Ask HN: I have been unable to land a job in two years, does anybody
I have had all sort of experiences in my job search:
Sometimes I pass the interviews but companies goes with other candidates. I have failed some interviews too (Unable to solve the problem on the given amount of minutes by the interviewer). I have taken two take-home projects, ghosted. In my last interview after elaborating about my experience they told me: We have just been told the vacancy is no more. Also, I have been noticing that Spring have become synonym of Java (Most of the time when I apply for a Java Developer job they ask about Spring), I can grasp it on the job.
I need to refresh some Algorithms knowledge, I have devoted sometime learning Scala for example, and a little bit of Haskell.
I firmly believe I can help with something in a Software oriented company, even data wrangling or any other task nobody else likes to do.
Here's my website: https://calebjosue.gigalixirapp.com (Take a look at the lifelong learning section)
I am located in Mexico, so I am willing to do remote. And... (Please don't hate me for this [I know this put pressure on other country's citizens]) I don't charge that much.
P.S. I can't help thinking one of my biggest mistakes have been being too idealistic. Or neglecting reality, e.g. I have devoted these two past days entirely to Blender in order to produce a little sorta short-film. But any step I was thinking I shall study some Algorithms. But I really wanted to finish this Blender project, once down, I hardly will spend more than half an hour to it (Exception on the weekends of course).
Be the visionaries Steve Jobs have in mind when he said he was looking for a long-term relationship: _We will build great things on the next decade_ (IIRC)
I accept I've failed on focusing in a simple thing to build deep knowledge of a given computer science area. If you allow me to play the victim card: I am in need to buy some medicines for my skin condition. (Yes, I know you are not a charity but believe, I truly believe I can help you with something).
100 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadIn a perfect world, other jobs would pay as much or enough, and I could be a park ranger or something by day and code by night. Unfortunately though, not the way the world works.
Anyways, sorry for dreaming on your comment, and best of luck in your search.
If you are applying for a senior Java role in a Spring shop, they'll be expecting you to already know Spring. The easiest way is to write some projects in Spring!
That is it, right there. If you can show off a nice professional website written in Spring (try to find a designer buddy who is also out of work and needs a portfolio piece!), and a link to the GH repo for the same site, you'll possibly skip a large portion of the interview process, or at least be put in the front of the line.
I understand that you usually can't share what you do in your dayjob publically, but in that case you need to create something yourself. Even while working a 9-5 you have enough time for that in a couple of weeks (I say that as someone who works longer than 9-5 and has young kids) - if you have been laid off you have no excuse.
I created an "Ask questions to your PDF" app (using OpenAI's APIs) as an example project that is public on my GitHub profile. There's lots of things that would need to be changed before I put it into production, but it demonstrates that I understand the fundamentals and backs up what my CV claims.
As a hiring manager, my biggest concern is we end up hiring someone who doesn't bring anything to the table, and just wastes everyone's time.
Not if you ever get said job.
If that's what's in-demand, then spend time learning it with the time you have.
If you can learn it quickly on the job, you can learn it before you apply for the job.
Pay for a course or even an actual teacher/tutor.
If I understand it, someone opens an issue then assigns a bounty. But clicking through a few, it seems to be a free for all. People asking to be assigned, other people making PRs, yet other people asking for clarification, yet other people asking if it's still open.
It's a cool idea, but I can't think of a worse implementation.
Keep in mind that open source is always a bit messy, and a lot of people on all projects (even without bounties) never actually follow through with contributions that they plan to do for a whole host of reasons. The way I've approached it is once someone either has a track record of contributing or makes substantial (visible) process on a PR I assign the bounty to them.
[0] https://github.com/getgrit/gritql/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...
1/ For coding interviews, you should be solving 4-6 leetcode problems per day which should take about 5-6 hours). The remaining 3 hours of bandwidth should be spent learning system design.
2/ If the jobs are you applying for learn Spring, go build a few apps on your own in Spring. Your github profile doesn't have much coding activity.
3/ your profile photos in github and your website aren't centered.
4/ I would remove the donate button on your website. it doesn't signal that you're a successful programmer. If you truly need to have a donation button, write more explaining why people should donate to you.
Whev, i'd have an absolute mental breakdown over that. But maybe it's the kids and other responsibilities, how old are you?
I don't even think i grinded that hard in university, i've always only been able to do that kind of work 3-5 hours even when maxing out for an exam, and only for a few days at a time.
The best advice I heard is to treat interviewing like a full time job with lunch break and a defined end.
9 hours of heavy thought work? Yeah right.
Good way to mentally exhaust yourself and burn out
I don't want to be overly critical and I wish you the best of luck in your search but your website/resume is not helping you. Whether it's the 1998 Geocities UI/look & feel (hard to read) or the obvious spelling errors (Bacherlor's Degree), you are not putting your best foot forward. It is difficult for someone to determine where your experience is and what type of IT job you are looking for.
Suggestion: Revise your resume and have 3-4 people in the industry review/critique it honestly. Keep refining until you have something that is generating more interest.
Put yourself in a hiring person's shoes. You need to fill a position and are looking through a few dozen applications / resumes. You have 5-20 seconds to attract their interest. What changes do you need to make to engage that person and make them want to reach out for further discussion? Good luck - these changes are not hard and you can do it!
That is probably priming the hiring manager to look for things on the CV they feel would also be outdated and then they are on to the next person.
I would honestly say no website would be better than this current version.
I know that's stupid but it's also real.
Use something simple like linktree and go way deeper on your blogposts if you want to use that. When I'm in a hiring manager role, I'm looking for works that express depth and competency.
Really, if I can find say, 100 or so lines of competently written code, I'm interested. As far as what that means, take https://js1k.com/ and click on any of them and go to the demo details. I just picked a random one: https://js1k.com/2019-x/details/4167 ... I see that code and I think "well this person seems to know what they're doing, it's worth a phone call".
Or let's take https://allrgb.com/ ... any one of them take pretty decent understanding and coding to do (here's a random one: https://allrgb.com/random-triangles) Make one, do a writeup on it, release the code and present that.
Another tactic: Any large software project. Let's take Libreoffice. Bugs from the last 7 days: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BB... ... or the 1000 open tickets on wireshark: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/issues start fixing them. There's plenty of work to do.
If your work is good, the jobs will actually come to you. Most companies are desperate for good, motivated, easy to work with engineers.
The rest of your comment I don't have a problem with.
No offense intended, and of course I don't know OP at all and this is all 100% based on an initial gut feeling, but this is not the website of someone who seems like they would be pleasant to work with. I wouldn't be surprised if hiring managers got the same feeling and just moved on.
The garish green on black, the large prominent picture of their face, the odd English ("Hello there all", "and I do like to share the following with you"). Also, the odd domain.
Normally I wouldn't even mention any of this since everyone is free to have their own style, but if OP is looking to get hired it might help if their website looked a little more "professional". Or just don't plug the website.
sure, the website may look kind of ugly, but it is also very simple (and in fact green on black are old terminal colors. maybe just get an old terminal font and suddenly the website would look cool?), so i find it easy to look past that, but all that tells me is that this guy is not a designer. and the odd phrasing tells me that this is not a native english speaker. that's all.
if you are reading any more into this then that tells me more about your character than about the creator of the website.
And this is not about me. This is about all those hiring managers that may have seen this and been like "ick", closed the tab and moved on.
The non native phrasing isn't terrible, but at least spell Bachelor's correctly.
The main failure is to present oneself in the manner expected (and effective) to those hiring. Not many will spend time wading through such bespoke oddness, when the experience appears relatively standard.
If you've been unlucky enough to sort through hundreds of resumes and make hasty decisions on who to spend time on, as a constraint of time and the volume of candidates, you have to make ridiculously judgmental and often wrong decisions because you need to say no to over 95% of them.
A site like this would be ok if the domain was say blahblah.(mit|stanford|caltech|something-fancy).edu/blahblah and linked to their scholar page but outside of that, probably not.
If you want a personal page and you're not a designer, just use a template from a site like https://html5up.net/ and replace the images and copy. If the site was say https://html5up.net/astral ... not only do all my objections flutter away but now there's a small checkmark in the "interested" column.
Know what the people on the other end are tasked with and feed them what they're looking for.
Is there currently a shortage of good, motivated, easy to work with engineers in this job market? It was my understanding that we are in an employer's market right now. Have things turned around?
We have such a reliance on hoping someone will give us a consistent, hourly rate rather than going it alone and doing something yourself. It's not easy - but you stop relying on others.
I don't think your current website and current resume show off your employment history at all, and if you're applying to places with the new ultra minimalist resume I could see that being an issue. It might also be worthwhile to update your links and listed emails on your resume, website, and github so that they all point to your current website and contact info.
My friends and I have been part of the layoffs - SWE and SRE work. Everyone is job hunting and hiring seems to be way down. I know my most recent company had a hiring freeze for the last year and a half across most business units, but they still had job postings the entire time. That might be very common. And it seems like most places want the exact right applicant for their tech stack. Unfortunately this is the nature of remote work - there probably is someone with exactly the right expertise applying.
It's rough out there, but keep at it. Good luck!
reflect on what you want, it’s definitely not a programming skill issue
> Sometimes I pass the interviews but companies goes with other candidates. I have failed some interviews too (Unable to solve the problem on the given amount of minutes by the interviewer).
Reminder: during interview, you are checked not only for technical excellence. How you communicate and deal with difficult questions matters a lot. (Maybe even more)
Also as others have mentioned, if it’s spring position, knowing spring is mandatory. (2 years seems like a plenty of times to make something with spring)
Last but not least, your linked web page has link to CV, after opening it it became clear to me that you are looking for junior position, only couple of entries about training. (Then eventually I noticed the link to PDF; please understand how this confusion on my side is not beneficial to you; also nitpick regarding PDF, it lists “completed trainig required by the company”. It does not seem relevant to next employer unless its clear what the training was about)
They sent an offer the next day essentially explaining that this stuff matters as much as technical competence. My technical solution was wrong, but pretty close to the mark so not all that concerning.
There are very few jobs for niche technologies, you might end up not finding any you like or where you would be accepted. If you want a job, you must sometimes pick something that is less interesting, but actually used in the industry.
> look for jobs that use the techology you want to learn, then apply for a junior position
You would lose to a candidate who knows anything about the technology. There are tons of applicants for junior positions, and someone who doesn’t know a thing is at a disadvantage.
I've typically had pretty good success landing jobs and a lot of the time, it doesn't come down to the technical skills, but what I like to call 'the vibe check'.
Obviously, having the right experience is important, but I typically focus on a few things that might be missed:
- Analysing the business and understanding their brand and culture so you can speak their language during the interview - Showing interest in their broader business goals - When explaining technical challenges you've faced, describing how you took those learnings away and applied them to a problem you faced in the future
Not hard tips, but after doing this I definitely got more job offers.
(p.s. If the resume is lacking, just pay a professional to make one for you).
Also, wtf does Steve Jobs have to do with this? It's non-sensical and out of place. I hope you don't go off on such tangents in your interviews.
1. The person needs to be reliable, I need to be able to depend on them, they need to be able (within reason) to think for themselves and solve problems in a good, none-convoluted, well documented and future-proof way.
2. The person needs to be able to learn for themselves and master a topic. That doesn't mean this is a school test, sometimes the solution is: "Boss we would be stupid if we built this ourselves, there is this great open source project I found"
3. The person needs to be able to communicate clearly and honestly.
Notice how most of these aren't related to the programming at all? They are more about how you conduct yourself and what people can see in you.
My advice to you would be to work on one or two "bigger" projects to which you can point when you are sitting across in the interview. If you are clever and pursuing different topics is your driver, choose something where you can apply all of those skills. Maybe you find something that would involve Blender and Spring? Blender has a python API so you can remote control many things. The most important part is however that you get those projects to a good state.
The reason such projects are a good thing is because it would show me that you are able to organize yourself, you can get things done, you manage to combine your skills etc. and above all: Solving problems motivates you.
And even if you had those projects and you sit across and talk to me like all of that bores you I am not sure I'd give you a chance.
1. Build a professional CV. The current one (CV_Late2022.pdf), with a black background, bright colored links, no useful information, it's off-putting and looks amateurish. I found your "real" one (CV_Mid2022_Frozen.pdf), not sure why it's an additional click away. Take the "frozen" one, and turn it into a good-looking professional one. Just put something like "2022-present Career break" at the end.
2. You probably should do lots of practice interviews [in english]. Get feedback on how you're doing. If you want to get a job, this is probably the highest leverage activity (other than fixing the CV), _not_ messing around with functional programming and Blender.
3. Pick some open source projects and try to contribute. If/once you're successful, put it on your CV.
Less important:
4. Make a showcase site that looks good. The website as-is looks like something on Geocities from the 90s, amateurish like the CV. Only show things that tell a good story. Also know that the showcase site is not that important, eg. recruiters don't look at it, hiring managers _maybe_ will see it.
5. You always mention the ACM membership, but it doesn't mean anything. It's just a membership, not a qualification/accomplishment.
6. Consider not having a big picture of yourself everywhere. Are you trying to get hired based on your looks, or your competence?
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Note on asthetics, since some people mention it in comments:
A. I personally strongly believe that asthetics matter, because asthetics are a big part of Engineering in general, Software Engineering in particular.
B. If the person can't follow some sort of reasonable cultural style guide in your 1-page CV, will they follow coding style guides at work?
C. Eg. if somebody doesn't bother to align paragraphs, leaves commas hanging, uses inconsistent spacing, has typos, etc, ON THEIR 1-PAGE CV, THE MOST IMPORTANT DOCUMENT FOR GETTING A JOB, then.. Will they indent their code? Will they follow style guidelines? Will they use good names without typos for variables and functions and classes? Will they write good comments and commit messages?
D. Having reviewed 1000s of CVs and done 100s of interviews, the above correlations exist. And picking CVs and interviews are about looking for signals.
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Obviously I'm just one hiring manager in about a pool of a million (or more), my opinion is not universal, no reason to get too worked up about it!
"They may not have the same clarity and logical thinking abilities as you." - then I don't want to hire them :)
I liked it! But then again, I used the internet in the 90s so it’s nostalgia. You’re probably right
Because honestly, I like your minimalistic looking website, and I even like the fact that you put a picture of yourself on it, there's an element of authenticity to it that is genuinely touching in an era where everyone is sporting the exact same SPA react site.
That is going to frame everything about the person as "outdated" and little surprise no one is hiring them.
I mean here in this example from OP - if he improves his CV visuals and then finds a job - that means he had the technical qualities to get the job in the first place, only the CV impression was causing the rejections. Which means the hiring managers are following a flawed metric, relying on shallow and easily manipulated visual factor. Every time I try to dig into this, the answer is along the lines "You need to impress the hiring manager in 10 seconds" which is a very different game than the technical skill and I don't see how would that impression translate into long term work performance. It's just gatekeeping. Nobody is quoting any statistical research, not even the hiring managers themselves, so I suspect there isn't much to back this practice. I hope someone can prove me wrong.
It's like democracy. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best we've come up with so far [that scales beyond small teams].
- Where is your resume? If it is on your webpage I sure couldn't find it. Make it more prominent.
- If you want to work in software development, you need to have demonstrable skill at doing so (at least to the junior level). Code more and show off what you have done.
- Try to reign in the overly verbose way you communicate in (i.e long rambling posts with too much unrelevant information). This may come off as harsh, but it can pay off knowing when and how to communicate to different groups of people. (Suggest checking out 'bottom-line, up-front' or 'BLUF')
I agree with many of the other points already made by others so won't duplicate them.
Good luck!
This is like? Want me to build your house: I've taken a masonry course online.
Show me at least 4 walls that you've built and if your specialty is walls and these are your demo walls they better be state of the art, all best practices, explain why you used which technique for which wall.
I haven't been able to find a job in over a year in spite of a stellar resume. Also I write a fair bit online anonymously.
Most of these tech people are control freaks so they probably snoop in on their employees with all kinds of special tools using text analysis.
I assume you meant "use a fake identity to express political views online", not "use a fake identity when applying for jobs"?
When HR people are handling multiple candidates at once, they can forget to re-run certain checks in light of new information so that's a good opportunity.
I'm still trying to perfect my strategy. Hopefully I'll have a job by year's end. It worked well for my last job (lasted 8 months) until I admitted my unvaxxed status and they came across my Twitter somehow.
After they gave me full control over their infrastructure and database, I thought I'd made it and got sloppy. You can't ever let your guard down.
The problem when you tell half-truths is that, eventually, you start speaking in 60% truths, then 70% truths, then they'll realize that you're one of the good guys and you're out.
It's probably better to start with half-truths and work your way backwards as they get deeper into the fiction you created, it gets easier to fool them as they get more invested in your deception.
There are a couple of things I noticed when looking at your website and CV. You seem to have many interests and ideas. Maybe too many. This might be ok on a personal level, however on a professional level this is only good if you can actually follow through on those interests. Otherwise it might give the impression of a lack of focus more than anything else.
For example, you mention Swift as area of expertise and an iOS Developer nanodegree. Yet I don't see a single iOS app you made. You mention Cloud Developer using Azure, yet I don't see any demo or portfolio projects.
On the CV of 2022, you mention AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (Coming soon). But I don't see this certification.
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't think you need to have all of this. But then there is no use in mentioning it. Show what you actually have.
In your blog, you mention something like this: "Explain the protected access modifier in Java, probably using Blender"
This could actually be very interesting and something unique! But don't talk about it beforehand - do it, then show it!
Don't put your TODO list on the Internet. Put your DONE list on the Internet.
Hope this has some value :)