> The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism

Just want to comment on this, because I think think favoring unknown candidates is a mistake we make too often, and in fact the "normal" process is a disaster on both sides for this reason. Nepotism or Cronyism is granting resources, patronage, jobs to someone you know instead of a qualified candidate. In many industries this is how they function because qualifications and skill provide little to no differentiation (Think knowing Microsoft word and having a comms degree with no work experience).

In high skill industries where experience is hard fought... people know the who the "people" are because they stick out like sore thumbs. If your hiring process at work is throw up a job on indeed and see what resumes come through, your company likely isn't worth working at anyway because the best candidates aren't randos.

Think of it this way if you were putting together the Manhattan project again would you recruit the people with a stellar reputation in physics, engineering, manufacturing, etc OR would you throw up a job on a job board or your corporate site and see what comes back? The difference is active vs passive, good reputation vs no reputation (or a bad reputation).

Not trying to make a big semantic argument... I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"

> As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become.

Same here. I have been hiring and it is a shit show. We advertise one position and get inundated with resumes. Many of these resume are complete fabrications, so we cannot rely on them at all. So we implemented a filter by asking candidates to do a small project. Candidates do not have to hand-code it. We encourage candidates to just use AI for the simple project. Only about 10% actually do the required work that typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete with AI assistance. Some get offended that we even dared ask them to take the assessment test and start using profanity to let their displeasure be known. Quite strange.

The number of fake resumes is insane. During reviews I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call.

There are now AI CVs mimicking real people, so the CVs point to real Linkedin profiles, Github profiles.

Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.

This is probably crazy talk, but I have been wondering how requiring people to slap a stamp on an envelope and mail in a résumé would go.

I wonder if we are back to “who you know” because of a couple of factors:

1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that

2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail

I must be missing something. 1200 real applications are hard to sort through. 1200 mostly fake applications are much easier. Hiring is a high-leverage activity, and it's absolutely worth spending a couple hours going through those by hand.

Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly instead of just submitting a resume to the ATS? With the AI spam etc. it feels like the usefulness of these automated systems is quickly diminishing. Hiring feels broken right now.

I haven't applied for a job since the 1990s so I'd be out of the loop, but what are the faked resumes trying to achieve? Just get in a role and get paid before being found out? Are they trying to find brief or lazy interviewing processes? Do they only target remote positions?

>A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic.

In government work programs in British Columbia, we were taught to address every point or requirement in a job listing that we could. Is this tactic clearly distinguishable from clearly faked?

This was the problem recruiters were invented to fix, but somehow recruiters have moved on to fixing every problem BUT this one.

> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic.

Then why would have unrealistic expectations in the ad?

Your use of nepotism is actually reputation.

On the hiring side too, and I really don’t understand the fake resume with AI trend. How can they possibly think they’ll pass the interview? Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences. Maybe they are betting on a broken process? Maybe you can pass (dumb) HR filters with lies, but not real interviewers, at least from what I do and have seen.

Use hiring brokers. The good ones will vet the candidates and verify them.

Job seekers should also consider seeking representation from top tier brokers.

It’s pretty much always who you know… at least to get a showing. It’s rare in history to find counter examples. And in a LLM fueled world it’s going to be more important.

Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview.

So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.

>> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic

Can you elaborate on why you consider a close match to the job description to be unrealistic?

The fact that even well-meaning hiring managers can't see great candidates because of filtering overload says a lot about how dysfunctional the current system is

Been a couple of years since I last was an interviewer, but I’m always amazed at people who blatantly exaggerate in-depth experience while seeking a highly technical position.

Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z

Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z

Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly.

Why do they even bother?

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What could potentially put an end to the current hiring "winter"?

We have an increasing amount of immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job, in combination with the tech sector shrinking, as well as companies as a whole being much more careful when hiring.

There would need to be some explosion in the amount of tech jobs, in order for everyone to be able to get one. However, I just cannot see what could cause something like this in the near future.

"this is not some game-changing phenomenon[0]. The jobs will return when it is once again a "seller's market" -- which it surely will be."

Pretty bold. Things like manufacturing haven't recovered and we're seeing similar outsourcing in tech.

Substitute "church secretary" for driving a hack, and "soldering heart monitors" for hazmat work, and you're me!

You do what you have to to pay the bills. If that means going outside your field for a while, so be it.

When the Great Recession hit, 90% of the food truck operators in my neighborhood were very recently bankers and finance people.

I wonder if with AI it is possible for someone to be a productive entrepreneur easily than finding a job in today’s market. Specially for someone over 50.

I think "most people in the real world" have at least a few rungs between their current situation and true homelessness. Many people have some sort of family or other community that they could lean on, even in America where family ties are weaker than any other place I know.

I have a couple friends who haven't had steady work in years, and they still eke out a pretty reasonable existence living with friends and family because they are kind and considerate and people don't mind having them around. A lot of street homeless have mental or substance issues that make it hard for them to coexist with other people.

The median household net worth in the US is $193,000. The rate of home ownership is 65%. I don’t think the median American is at risk of becoming homeless during normal unemployment. Maybe you mean that the article isn’t as relevant for a global audience which is fine, but I would think that the median American lives in “the real world”.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...

https://www.nahb.org/blog/2024/08/lowest-homeownership-rate-...

Normal functioning adults do not easily become homeless.

There are several drops in lifestyle you have been accustomed to, before that happens.

This is going to upset some, but the tech industry is full of delusional people that are completely out of touch with reality and the needs and struggles of everyday Americans.

I recently stumbled upon a YouTuber grousing about losing her six-figure tech job. She was in full freakout mode about budgeting etc. but something didn't seem quite right. Then she disclosed she's married, financially stable, husband still has a great job, etc.

It made me stop and think how there's people out there delivering groceries, putting on an apron, all so they don't have to switch to eating cat food by the end of the week.

OTOH ex-Googlers are worried they might be forced to switch to store-brand mineral water within weeks.

Blog posts are aimed at an audience, HN is an audience, and in both cases the audience in question is a technical one with an above-average number of well-paid professionals. The whole framing that the blog post "reeks of privilege" to "most people" is a bit strange. If I were to read a Yachting Monthly article about The Five Most Attention-Grabbing Mega Yachts For The Conspicuous Consumer Billionaire it would probably reek of privilege to me, too, but that's an entirely self inflicted problem: nobody is making me read a specific article from a yacht magazine.

>psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.

Thanks. You hit the nail on the head.

Burnout is real, and it’s worth talking about, but it’s a luxury to be able to even think about rest when your bank account is at zero and you're juggling survival

This is one of my main concerns. A lot of countries are talking about raising their retirement age, and I just think to myself, which tech company is going to hire a 68-year-old? Sure, I could transition into management, but my company just laid off a number of middle-managers and the ones left are expected to do more than just manage (code, design, etc.). So I'm not sure that's all that safe either.

I like learning new things, and I hope to continue that into my 60s (and beyond), but I have to imagine picking up new skills will get harder as I age.

It was always my understanding that software careers are shorter than other technical careers, and the higher wages compensate for this. More than compensate, if you invest early.

If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.

I didn't have problems with age discrimination — I don't think — but I think because I countered it with energy and eagerness. "I'm ready to hit the ground running. Availability? Leave a laptop on my desk and I'll be there tomorrow. I'm not yet an expert in your line of business, but I've worked through 8 different industries and succeeded in each, and learning as I go is my favorite thing in the world. Let's go!"

I feel like the underlying issue is less with age and more with ossification. If you're a world expert in Visual Basic but don't want to learn that "fad" TypeScript, well, get used to being unemployed.

> If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?

Life never gets easier with age. I guess that's just something we all have to come to terms with eventually.

It's been such an obvious self-own for tech workers not to capitalize on any of the multiple booms they've seen, and unionize.

> next 10-15 years or so

That’s a long enough tech career to retire. I don’t know you, but I know that even 65 year olds with 6 million in the bank are nervous to retire.

Read through your comment history and it sounds gnarly. I hope you find something soon. I was unemployed for 6 months in 2022-2023 and it was horrible. I guess I learned something from it, but I hated it. That said, I became employed after applying to a role by emailing the CTO after they posted on the monthly Who's Hiring thread. I've had 2 jobs from HN since.

HN has been huge for my career personally, so I made this site to help make it easier to find stuff that's good for you: https://hnresumetojobs.com/

Sincerely wishing you the best of luck.

> (former?)

This hurts. As someone who's been unemployed, struggling with mental health issues, for far longer than I'd care to admit in such a forum, I struggle with the question of when it's just been too long to realistically get back into it.

I wish you luck

Was at your place two weeks ago. Was selling things. Found a job finally by a sheer stroke of luck within my network (cold applying never worked for 7 months).

I wish you all the best and hope you find a job too.

Sounds awful. You're articulate and it sounds like you have a decent amount of experience, I hope you find some employment commensurate to that.

I've had some extended periods of unemployment. Only advice I can offer is to strengthen existing social connections and put yourself in situations where you can meet new people. I've gotten work before from people I met in random social contexts. I guess you could call this "networking", but I hate that word. It's good to reduce your isolation, whether or not it directly lands you a job.

Email in bio if you want to chat. Maybe I can help.

is the job market really that bad for tech workers :( . I got laidoff on paternity leave last week. I am so scared.

Hope you find something soon !!

I'm guessing it is due to the advice that getting a job is a "numbers game".

When I was hiring somewhat recently, I talked to a worryingly high number of people that didn't know what role they're applying to, had perfect resumes and were taking the fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude to its limit. I mean I get there's a sales aspect to an interview, in a way, but this was pushing it way too far. It was a very frustrating experience.

A lot of the recent advice has pretty much destroyed the hiring process, in my humble opinion. It swings from solving hard computer science problems to testing trivia to being a political round-table. I keep on wondering how much worse can it get before a reset is needed.

It is a generational difference. Zoomers have a tendency to communicate like Jordan Belfort. Oftentimes it seems scammy but it is prevalent because it sometimes leads to new opportunities.

I block those people

This is why I honestly think it would be better if the popular job boards limited the number of applications you could submit per day. The game theory of the job market incentivizes spray and pray.

> - basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR

When I was looking (a while back), my experience was that the big sites are a dozen or so of consultancies and head hunters reposting all the jobs as "an opportunity for a client."

FooCorp (a real company) would post a position. Then headhunters and contract to perm style consultancies would repost it. This way, you'd get 1 + 12 job postings for the same position (assuming that the company even posted it there in the first place).

Next, applying to a position (other than the real one) on that set would get you ghosted (they're collecting resumes to send on and will pick 100 that they feel have the best chance of getting hired before contacting back). Sometimes, they'd call you back with a different position that "you'd be perfect for". Often, the resume that they send on to the actual position is significantly doctored from the original (to the point where its "this person isn't the one on the resume"). In today's world, the "this is an AI fake" is sometimes the transformation that the head hunter does to your resume.

So its not so much run through the company's HR, but run through the head hunter's filter trying to find the "best" ones to send on and for that filter, even though you applied it might not get to the hiring company to consider.

(Anecdote: when I was unemployed looking for a job a number of years ago, I tried some headhunters. One interview that I got they were asking me really odd questions about technologies that I knew nothing about. When it was pointed out that "I should know about these things, its on your resume" they showed me the one that they got that had my name on it... and it didn't match the copy that I brought with the exception of when I got my degree and what university it was from. They thanked me for my honesty and we both agreed that I was not a good technical fit for the position.)

This disaster is why I've built a whole side project automating the act of doomscrolling through job boards, so I can focus on actually talking to people when I find something that does interest me. (And can track the results in one place without repeatedly running into duplicates.)

People forget that finding a job is a sales problem. All the other stuff - interviews, resumes are just sales tools.

Imagine trying to find customers only by cold emailing.

It's all fun when you have money... otherwise it's a recipe for disaster

And unfortunately if you don't have a network for whatever reason, you're essentially screwed. Networking is basically the only way to get there, but I don't think most of society can handle the networking requirements to be stable.

I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.

There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.

At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.

These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.

It's tough to watch the change when not too long ago a software developer with decent skills could literally submit 5 resumes and end up with 3 good offers.

In the recent UAP hearing, whistleblower Borland talked about how financial ruin is the real fear holding whistleblowers back:

> Are you scared for your safety?

> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.

https://www.rev.com/transcripts/house-uap-whistleblower-hear...

There is something fundamentally broken about this entire user journey and industry. There are lots of jobs to fill. But hiring managers don't find people reading through resumes submitted in a form. People don't get jobs by submitting resumes into a form.

The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.

It's just an abstracted and bureaucratic repackaging of the difficulty with searching for prey and forage during a succession of harsh seasons that some of our unluckier ancestors experienced, such as those who lived at the time of the Pleistocene Toba eruption.

To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.

It's less the employment and more the eating and shelter that the employment provides.

Life used to be even worse than this, though.

I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.

Can you share a little more? Because this is outside the norm I’m hearing and I’d like to know more.

That’s before getting into the jobs that are functionally not real, even if the employer in question believes they are honestly looking.

Seeing bog standard senior engineer positions still advertising for the places that ghosted me 5 months ago means the job posting is fake for one of the n-teen reasons companies paste fake postings or the company has gotten unreasonably picky with how much labor is on the market

I've had about six or seven months of temp work in the last four years. It's uncanny when people talk about having a couple months of unemployment being rough. The article points this out.

> Tell them you’re unemployed, what do you get? “Oh yeah I was unemployed one month ten years ago boy that sucked.” Yes, friend, yes it does suck right now six months in, and unlike your little story there I don’t know when or if it will ever stop.

This is on point, but then the author completely misses the mark a following paragraph.

> How often have you known somebody whose life was really, finally wrecked by unemployment?

I don't know anybody in my situation. The people I know send one job application, get an interview, and get an offer. I don't know how they do it. They don't know how they do it.

People look at me like I must not be trying very hard because it's trivial for them to get a job and infer that it must be for me as well.

The author says

> It won’t turn out as bad as you fear.

And continues by asking how many people does the reader know go homeless from being unemployed?

> I’m talking about who do you personally know who’s had it go that badly?

Homelessness is just a weird way to frame that. A family friend is the only other person I can think of in a similar situation to me - mid 30s, university educated, very unemployed - and they're living with their parents.

That doesn't mean they're not having a really bad time. Or that its not bad for society in general when we waste human capitol like this. She had motivation enough to travel out of country to get her degree. She is educated, but had no place in society, no career or family of her own now. That isn't fine just because she isn't homeless.

My savings are gone and even when I lose my home this year I will have social support structures, like living with family. I won't go homeless but that doesn't mean my career isn't over or that things aren't that bad.

I'm not even worried about being homeless.

I'd sleep in a tent if every day I woke up to doing what I loved.

I am worried that every day for the rest of my life will be worse than the day before it because nobody will work with me and nobody wants me on this earth.

1.5 years for me

Still searching for some reason!

Even if the game doesn’t take off, just having a shipped product under your belt is a signal. It shows follow-through, creativity, and self-direction

This is an interesting take. I think they are heading down this path, especially with the 'Easy Apply' button which is essentially what you're talking about.

If I have to guess, the current business model is likely profitable & any deviations too far from that could hurt their bottom line. Incrementing slowly overtime to LinkedIn replacing the CV seems to be the play, mainly to keep the current cashflow going.

> I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me.

This is surprising to me. Unless you last tried this long enough ago that the manager said, "I like the cut of your jib, young man, you've got grit" in a transatlantic accent.

Is this in America? I can’t imagine walking anywhere, nor being able to get past security, if indeed there is even a human manning the gates.

You may have given up too early. For me the key part of this story is that she made a personal connection willing to guide her through and to overlook technicalities (like not having enough experience). The fact that she then reached a different person who was a jerk is a matter of chance. I’d you find a way to keep making these personal connections, she’ll get a job eventually. Also: it sounds like you’re very supportive and invested: good on you. She’s not alone.

I'm sorry you had that experience, I can certainly empathize.

Open source isn't working for free, it's working for connections instead of money. I find this way of thinking about it useful: my first order goal is not to fix a bug in the project, it is to do a favor for the human being(s) behind it.

If you're really contributing and aren't getting the reward, by all means, walk away and hack on something else. But it's also important to have some humility, and recognize that most of the time you don't get that reward, it is because you simply aren't being helpful.

The hard truth is that nobody is going to help you figure out how to be useful. They're just going to say no.

If you don't like how an open-source project is run then you can fork it, or start your own competing project from scratch. That's the beauty of open source.

> you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.

I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)

So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.

But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.

> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.

I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.

Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.

It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.

>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. [If you’ve been] working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.

It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.

> the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too

I agree.

But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.

My experience has been just the opposite. While I developed solid technical skills, my focus was on developing soft skills. However, all the management jobs I've seen hire based on programming rather than management skills.

>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills.

Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.

>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.

You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.

The pool of young kids that can challenge the technical ability of someone with 20 years more experience is small enough that I don't mind competing with them for employment.

A kid twenty years younger than me is in their early twenties and they would have to be some kind of Wunderkind to have spent decades learning operating systems, networking, programming languages, business and law to the degree I have.

When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.

> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.

This is straight up agism and should be banned. It's like saying black people can't code as well as white people.

Carmack and Torvalds would disagree with you.

> simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillets

I dont think its this. I think its just brutally hard to earn a return on investment right now. For whatever reason, innovation has disappeared from the market. There's a lot of things changing with generative AI right now but very few actually valuable ideas have come out.

The real challenge today is finding problems to solve that people will pay money for.

"It feels like the current job crisis is artificial and specifically intended to lower people's salary expectations and increase their work output"... bingo.

Well, I'm currently having a hard time finding a good electrician, and the ones who I have employed in the past earn pretty generous hourly rates.

(I say this half-joking, but also I know a DBA who retrained as an electrician and was happier than ever. It's the fact he retired - early - which has put me in my current predicament.)

And the analogue of the exceptionally good-looking STD super-spreaders would be... the resume-driven-development self-proclaimed "10x devs" who job-hop every 6 months, leaving a wake of disasters?

Dating is unbelievably easy in some ways though. I'd argue the problem with dating today is that people don't do the hard things and instead look for love on apps and other bad places.

Dating is just a numbers game. Roughly speaking it's about maximising interactions with potential partners and taking a shot in as many of these interactions which go positively as possible.

You can game dating in your favour with a bit of strategy. Unfortunately job searches are much harder to game since you can exhaust the number of active positions for your preferred role quite rapidly. The only advice I can give on job searches is to keep your skillset as broad as possible. Specialising is good if when you find work you want to be paid well. Being well-rounded is good if you want to find work as easily as possible.

From someone in a country where the government does get involved: The entire system is overrun with bad actors and blatent abuse.

Employers do not want this, and they have a very big say in the government.

All US states I have lived in have government employees that organize job fairs and connect unemployed people with businesses that need employees.

https://www.worksourcewa.com/

https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Job_Seeker_Informati...

https://www.worksourceoregon.org/jobseekers

https://dol.ny.gov/career-centers

https://www.nj.gov/labor/career-services/

Employers don't want to have this dictated to them

As other posters have said, this only really works if you have a network. Zeroth-order referrals (i.e. they call you) work best, first-order referrals (i.e. you know someone at the company) work decently well, and second-order referrals (you know someone who knows someone to refer you) are a guided shot in the dark.

People who have networks all know this. The issue is that a shocking number of people don't have any network at all. These tend to be the sorts of people who are either actively antisocial at work (the "coworkers aren't your friends" type) or job hop so frequently that they don't spend enough time at any single job to develop any meaningful professional, let alone personal connections.

Referrals by hiring managers who I have previously worked with and want to hire me aren’t even getting me a phone screen from their recruiters.

The majority of employment in tech is with large, corporate firms, and unless you are in the executive tier they all have implemented a massive amount of process to prevent bias in hiring which means that even networking has low impact on getting a job, beyond letting you know the positions even exist

I got my dream job by applying on their website. As a hiring manager, also interviewed many people who got theirs at other companies' websites. Networking is better but website applications used to work alright. This could have changed with AI resumes.

I know this is just anecdotal but just want to say I got my current job just applying to a job from a linkedin email. I admit I was surprised how easily and smoothly it all went actually...

This isn't true and is horrible advice.

Use the paths available to you to get a job. Exhaust them all. If you know someone that works there and THEY track you down, yes this is good advice, great way to get a job.

This might work if you already have a network, but otherwise good luck getting through to people on the phone. HR will answer the generic questions, but tell you to apply online. Cold "calling" people on LinkedIn is a shot in the dark. Some people don't mind you doing it, most will ignore you.

I always got my jobs applying via linkedin. It's true that I usually find the recruiter and send them a message as well saying "hey I applied to X position. let me know if my profile fits". Perhaps this extra message makes the difference? I have around 12 years of experience (5 jobs in total).

I don't really have a good network, since I have worked in different countries.

> It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.

Just be careful contacting recruiters directly. I know of at least one F100 that will blacklist you for pestering their recruiters. If you think ai-generated resumes are overwhelming recruiters, you should see their LinkedIn inboxes.

> A form is not going to a hire you, a person is.

This is becoming less and less true.

> You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.

Unless you're lucky, this is no longer going to happen. Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.

I've gotten 3/4 jobs by cold applying. 2 at pretty big/famous tech companies. The 1 that wasn't cold applying was through an agency.

Ridiculous. So 99% people wait in line for the pizza but you waltz up to the counter and say you know the owner? That's fucked up

I've gotten several jobs this way, including the best jobs of my career. It's insufferable the way so many commenters here assume their experience is representative of or applicable to others. It's like if main character syndrome was a web site comments section.

This is very well said. It's horrifying, but very well said and very true. Sometimes the situation is just plain bleak. I have been unemployed for more than a year twice; I've been unemployed or underemployed for about 5 years in total. This despite accomplishing great things while employed and being well-regarded at past jobs. For me, each time the cloud has eventually passed and new work has come along, but that doesn't help until it actually happens.

Great write up.

His about page: https://www.jeffwofford.com/?page_id=464

His story here https://www.jeffwofford.com/wp/?p=2227 probably tells you a lot about him.

This only works if you had a good job and a decent amount of savings and no family to support.

>Hate to say the obvious, but it's all about supply and demand.

Presumably the computer science departments will continue to churn out more supply for a while yet.

@phoenixhaber, you're in a very dark place, no doubt about it, and it sounds like you've been there a long time. I've been in that dark place and I feel for you. Let me just assure you that dark times do give way, eventually, to light. If you need a rational basis for that claim, think of it as regression toward the mean: extremes, good or bad, move toward the non-extreme. Things will get better.

In the meantime, your task is to separate from the darkness and let it be on the outside, not the inside. It's bad enough when it's on the outside: that is, in the world around you or even in your own body. When it's on the inside—not just the body but the mind—then it destroys. Push the darkness out of the mind and into the outside world. That's pretty abstract advice but it's the best I know, and if it makes sense to you, I hope it helps.

No offense, but maybe they're narcan-ing you because you because you're nodding out in public?

I am not doubting you have been fucked with -- I once got into a 2v1 brawl on the Mission and 16th BART that only ended because I sent one flying into a pillar and told the other if he kept coming, he was going onto the fucking tracks.These guys kept going over to a homeless guy who was just... sitting there... trying to get a rise, hoping for an excuse to "defend" themselves. And when I told them to quit being bullies, they tried to jump me.

So trust me, I believe you, and I get that trauma can have an impact on your life.

But if you are using narcotics, it will impact your search.

If you want help getting clean, I could send some resources to the email on your profile -- on the technical side you sound like a better coder than me and if you had that part locked down I suspect you'd quickly find work.

That narrative is outdated. There is clearly not a shortage right now. Any decent job on LinkedIn shows 100's of applicants within a couple of days.

Is there actually a huge shortage of tech workers in the US?