Anecdotally even folks with great resumes listing recent FAANG experience are having a hard time landing roles currently. They've also coined the silly term "The Great Hesitation" for the market currently where everyone is "waiting to see" instead of hiring.
Mostly I channel my depression and anxiety into spite which I then use to fuel other endeavors.
If working for the stupidest, most short sighted, group of humans that we have yet developed through decades of corporate nonsense is no longer the way to have steady employment then it's time to find something else.
That's mostly what I've been doing too, and that's helped a bit, but the last few days the depression has started getting the best of me. I got rejected for a few jobs where I genuinely thought I aced the interviews, and it's put me into a really foul mood.
I am sure things will eventually improve, and maybe this is a sign that I've tied far too much of a my self worth into my career, but it's sometimes hard to stay optimistic.
How anyone reasonably expects me to not tie self worth to a task that I enjoy doing, and perform a minimum of 8 hours a day 5 days a week is a mystery to me. The same goes for the folks that think the environment that I spend that time in should somehow not have an effect on my well-being.
The best I can do is understand how deeply broken the hiring process has been for a while now, and that we have still found a way to make it worse in the past few years.
It also probably helps that while my personal endeavors have so far generated $0 and I'll need to address the cash flow situation in some way soon, they have generated more genuine satisfaction than my last job. Which is surprising because I generally liked the work in my last role.
There are billions of people on earth that work everyday to support their addictions to food and shelter. I wake up in the morning, walk over to my office in the next room, work 8 hours, shut my computer down and money gets deposited into my account.
I've been working on a project that eventually be something I could parlay into something that could make money, though unless I'm able to convince a VC to give me money I find it unlikely that that will actually happen, and I have absolutely no idea how the hell I would go about pitching this to a VC in the first place. I probably would need to befriend someone with business acumen.
I wouldn't VC anything personally, that'd be just trading one leash for another.
That's fair. I think I can deploy a fairly minimal version of what I'm doing on a relatively cheap cluster of servers on DigitalOcean or Hetzner or something.
Only issue I have is that I have absolutely no idea how to promote the stuff I'm working on.
An ex-FAANGer could be the last person I want to hire for a startup.
> An ex-FAANGer could be the last person I want to hire for a startup.
It depends on the person and not where they last worked or didn't work. Never write anyone off till you have at least talked to them, 'interviewed' them and given them a chance
(1) Unfortunately when the job market is the way it is right now hiring managers don't feel they can talk to everybody and will look for quick heuristics to eliminate people. Myself I have left experience off my resume which I thought would make me look overqualified and it's worked.
(2) Of course FAANG is not all the same. There's the story that AMZN is an awful place to work but I know some people who are happy and productive there who I'd love to snap up if I could. I've debriefed numerous ex-Googlers and they all seemed broken to me, a common story was "I thought I could have impact there, I thought I could learn something" but they couldn't. [1] I actually have a few cases of before and after interviews where I'm inclined to say "I told you so" I can't say I've really sampled Facebook, Apple or Netflix though.
[1] Google is less a company that does things better than other companies than it is a monopoly that doesn't have to do better on any metric, the one metric that matters is earnings, and they can always tighten the screws on their ecosystem to take a little more.
I've thought about taking experience that makes me overqualified off my resume as well, but I don't know the way to explain the gaps in my resume for that. What do you do?
While the part that I left off happened a long time ago so I didn't have that problem.
In general gap problems are tough and need some combination of hard work and luck to overcome. I had two times when I had gap problems.
For the first I was still processing my separation from physics, had spent two years as a nearly full-time activist (a bit unplanned) and had trouble with depression and chronic pain. I networked very hard and managed to get a new position created for me after about eight months of busting my ass.
For the second I'd spent a few years trying to start up my own business together with a salesman who couldn't sell anything. I gave up in December 2016 and rolled my car on the 31st, I created a workflow system that processed job listings and applications with plans to AI enable it. I saw a listing for a company that was doing something similar and was pretty sure I'd get the job and sure enough I did. They liked the story of my workflow system, and funny enough that code has been through various revisions and become an RSS reader and image sorter.
I'm not sure what looks worse: short stints at companies or gaps. I've tried the A/B test with my resume but the result are inconclusive.
I really hate the software industry. I like writing code, I like building stuff, I like math, I like a lot of my fellow engineers, but the entire industry is pretty insufferable at this point.
Do gaps matter these days? If anything, everyone knows there have been layoffs; there has been job hopping; there have been startups named "Yo"; weird platforms and languages; political jobs; volunteer gigs...
Is a resume that just lists enough experience relevant to a position that bad of an idea? (and skips the noise?)
Did you try A/B testing that by any chance?
I have not. Worth a shot.
Hmmm. In the case of submitting resumes in response to job postings, there is the issue of the software that ingests these resumes. I have always wondered if some keywords were toxic with some of these. Or whether they latch on (parse) some resume features which then eliminates you if you mess with them. For example, does deviating from "standard" resume formats disqualify you? Does listing some specific tools, platforms or hobbies run you head on into a keyword-specific scoring bug?
Of course any such problem would be poor design, but we know how little that means.
I keep my eyes open for people testing HR resume ingestion software, publishing findings or even side by side comparisons. And I have never seen useful reports. Anyone knows any, please let us know!
I have noticed a lot more jobs are requiring you to post your LinkedIn now. A small part of me thinks it's an AI automatically filtering for these things now.
I thought about buying a domain name that looks similar enough to a LinkedIn URL shortener and writing a thing to track the data around it (like Grabify) just so I might be able to see where it's actually being ingested from.
I'm curious what the point you're trying to make is. It's not like ex-FAANG folks are the only ones reporting an endless stream of soul crushing rejection letters.