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Comment by steerablesafe | Hacker News Reader

Interviewing with a poor financial situation in the background can be indeed suboptimal, but I think for a different reason. You don't have leverage in negotiation and you are most probably desperate, which is hard to hide. Overall this comes trough as lack of confidence and undermines the interview.

To turn this into an advice for people interviewing without a safety net: get a safety net. It can be a job that is easy to get, a rent that is easy to pay, just make sure that you can live by that situation indefinitely. You need to leap from there. You need to be able to turn down job offers to be able to negotiate.

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I have a safety net, it's in the form of subsidized housing where I don't have to pay anything for rent as long as I don't earn an income, and utility and food are paid by one of my relatives through an allowance. Having said that, I'd be careful how you treat these situations because it's easy to fall into a loop of complacency.

With nothing to light a fire under your butt, you have to sometimes create your own crises because simply setting deadlines when you don't need to pay for anything doesn't have any real stakes. This is coming from personal experience- I've been constantly job hunting since 2015 with no FT offers in software development, despite having 8 years experience from 2007-14. Job hunting now just feels like going through the motions and I'm burned out from so much interview practicing.

I have the potential to turn down offers because of my situation of not needing to pay for almost anything, but I can only take advantage of that if I get offers to begin with. Whatever approaches I took in the early 2010's to get work aren't effective anymore and I'm still in the process of discovering what will work for me today.

> "live by that situation indefinitely"

It's an unfortunate reality that it's become impractical to match this advice in all circumstances. When I was young I found that

a) I had to live within an hours drive of a city with jobs to get jobs in that city b) There were 1/100th to 1/1000th the number of jobs available if I stayed with my family. c) Minimum rent + student loan payments + heating bills exceeded what an "easy" job could cover.

I ended up not paying the student loan debts for about a year and recking my credit, but I was ultimately able to get a job. People with mortgages, families, or other fixed expenses can likewise not stay unemployed forever in the modern world.

As an experienced hire, if you take a big down-level for expedience employers will question it in the future.

If you're broke and don't have kids to feed, hit the road and go backpacking or something. No one cares how much money you have. What people care about is that you have an interesting story and are resourceful enough to make the best of any situation. Because one day you're going to get paged at 3am where all the technology is crumbling around you and you're the only one who can save it, and what's going to make you succeed at that moment is your lived experiences until that point saving yourself.

This seems a bit specious. I've done things along this line, and it was great, but I had some support infrastructure and a tiny bit of money to actually pay for shit. You're going to need to also build the ability to support yourself for realsies (financially) as well when you return or during, otherwise you're just another idiot who flew to Thailand with $0 in the hopes random ppl will fund your vacation. With some savings, and some ability to work jobs that you'd find anywhere, then ya go make what you can of it, but this isn't that case... yet

Not a thought that would have crossed my mind. My mental model was more along the lines of Paul Erdős showing up on famous mathematicians doorsteps asking for a place to live. I don't think anyone accused him of being some loafer trying to hitch a free ride. I mean if you backpack and people don't even want you around for free then how on earth are you ever going to get that faang cash money.

I feel like we might just have different ideas of backpacking. People wouldn't want you around for free if you are net negative, but if you're suggesting what is basically an unpaid internship for strangers, then I just didn't interpret backpacking to mean that.

I'm suggesting that, if you're unemployed, you can literally do anything. With or without money you have the power to change the world. So what you choose to do with that freedom says something about who you are as a person.

I always talk about my time traveling and riding trains and going to antarctica in interviews. Most of the time it breaks up the monotonous interview process and allows me to stand out in the crowd.

Anyone with time travel experience should have no problem getting a job :)

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