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If you would like a response, it's best if you're not anonymous. I am a hiring manager and I've interviewed (at this point) hundreds of techies, and I'm sure I'm not alone in being in this position on Hacker News. However, the only way we can really help is to know more. Post your Github profile and your LinkedIn profile, and let us know what you're looking for. Who knows--you may even score a job!

I'm going to second this comment (I happen to be a 'hiring manager' as they say) and if someone posts here they are looking for work and I have an opening I'll see if I can match them up and contact them if I have contact info. (and sorry Ernie we're in the Bay Area and we haven't been able to make it work effectively with remote folks)

To be honest, I don't want to be contacted. I want to pick a job that looks interesting to me and one in which I could add real value.

In the current job market, that's how it's supposed to be, but I just can't see it. I'll keep trying, I'm just worried that the response rate of the companies I've applied so far is close to 5% only.

Thanks for your advice.

That is perfectly understandable. But it isn't particularly practical in today's age of 'infinite programmers'.

The popular narrative is that there is a shortage of technology talent. This is false. All I have to do to get thousands of resumes is put an ad on Craigslist offering $175,000+ for a computer programmer. I can offer $60,000 and get no one. This is a very reasonable expectation (in that the more I'm willing to pay, the more folks are willing to work for me).

The effect of that, which isn't obvious, is that for "good jobs", the kind you would find that are interesting to you and you add real value too, aren't being chased by unemployed programmers they are being chased by every single programmer who thinks they aren't making enough money in their current job. That is where the thousands of resumes come from, people gainfully employed who are tired of not getting any raises for the last 2 to 5 years. They want more.

So when you apply to a company through the 'fire hose', your resume arrives with a zillion others. Chances are you are in a lottery you don't even know, and the 'scoring' system is something like "College, GPA, open source cred, buzzword matches, Etc." Worse the person doing the initial screening might be an English major[1] who is "good with people" and so they are working in HR and haven't a clue as to what makes one person more or less appropriate for an opening.

When you apply to a company by having someone who knows you and respects you talk to managers who are looking, you aren't in a lottery, your in a select short list of people. People where resume details mean less than the fact that you are considered to be "good" by the person who referred you.

So when you find a job that looks interesting, you contact someone you know at the company and let them know you are interested, then you are doing the contacting but you will get a much much higher response rate.

[1] Not trying to offend English majors here, one of my daughters is one, it's that if they end up in a tech company and aren't in marketing or the tech pubs group, they are most likely to be in HR.

that's a great philosophy, but you have to have the personal network to back it up. make a lot of friends, know who's working on what, and offer to help the ones with projects you like.

Chuck, do you mind if I send you my details on email? (Some info can be found in my profile).

Always happy to get mail from engineers, not so enthusiastic about getting mail from recruiters trying to 'help me with my staffing needs.'

Please send me a message too. (Same as Chuck: No emails from recruiters, please.) We use both Erlang and Haskell at our company.

Could it be that you have not adapted your resume/cover letters and so forth to the American market?

There are regional differences between what should/shouldn't be included in a resume, like a picture of yourself, your age, your family status and similar things. A resume not tuned for the local market may disqualify from some positions in the hiring manager's mind.

Finding a job in a new city is never easy but a capable programmer has a better chance than most others! Have you tried any visiting any local meetups, conferences or co-working spaces?

I think what's wrong with your approach is that you underestimated the difficulty of completely uprooting yourself. In most cases when people take time off, they come back to somewhere that they already have a network - they call people they used to work with, or went to school with, etc. Or, when they want to move somewhere else, they line it up in advance so that if it takes six months they aren't screwed (eg; get a job that will relocate you, transfer within a large company). You now have two strikes - one, absolutely no network, and two, a short employment gap. I think the lack of network is a bigger deal and you would be having basically the same problems if you'd started looking straight away when you got to NYC.

We're looking for software engineers at TheLadders (http://theladders.com), here in New York. My contact info's in my profile. :)

I took 5 months off to get used to this country, travel and finish some personal projects I had in my mind since long ago.

In hindsight, I hope you see how this was a terrible idea. For years, there have been article after article about how the only people able to find work are the people that are currently working.

You appear to have chosen to create a 5 month gap in your work history. Can you imagine how this looks to an employer? I instantly think of someone who is lazy and is only willing to put the work in to find a job when they absolutely have to. It makes me think you'll wait until the last minute for everything.

My advice is to find a way to explain what you were doing during those 5 months that doesn't come across so negatively. If you were working on side projects, tell them you were working for "[YourName] Consulting" and thought you'd try your hand at freelance consulting. Then you decided that it wasn't for you.

Best of luck.

> You appear to have chosen to create a 5 month gap in your work history. Can you imagine how this looks to an employer? I instantly think of someone who is lazy and is only willing to put the work in to find a job when they absolutely have to. It makes me think you'll wait until the last minute for everything.

That is poor judgement on your part. Your advice is crippling. If one is stuck in a dead-end job, then fun-employment for the purpose of self-improvement or side-projects makes plenty of sense -- as long as one can economically support themselves. You think employer XYZ gives a shit if there is a 6-month unemployed window if my GitHub productivity was "rock star" level with amazing side-projects to show? If the employer doesn't hire me, then that saves me the trouble from working for a stale company.

Who knows how many entrepreneurs wouldn't be where they are today if they took your advice and continued wasting their precious time away at Initech and TPS reports.

> You appear to have chosen to create a 5 month gap in your work history. Can you imagine how this looks to an employer?

Are you by any chance trolling? I am a middling .NET developer with a self-chosen 4 month gap in my work history ("personal projects to grow Python experience") and it took me something around four weeks of not particularly intensive search to get a signed contract in not particularly software-heavy Vancouver.

You'd rather have someone lie about what they do with their time than tell you they do something other than pump out code?

This sort of "you must have a job" selectivity isn't a factor for halfway decent software developers.

I hate the attitude too. However HR treats most people with suspicion. They think you've been prison, or fired from a job after a month or two.

Of my applications that proceeded beyond email, five had HR or non-technical recruiters handling the initial screening. It just doesn't seem to have been that big of a factor. Maybe Vancouver is particularly progressive on this, or I've always happened to encounter good HR, but I somewhat doubt it.

I screen & interview a zillion people for my company's engineering team, so I can imagine how this looks to an employer.

It looks like a normal human being who is fairly self-motivated to work on cool projects.

Seems that like me, everyone else commenting does not agree with you. Anyway, I'll mention my particular situation: I worked my ass off for 4 years in my previous company, it had it's ups and downs but it was a great experience.

I moved here, it took me 4 months to organize my legal situation in the US. This is, getting a job permit. I knew how long it was going to take in advance, so I decided to take the most out of that time to travel, know the country better and work in "personal projects".

What does "personal projects" mean for a software engineer? In my case was learning and shipping actual products in two new programming languages, participating in a Challenge Post competition, joining every possible NYC meetup and getting to know every possible corner of New York City.

I'm very glad I did that. And I'll do it again.