Unemployable and Uninvestable

learn to edit your resume to the positions. and keep your history short and consistent with the edits

I’m in a similar boat in re to launching company. I don’t have any solid connections because I didn’t go to Stanford (went to a ranked 100+ school) and nobody in my family has ever started a business. My dad constantly worries about me taking risks for example as all he knows is working 12 hours a day and not go on vacations or out to eat.

Regardless, I am attempting to move forward by setting up calls with people who are my target audience (in my case director or higher level people) to discuss my product/idea and get their feedback and pain points.

I decided I want to try entrepreneurship last year after teaching myself how to code six years ago and quickly rising up the ranks to a top performer and leading teams.

I think for people like us who don’t have connections or come from lower class, our best bet is to keep grinding and learning until it works out. If it doesn’t well that sucks the world isn’t fair.

I’ve already accepted that is the situation, so now I have to make the world work for me otherwise the worst thing is I stay in the situation I’m familiar with.

Ten years ago I was taking the train and then walking to work (1 hour commute) to make 12 dollars an hour. I struggled in school because I didn’t understand a lot of the topics and life events that made it difficult to focus or care about school. So I know life is a wave like journey with peaks and valleys. I didn’t realize I would like software development until I was 25.

If it works out great. If not at least we tried and built up ourselves to be the best version on our own.

Sorry for ramble maybe it doesn’t help. But don’t be too hard on yourself friend.

Sometimes I have seen people making more money selling hotdogs from their own hotdog stand than some people get killing themselves in tech.

I have been mostly unemployed since the dot com implosion of 2000–2001.

I made a small packet of dot com cash that helped me in the early years. Not retirement level money, but enough to supplement cash from infrequent consulting gigs. And enough with my spouse’s income to qualify to invest in startups either directly or via venture capital funds.

I’ve applied to hundreds of companies across the industry since 2002. Multiple roles from low level programmers to mid–level managers and executives. I had been the CTO of a fairly large company in the 1990s. None of my experience mattered. There will be hiring managers from FAANG jumping in here saying “no, no, no, we absolutely look at your experience” and I’m here to tell you with one anecdotal data point that they don’t.

So I’ve withdrawn entirely from the industry. Happy to sit back and watch companies repeatedly make the mistakes that I made and learned from in the 1990s.

In turn I’ve been building and profiting from my own businesses over the past decade. Investors reject them as “lifestyle” businesses because they only earn a few million US$ in profits every year. But that’s plenty for myself.

I have no investors to answer to, few employees to cater to, and it’s a lot easier than constantly trying to play catch up with whatever the rules are for either getting employed in tech (you’re not all FAANG companies, stop interviewing like you are) or invested in by venture capital (expecting every company to have unicorn returns is how you get Theranos and FTX).

Between the businesses I own and the investments we’ve made we’ll do fine as we slide into our 50s and 60s.

Build a small business. Get it going. Hire a kid to do some of the work. Grow some more. Hire another kid. Keep iterating until your “work” is checking in on people, then hire someone to replace you as the manager of the business and start another one.

Constantly killing ourselves to hit the big payday in tech is like spending every last dime on lottery tickets in the hope that you’ll get that one big payday. It’s a lot healthier and saner to just spend the money on yourself or invest it in your own business. It’s probably not going to be a gajillion dollar payout, but it’s going to be more satisfying.

I once took an Uber and got into a conversation with the driver. He told me that he used to work in tech but was currently unemployed and struggling to find work. I told him that I experienced the same thing recently but found a contract job (eg, Infosys/Cognizant/etc) by actually answering the fly-by-night recruiter spam emails. Yeah it wasn’t the best but it paid the bills. I told him I was confident that he could find a similar job instead of driving for Uber. His response was totally dismissive “I don’t want a contract job, I want to be a full time employee.” Sometimes beggars can’t be choosers.

I was kind of in the same position, so I found a niche where I'm both a pretty good engineer and a pretty good designer, which is the biotech / clinical trial space. (It's not hard to stand out in biotech if you do software)

However, the pay is like 1/5 of tech ($70k-ish USD, and am living in Sydney, but the city is fairly livable on a lower wage unless we go house buying). but we do really cool stuff and we treat real patients with our clinical trial, which more than pays for it.

I think I have thorough advise for you but I prefer to give it in private. Can you contact us at morphle at ziggo dot nl?

It’s a matter of who you know AND what you know. They aren’t separate, they feed on each other. You need to be good at both.

Dye your hair, delete some old jobs, dress younger, remove dates from schooling, etc. Engage with a body shop.

people may be able offer better advice if you are willing to share a little more information and data points -- what kinds of jobs have you been applying for? which specific areas do you offer skill and experience in? (technical skills / management skills / domain knowledge)

I think your problem is that you are taking things at face value and believing the things people say, instead of seeing the world for what it is.

For example, VCs and Angel Investors will say they are looking for good business plans and good ideas and good pitch decks. But ALL they care about is finding the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. If you seem like someone that would sell his company for 10 million dollars they have zero interest in you and they NEVER had any interest in your idea.

Similarly with finding a full time job, the listing may say "5 years in Python" but what they really want is "Someone who is good enough to seem productive but will not make any of us look bad". When you apply for jobs an interview you should be thinking how can I get these people to think that I will be good enough and polite enough to make their lives easier without being a threat.

I am not in your position but I feel you are being a bit hard on yourself...

- Most of what you see from the outside is not the whole story. SBF or the other companies with no clear mission getting $, well...We seldom know the whole story including how much of the $ is actually theirs and how much is owed. Dont anchor yourself on others.

- It is highly unlikely that you are unemployable, try going for industries/markets/positions that you haven't gone for in the past because of your own opinions. (I reluctantly went into an industry I held back from for a long time only to realize it was foolish of me not to be open minded)

- Show/display/market to your prospective employers what they want to see/what role they are trying to fill. Just because you have experiences doesn't mean you have to lay it all out..just enough to show that you fit the role they are looking for

- Fundraising is difficult especially if you have a personality that is not conducive to networking. Try alternatives...gov't grants, kickstarters, etc.

At the end of the day I don't think there is any secret sauce other than hard work, patience, and a handful of luck.

Keep trying and hang in there :)

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe.

I'm a 40-something SEI&T engineer, Senior Principal, at Large Aerospace Firm A. 20 years of experience. My beard is completely and thoroughly gray, my bald spot is spectacular, and my demands on my employer are high.

I could shit on my boss's desk and management would politely ask me to not do so again and move my office further away.

If I quit, Large Aerospace Firm B would hire me and if I didn't like their offer Large Aerospace Firm C would hire me.

If I no longer wanted to work at a Large Aerospace Firm, NüSpace Firm X would hire me. Maybe with a slight pay cut but they also tend to be in lower cost of living areas.

And I'm merely average. Shitty school paid for with GI bill with mediocre grades due to having to work full time while taking 15 credits a semester, a couple of professional memberships I don't invest enough time into, and a history of working on projects that have imploded due to scope creep or poor management.

In what fields do engineers work where unemployment is even possible? What locations?

In my field (rockets and satellites and the like), at my location (middle Atlantic), we are starved for employees.

Except for the junior engineers, hired in a mad dash directly out of school to snap up bodies as space has exploded, everyone I work with is ten thousand years old. There's a massive chasm between 20 year olds and 10,000 year olds because everyone in their 30s and 40s has gone to work for some dot-com company whose only purpose in life is to steal their user's personal data and invent new ways of spamming ads everywhere.

Being old is a net positive because you know where the bodies are hidden, how to hide them, and can teach the kids how and where to hide them.

It's hard for me to believe that a senior engineer would be unemployable due to overqualification.

It seems like all job openings these days are for senior folks. Entry level jobs are really hard to find.

Are your skills still relevant? Are you off on the salary? Mayne you're just bad at interviewing.

I'm in a similar boat though I'm employed for now in an independent, bootstrapped startup. I am unable to find employment in any big VC-backed startup or any big tech corporation.

On the job hunt, I kept applying for those jobs anyway because then at least it helps to awaken people when they are told by their superiors to drop me for no reason. I suspect there must be some kind of blacklist. I often get dropped at the last stage of the interview (e.g. the one where I'm about to meet the VP of engineering which is supposed to be a formality).

What worked for me was to find an independent startup which is not affiliated with big VC or big tech.

And for the record, I never did anything wrong at any of my previous jobs. I suspect that some of my troubles may be related to one of the following things I did:

- I refused 2 job offers from well connected VC-backed CEOs in the US (who I met over video). I wasn't prepared to move to the US.

- I worked for a hotshot VC-backed company remotely as a contractor and after 1 year (with limited growth), I asked the CTO for advice about getting funding to launch my own startup and that didn't go down well with them. Whoops.

- I joined the blockchain space and worked for a reputable project which is still going. The Matrix really started to glitch after that.

I feel for you. With an almost 20-year-long career in software engineering, it often feels like I am moving into a similar place. A few years ago I was lucky to join a now-healthy start up, but I surely do wonder what's next. So, I wonder if becoming a consultant is one answer. At least, as a consultant you ARE expected to be (over?)qualified.

My guess is that you come across as either a eeyore or an asshole. I do not know you and you don’t give enough information in your post, however I can’t think of any other reason you wouldn’t be hirable, unless you are unrealistic about your own skills and capabilities. If you are open to suggestions, I would recommend spending a significant amount of effort on the “how to win friends and influence people” side of the equation.

I will hire the nice optimistic less skilled engineer over the mopey, pessimistic, more experienced engineer every day of the week.

Send me a resume. Gherlein at BrightSign.biz

If "overqualified" truly is the reason-- just lie. Delete everything but the past 5-7 years off your resume. Push has come to shove. Say what you need to say to win them over.

Re investments: Don't be discouraged by lack of investment. Most businesses are bootstrapped. There is absolutely nothing wrong in that. Reading technology news might give you the mistaken idea that all and sundry are VC funded. That is not true.

Finding a job (or a consulting role) is essentially a sales and marketing function. If you treat it that way, you'll find the results much more effective. Consistently market your services, follow up on interesting leads. It takes time. However, carefully analyze every failed lead to see if you can learn something from the failure. And modify the pattern. Don't personalise a lead that does not close. You'll become depressed. I know it's hard to do that. But if it helps think of selling your services as selling a product.

It helps to be extremely curious about people and see if you can help.

Finding a job is a full time job. It's a sales and marketing function. You can get good at it.

Looks like most hiring managers just want worker drones. Mediocre people with average skills, not too good and not too bad. Just enough knowledge to do the work and not make waves.

This may not be what the executives want, but they are so detached from hiring that they cannot and will never change it. It just doesn't hurt enough to care because there is an endless supply of average workers.

I am in the same situation and have no idea what to do next.

[OP] I did't expect so many comments, and I'd like to thank everyone for their input.

To answer some of the common questions: My background/speciality is 2-sided marketplaces in the tech world.

I don't think I'm bad at interviewing or come off as an asshole. In the past, I could easily land a new position in a month or so. I know markets change, but I feel that as my career and titles have grown (management and C level and one FAANG tier company on my resume), I find myself being dismissed at the final interview step.

I have had the overqualified theme thrown at me few times. Perhaps I excel at IC interviews, but suck at management tier interviews.

I could downplay my experience. I have to admit, I saw it as a form of dishonestly, initially.

Here is a recent example: My last interview was for a management position at a small startup, with decent funding. During my first meeting with the Head of Engineering, he informed me that he felt I was overqualified, after seeing my resume. It was clear that I had more experience in both depth and breadth than he -- I don't really care, but as someone pointed out below, perhaps that could be seen as a threat. I don't care for office politics, I just wanna get things done.

Another interviewer (different company) informed me that my resume looked as if I were entrepreneurial (as I do have my latest startup listed), and they were worried if I would be satisfied. I tried to allay their fears, but to no avail.