They thanked me for my honesty and we both agreed that I was not a good technical fit for the position.)
Re: When the job search becomes impossible
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share a little more? Because this is outside the norm I’m hearing and I’d like to know more.
I'm not a PM, but I PMed it very aggressively. I made a Notes.app personal wiki tracking every company I spoke to, with a timeline in reverse chronological order of every contact I'd had with them, like: Foo Corp Recruiter: [Jane Smith] * 2025-09-15 On-site prep call with [Joe Brown] * 2025-09-13 Coding screen with [Pat Doe] I kept a "pipeline" note with companies in each stage, like: # Leads * [Adam Albert] at [Bar…
Re: When the job search becomes impossible
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must be missing something. 1200 real applications are hard to sort through. 1200 mostly fake applications are much easier. Hiring is a high-leverage activity, and it's absolutely worth spending a couple hours going through those by hand.
For 1200 applications, a couple hours translates to less than 10 seconds per application. In the age of LLMs, why do you think you'd be able to discern whether an application was fake in 10 seconds? Remember, it's not "obviously fake", it's "designed to con you" fake.
The "smell test" takes longer than you think and often involves an actual interview.
Re: When the job search becomes impossible
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just for clarification, you've had 3 jobs in the past 2 years? Were some of these contracts? Otherwise oof, that sounds like volatility only worth dealing with if one really needs an income, esp. considering the signal for prospective employers.
I was laid off in Aug 2022, found a new role in March 2023, then found another role in March 2024. So basically 2 roles in 2.5 years. It's fairly common in the bay area, especially since I'm in the startup space.
Re: When the job search becomes impossible
#250The thing that bothers me so much about this post is that it reeks of privilege by treating unemployment as if it were mainly just a bad trigger that you talk to your expensive therapist about once a week. For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
This is going to upset some, but the tech industry is full of delusional people that are completely out of touch with reality and the needs and struggles of everyday Americans. I recently stumbled upon a YouTuber grousing about losing her six-figure tech job. She was in full freakout mode about budgeting etc. but something didn't seem quite right. Then she disclosed she's married, financially stable, husband still ha…