Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

I'm dealing with this right now. I have a ton of experience--since I was a young teenager, in fact--of being a software developer, mostly in positions of technical leadership. Most of my resume consists of architect jobs. And yet, to pay the bills, explore a new area of the country, and expand on complimentary skills, I took a job as a senior DevOps engineer contractor at Idaho National Laboratory. Since my contract ended and I've started applying for jobs again, it feels like I'm being treated as damaged goods. I can't tell whether it's the fact I live in the Idaho Falls area or whether it's the Senior DevOps Engineer title. I get the standard "We've decided to pursue other candidates" non-reason. I have no data on which to base tactical changes to my approach. My applications are just falling into a black hole.

I know I am a very qualified candidate for any of these positions, and I have lots of GitHub contributions where people can actually see my work. That doesn't seem to be enough, however. Can't I just talk to a real person? My communication skills are excellent, and whenever I have gotten in front of the hiring manager, it nearly always leads to an offer. Am I the victim of algorithm-driven hiring?

To plug myself a bit: If anyone is looking for an experienced .NET architect who's done a bit of everything (including my own startup), drop me a line. I favor working remotely but I'll relocate to a desirable area for the right position. [nathan] at aldenfamily |dot| net.

Oh, and OP, you didn't mention if your question applies to you, but if it does, hang in there. We don't have much control over the ridiculous state of hiring in IT, so there's not much we can do except plug along.

To be honest, I would rather take more algorithm-focused interview tests than be filtered through the HR perception that I don't qualify for Programming Language Y because I only have experience with Similar Language X. At least most of the companies that do algorithm-based tests are more agnostic about the languages you have used in the past.

Pair it up with the fact that I never look for jobs until I am let go from a job, and I have a double whammy for "hard sell". Something I didn't know that is a bad idea to do until much later in my career. But hey, it's not like we all know about all the things you should and should not do about careers. I just assumed that the only drawback of not having a job is that you have no income stream coming in.

I am able to get through interview rounds with Amazon, and also have gotten the attention of a few interesting companies from my Github projects. But somehow I do not get a good perception with local companies on my resume. Others have helped me out on fixing my resume and they've told me, it's too aimless. It does not have a clear sense of growth and direction, so I am trying out a new resume hoping that my job-searching experience will improve.

I wouldn't concern yourself too much with feeling like damaged goods. It's very easy to feel that way after a period of several or many rejections, but that's probably not the actual case here.

In this instance, it might just be a matter of not finding a good remote match. That can be tricky. I was job hunting for a few months last year and was solely focused on obtaining a remote job but couldn't find one that fit. The only people who seemed very interested enough to take it to a final round interview were paying ~10-15k market rate for my area. And so I'm not working remote. Happy at my current job, but still. I got summarily rejected from a lot of remote gigs I felt I was absolutely very qualified for.

When you ask them why they turned you down, what do they say? Have you tried asking for resume feedback?

Most of the job ads (Dice, Indeed, etc.) obfuscate the actual company behind a recruiter and no-reply email addresses. I would love to reply and ask, but in 99% of cases the reply email is noreply@somerecruitmentfirm.com.

I have talked to a couple of real people, one over the phone and one over email. In both cases I feel like I had a good rapport built. The first guy turned me down because his company only had the budget for a junior programmer. The second guy hasn't yet responded to my reply to him, but I'm hopeful.

Overall, I've probably applied to 100 different places (mostly remote jobs) and haven't even received rejections--let alone a reply--from the vast majority.

It pains me to no end that I am seemingly not allowed to simply talk to a real person. I understand why; I'm not naive. It still sucks.

Since you mentioned Indeed, I thought I'd mention I had a similar sort of "resume black hole" experience. For a long time, I wasn't really thinking and just applied through those job board sites, directly from the posting. Later, I started using those sites just to research companies, and then go to the company site and apply there, and all of sudden I get five responses in a week. If there's no company listed, a lot of times you can google portions of the job description and it leads to a real company. My resume formatting would often be messed up by the job board sites, so it probably went straight to the garbage. There's really no reason to go through a recruiter if you can avoid it.

I've been doing that whenever possible. I even have my wife helping! It does work for some of the posts where the actual employer's name is listed, but for recruiter-obfuscated posts, it's much more difficult. Sometimes we are able to reverse-engineer the original company using location and other information, though. It's still a draining experience.

Many of the job ads are fake. They are simply going through the necessary motions to prove that they couldn't find a qualified candidate; then they can qualify for an H1B visa.

What's your timeline here? 100 resume sends over how long a period?

If I can give some unsolicited advice, I would recommend

1. Put your resume on Monster. Hordes of recruiters here will give you a lot of phone calls. 50% will be for bad fit jobs, oh well, sucks for the recruiter, take the call and use it as practice. Maybe they'll get you an interview, boom, interview practice. You might even get an offer this way which you can use as leverage against other positions (or just to add urgency to other applications).

2. Indeed jobs, in my experience, are absolute garbage. I don't waste my time on that site anymore.

3. LinkedIn and Angel.co have the highest quality positions that I could find.

4. Connect to as many people a day on LinkedIn as you are capable of - this will allow you to make more 1st level connections which will then allow you to send more "hey, do you know anything more about this position? I'm looking to apply and want to know what your experience at x company is" type messages.

5. Stack Overflow jobs is a great portal for remote jobs.

6. Those code-test-find-you-job sites I've heard good stories from, can't remember names off the top of my head, sorry.

7. Took me 250 resume sends to get my last job, which led to 30 phone calls which led to 10 code tests / interviews which led to 3 offers. Food for thought.

It is very unusual for companies in the US to cite any reason for turning down. It doesn't really help them, and while it might be nice and help the rejected candidate, the probability that said candidate will believe he was wrongly turned down and file a lawsuit is just too high for comfort.

It is unusual to come unprompted, but I got feedback 80% of the times I asked.

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