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Comment by throw4failure | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a good thread in which to try to solicit some advice, since it's at least tangentially related.

I was terminated from my last job. In my opinion it was due to my chronic and major depression that I have since been seeking extensive treatment (medication, several months rent in therapy) for. I say "in my opinion" because I really can't rule out that I'm just a lazy, crappy developer who is trying to use mental health as an excuse.

Either way, I've been unemployed for over half a year and am now trying to re-enter the job market. Obviously the gap is a bit of a red flag that I've been candid about to potential employers, in the sense that I speak about a medical issue, not the specifics.

If I could go back in time, I would have quit from my last job before being fired, but honestly I was beyond caring about anything, period, so the consequences of taking the career L barely phased me. There was no upside to being fired, I just didn't care.

Now, I wish I had cared, because it's an elephant in the room I don't really know how to address. Do I tackle it proactively by outright telling everyone I was canned? Do I wait until they call up my former employer to verify my work history?

If anyone else has been in a remotely similar situation I would greatly appreciate any tips or feedback. Please just refrain from telling me I messed up - I definitely know I did.

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You're right to be concerned - it is a red flag. It's something I'd ask about if I were interviewing you. However, it's _not_ a dealbreaker: I've hired people who've been fired, with longer gaps than yours. You can recover from this.

When you get asked about this, your interviewer is going to be looking for a few things:

- are you honest about what happened self-reflective about the causes, and take ownership of the parts that were under your control?

- what have you learned from the experience that might help prevent something similar from happening again?

Definitely don't shy away from it, or claim that you quit. Getting fired isn't a dealbreaker, but dishonesty is.

So, if someone asks you "why you'd leave Company X?" (which, if they're a good interviewer, they will), you'll want to be able to say something like:

"Actually, I was fired. I had some medical issues that I let get out of control, and my work suffered. I've got the medical stuff sorted now, and I've learned how to take better care so that my work should stay consistent in the future."

I obviously don't know the specifics of your situation, so that's fairly vague; it's better if you can share specific work strategies that you've since learned, i.e. around managing your priorities/task lists or whatever. You don't need to -- and shouldn't -- go into specifics about the medical side, but you certainly can talk about things you've learned to keep yourself engaged and focused at work.

Good luck!

Thank you kindly for the extensive answer.

> You don't need to -- and shouldn't -- go into specifics about the medical side, but you certainly can talk about things you've learned to keep yourself engaged and focused at work.

This is very helpful. You touched on something I've been conflicted about, namely how to navigate being open about my situation without being open about the specifics of my medical condition (I'm not averse to it, but from my research online it's my understanding that sharing the nitty gritty details doesn't help either party partly due to potential legal issues).

> I've hired people who've been fired, with longer gaps than yours. You can recover from this.

This is very reassuring to hear :)

I'm expecting more than a few negative responses from employers, just like I would in good times, but my mind has also been drifting to worst case scenarios where literally nobody is willing to hire me for development again, so it's good to hear that there's still hope :)

Good luck with your search! I am not a hiring manager but in my experience being involved I would agree that a gap isn't a deal breaker at all. In fact as long as you are upfront and show that you've improved from it that could be a positive too!

One important thing for me is to be aware of what you don't have to share to interviewers! Try to answer questions fully and honestly but don't be afraid to keep your medical specifics private

Thank you :)

Never admit that you were fired. Your prior employer isn't going to tell anyone, if they know what's good for them. Small, inexperienced companies with no lawyers might, but no real business is going to risk a lawsuit by saying anything bad about you whatsoever. They'll confirm that you worked there and that's about it.

Six months is not a big deal. You've been told all your life that gaps in your resume are a problem, and some people here will tell you that they ask about it, but they're all just following a rote pattern. You don't want to work anywhere that actually cares about this. Most people couldn't care less. You can always leave the months off your resume if you're really worried about it.

Do not under any circumstances tell people that you were unemployed or lost your job due to depression or mental health. I'm not going to sugar coat this for you. Never admit this during an interview. It's a bad idea to mention anything health related. It's also none of their business, unless you require an accommodation that needs to be addressed before you're hired.

Companies rarely check references. They might check your employment history, and they might ask for references to check your professional qualifications, but hardly anyone speaks to references. Don't put any on your resume. If someplace cares, they'll ask. Hopefully you have some ex-coworker willing to say a few nice things about you. If not, you might want to say you haven't stayed in touch with anyone from that particular job. If you can't summon any professional references at all, that may slow down your job search, but really, people don't usually check. Don't lie; just don't stress about it that much.

Lying is never a good idea, but you shouldn't be offering up negative information about yourself. Forget about what's fair, legal, politically or morally correct: there's a stigma around mental health issues and you don't want to bring them up with a potential employer.

You'll be fine going forward, although now isn't a great time to be looking for a job, so it might take longer.

> but hardly anyone speaks to references.

I'd be surprised if this were universal. I've been the reference for several people and had references checked for every job that I've had.

I can totally understand why a company wouldn't check references (bias, mainly), but HR is full of a lot of cargo cult superstitions.

I'm probably biased here due to the length of my career; at this point, my resume is extensive and speaks for itself. References may be more important if you've got less experience.

I think that's kind of the point of references though, right? Your resume speaks for itself, but you wrote your resume. It's a good sanity check for a potential employer to quickly verify that it's actually accurate.

People exaggerate on their resumes all the time. Maybe the 2 interns they supervised materializes as them managing a team of 4. Maybe the project on which their boss did the brunt of the work on becomes a project they architected and lead. It's easy enough to make all of this sound true in an interview, so it's totally logical for an interviewer to want to fact check and keep the interviewees honest.

> I think that's kind of the point of references though, right? Your resume speaks for itself, but you wrote your resume. It's a good sanity check for a potential employer to quickly verify that it's actually accurate.

This is 100% true. However, people are lazy and skimp on due diligence. Just because something is a good practice doesn't mean it's always done :P

The times where I’ve learned someone was lying on their resume, it was always someone claiming extensive experience. Several were managers, where it’s easier to bluff, but there were applicants for senior technical positions who were apparently hoping nobody would expect them to deliver.

Thanks for the reply and for offering a unique perspective :)

> Your prior employer isn't going to tell anyone, if they know what's good for them. Small, inexperienced companies with no lawyers might, but no real business is going to risk a lawsuit by saying anything bad about you whatsoever. They'll confirm that you worked there and that's about it.

This is an interesting point. I had been under the impression that even companies with fairly restrictive HR policies could safely disclose whether or not a former employee was terminated. After some fresh googling it seems I might have been incorrect and that now employers increasingly might just admit you existed :)

> Do not under any circumstances tell people that you were unemployed or lost your job due to depression or mental health. I'm not going to sugar coat this for you. Never admit this during an interview. It's a bad idea to mention anything health related. It's also none of their business, unless you require an accommodation that needs to be addressed before you're hired.

Sadly, I think you're very much correct re: mental health. I almost wish I could be more candid, but everyone (here and elsewhere) seems to agree that's just a terrible idea.

> It's a bad idea to mention anything health related.

I have, however, mentioned health / medical issues in some of my early conversations. I definitely understand how that could make potential employers nervous, so in some future interviews I may try to omit mentioning health at all.

> You'll be fine going forward, although now isn't a great time to be looking for a job, so it might take longer.

Thank you :)

I am in a similar position as you. I have a medical issue and I was fired in August 2018. Differences being:

- I intentionally got myself fired so I could get an extra $25k in salary/severance/unemployment.

- It was my first job out of college.

- I have positive references I can give. (my manager sucked, other people were cool)

- Medical issue is physical and not mental. (herniated disc / sciatica).

Here is my advice:

- Practice interviewing at a bunch of no-name companies you don't care about. I practiced at a dozen or so startups, got rejected by half of them and learned the red flags. Now I'm at the onsite stage at Google / Facebook, both asked about previous employment history, which I talked about, and everything worked out ok because I practiced.

- DO NOT MENTION, OR INSINUATE, YOU WERE FIRED. And don't lie. If you imply that you were fired, nobody will give you a chance. This sounds like a death sentence, but thankfully interviewers don't probe into it too much if you tell the right story in the right way. Find a good narrative and build on it like you would an essay. Practice this. Over and over and over and over again. It's hard to get right, but once you do, it becomes a non-issue.

- I try to avoid saying negative stuff about my last job. It's about 50/50, some hiring managers see it as a red flag and others sympathize. It's best to come up with and practice a few neutral stories to tell them

- Nobody cares about a 6-month employment gap. I know plenty of people that take more than a year off. If anyone asks just say you were focusing on your health, family, hobbies, whatever.

- See as many practitioners as you possibly can about your medical issue. Good ones are hard to find. It took me 20 tries (and $5k down the toilet) before I found someone who could treat me.

- I should have put this behind me way sooner. Moving to a different city helped me a ton. I'd recommend getting an Airbnb in Lake Tahoe or Hawaii if you can afford it.

Good luck.

Thanks :) - you are, in fact, pretty cool

> DO NOT MENTION, OR INSINUATE, YOU WERE FIRED. And don't lie.

It's unfortunate that openness is punished so harshly, but I get it. You're not the first person to caution strongly against letting anyone learn about the termination, so I'll try to move forward accordingly :)

> I try to avoid saying negative stuff about my last job

Definitely agree. It's one of those things that's more likely to harm than to help.

> herniated disc / sciatica

my sincere sympathies. I herniated some (cervical) discs a few years back, it's an extremely frustrating condition. In my case it's gotten better with time to the point I can do almost everything I could before, but I don't see myself getting back into MMA or other full contact sports.

No problem, hopefully we can get out of this rut! :D

Yeah I only have a sample size of two, but I insinuated I was fired at both, and neither wanted to move forward. Perhaps I should have been blunt about it instead of hinting at it. Or maybe it was unrelated. Hard to tell. There might be a way to talk about it tactfully. For me, it's just easier to not mention it, since it can open a can of worms to talk about negative stuff, cuz I kind of hated my manager and that was what ultimately pushed me to get myself fired.

Regarding hernated disc, yeah it's pretty manageable for me now. I actually found a really good massage therapist that is helping me recover. Unfortunately there's a bit of a hiccup with this Coronavirus thing but it's not the borderline life-ruining thing it used to be

That's a tough one. I've never been an interviewer but have lost a couple short-term jobs because of depression. I also think it's the right way to avoid talking about the details. It's a medical condition.

You might be able to say "I put off seeking medical attention for too long, and it got in the way of doing my job. That was a wake-up call, so I've focused on getting better since then."

Was that the first resume-relevant job you lost because of depression? If so, you can also mention that now you're aware of your medical condition, you're proactively managing it.

If you have been fired from multiple resume-relevant jobs, then don't use the "I learned and won't repeat it" part. In a perfect world, the interviewer should know. Not because you're an immoral worker, but because it's a risk you and your employer would share.

Finally, you "messed up" in the way that a dropped glass hits the floor: no point shaming the glass. Be proud of seeking treatment, but remember there was also luck in that decision. Our ideas of choice and responsibility are more complicated than usual when psychological disorders get mixed in.

Thanks for the answer :)

> If you have been fired from multiple resume-relevant jobs, then don't use the "I learned and won't repeat it" part. In a perfect world, the interviewer should know. Not because you're an immoral worker, but because it's a risk you and your employer would share.

Thankfully, although I think I've had depression for several years, I've left all other employers on good terms. For some reason things just spiraled heavily this last year, but long story short I don't have a pattern of termination.

> Finally, you "messed up" in the way that a dropped glass hits the floor: no point shaming the glass. Be proud of seeking treatment, but remember there was also luck in that decision. Our ideas of choice and responsibility are more complicated than usual when psychological disorders get mixed in.

There definitely was. If it hadn't been for my family and friends I would have avoided treatment much longer than I did, in addition to probably getting deep into substances. We're all products of circumstance and luck to varying degrees, and I've - all things considered - been very, very lucky.

Everyone looks at resumes differently. A resume that's perfect for one person screening resumes won't pass someone else.

In my case, if I see a gap on a resume I just assume that someone took time off to raise a young child, had some savings and traveled, ect. I wouldn't even ask about the gap, but if it did come up, even a vague "I just needed a break" would be fine. The whole point, if I were to ask, is just to make sure you can partition your personal life from your professional life. (I don't expect you to be perfect. I'm not perfect either.)

Now, hindsight is 20/20, but you could dedicate some free time to an open-source project, a "business," ect. Just enough to put something on your resume to fill the gap. When I worked with someone else at starting a business, my partner spent a lot of time (and money) going to a therapist. I had no problem with it.

I interview people regularly and if I see someone with technical talent, then I'll proceed. Chances are I'm not looking up your references until I'm pretty sure I want to hire you, so up until that point, it's on you to impress me with your technical knowledge.

Brush up on the fundamentals. Maybe read cracking the coding interview. And if possible, spend some time working on an open source project, preferably an existing one, not your own (it shows you can collaborate, which is a useful skill if I'm gonna hire you).

I appreciate the feedback, thank you. In particular, reminding me to contribute to a larger open source project which is something I haven't done since leaving my last job.

I think a lot of people take open-source to mean "oh, I'll make a project that does something cool in my own time and throw it up on github and everyone can see the code."

And sometimes this works. If you are (to take an extreme example) Linus Torvald and your open source project in Linux, then holy cow, I'm gonna hire you right away. But most people don't have the combination of talent, luck and perseverance that are required to get wide adoption of an open source project. So in 99% of cases, what you are left with is a library or small project that you threw up on a git-hub that maybe has a few stars and that almost no one uses.

Furthermore, as a hiring decision maker, I really don't have much time to actually read your code. Got a project with 3 stars on github? That's great, but I'm really pretty busy writing new features and maintaining my code and I don't have time to read through your code unless I'm pretty certain I'm going to hire you, so I look for proxies. Number of stars is one of them. If 1000 people use your product, it probably says something about the quality of your code or the difficulty of the problem you solved, or at least your ability to solve a problem in a way that people find useful (yes, yes... I know it doesn't guarantee any of these are true, it's just a proxy, but in the initial stage of interviews, proxies are useful).

The issue is that most people are never going to write a project from scratch that gets 1000 stars. However, if you have substantial work in a project that you didn't start, that's also a great proxy. This means that you collaborate with others and not only that, but the people you collaborate with think you are good enough that they are willing to merge in your code. That's a good proxy.

More than that: there are just a handful of open-source projects that went anywhere at all. Among an enormous slushpile of perhaps-worthy but ignored projects.

As a filter for useful, sharable code, open-source is an almost total failure?

Good to know you leave references until the end. I will not be able to get a reference if I leave. My company's policy does not allow employees to be a reference for anyone who is leaving.

This isn't uncommon, and as I understand it follows directly from the typical HR policy of only confirming the essentials, such as title, dates of employment and reason for leaving. Companies care more about possible litigation than they do about helping you with your next job.

However, in my experience it's haphazardly enforced. If you're on good terms with a colleague or manager, it's my understanding (IANAL) that they can still provide an informal or personal reference. In practice, for most prospective employers this is just as good as a formal reference (since most companies these days have the aforementioned policy anyways).

I've only really heard about this policy at some of the larger companies more recently. I didn't know it is becoming a common thing.

I guess it's just another sign of corporate hypocrisy - please provide references when applying, but we will not allow you a reference when leaving.

My company requires 3 references. Hiring manager does calls those just before offer is made and there is intent. I don't like calling references unnecessarily. There is a form which mostly is about how candidate interacted with co-workers and management and general effectiveness at job. Medical stuff does not come up generally. Personal references do not work well here in general for technical hires unless it's an intern and they worked together on school project or something.

My guess would be that many of the references you call do in fact work for companies with a no-reference policy. This has at least been the case at all of my employers (large and small places alike, some household names), save a 5 person startup.

In my experience, although near-ubiquitous a no-reference policy mostly seems to mean "if anyone calls the company line or shows up on prem, we redirect them to HR who then tells them nothing". It doesn't mean they go out of their way to stop individual employees from giving positive references on their own time (to wit I've never seen any employer actually make any effort whatsoever to disseminate their no-reference policy to employees, it's just a CYA measure they adopt if communication happens through channels they're directly accountable for)

If CTCI is your idea of "brushing up on fundamentals," you're doing it wrong.

What kind of approach would you suggest? Genuinely curious :)

What do you want to learn? How to pass interviews, or actual fundamentals? For that matter, fundamentals of what?

The context of the original poster's question makes it obvious that they are looking for help interviewing. I'm not disputing the importance of learning "actual fundamentals" and for those, I agree that CTCI isn't the right choice, but it's a very popular book for interviewees for a reason.

Interviews are (with varying degrees of efficacy) meant to gauge fundamentals - so I think you're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy.

That said I haven't really solicited advice on either. My concern is more specifically related to how to frame my past employment and medical issues for a future employer - not so much making it through a technical screening.

I was, and am, curious about what others deem important to their career and craft (e.g. fundamentals), but like I said it's mainly curiosity. If you have something to share I'm all ears, and if not I wish you well.

I was in a really similar situation a couple years ago. I was having mental health problems two years into my first job out of college. Around the same time my manager quit and a new manager started, and the new manager only knew me while I was struggling so we didn't have a great relationship. He told me to take a leave of absence, and before the three months were up he sent me an email saying that my job had been terminated due to my company's abandonment policy.

I had a looong gap on my resume when I finally felt well enough to start interviewing again. I tried the honest approach and mentioned that I left for medical reasons, and I never made it past the initial phone call with a recruiter. I finally lied and came up with a believable cover story (that I left to work on some startup ideas and did some freelance work) and then I was able to get a job. Keep your lies small, and obviously don't claim you were an employee somewhere that you weren't.

I was paranoid, so when the company I was interviewing with told me they were going to do the background check, I went ahead and called my old companies HR to see what they would say to the new company. All they had listed was my start and end date, not the reason I was terminated or anything. My new company outsourced the background check to a different company, where I had to fill out a form listing everywhere I was employed. I only lied on my resume and I didn't lie on the portion where I had to fill out forms for the job application and the background check. I was never caught in this lie and my new team is happy with my work.

It sucks that we have to do this, but when interviewing companies will take literally anything as a reason to reject you, even if you can do well on the technical portion of the interview.

> He told me to take a leave of absence, and before the three months were up he sent me an email saying that my job had been terminated due to my company's abandonment policy.

I don't understand here. Unless the new manager was just being shitty, being on a leave of absence would generally not be considered job abandonment.

In any case, good job on gaming a shitty system. When will people realize that some of the things employers take as "deal brakers" have literally zero correlation to actual job performance?

Yeah I'm not totally sure what he did was legal. Before I took the LOA, I had been missing work and asking to WFH a lot. I probably could have fought it or sued but again, I wasn't in a great place mentally and the whole situation gave me horrible paranoia about going back into tech (on top of the other mental health problems I was having). This was at Amazon, which dooesn't exactly have a reputation for being nice to their employees.

Ironically, even with the gap I think I'm a waaaay better developer than I was at my first job, simply due to having more life experience and being more responsible overall. It probably took me about a month or two to get caught up and not be rusty, and I think my "getting up to speed and familiar with a new codebase and platform" time was more or less the same as it would be at any new job.

Why would I see the parent comment grey? I surely hope there is some rule I don't understand here about new accounts, because otherwise it means somebody had nothing better to do than to be mean to someone depressed and asking for help.

Maybe that's the advice for you, if you're feeling down go have a look around for somebody who has it worse than you and push them further down! Nice work, everybody.

It wasn't gray when I got to it. This is part of why the guidelines discourage complaining about downvotes. It's often temporary. Someone was probably just having a bad day.

I could be wrong but I thought comments of a certain length were greyed a bit to discourage lengthy comments?

Just wanted to chime in and say, 6 months is actually not a big deal at all. Listening to people who say it is will only serve to add stress to your job search. I took a year and a half off to travel when I was 26 and nobody cared. You can explain it in any way you want to but I certainly wouldn't mention getting fired or specifics about your personal medical history. Good luck.

I would think nothing of someone taking 6 months off. The only reason I've never done it myself on my own volition is that a good opportunity has never presented itself. Aside from one time I was laid off, I've had a job offer in hand before leaving an employer. And that one time I didn't, I got a quick job offer in the middle of the dot-com blowup so it certainly wasn't a good time to travel the world.

I'm sorry we have switched on resumes from reporting years to reporting years and months. It used to be that even 20 months off could just disappear.

When you're ready, drop this Hacker News name. Switch to something like makingChances.

Sounds like restarting may be helpful -- not expecting to continue from where you were -- getting a contracting agency to pitch you and going from there. Once you're in a job, most people don't care about earlier gaps, except that managers who don't know how to collect people who can do the work get fixated on superstitions.

To restate what you're probably already hearing from your therapist: everyone can become depressed. It's something you learn. Some people are more clever at picking it up than others, but everyone can learn it. Depression is episodic. It goes away and comes back. A common recovery is for the gaps between episodes to get larger and the episodes get smaller. Depression grants three super powers. 1) You can see probabilities and how much control you and others have. People without depression cannot. 2) You are ready to serve, even at the risk of your life. This is something that doesn't apply to most of modern life, but does come up now and then. Think of Oscar Schindler. 3) While in an episode, you can be confident that you will not enjoy things. So if you're trying to resist a bowl of ice cream, you have help: you won't enjoy it.

Your negative thoughts and feelings are a natural part of mammalian neural systems, like kicking when you're tapped under the knee and being able to see dim lights easier if you look a little away. Those thoughts and the feeling of dread are not necessary or helpful (in almost every situation). You do not have to respect them. In fact, when they appear, you can disrespect them. They are just an evolutionary glitch that served primitive communities, but were never in the best interests of the people getting them.

Been there. Hold tight, things get better. What worked for me:

- Tell the interviewer you needed some time off and that you're fine now.

- Don't mention depression.

- Don't trash-talk past jobs regardless of merit.

Remember, life is not fair. Don't overexpose yourself if you don't need to.

Its fairly likely that your previous employer has a policy that your previous employer will just confirm that you worked there. In that case, it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

There are services which you can pay to call up a previous employer pretending to be a new employer doing a background/reference check on you. They will then report back on what they say.

In the case that they do say something negative, one option would be to hire a lawyer to send them a cease and desist letter. My understanding is it's fairly affordable to do and it's usually enough to get them to stop.

This is not meant to be hateful, but what an awfully long and needlessly complicated process just to prove that you didn't learn anything from being fired.

Having hired hundreds of people over my career, being fired is not an automatic exclusion, but we would be 100% looking for growth in the person sitting across the table from us. Your process shows no growth.

I'm not sure that I follow. If a previous employer is telling callers things that are keeping you from getting a new job, then I'm not sure what that has to do with personal growth. Especially if you were fired unjustly.

You don't really need to hire a service to do a fake reference check and report back. Just find a trusted friend, or, if the company is large enough, you can probably do it yourself.

My mood disorder has made my whole career a rocky journey. I'm 43 now, and doing well in my current role.

Managing your depression will always be part of the trip. Don't listen to the voice(s) that say you are a failure/loser/underperformer, just do your best. Say it to yourself whenever you need to: "I'm doing my best, and that's how it will always be."

Strangely, when I know that I'm doing my best despite everything, I feel calm.

> Obviously the gap is a bit of a red flag that I've been candid about to potential employers

Well, I would address this by actually improving your situation: start reading the code from open source projects in your sort of headspace, and set some goal that requires you to do work visible to the public. If you're unemployed, you should have plenty of time to do that.

I get that clinical issues will get in the way of that, but I'm also sure that if you're getting help, you should have some strategies to set aside some time every day. It is absolutely worth it.

> Do I tackle it proactively by outright telling everyone I was canned?

Maybe not that way, but if you have some good evidence you did soul searching and made a daily effort to sharpen your skills and understand how you got yourself into this mess, then that'll go a long way with a decent employer.

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