Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?
Never used to have any trouble finding employment. But it seems as of recently my CV is toxic waste. If recruiters reach out, I give them a good time to call and never hear back. If I reach out to them, silence.
Did I do something recently with an unpopular technology? Did I piss off someone powerful? Did I get too old? Who knows!
Lots of coding experience; bosses have always been happy with my work. I've written stuff about programming online that has been well-received. Several personal projects under my belt, and plenty of OSS contributions too. Suddenly nobody wants to know.
Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Did you fix it? How?
CV in case some kind soul wants to take a look: https://foon.uk/robin-allen-cv.pdf
303 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] thread- You missed your work goals objective paragraph! Why are you looking to a job? What is your interest? LinkedIn and Internet in general are full of examples. Why do I need to hire you beyond your specific skills? How are you as a human? as a team player? How do you contribute to organizations beyond your formal work?
- I will not separate between full time work and independent, OSS, volunter. I will follow the typical reverse chronological order for work in a single column.
- Put a summary of your skills somewhere (Python, C++) and learn and experiment with Rust if you want to increase your chances!
If you ask me I would pay a few hours of someone to help you with your CV. It could be an average recruiter that has the hiring filters always present on his/her head.
I appreciate the suggestion of adding more "soft" human bits about me. As a dev my natural reaction to team-player stuff on CVs is "anyone can say they're a team player, who cares?" but maybe recruiters see it differently.
I've gone back and forth on separating the volunteer work. Having it all in one column I felt it looked like I was trying to pad out "real" paid experience with unpaid "filler", but again, appreciate the different perspective and will try chronological again for a bit.
I like Rust; done some OSS contributions in it. I'll try adding a section about that. Thanks!
Will also consider professional help (of the CV kind).
Thanks again for responding!
This generally doesn't exist on UK CVs
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: - Artifical Intelligence - Quantum Computing
Get good at these. Now, is the right time.
If you want go deep, you will need to refresh/learn few key mathematical foundations that form the basis of QC. They are definitely not hard IMHO. If so, then read Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang excellent book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computation_and_Quantu...
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.
- 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 <- C/C++/ASM's bread and butter 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.
Besides the standard callouts of “it’s an anomalously hard job market right now due to a recent layoffs flooding dev supply of interviewees, due to a post-covid hiring frenzy hangover, due to anticipated US tax code changes discouraging hiring, and due to high interest rates in the US currently discouraging risks including hiring” the thing that may be actually in your control is I notice is a lack of quantification of project deliverables and accomplishments on individual projects.
Looking at the first point as one example, it could be summarized “created app”. Especially as your most recent work, I’d want to see you go more into the experiences the app enabled - perhaps the user counts who were using it, what the experience was for them, any metrics you might have that you moved the needle on, or what your changes enabled people at the installation to do. Quantifying the impact of your work with each work item I think would go a long way towards making the CV better.
I'm in the UK so not sure how much the US situation is contributing, though there might be knock-on effects.
I appreciate your feedback about what details to add and about that most recent point. I agree, and will spend some time rewriting.
Again, thanks so much for responding and I'm happy to hear you enjoyed those games. Cheers!
I think folks reading this are seeing that you are too technical and lack of business acumen (while maybe not true).
For the work that you have done in each company they may be interested in the results of you creating these not that you created those. Did you ever find out what was the impact of your software development on the actual business?
Make sure to include numbers, people love data and lifts in sales, reach, clicks, awareness, revenue, etc.
You can save so much space by summarizing your language skills elsewhere instead of in each company. It also sounds redundant to say Used X, Y, Z because of course you needed to Use some programming language to achieve that. Group all of those elsewhere for those that you feel you are an expert with.
Best of luck!
I'm definitely guilty of thinking like a dev. Built what the PM wanted, they liked it, I did good, right? D'oh. I guess I should have been keeping notes of those business figures all this time. I'll definitely do that when I find a job again. Of course, even if sales improved while I was there, I'd feel a bit silly claiming it was because of me, but maybe I should anyway. Thank you!
About summarizing those skills, you're probably right. I did it this way because I had a recruiter say it needed to be clear what tech was used in which job, but I guess people are always going to have different expectations. I'll try it the other way for a bit. Cheers!
Here's what I emailed you - putting it here as all general advice that might be useful.
---
First impressions are that for 13 years experience you CV is a bit short. I would not be concerned about letting your CV go onto multiple pages, there's nothing wrong with a long CV when you have sufficient experience to fill the space.
You don't have anything about who you are on the CV - just a few paragraphs to give the reader a broad brush about what it is you do and what you are bringing to the table can really help.
For each company I generally include something brief about what the company (or the part of the company I'm working in) does - you want the reader to think "That's an interesting business - I bet this guy learnt a thing or two there". People are trying to pattern match against what they are looking for. So anything you can do that will trigger thoughts like "I bet this guy has seen the same problems we have" or "We're going to hit similar things to what this guy has seen" etc..
What's the impact what you've done had on the business and users? For example the recent work you've done sounds like pretty important stuff - rather than listing it as a bunch of technical achievements try and reframe it as impacts on the business and users. E.g.
"Created a set of user friendly administration tools for trial staff that allowed them to easily monitor participants’ progress, and generate statistical data. This allowed them to focus on blah blah blah blah..."
Think about why you were hired for each role - what is it about you that made them pick you and then try and express that in the CV along with how you met those needs. e.g. in the recent University job you were probably hired because of your expertise in software engineering and you probably brought a lot of experience to the role on how to leverage technology to get the job done.
I always try and remember that the person doing the initial read of the CV is not going to be technical - you need to get someone excited about the problems you can solve in the business.
Everyone has a list of technologies they've used on their CV - so you need to stand out from them.
I recommend, following any rework, handing this to a few friends (preferably non-technical), in person, for feedback on readability and appeal.
That’s the problem, you know too much. People in charge of hiring don’t want to be outshined.
The problem as I see it is: are you a games/3D Graphics developer, full stack developer or AI/ML engineer? The lack of clarity in this difficult market may be one of the reasons.
The CV would be a lot shorter with only the 3D graphics stuff, but maybe that's not a problem? I'll try creating a separate graphics developer CV and see what happens.
I've heard the horror stories about games industry conditions so hadn't really pushed in that direction but will definitely start looking for non-gaming 3D jobs.
Thanks again, much appreciated.
Yes, they are unfortunately true more often than not. My suggestion is to leverage your prior Game Dev related profile/experience to get into lower level of graphics tools stack (sorry that didn't come through). These exist in semi and FAANG's (but be prepared to play a bit of the leetcode game as well). Just check F and fruit company with 3D Graphics as keyword!
Also, I think the process of doing this makes me consider more carefully what I'm trying to convey about each role, and what parts of the resume I want to draw the most immediate focus to for a given type of job app.
Good luck with everything, it's not your skills!
How did you manage to find non-UK companies that will hire UK people? I find most remote US roles say "remote (US only)", and similar for other countries.
2. You didn't mention your educational background. Please list if possible.
2. University of life. Never been much of an issue, but maybe that's changing?
I may be wrong - just a suggestion.
In my case I was a 15 year full time JavaScript developer. After years of frustration watching children run the daycare crying about needing more frameworks, not knowing how to program, and hyper insecurity I could not go back to that kind of work. I largely made myself unemployable. If AI eliminates the need for framework junkies who cannot be bothered to write original code maybe I will give it another shot. In the meantime I am entry level data science and enterprise API management now.
I'm not trying to criticize you. You don't sound like a bad person or anything. But you do sound a bit resentful and dismissive of more junior engineers and their desire to use Java frameworks.
Look, software has a very real people problem. Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead) thought as much when he wrote Office Space. If you to see how widely this is viewed by other senior developers read the comments in this other recent thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38958789
Yes, the subject of declining quality of tech workers is an interesting one. I first noticed it around 2014, but I think the root of it may go back into the late 2000s. It seems like a lot of people in that era started hearing that they should major in CS because it's a high paying field, and they took that advice regardless of whether they really had any inherent interest in computing or the magic of computers. This resulted in more and more people coming into the industry who seemed like they didn't quite fit, although as a manager you want to welcome everyone on your team and get them to be their most productive, so obviously you don't want to discourage anyone. I think it may be related to what you're talking about.
On the other hand, I would say that with each new generation that comes up, they are confronting a new world with increasingly high level tools, and I don't think we should disparage these folks. It isn't like I grew up on Charles Babbage's Difference Engine; I just took the field as it was at the time I happened to be a teenager.
Like in your situation, you probably started with Java when frameworks like Spring did not exist yet or were not widely used. But as those things evolved and got better, it's what the newer people would have been taught or done in previous jobs, so I don't really buy that that in and of itself makes them lesser engineers. They may just be doing the most reasonable thing with the tools that were popular at the time that they learned. Is it possible you are conflating some specific not-so-great engineers with whom you worked, with the broader trend in that period (and today) toward increasingly high level constructs as the underlying silicon gets faster and more powerful? Not sure, just offering it to you as an idea.
I'm really sorry that you wasted 15 years! I've wasted a lot of my time on the earth as well, and I think most people feel that way about some period in their life. But it sounds like you came into some ideas and insights that you wouldn't have otherwise had, even if the experience itself was frustrating. Maybe that's just the reality of life?
If you want a strong team that optimistically works well together then set supremely high standards with risk of failure. When risk of failure to deliver becomes probable spread the tragedy across all team members. This is when your senior developers will step up to guide the juniors. Failure to do so results in whiners who throw each other under the bus.
In my experience the 1 page constraint is less important so long as it’s easy to get a good picture of you on the first page.
Simplify it to be all black text, single column, with underlines under each section heading. In other words, make it look like the most brutalist traditional resume.
Other comments in this thread also have good substantive suggestions, but just nailing the formatting can make a big difference.
Picking one at random: "Worked on frontend and backend systems for this health tech company." OK... and what impact did your work have? Can you cite a qualitative improvement on the business due to your work? If not, can you at least cite quantitative facts like: "Released 6 updates to the product."
I'm going to make a suggestion that sounds negative, but is intended to help you realize if your bullet points read well or not -- For each one, imagine a hiring manager at an interview asking you, "So what?". Then throw out your original bullet point and instead type in your answer to that question.
In other words, it would be good to clearly show impact - it would be so useful for the reader to have the final result without having to figure that out himself - but unfortunately it's usually hard enough to find good data for such claims, so anybody actually putting them there is automatically suspicious.
Unless, of course, there's a plausible algorithm for getting such data which I'd like to hear.
For example: you coded and launched a new feature, and that feature brought in 20% more users over the following year. Sure, there were probably other factors that helped, but when you can point at specific things and back them up with metrics, it's 100% better than just listing a bunch of skills and jobs.
In the UK market folks aren't particularly receptive to that sort of thing.
- Some think I'm no longer technical enough because I've done managerial stuff, despite recent work being hands on.
- Some think I'm not managerial enough because I still do technical stuff.
- Some think I've somehow failed because the specific role was only ~20 months ( it was actually equity shenanigans )
- Some think I'm too senior and won't stick around ( despite the role being top of the market pay wise )
Mostly, I don't really know, because when going through the front door, they typically don't respond, and in actual fact the only leads I get are the ones that contact me.
But I think our specific culture focuses on reasons to say no, rather than reasons to say yes, and the current market only helps compound this, even if the outcome is worse.
Of course, I might just be shit, but they also likely don't know that by not speaking with me. :)
Even if I did, it was probably someone else's idea, someone else decided it would be worth adding to the product, someone else made a UX and UI design, I wrote the code, someone else tested it, maybe there were some iterations of those. It's all team work.
Someone claiming such a increase as their personal achievement is spouting BS and would not get an invitation here.
SMH.
None of the companies I worked at disclosed to the engineers what features led to what results. So I made shit up and nobody called me out on it.
"Argued with CTO about importance of X. Did X, against my recommendation. Delivered X early, tested, documented, fast, secure. X flopped, and company laid off 20% of staff, including my team".
There may not have actually been positive benefits to everything that you did, because... they were dumb moves. Do you put that on there? Or do you just put what you did, minus the impact?
Now, would it sound better if those products succeeded? Of course! But there is still something that can be said for my work.
Or... what if the impact is "user subscriptions decreased, cancellations increased, revenue declined"?
I was pointing out that "impact" isn't always positive - adding it to a resume might not be all that useful.
This happened to me. Was told to convert a lot of stuff to an XML database, which... no one had any experience with. But the owner wanted to be in the XML space. They sold a deal which was based on the XML database tech, but it was so bad, and so slow, and didn't actually take customer needs in to account, that we burned over $1m over 6 months, and half the company was laid off.
So, yes, I can put "XML database conversion" on a resume, but there's no positive outcomes to add to it. This is what the OP was being told to do - add positive outcomes. They don't always exist, and yes, it's outside your control.
But in all seriousness, in the scenario you describe above, I'd question if X belongs on your resume at all. If you did it, and it was worthless, is it something to brag about?
There are no doubt exceptions to this, where something is really technically interesting, but honestly, 99% of the time, what you did is just not that novel; you are better off leaving it off your resume and instead demonstrating your skills with something where you delivered value.
It's also worth noting that even where X flopped, you still hopefully contributed something positive. In your own example, you delivered X some (months?) early. That alone saves $.
I was once part of a Salesforce (god help me) implementation where we were moving all our analytics into this new Salesforce platform with the idea that it would be the central hub for all employees. When all was said and done, it flopped. It tried to do too much at once, be everything to everyone, and was useless for most. 80% of employees only logged in once. It was exactly as you describe, where from the beginning, I warned we were on the wrong path.
It doesn't usually land on my resume because, I mean, it's fucking Salesforce, but if it does, or if it comes up in an interview, I can talk about how I replaced our contractor's ETL with a custom one that ingested the data in 10% of the time making it possible for us to actually keep our data up-to-date, or how I was able to refactor the data model to take proper advantage of compression and save us around $30k/month in storage costs (Salesforce cloud storage is stupid expensive).
Sure, the whole thing was a major screw-up that literally cost the company millions, yet I can still talk about how I made that situation a little better.
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.
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 something about you. Looking at it from a hiring manager's perspective, why would I want to talk to the guy who "built data analytics tools with SQL Server", 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've got 100 resumes with SQL Server experience. The first one had a job; maybe they were good at it, perhaps they weren't, I don't know. I have literally nothing to go on. The second at least accomplished something (or is a liar; yes, I'm aware of this possibility). If you don't give me a reason to speak to you, specifically, you are just hoping you win the lottery and happen to be one of the ones I call in.
> but the OP was told to add the outcomes
Outcomes don't have to be the final outcome of the whole project. The outcome of the Salesforce failure above was millions of wasted dollars. The outcome of my refactoring our data model was a cost savings of $350k/year.
How did you learn about that number? Where did you pull it from?
If your asking how I knew the cost, I asked.
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.
There are for example a couple of projects where I worked, that should I failed to do my part, the company could be fined, and even maybe arrested. Thing is, I don't fucking have idea of what those fines could be, and of course it was a multiple team effort and it would be hilarious for me to claim credit alone.
Just make some plausible sounding number up and add it to your resume.
To be clear, I hate this sort of shit, but the game is the game.
Rationally I know how things work. But emotionally I am still the same as my parents and this is a fucking wall I am so far unable to cross.
Maybe I should consider therapy. Which would be kind of funny: Making therapy to become more of a sociopath and survive and thrive in a sociopathic society.
The point is to convey that you’re capable of providing some value to the company, should you be hired. It’s like being on a championship football team: sure, you weren’t solely responsible for winning. But being apart of winning team is certainly a lot more impressive than just listing your dribbling and passing skills.
I think you are taking this entirely too literally and missing the forest for the trees. The simple point being made is that communicating your value is easier when you go beyond the basic Skills and Experience CV that every average candidate slavishly sticks to. It doesn’t need to be an exact calculation, it just needs to convey that you’ve achieved something.
Perhaps Gomde UK had you there just to drive the tractor (absurd example to get point across), but you really loved working with sqlite and you went on to create an event management system from back to front and received good feedback. How you interpret your value tells a lot, share it!
> They're all fake.
Sure, but they are semi-based in reality and give insight to the scope of your work.
* "Perfectly implemented [some feature] on [some project], resulting in perfect launch". Definitely an IC. Maybe not even senior.
* "Led organization-wide effort across 100+ engineers to migrate from X to Y". Might be an IC. Might be a manager. In either case, you don't do this type of work below senior level.
Your boss / hiring manager / everyone else has the same job.
when we are all working together to push the work forward, no individual contribution has a chance to stand out.
In a CV, the impact you made is a story to tell, not a number to calculate.
if there is a story to tell, it doesn't reach our team.
Perhaps your python focus is a current issue in the UK market?
Oh, they also can't take a blame for overhiring during the pandemic, they were simply following the same 'macroeconomic factors' that are the reason for the mass layoffs now.
You'd think that the economy is some kind of terrorist with demands holding the gun to the CEOs' head. They just have to follow these demands and the economy simply happens upon them, absolving them of any moral and ethical responsibility for their lack of foresight and accountability.
Basically they are all mere automata that bows down to and is animated only by the overpowerful economy.
It's the same old in capitalist world, just this time software engineers are the ones affected.
The system is beyond fixing now, as you have always been treated as an expensive but totally expendable cog in their money making machines. We should have organized into unions and elected government that cares about humans (and nature), and not for the GDP and their own bottom lines.
Thank Elon and the FAANGs for starting the wave that flooded the market thousands of qualified good engineers as soon as they realized they need actual sustained revenue rather than the nebulous promise of never ending cancerous growth. When the market is that flooded with good people, of course our wages stagnate and our employability is in question.
It's called 'end-stage capitalism' for a reason, because the diagnosis is simple: there is nothing coming after it.
Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism.
It pretending that it's creating value, while never showing where the value comes from. Often it comes from extraction from other places. What the OP is experiencing is merely one of the many ugly heads of the very much real process of extracting value in pursuit of profit. There are many other sides:
- Your cheap t-shirts are often created with child labor, and at tremendous cost to the environment.
- Their cigarettes and pain relievers are your addiction and your death.
- Your meat-for-everybody-everyday comes at the expenses of destruction of native habitat, immense animal suffering, toxic runoff and deforestation.
- Your consumer electronics come at the cost of toxic levels of PFAs in your and your children's blood.
- Your convenient transport comes at expense of choking cities, rising sea levels, and dying habitats.
- Your ChatGPT/Dall-E convenience robs hundreds if not thousands of people from their livelihood, and has been trained of others' work without their permission or consent, and the electricity and pollution bill will astound you.
- Coca cola and their plastic producing friends and its convenient packaging created an obesity epidemic and an island of garbage in the pacific.
- Teflon and 3M and their amazing, revolutionary non-stick surfaces created our future cancers.
What's happening with the layoffs in the industry is just another facet of extracting $$$ without looking where the "extraction" comes from, yet another logical level of "optimizing", disguising the fact that it's all a race to the bottom. Yet another group is going to be replaced by automation or less workers doing more work for less pay, simply in pursuit of "value".
> Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism.
Yes, it's the excess before the imminent end, it's the idea you can infinitely grow in a finite world with finite resources. This idea is mirrored by the corps and their gambles on the stock market, pretending to create a value in the millions more than they actually do create. It's unhinged, unstoppable, unsupported by reality, grotesque growth, very much like cancer.
You can disagree, protest and twist and shake your logic like an eel trying to deny the undeniable: the only thing capitalism is hand-delivering is the collapse of society, the mass extinction of nature, and the end of a livable Earth.
The fact that the OP, a more than talanted dev, can't find a job easily atm is very much connected to the extraction of value, and the insidious exploitative character of capitalism. Take your growth and keep it to yourself.
My honest motivation for writing the message was that I understood (maybe misunderstood) ath3nd to be saying that they had lost a job one year ago, and then I saw a very long list of political grievances. It matched a pattern I have observed in my career where a person on the team seems to have very strident political opinions, but when you talk to that person it becomes clear that the person is angry about something in their own life and is using political discourse as a way of being angry all the time without acknowledging to themselves the issue in their own lives.
I put these two things together and thought perhaps I could help a fellow engineer who may have fallen into a pit of despair. Based on ath3nd's response, it doesn't sound like that's their situation. Maybe my comment helped another person who was reading the thread. Maybe it helped no one. I'll never know.
I'm not going to going to offer counterarguments because it was never my intention to engage ath3nd on any political matters. I don't necessarily even disagree with the person, but I also don't think HN is at its best when people use it for political debates.
My comment was posted with a good heart on the theory that it might or might not help someone else. That does not preclude the possibility that my comment reflects my own insecurities or failings. I think almost anything you do or say is in some way a reflection of who you are, and like anyone else I surely do have various insecurities and flaws.
I've had non-stop employment for the last 17 years.
I think you get the wrong idea. I am happily employed for the moment. I am lucky to be in a very senior (VP of Eng) position in a company that I helped start. I am also able to hire and retain engineers for my teams so, luckily, I am not at the mercy of risk-averse hiring managers "scared to work with me". My point is that not everybody is that lucky, and that now even great people with great skills like the OP are struggling to find employment, and it's not their fault, but it's the system's.
One of capitalism's great ploys is the: "suck it all up and grid, it all depends on you" attitude where all emphasis is on you and your skills, but no emphasis on the problems of the system iself. It's like lottery, somebody got rich playing it, so you must be doing it wrong.
- If you didn't make it, you didn't grind/hustle hard enough. Must be something wrong with you
- There is a great garbage island in the Pacific ocean. Must be that you, the consumer didn't recycle well enough. Totally nothing to do with the corps created non-recyclable materials that are cheaper to throw away than reuse.
- The cities are choking with air pollution. Must be YOUR fault for not using a bike, and not the government which didn't make the infrastructure for biking or quick and efficient public transport, nor the corps which didn't invest in alternative fuels when it was the time.
It's always the individual person's fault in capitalism, and all attempts to question the system are explained away with the individual sucking at it. Even individuals within the system are likely to turn on other and say: "oh, if you just did this harder or better, you'd be richer". There is a lot of survivor bias there and not understanding that success in that system is often based on pure luck, where you were born, and who your parents were. In reality, for the majority of people, unless you are very rich, or live in a country with at least some amount of social security (i.e not the US), they are one chronic condition or long sickness away from homelessness.
We shouldn't close our eyes and see how the world is for others, and realize that we are one of the few lucky ones. But we could easily, as you said, have been out of a job, despite a very impressive amount of skills, similar to the OP.
And while there are for sure things that they can do to get some employment, the fact that the OP is actually a legend in some communities but is still struggling to find a job, that should be ringing alarm bells for all of us. Because I don't think all of us here have the same or comparable accolades as the OP.
> "They're getting away with it because everybody is doing it. And they're getting away with it because now it's the new normal," he said. "Workers are more comfortable with it, stock investors are appreciating it, and so I think we'll see it continue for some time."
> Interest rates, sitting around 5.5%, are far from the near-zero rates of the pandemic. And some tech companies are reshuffling staff to prioritize new investments in generative AI. But experts say those factors do not sufficiently explain this month's layoff frenzy.
They are simply bumping up their stock price. They were hiring and growing like little malignant cancers when that was the signal of "success", and now they are "streamlining", which is the new signal of "success".
It's no good being a "star" employee if you can't communicate that fact to other people.
We can have a tendency to underplay what we have done. Often in tech we pull amazing rabbits out of hats - and then when people say how great it is, we'll respond with how it was nothing and anyone could have done it. It's nothing special...
Someone gave me some advice a few years back which was - if you don't feel mildly embarrassed when you read your CV you are probably underselling yourself.
On the reaching out to old employers - unless you left on really bad terms - drop them a line. You are a known quantity, it's a low effort hire that won't cost them anything (apart from your salary).
I can't see any job titles - which is frankly more important than the company and makes it easier to skim sections of experience
Definitely go into more detail than just "Worked on" and "Used" - anything on stuff the company uses in the CV is not confidential and you can put on your CV.
Finally put months on your CV - it's not clear if your most recent role was 12 months or 1.
The other thing I'd suggest is tailoring your CV to the roles you're going for - the last time I had to write my own I had a two page appendix of the awards won by my projects as that's the sort of thing the hirers I was targeting would be looking for. And as someone hiring now I'm far more likely to interview someone who's CV shows some interest in the kind of work we do and who we do it for.
I've stopped doing that because it gets tiring why I changed so frequently in recent years. It's not my fault places go bankrupt, startups do layoffs, or teams just up and dissolve after you join, and it gets tiring explaining that rather than discussing my experience, skills, and interests and the role at hand. It was a total mistake to enter into the startup world.
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 contract ended" or "startup shut down due to loss of largest customer").
Edit: spelling.
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 algorithms. And it's very sad thing to have to explain those months.
It's not fair, but it's true.
> 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 irrelevant to my experience and skills.
My automatic response there when filling out is "start date is always first of month, end date is always last of month".
Refactor it to more clearly lay out your specific skillset, roles, and what you achieved in them (improving business metrics).
As others have noted, you need to emphasize what you’ve done. I’d eliminate every “worked on” statement with something like “solved X bugs, launched Y product, lead z engineers, improved K metric, owned B area, used d,I,g technologies of interest”
Anecdotally I’ve observed a shift away from LC style hiring to a blend of resume+SYS design/code review. I’d credit the shift with dual efforts to find cost effective engineers and a fear that LC has been overfit by interviewees.
Maybe in some horrible organisations they do immediately disqualify you, but working with people that have gaps is often interesting and fulfilling.
Also, whatever you learned about life in the gaps can be very useful to your employer!
Maybe those gap-experiences make it easier to build relationships with coworkers and customers? Or gave you the confidence in life to reach out when a coworker is having a rough time personally? Or allows you to dare side-step hierarchy and get stuff that is important to customers done instead of getting bogged-down in endless meetings? Or allows you to bring a healthy culture of work-life balance to your employer?
All these things could have a big positive financial impact on the business.
I would include gaps on your CV and highlight what you learned or enjoyed during this time of your life.
Finally, if you tick the tech-checkboxes, recruiters probably unconsciously prioritize candidates that have an interesting life-story to talk about. I would rather talk about your gaps that all human beings can relate to, rather than about some random tech I'm not really all that familiar with.
Good luck!
With an updated LinkedIn you can reach out to past bosses, coworkers, and friends for introductions to other people in industry (whether they're hiring or not) – and follow that chain until you find something you're interested in.
Either the postings are fake (there for legal reasons, or to make the company look like they are healthy and growing) or they will be spammed by so many applicants that even if your resume is a perfect match it will just get lost in the noise.
The main difference is I have a short para at the top as an intro. Also you can click each position for more details.
Code for it is on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/gushogg-blake/svelte-cv