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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

I've taken multiple six month stints off, and in the UK no one has ever asked about it.

The issue is earlier in the resume screening process, before they’re talking to you at all.

If a company receives 200 applications and 50 of them have flawless resumes, even something as small as a couple unexplained gaps could be enough to move you below the cutoff for getting a call back.

I think the thing that confuses people about gaps is that it doesn’t make it impossible to get any job. It just raises questions for interviewers who have a lot of resumes to sort through.

If you’ve only ever applied to jobs in less competitive markets or times, it may not have mattered at all yet. There are actually a lot of small hiring quirks that an entire generation of engineers hasn’t encountered yet because we’ve been in a decade long bull run.

This makes sense from the company perspective, but gaps still shouldn't bother candidates because there are many thousands of companies in the world. Since companies give no feedback on an initial rejection, you can't even see how often you're being rejected for gaps vs. other things, so it's not even worth worrying about.

I'm in management, writing to confirm this. I've seen many CV's, many gaps, never asked about it, I don't even assume why it happened.

Burnout is a known problem in our profession, I approach people with open mind, I experienced burnout myself and taking time off is desirable for mental health.

I am replying to this reply here because I can't reply on the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31203871

Firstly: Do you think every comment should be positive? Secondly, how is my comment negative enough for you to make that reply? I asked a question and gave (honest) feedback on my reading of the article/post.

> The list is obviously not for you

But it IS on HN which I read. HN is a public forum that anyone can join and make comments. It is fair game to give feedback on articles.

> this reflex where one needs to be so angry and vocal about something so benign (and useful) is what makes me question what have we done to ourselves as a society.

The usefulness of the advice is completely subjective and the main point of the comment section is to discuss that. Would you rather comments like "love this", "+1", "all great advice!". That seems completely useless to me.

Your questioning of society based on my question and feedback seems outrageously ridiculous to me.

Ironically, a quick look shows you have multiple grey posts and are not a positive commenter yourself. Maybe your reply was actually some self reflection.

And if you feel self-concious about it, just write „freelance projects“ and in the ultra slim case someone still inquires about that telling them point blank you‘d love to divulge it because it was a very interesting project, but you‘re bound by an NDA.

Thats a dangerous way though and leading to the road of fraud.

Would be a red flag for me, if someone boasted about secret NDA work, which did not exist at all. And this can show up very quickly with some questions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com