Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

I was unemployed for six months in 2023. Some of that duration was self-induced. My wife did not want to relocate across the country and I did not want to go back to being a junior web developer, or senior positions that sounded very junior, as I have 20 years experience. Fortunately, I landed two opportunities unrelated to writing JavaScript at once and I took the lower paying one because it was fully remote.

Here is a list of things not to do:

* Don't waste time using employer online career portals. These only continue to exist to satisfy EEO legal requirements. Most employers don't respond to these.

* Don't pad your resume. Make every line of your resume count as if it were being read by a human. With AI tools now filtering resumes they are getting better at bullshit detection.

Things to do:

* Upload your resume to places like Indeed, Zip Recruiter, Dice.

* Be very specific on your resume. Yes, you should state something about your tech stack in the fewest possible words, but anything related to competences should be expressed in quantifiable terms only. For example you saved the company billions of dollars, or shipped 200 features to production, or reduced execution speed by 50%

* Be clear about your experience and what you are looking for.

* Have external credentials like PMP, CISSP, security clearance, and more. These open doors for you that you currently don't realize are closed to you and likely pay more.

Listing an active US security clearance on your LinkedIn or resume, is a sure fire way to get malicious actors trying to "hire" you; and makes you way more of a target. Especially combined with your technologies, company and time frame worked... It's just realy bad idea.

No, just no.

I'm long-time unemployed, had my last interview in Dec 2025. But what I can tell you is that during my interviews I get a lot of questions regarding numbers like: "how did you get to $X mio ARR, saved Y% on the data ingestion pipeline, or decreased processing algorithm speed by Z mins?"

Don't do that!

Everybody is trying to "quantify" their resume but hiring managers are calling the bluff. It's straight out lying, they smell your BS.

Speaking of lying: I get a lot of input from my peers how to actually make it to the next round of an interview process. Across the board they advised me to inflate my expertise of skill XYZ, if asked. Speaking humbly about yourself is not recommended - quite the contrary: brag, but keep it vague and very brief. I never had to do this in the past but now it's almost required.

Shameless plug: If you have any leads that help me secure a full-time position as Solutions Architect (or the like) you won't be disappointed - I'm a fast learner, taking on the toughest challenges! Now that all my savings are gone, I finally need find some work - maybe with your help? Thank you!

Yes, of course, DO NOT LIE on your resume. DO NOT exaggerate, bend the truth, or other shenanigans, This is not an excuse to avoid quantifying your contributions though.

If it's not BS, there's nothing to smell.

Some people genuinely have increased revenue by 40% in a department, on their own. I know, because they were my direct reports, and I was more than happy to clear away roadblocks for them to continue doing the same thing at higher and higher levels.

The issue is that no one wants to say their part was only 0.02%, so they take credit for the job the team as a whole did.

> production, or reduced execution speed by 50%

Hopefully that's "reduced execution time" :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com