Being kicked out of the tech industry
jacky.wtf
jacky.wtf
To OP, hiring is an extremely risky process. We do interviews for a position because once that one person is chosen, it's a time/money investment of 3-6 months before the company learns if candidate is any good. And tbh, there are many, many, many not-so-good candidates. So yeah, when interviewing, people look for flags (both green and red) but red flags have a much higher signal than green ones.
You said you don't know if its them, or if its you. I read several read flags in that post and given that there's 100+ candidates to choose from (in current market), if I came across you, I'll be honest, I'd rather just skip right over to one of those other 99+.
My advice (and others said it), delete the blog post, take a step back. Get a coach or a friend to help you really, really see yourself from a third-party perspective. Maybe you do need a break, maybe you do need a career change. But yeah, tech right now is stacked against most of us and that's just reality of free markets. Sometimes it's a sellers market and other times it'll be a buyers one.
How are you supposed to know what the impact of your work is, especially in a large company?
Because my experience is that most employers don't tell you how your work affected the company's KPIs or what not. You don't have access to the analytics saying how your changes affected conversion rates or visitor counts or whatever else.
Do most people just make this stuff up? Guess somewhat plausible numbers?
Or are there companies that tell their employees exactly what effect their work is having on the company and how much impact their actions are having as a whole?
But in all it's a bit silly because employers will say they want to hire people who do "impactful" work but most of them won't let people pick what they work on, or tell them how what they're doing contributes to the organisation's goals.
If you want to build an HN-approved CV you'll need to find an employer who will give you clear information about company KPIs and will let you self-select the work you do to improve those KPIs.
> If you want to build an HN-approved CV you'll need to find an employer who will give you clear information about company KPIs and will let you self-select the work you do to improve those KPIs.
Yeah, pretty much. And even outside of your resume/CV, it definitely feels like whether you do well in a company comes down to whether you're lucky/persuasive enough to be put on a greenfield project with a lot of support from management and interesting problems to solve or stuck on a badly run project with no meaningful results in sight.
Still remember the one company things didn't work out at for that reason. Joined at the same time as one other developer, and they seemingly got put on all the interesting projects where they could instantly make a huge impact on the organisation. Yeah, it's a lot easier to do well in a role if things line up so nicely.
> stuck on a badly run project with no meaningful results in sight
You don't need meaningful results, really. Just projects that sound impressive to prospective future employers where a backchannel won't throw you under the bus. Like if you spend two years on some overhaul of an internal system that turns into a horrible shambolic quagmire, unless your colleagues blame you for the quagmire just leave that part off your CV and say what the project was meant to achieve.
Contrary to what others say, don't make stuff up unless you're a particularly skilled liar. If you have to ask the questions you are asking, you aren't.
Maybe not a thing in the USofA, elsewhere a number of G20 countries have compassionate leave and such things baked into workers rights.
I want to go to work, cooperate with mature adults, make a paycheck and go back home. I don't want to have to help my colleagues through their mental health crises, I don't want them to cause a ruckus and I don't want to be recruited by them into a marxist revolution.
Every post exudes histrionism, grandeur, chuuni.
"I'm not capable of being a respectable Negro" I don't even know what that means, how about being a respectable person? I see your website and think "probably not".
Based on what I read there I wouldn’t even consider them for a role.
> I think I'm giving up on being a "professional" software engineer. I've tried it for a decade. I've been laid off more than half of the times I've been in the game.
According to their own resume, their first stint as a software engineer was in 2019. Maybe my maths are just bad - but this doesn't even get close to a decade.
> But this feels more like being kicked out. Getting more than 5 rejections a day despite my past work is humiliating. Having to be told that "you're great but no" more than 6 times a day is demeaning. And having to hear that it'll take a year to find a job — how the fuck does society claim to be in a good place if folks have bills to pay during this time[2]?
They also don't seem to have any experience or any awareness of how bad it was in 2008, the dot-com bubble, etc. It's giving main character syndrome vibes.
> Did my bringing up of a book at a company get one of the executives too upset?
and
> Did me having a crisis in public become too embarrassing for another?
It's a lot of assumptive takes that the reader would know every aspect of their lives.
> It is solely a game of referral: it does not matter what you apply with because other people are cheating in the application process.
This has been a "thing" since forever. Companies even incentivize referrals.
> It's more if they like and trust you.
They completely miss the mark with the pivotal point here: Trust. If a company can't trust you, for whatever reasons, then - yes - you are liability in many forms. Again, this isn't something new or manufactured in the last decade.
> I think I get a little bored of seeing the same old business as usual when more than 30% of people are fucking going through for it for no reason outside of "you're not the match we're looking for". Well, what was it then!?
See: AI.
I wasted too many cycles on this -- but there's a whole lot of "it's not me, it's everyone else" in here. The market is especially tough, right now, and if you don't have a set of skills or experience[s] to make you stand-out from the 300+ people that are applying, what do you expect? It's tough for everyone, not just you...
But. Based on my recent job search, getting eleven notifications per day means he must have been submitting hundreds of applications per day. Over the course of 4 months, I submitted for something like 120 positions. I'd be lucky to get one rejection a day (usually just no feedback ever).
And yeah the like and trust thing is paramount. You can be a John Carmack level engineer but if you're a jerk or not trustworthy then yeah it's going to be really hard to find a job.
I've been told to drop my earlier roles at Shutterstock because it was "too old" and "too short".
> It's giving main character syndrome vibes.
Eh, it's a monologue.
> It's a lot of assumptive takes that the reader would know every aspect of their lives.
Again, a monologue and a lot of it is phrased as a question. If you've read my blog before, it might not be news. Link's at the top of site!
> Again, this isn't something new or manufactured in the last decade.
Of course not but I do think the initial trust dance has weakened dramatically over the course of the last decade.
> but there's a whole lot of "it's not me, it's everyone else" in here.
I explicitly do not do this in the article, wtf? lol
Good luck.
2. The language contains too many errors for a senior candidate.
“agentic devlopment”, “MFP … initative”, “the Veteran Affairs” rather than “the Department of Veterans Affairs”, “I begun my career”, “kept me going and interesting in consulting”, “problems that’s been ailing them”, “tight knit” should usually be “tight-knit”, “on-going” should be “ongoing”, “around ~3x weekly” is redundant, “Deployed changes to help reduce noise of the maintaining of…” is difficult to understand, “Extended dynamic application placements from Glitch’s internal mappings…” is nearly unintelligible.
3. Generic positioning
4. The resume lacks prioritization, which as a hiring manager I will interpret as they'll struggle with prioritization in their work too.
I wish them all the best, but reaching for conspiracy (am I on a list?) when you haven't introspected and critically evaluated what you put out there, signals to me they will continue to struggle.
Fork found in kitchen.
It's a buyer's market - he should spend the hour with an LLM iterating on his resume.
Perhaps it is easier to understand once you acknowledge hiring managers don't handle a hand full of applications at a time but hundreds, and half of them are dropped right at the first round. What compels you to spend your time pulling this candidate into an interview round over anyone else? The candidate clearly didn't even bothered with a spell check.
Half of the issues pointed out are more than stylistic (activity instead of impact, generic/no prioritization). Even without stylistic issues it's not a compelling resume.
And basic spelling mistakes are more than a stylistic issue, it shows a real carelessness that it's hard to imagine wouldn't be in their work
That can be bad luck, but taken as a whole, many recruiters and/or hiring managers are going to pass over this resume.
I’m sorry you’re having a hard time. In an industry that was created and is fueled by lots of unconventional personalities, I would hope people would be more willing to prioritize the work first and fixate less on personality and relationships.
I agree with the sentiment that the resume is a very weak resume but it's not clear if he's getting rejected outright or after an interview.
Listen I've been laid off several times. The thing that was different from the last time is the number of auto rejections I would get. How do I know they were auto rejections? Submit application ... One minute later: thank you for applying... Two minutes later: unfortunately you don't have the right requirements.
I could say it's because of the use of "AI" in the hiring process (don't even get me started on some of that BS, but it's laziness. Maybe just filtering off key words like has been done forever.
And referrals? In what universe is that "cheating"? Yes I've had cases where I've made it to the decision point - just me and another candidate. Guess what? The other candidate was a referral and got the gig instead of me. This used to be called "networking" but somehow it's "cheating"?
My advice to the writer is to update that resume to what people are looking for now: the impact of things you designed/created is important! It saved X hours per week etc are better understood than "I worked on a thing that did something".
And the question of "calling out companies" etc ... Yes, that can be a problem. If I'm looking at hiring two people and one has a public record of this moreso than, say, a public record of projects (I don't know if this is the case here, but I'll assume) and the other has a public record of projects, well guess which one I'm going to hire. The worst hires are the ones who are going to "cause problems". Not criticizing calling out companies but if I make it a point to criticize companies I work for, what is a company supposed to expect out of me?
The writer is the cause of and solution to his own problem but instead he's victimized and being "kicked out" of the industry.
To OP, cheer up, there are 100 of thousands of people like you, you are not less nor full of “red flags”, you are who you are, my advice: look for something within tech but not software engineering, or something entirely different but still bringing peace to you, if you like driving get your truck license and go for it, if you like building and being handy look up carpentry or similar, you are most likely to make better money than most software engineering jobs right now.
1 https://nitter.kareem.one/JustinWolfers/status/2062886676116...
2 https://nitter.kareem.one/JustinWolfers/status/2072666868297...
Right off the bat, he's been laid off half a dozen times. Now being laid off while you're away for bereavement sucks, but what about the other five times though? Getting laid off once or twice isn't a big deal, but six times is a pattern. Then getting five rejections a day, there's a pattern there, and the common variable between them all is the person applying.
> Am I on some sort of blacklist invisible to employees for talking too much and causing too much of a ruckus in a workplace?
Maybe? Depends on what you were talking about and how much of a ruckus you made.
> Did my bringing up of a book at a company get one of the executives too upset?
Maybe? Depends on the book. Goodnight Moon? Mein Kampf? I have no idea what book it is.
> Did me having a crisis in public become too embarrassing for another?
Maybe? I have no clue what he's referring to.
> What the fuck is the problem?
It sounds like the author is the problem.
Then further on he talks about needing skills. Which yeah it's important, but it's also very important to get along with the people you're working with.
> It also doesn't help that I'm on public record multiple times for being comfortable with bringing a company to the cloth if they're not respecting their workers
Yeah is it really that surprising that companies don't want to hire people that will cause them problems?
Then I got to this part:
> I also know when I make white people uncomfortable and I'm not capable of being a respectable Negro
Jesus Christ man. I didn't even know the author was black up until this point. It isn't a race issue dude, you just sound awful to work with. You don't have to be a "respectable Negro", just be a respectable person.
> If I have to resort to that behavior in order to get a job, I'll join the police academy.
No stay far the fuck away from being a police officer. You don't sound like you have the right temperament to be one. If this is what the author sounds like while writing his blog, I can only imagine how bad he'd get under the pressure of doing police duties.
After reading this I went and looked the the guy's resume. After at most two years of professional experience he went from software engineer to senior software engineer, which is quite the jump for such little experience. And he was only in that position for a few months. The longest he's been able to hold down a job is two years. His list of technologies that he's familiar with is also pretty bare for seven years of experience. It's a pretty weak resume.
This guy really need to do some introspection and consider how his behavior is affecting his career. It's not just a tech industry thing either, he'll probably have problems wherever he goes just given how difficult he sounds.