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Comment by Tao3300 | Hacker News Reader

> Big gaps in employment

Really curious what you suggest as a remedy for this one. It seems to boil down to "sorry, you're screwed now" or "lie but don't get caught"

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I once took 3 years off to play an MMO game (not joking). After that had to restart from the bottom of the salary ladder, but climbed back pretty quickly. This is a universal secret weapon - drop your salary requirements, like, a lot, to get hired. You can usually climb back.

EVE Online? :P

No, a Korean one, which, in complexity, makes EO seem like kindergarten. Enough to say, you can code your own bot companions in LUA.

> climbed back pretty quickly

How quick is 'quickly'? Going through the similar motions here, nearing towards the end of the MMO's current cycle of content.

If you've got 300 CVs to review, much of them with similar experience, do you interview the people who've had 2 years off, or the people that haven't?

I'd probably take a mix. Those people were probably doing some interesting stuff in those 2 years. Generally among our hires, those applicants have been much more eager to get down to business than the ones that are burned out from working the same job as the one they're applying for at a place they hate that isn't paying them enough.

And before you think you dodged it, I'm still wondering what you're suggestions are.

At least in my field, it would be an absolute complete irrelevance.

You’ve said 2 years here. What sort of gap wouldn’t be a factor to you? 3mo? 9mo?

Why does this make any difference to you? Are you afraid that they secretly joined a terrorist organisation and were in a training camp in a Middle-Eastern country?

That suspicion will surely be a problem for people of certain nationalities. (here in the EU there have been a few cases in the news which tends to make people more suspicious)

What if you been running a freelance consultancy for 15 years or so, but have very few references from clients available due to seldom interacting with anyone on the client side with meaningful technical experience.

Let's say for example your consultancy works with primarily physicians directly, or wealth managers, or attorneys - people who are not incapable of understanding technology, but have hired you precisely because they don't have the spare bandwidth to get into the weeds of another complex technical domain in addition to their own, and would have absolutely no idea how to comment on your understanding of algorithms or ability to function a small develepemt team as an IC, etc.

I've never seriously considered trying to parlay my experience into a mainstream developer role because I assume that in a sea of 100 applications all having a similarly recognizable list of roles and references, anything that doesn't fit this model is ignored because it's too much trouble to to make a side by side comparison with the rest of the candidates.

On one hand you're saying you want evidence of the candidate's work in recent years, but on the other hand you're also saying fuck people who take breaks to recharge, they should be on the rat race like the rest of us.

I'd interview both of them so long as they pass the requirements. The second guy I'd want to see recent projects, not employment.

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