My job search story | Hacker News Reader

My job search story

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98 pointsromafirst364 comments

A couple takeaways from this post and my most recent search:

* The first versions of the CV are so, so bad. Almost parody-level fluff (the rainbow infinity sign is peak CV cringe) hiding what should be considered some pretty impressive outcome metrics. It would be significantly better if the entire CV was "CEO who scaled startup from $XM Valuation to $250M Valuation" in 72 point font.

* Applying through the front door doesn't work. Only networking is going to get you a job at this level of seniority (and lately almost any level of seniority). Tuning your CV is only helpful for organizing your thoughts for your elevator pitch.

* Being without a job near the top of the pyramid is very bad, and you need a much better story to explain the gap. No one is handing you the keys to their company if you seem like a risk. "I'm a Ukrainian refugee" is a great story and should probably be in there to explain the lack of current employment. Your journey of self discovery is a great story to tell after you land your next role, not while you're looking.

* Probably most importantly, we've been living in a 15-year tech bubble driven by low interest rates and quantitative easing. Valuations have been driven by the insane amount of money flying around, and those valuations have required zero-marginal-cost and infinite TAM to justify the numbers. SaaS, tech, AI/ML are pretty much the only stories that can claim to meet the "zero cost, infinite TAM" investment thesis. Zero interest rate meant you got a super long runway to keep the fantasy going. We have a glut of people who can launch and scale tech companies and there aren't as many opportunities for that as there were three years ago.

OK I just read the CV and, wow, this is maximum cringe.

Some favorite parts: - "Perfectly designed to kick your competitors' asses" - "Jaw-dropping level of systematisation" - the row of logos for various corporate buzzwords and concepts, two of which are so faded it's hard to tell what they're supposed to be

But the absolute peak, the cherry on top, is the claim "Zero corporate bullshit" in the section "ABC's of Me" (barf). This CV is -all- corporate bullshit down to the last pixel. It's like saying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is PG-13. Like calling a ribeye steak vegetarian. Like North Korea calling itself democratic. You get the idea.

> Like calling a ribeye steak vegetarian

TBF the steak is made 100% from a vegetarian.

Nice one, will steal it on next beer & "veggie" bbq!

You have a bright future in marketing (assuming you're not working there already).

> Applying through the front door doesn't work. Only networking is going to get you a job at this level of seniority (and lately almost any level of seniority)

Every board member at an organization looking to find a CEO already knows who they want to put forward or at least talk to about the job, they have known from day one that they were appointed to the board. Networking with board members is what has to happen.

Another thing that was tickling the back of my brain while reading this was "the failure mode of clever is asshole,"[1] which is one of the most helpful blog posts I've come across. I personally have to work very hard to mute my initial interactions down to what's appropriate for a low-context introduction. The oddly coined phrases (e.g. "findicators") that others have commented on fall pretty squarely in this category.

[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...

So, like, the author was trying to find C-level position... in Europe... by applying CV and pinging people on LinkedIn? And now complaining they couldn't get a job because of job market?

I've seen how European C-level hiring works, multiple times. Either there is a really good manager not from C-level who worked for multiple years, already has personal connections with the board or the owners, and they get promoted when opportunity arises. Or there is the guy someone on the board/owner knows, who is invited to the CEO position, and who, in turn, invites his previous colleagues to other C-level positions. Or maybe there is a fund, which owns multiple companies, and this fund moves someone from CEO of one company to the board of other company and vice versa.

The talent pool for C-level positions is huge, and the positions are scarce. Most of them are filled by networking. There is one-in-a-million chance one can kick the door with just a CV in such way. Especially with a CV of that quality.

Pryvit Ted.

Long morning, so some thoughts that may be of use.

CV:

  - No real education (this is the U.K., everyone has a degree if they're white-collar); no "MBA Essentials" is not a real degree from LSE -- it's more like Harvard Extension School or MIT EdX
  - Too much design shenanigans. I can barely make sense of what sort of P&L experience you had, much less what you actually did in your resume. Are you a designer, an executive, a salesman, or a leader? Going for "God Emperor Generalist that can do anything" comes off as unfocused. Tailor the resume so it only reflects the exact skill-sets necessary for the job at hand (i.e. don't talk about developing a GTM strat, if you're looking to be a designer).
  - Too much flourish. This is the U.K. Your resume looks like it's trying to scam me. Less color, less stars, less fancy gimmicks. 
  - "Developed phygital, industrial EdTech platform" -- is this a typo or is this a play on physical-digital divide? See point above.

General Strategy:

  - While "creator economy," "metaverse," and related tech are popular in Eastern Europe, they're second-class industries in the first world. 
  - Anglosphere has pulled back investing into R&D and so-on. This resume and strategy would have worked in the era of cheap money, and mania -- but not now. Everyone is more serious, and only looking for things that will help them *now* (not years from now).
  - This is not Eastern Europe -- everything is more "who you know." Era of "diamond in the rough -- we should take a chance and have him preside over important shit" is not now. While I can appreciate the marketing strategy here to get your name out, it's more important to make long-lasting bonds in these times. And for the work you've done, no one is going to put up the position in a job portal -- they're going to find someone with the requisite skills in their network.
  - U.K. is not the place for your scene. It's stodgy. Sales doesn't work as well (see: more relationships). Very few are going to need your skills. Spin your experience less into manic "conquer the world" and more "didn't rock the boat, but helped many people achieve their goals." 
  - CEOs don't need to apply to random job postings

You're going to have to take a step down and come back to the real world for a few years. A sales gig is the most probable outcome for the "here-and-now." Best of luck.

Wow, that was hardcore. The hard love was oddly refreshing, especially given the razor sharp take.

He should make your reply an attachment to his CV. He'll get an amazing job in no time, even if out of sympathy for how he's been treated!

You can be direct, gentle, and helpful at the same time. Just takes a little creativity...

At the executive level you stop getting the kid gloves with the feedback (no feedback sandwich, no mincing words, very direct and to the point). The other thing that happens at the executive level is you stop getting direct feedback at all, so when someone spends the time to give you some direct feedback it is a gift to be treasured. As soon as you find a role you’re already on a PIP and often times the feedback you get will be from your exit interview.

> At the executive level you stop getting the kid gloves with the feedback

Hmm, that doesn't ring true here, I've coached a lot of execs and the ones you described are often getting the coaching for the very reason that they are too direct! The consequences for that are varied and definitely real.

And again, you can be very direct and also sensitive, gentle, etc. So it's not like there aren't any options for putting things out there in an effective way.

> The other thing that happens at the executive level is you stop getting direct feedback at all, so when someone spends the time to give you some direct feedback it is a gift to be treasured

This would seem to be a pretty logical self-reinforcing loop on its own, but again, I have to say that in practice it would be quite an exception. There are many, many different mechanisms through which executives receive feedback.

The exceptions who aren't getting feedback, even in those cases, are the execs who are too direct. Why? Because the same people are often effectively deaf to feedback.

And so, they tell professional consultants and coaches that they'd like to learn to be _more_ sensitive to feedback. Their training is nearly the exact reverse of what a lot of people think execs want or need.

These kinds of execs often explain that they'd prefer to be able to pick up even the subtleties, in a way that a) helps them do their job more competently and b) protects them from even more critique, which is what some of the most direct people out there fear more than anything.

So, I have a hard time buying this as a general principle, let alone some given attribute of just doin' business. If any given person or commentator is experiencing those issues themselves, it's far more likely, in my professional experience, that they share the same blind spot that other over-direct people have.

Well I’d certainly love working in whatever industry you’re in because myself, the myriad of executives I’ve recruited and coached, and my own peer network have the completely opposite experience. Getting a coach indicates that you’re not getting that feedback in your existing organization and you have to outsource it.

Executives aren't an industry, they can come from anywhere. From tech to government.

Or both, one client was a government appointee who came from an executive position in publishing, she knew she couldn't take the same style into a much less private organization. Turns out she brought her new understanding and style back into private life & business.

If you realize you don't really have to be blunt & jerky, even playing the critic archetype isn't so necessary, and it's more like a habit maybe, it turns out that this realization often opens new life opportunities and mental pathways...

As an Eastern European with 21.5y of programming career, I have exactly zero clue what do your EE tidbits mean.

I think parent doesn't know much about Eastern Europe jobs market, but makes assumptions, and wrong ones at that. He's also wrong about not being able to get a tech job without a degree in the UK when by Europeans standards UK is one of the most liberal places to get tech jobs without a degree, as many other EU countries are a lot more strict about letting you in without a degree then the UK, especially if higher education is 100% free and everyone has a degree.

He does have a correct point that in this economy, unless you already have strong connections inside the company, most places are only hiring outside workers for "the trenches" and less managers, leaders and visionaries.

I agree with you that, logically, it should be the case that "many other EU countries are a lot more strict about letting you in without a degree then the UK, especially if higher education is 100% free". However, my experience as a British person (admittedly, sample size of N=1 participants) is the polar opposite.

During the pandemic, I was offered (by a fellow contributor to an open source project) a pretty high-flying role in a large semiconductor company. It would be remote-working for a technical department which was based in Germany. Ultimately, though, I couldn't be employed because the British HR department of the company had a policy of 'no degree, no job'!

>a pretty high-flying role in a large semiconductor company

Well there's your problem.

Semiconductor companies, like all "real engineering" companies, mandate academic credentials for everyone on the technical side, especially for "high flying roles", nothing to do with the UK, in Germany it would have been the same or even more strict, it's how the industry operates.

If your "high flying role" would have not worked out, then the HR lady would have been under fire for letting in someone without a degree and not following protocol. She was just covering her ass by doing things by the book of the industry/company.

Try SW companies and you'll be fine without a degree. The more scientific and old-school engineering the company is, the more they fixate on your credentials. Here in Austria, some even want to see your university grades.

The intriguing thing here was that I had warned the person offering me the job that I didn't have a degree. He said something like "don't worry, we just put the degree requirement in the job advertisement to appease HR" and seemed very confident that it wouldn't be an issue. Later, he said it wasn't possible specifically because of the British HR, whose hard requirements he didn't know of.

Since I have no reason to think that he might have changed his mind on me or something like that, it really does sound like the UK department were stricter in this case. That said, I can understand how it probably looked from their perspective - they would have had no reason to trust the recommendation of a manager from another department (from another country no less!) without any paper qualifications to go on.

Incredibly on-point feedback. The CV is quite unfocused, too clever with invented terminology, and vacillates between professional and unprofessional. Boiled down to just the outcomes it could be solid, but even the "focused" versions are a bit all over the place.

Honestly, put all the hours spent on CV design towards trying to get coffee with useful people.

Having spent some time in Eastern Europe, it is much more "who you know" than Western Europe by a mile.

You've put a lot more effort into breaking down a lot of the issues than I would have, but my initial thoughts while reading the post were very similar to what you laid out. But it's almost a disservice to say anything more to this man than, get a job in sales.

He should literally forget everything else written and just focus on getting a job in sales.

'Metaverse' is a joke everywhere.

No serious person believes in that. Maybe some crypto bros.

Same here. It has nothing to do with the CV. 20 years of experience as a Product Management leader. Google, Booking Group, Trip Group, SEA, my own startup, Stanford MBA, Berkeley, bla bla. Everyone keeps telling me I'd have something in no time. Easy!

I network, I get a bunch of bla bla meetings, the occasional 'interview'. Na. It's been a year. One wanted to offer me 80% less money. But even they didn't have headcount at the end. Today a headcounter from Singapore called me to 'chat' and told me he is leaving the industry and the country as everything has doubled in price. Why he called me, I don't know. I guess he needed to vent.

There's a tooooooooooon of fake job searches out there. A company in Australia interviewed me for a CPO role and a friend of mine through headhunters. Neither of us got hired. That's fine. Yet, no one else either. It's been 10 months. The company isn't REALLY looking. Huge waste of everyone's time. They just want to appear to be in the position of being able to hire.

Hundreds of applications, intros, talks. I'm a single gay man, no family, flexible, can move almost anywhere, can easily do fully remote or hybrid, whatever. But na. I got tired. There are no jobs anymore for experienced hires (at least for us folks outside the US. In my case APAC or AU). I'm in my mid 40s and basically forced into (very) early retirement. Trying to figure out alternative things to do so I don't get too bored and actually bring home some money again.

Same but I’m just a low level IC. Hiring is just broken.

> They just want to appear to be in the position of being able to hire.

Why do they do this?

> There are no jobs anymore for experienced hires (at least for us folks outside the US. In my case APAC or AU).

I am having the same trouble, but in my case potential employers seem to want something very specific. I have years of experience with Scala and the JVM, but not Kotlin? Years of experience with Postgres, MongoDB, and Bigtable, but not DynamoDB? That’s a pass. Or at least those are the stated reasons they say to my face. Maybe I just didn’t do brilliantly enough in the phone screen/interviews.

Across the ocean, I’m hearing from friends in the US that entry level positions are impossible to find too. Not a single graduate of a coding boot camp cohort has been able to land a job since February.

I find this interesting. My team at a large public university in the United States just failed two rounds of interviews for a senior full stack software engineer position. Salary is around 130k full compensation. This number includes fantastic benefits and 12% match for 401k . We failed the interview because the candidates that we get are very inexperienced and they interviewed terribly not knowing even basic things. However we can't seem to get anyone more experience to apply because their salary demands are too high, so we end up with entry level engineers attempting to apply to senior roles. The university can't afford to pay anymore so we're kind of stuck.

My wife works for a private university (you've heard of it), in a non-technical role, and it's the same there according to her and her friends at work. The pay is mediocre at best, but the benefits kick ass. Those include excellent health insurance, which as most reading this probably know is a very big consideration in the USA. So maybe that's just how universities do things.

Depending on where said fancy private uni that doesn't pay well is located might be an issue. Yes perks are good. But mediocre pay only goes so far if you're living in a high tax, high rent state.

The CV looks just awful. I wouldn’t want to work with someone who showed me such a resume. Absolute buzzword spaghetti. The colors and the graphics just scream I peaked in high school.

From my experience people with such resume are low performers with focus on marketing themselves.

My initial thought on seeing this was “this is the kind of flashy, muddled, confusing output I would get if I hired you? Pass.”.

People very often forget a resume is a form of work product. If after reading it you get a bad sense about the person, or still have no idea what they are good at, then it’s a bad CV.

With of course the caveat that a CV is a marketing tool.

Several potential turnoffs in the (earlier versions of?) resume 1) possibly overqualified. Companies definitely do worry that someone overqualified will quickly grow bored and leave. Not an unreasonable concern 2) some of the language in the resume is a bit off-putting. Maybe it's a language issue, but I could see "World-Class qualified." and similar statements as coming across a bit like a bit of inflated sense of self/ego. I could be totally wrong on that, I don't know.

this is a pure grift post, which is what one would expect from a former director of an adtech grift (but I repeat myself) company. it should be obvious that the goal here is not to communicate the poor state of the job market, but to exploit the narrative of the poor hiring market in order to attract attention to a subpar candidate.

I find it amusing that fedir ("ted") skyba was still the ceo of AIR this past January, when AIR reported record profits and purchased another mcn grifter "ScaleLab". google reviews and elsewhere of scalelab are hilarious "don't use! pure scammers!". the co-founders of air decided to get rid of their star ceo just as the company started turning serious profit. no honor amongst thieves!

an mcn, or a multi-channel network, is a company that helps "content creators" promote and monetize their channels. they provide additional services that are generally value add fluff. you go to an mcn in order to boost your subscriber numbers, in exchange for a cut of your profit. if the pimp analogy comes to your head, it's not unwarranted, there are giant mcns for onlyfans and other such services. an mcn becomes successful through aggressive on boarding practices, and then acts as a rainmaker: if the channel makes it on merit, an mcn takes a cut and claims it as huge success, if it doesn't the mcn still takes a cut until the content creators wises up and leaves. if you ever wonder how YouTube channels lose their souls, it's through the deals with mcns.

from this perspective fedir's inflated ego combined with, the way another commenter put it, parody-level fluff cv should not be a surprise.

I feel you, I am an ex-CEO who didn't network very well when I had the chance. I'm at an early stage of a second career in engineering after several years break.

The more I write about my CEO/founder experience the less valuable it feels, and the more I've condensed it. I don't know how much of my thinking applies to your situation. But I worry that CEOs naturally come across as jacks-of-all-trades - I definitely see that in the mega-graphic on your first CV.

I once advertised a Product Owner position and interviewed an ex-CEO / inventor who wanted to tell me all about product sourcing in China, the software stack, managing an engineering team etc. ... very little chat about the job I'd advertised, which was probably my fault for not narrowing the interview earlier.

I remember thinking - I'm sure he can do it, but he's going to be a handful. I'm torn between worrying that this was ageism or just a bad impression, as if he'd said "I have done much more difficult jobs than the one I'm applying for". That is an easy impression to make by accident.

Random realisations about my own search:

1) My previous career led me to being over-familiar, and I'm working hard on fixing that without losing (what I hope is) a personable voice. That is definitely off-putting to an interviewer.

2) Even the stuff I'm proudest of must will be sotto voce, something that an interested interviewer can pick up on among a CV ruthlessly tailored for the situation. As a CEO you're used to selling everything about yourself; as an interviewee anything irrelevant is off-putting.

3) I have the luxury of not needing a new role soon, so I can focus on making enthusiastic applications that I'm really interested in. If I made 1000 applications I can't imagine how I'd express my any genuine interest in any of them.

Good luck, and please let us know how you get on.

> I have done much more difficult jobs than the one I'm applying for

Why is that such a bad impression?

The hiring manager believes that the applicant will get bored and leave the moment something closer to their seniority level becomes available.

If it's not relevant to why they'd do this particular job well, it's leaning towards entitlement.

One thing that is really touched upon in the article is tailoring resumes to the jobs. It’s a skill in and of itself and is something I’ve found brings a lot more success when getting call backs, in my experience.

However, it’s incredibly time consuming to do this for every job application. A lot of times, it just hits an ATS system and gets trashed before it even reaches a person.

A bit of a self-plug, but I’ve made Resgen[0] to help with just this issue (initially made for myself) - it tailors your experiences to the job description to give you better odds of actually getting in front of an actual person.

[0] https://resgen.app

I'm shocked but not totally surprised.

The job market became awful ~6 months ago in a fairly short period (largely because of interest rates IMO). There's just no comparison with how it used to be in the zero interest rate era, sadly.

I agree with you but with the additional point that this is how the job market for many fields has operated for several years. Tech has just be insulated until now.

I'm a mechanical engineer and scientist. I've applied to hundreds of jobs in the last 4 years. For every 100 jobs I've applied to, I've received 13 interviews and 3 offers. 41 applications out of 100 ghost me and never even reply back. This is now a numbers game. Networking helps, but only gets you so far in my experience. It may get you an interview, but a lot of places have long internal processes that can take months to hire somebody as various internal stakeholders examine several candidates. I'm not defending the process, since it is a complete waste of time for job seekers, but I do want to emphasize how this is not new to many fields outside of tech.

Right, sure. I agree that tech had it way easier before the interest rate spike. I'd just like to add that it's now even worse than that both in tech and also everywhere else (I hear stories of people with decent experience and qualifications sending out like 500-1000 applications and not getting an offer). The job search landscape is just very bleak at the moment, no other way to put it.

I totally agree! I know people and have heard stories of people applying to hundreds of jobs and getting few if any responses, let alone offers. I view the process as stochastic rather than deterministic, and that is why I call it a numbers game. I've applied to many jobs that I thought that I would be a ringer for, but end up getting ghosted. I try not to overthink it at this point. All that you can do really is apply and hope that it works out.

Most companies are currently very likely on hire freeze and recent, current or upcoming 10-15% layoffs.

Wait it out or better start your own thing now.

Cringe CV aside, author clearly prefers quantity over quality. It may work for a dev job but it won't for C-level. What author should have done is to select the most promising/aligned offers and invest time to analyze the company top to bottom to learn to speak the same language (market, niche), discover challenges they are facing and work out top executives profiles to better understand what they are looking for. Ideally network with top execs to get more insights into the company culture.

This CV is such a joke. Even the 4th version looks like crypro-bro bullshit.

As a start: despite what people say, there are lots of "CEO" roles. If you are a sole entrepreneur, you are a CEO too. CEO of yourself. There are also lots of small companies that have few people. I dont say it is an easy job. I want to say that later lots of them try to sell themselves as CEOs of multimillon companies. Which often is not that harder but this is not my point.

We have this guy with no education who spews more buzzwords than cryptobros. It is on MLM level of cringe.

The so called CEO "reached a record GMV, EBITDA and net profit". What does this even mean? Record? Is it 1 million? 10 millon? 50 billion? Since we have no number then it sounds like someone making up things. Btw. A "real" CEO would know that tons of data is public so you can show it.

180% yoy growth is a miceo company that sold 2 shovels instead of 1. 200% yoy growth.

Such empty comments show the guy is not a serious person.

Net profit YoY growth 15% and 60%. So he worked there for 2 years? Or 11? Is he lying?

He gathered a team. A team of how many? Someone managing 20 people would say it. Someone managing 1 - 2 wont say it.

Virtual salad bar... and a word salad. Does the guy think that those buzzwords convince anyone?

I could write more, but why bother.

This all sounds like MLM scam trying to find investors.

Also any real CEO (or manager) knows that people lie on their CVs. How many CVs did the guy really see?

Is this some satire? Some chat GPT generated content, where the prompt was set to sound like a crypto bro?

Have you applied at GoJo/Waystar Royco?

Resume reads like dialog between Tom Wambsgans and Lukas Mattson.

I hear Glengarry Glen Ross and Stratton Oakmont are hiring like wild too.

I truly feel for the author and the emotional toll these past few years must have taken on him. And as others have pointed out, the market certainly isn’t what it was a few years ago for any job seeker in the “tech” industry.

But reading both the write up, and the various versions of his resume left me immediately with a sense of genuine anger - not for the situation, but at the author. As a somewhat self reflective person this naturally caused me to seek the source of this visceral reaction, and the conclusion I’ve come to is something nobody must have told him, or he was simply unwilling to hear. The problem here is his language / presentation. Now, I don’t mean his command of the English language, which is certainly quite good (especially considering that the author is likely multi-lingual, and English may not even be his native tongue).

As someone who has been working with seasoned executives for multiple decades, what struck a nerve with me was they nature in which the author chooses to express himself. It doesn’t “feel” like the way a seasoned executive would be expected to write. It seems much more like a crypto-bro, or a 20-something year old trust fund kid with delusions of grandeur. It’s perfectly possible the author is a genuinely professional, capable, and approachable person. But he doesn’t come across this way in both his blog or his resumes. And the truth especially a marketer should know, is that presentation often counts for a lot more than content.

Who uses language such as “findictators”, “COMB-shape hands-on doer” and “Pain Recognition”? And what’s with the infinity symbol graphic on the first resume? My favorite part is the long list of self-described “ABCs of me” at the bottom of the resume. It reads like a self-help guru book for business “wannapreneurs” with zero actual experience (which is in contrast to him actually having experience, and that contrast is the issue). Even the picture on top of the blog signals “bro” in every way. The feedback form the high-profile career coach was simply code the author couldn’t decipher - “you have nothing specific to offer” just means “you’re presenting like you swallowed a dictionary of cool business buzzwords which gives you no real shape or form, but leaves an impression of self importance and overestimation”.

Changing this is incredibly difficult, even more so because VCs used to pump funding into plenty of leaders with this kind of presentation, which infiltrated social media and normalized the appearance. And certainly losing some of the artifice of “traditional business” has long been a hallmark of the tech industry (I recall a time when Bill Gates was considered “edgy” because he didn’t wear suit and tie). And authenticity is increasingly encouraged and needed in modern business. But even then, you need to be able to read your audience, and the author simply is missing something there.

I had the exact same feelings/thoughts reading his post, and I genuinely hope I am wrong about them because, if I am right, his only way out is to start again from the bottom or launch a new company.

I'd hire you if I had money or if I can get a new job myself that lets me hire people.

I feel like something is missing. I see the positive feedback what what about the feedback after rejection?

More proof that narcissistic personality disorder is prevalent among senior 'leaders'.

At work (and here on HN): deliver, and respect other peoples' time.

After finishing the article I am still not 100% convinced he isn't trying to troll. The CVs, the arrogance... the cover image. (featured on medium... true story)

If you think 1001 top companies have broken hiring process create startup that fixes it - as superstar ceo it should be oscillating at the top of your list.

> As an experienced hands-on hard worker, I’m so in love with creating and scaling products.

Ok, but...did you ever in fact create or scale any of the products themselves? Write any of the code, design the UI/X, administer a system? The impression I get, and perhaps I am mistaken, is no, you are by experience purely a manager, who told other people to create and scale systems.

He's suffering from being a refugee to western country.

> I even decided to get rid of my title as a CEO to not confuse hiring managers and decided to name myself a Chief Growth Officer.

So, it’s reaction was to lie on his resume and he wonders why nonody wants to hire him.

Managers dont hire ex CEOs. They are afraid those will either be too good, or hard to manage.

More likely they're afraid the hire will be too bad (and not even realize it). Anyone can be a CEO. Start an LLC and make yourself the CEO. Done. It's a meaningless title without context.

I know several blockchain projects that would love you but none that can afford you. Market is terrible especially in web3 gaming. I myself have taken a 97.5% pay cut with my most recent position compared to 2020.

Edit for the haters: it’s completely expected. In 2020 solidity engineers were being offered $1m+ annual base pay packages with no takers, since anyone could earn more building something on there own. Like it or not more actual utility that people enjoy is getting built now that the hype boys are gone.

Assuming you make 30K a year now… that means you made 1.2M before

A true millionaire wouldnt be afraid to give numbers, not percentages.

Serious people know how to calculate percentages.

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