Having no money is viciously hard to deal with, especially when you don't have any connections or a portfolio of work. When I graduated with my B.S.C.S in '06...
- I had no money to move. Any company that wanted me would have had to pay relocation.
- There are exactly 4 tech firms in the area, total employment of engineers is < 1000.
- I had studied general CS, generally trying not to be tied to a given TLA technology. This meant that I could not claim "years of experience with tech X".
- I had not had the time to do open-source work, I had been doing my studies. By the time I was aware enough to do interesting work, my studies were too intensive.
- I had had a bad semester immediately prior to graduation, and my GPA was not near 4. (over 3 tho).
- I had done academic summer research, not internships.
I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to. No. Luck.
I janitored for 6 months and dug up some university jobs, then back to graduate school, where I cadged the internship -> full-time transition.
I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways.
To this day, I have a good deal of sympathy for people out of work.
Based on my personal experience, I encourage hiring managers and recruiters to look past the keywords to the possibilities that the candidate has. A good candidate can move into anything they need to be, if you give them a chance.
I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to.
We need to have a How The World Works discussion with college students so that they understand that resume spray-and-pray is not actually how people get white collar jobs. Honestly I think that a good deal of the persistent unemployment problem is that people are doing cargo cult job searching and this checks their mental box for "making a good effort", when they should instead be making directed efforts to meet people with the authority to hire them and convincing them to make it happen.
Fully agree. I have recommended "What Color Is Your Parachute" to job seekers several times, but they were so exhausted from sending out dozens of applications every day that they didn't even have time or interest to read it.
Not that I have personally tried the strategies in that book (admittedly), but it sounded very plausible to me :-/ At the very least, what is there to lose. If 100 job applications didn't work, does it really hurt to try something else for a week?
they didn't even have time or interest to read it.
So one thing that counterindicates working alone at home is having poor discipline with regards to use of time. This sometimes bites me on the hindquarters: if you do a little work in the morning, goof off on the Internet for a while, and do a little work in the afternoon, it often "feels like" you worked that day. And if on a Tuesday you miss your morning, well, nobody yells at you. And why do the afternoon, when you've already missed the morning? And then that happens on Wednesday. etc, etc
Put it this way: let's say someone had voluntarily quit their day job as a result of, I don't know, achieving an exit. If they told me that, six months after quitting their day job, they were so busy with the three emails they wrote per week that they didn't have time to read a particular book, I would say that they merely have poor time accounting skills or that their revealed preference is that they have no intention of reading the book.
I hate saying "unemployed people are lying" in so many words, so I won't. But 6 months times 40 hours a week is a thousand hours. More if you previously had a commute or worked overtime. If you don't have 1,000 hours worth of progress on whatever your #1 priority is at the moment, you have to ask yourself why not.
To be fair, it is usually not just writing three emails. First you have to research the potential recipients, browsing job ads and the companies web site. You might even go so far as to taylor your CV towards the position.
Also, as you say, managing time efficiently at home is difficult. And they might just be tired of hearing yet another well meaning advice.
There might also be a factor of things taking more time if you don't have money. You have to go to the cheap supermarket that is far away rather than the expensive one around the corner. You have to go shopping and cook for yourself, rather than grabbing a quick lunch at your favorite Sushi joint. And so on.
But I don't really know - I actually offered to try to help some job seeker in my blog once, but nobody took me up on it. Of course my blog has no reach and I was also unsure of what I could really offer (except for computer skills, brushing up online representations and whatnot). I am actually very interested in that problem - figuring out ways to help job seekers could do a lot of good.
One thing I imagined was A/B testing for job application letters and CVs. If you are really sending out hundreds of applications, it might begin to make sense?
The A/B testing math for low numbers and low conversion rates is not attractive. You can work the numbers out, but my guesstimate at dinner is that if you get one interview per twenty and mail 100 per week, you'd need almost a year to get confidence on a 6th interview per week. I would A/B test your marketing site as a dev purely to communicate that that is how you think, but it would not provide value to the average unemployed person. (All devs with any desire to ever get a job should have a web prescence, by the way.)
The scenario is more interesting if you rep a lot of candidates. A LinkedIn oe what have you could test resummes or equivalent web views very efficiently indeed.
I wish a web presence worked. I have a web site, youtube channel, github, blog, linkedin, and twitter account. They all shows a track record of open source work I've shared.
I have no regrets on sharing my work online like this. However, the idea that it's likely to help land a job is just survivorship bias.
Honestly, I think OSS is overrated for career impact. ("There, I said it.") I'd also probably do your site a wee bit differently if I wished to get job offers from it. For example, I'd put a prominent notice on it that you're actually hireable. I'd also make your version of those little hire-me mini sites. Don't make people work (across six different places which are largely not connected) to discover how wonderful of a precious snowflake you are.
That said: just because you touch the Internet doesn't guarantee you a nice safe job for life, but you're a darn sight better off if the decisionmaker you influence either a) has read you in the past or b) is reading you right now than you are if you're in the spray & pray slush pile.
"A Junior-to-Mid Level Developer" ... Which is it? Pick one.
Also, "I've been out of work and on the job hunt for a year." This may be true but is not a selling point. Say instead, "I'm available for work, contract or full time, right now. Hire me."
As for the matter of picking "junior" or "mid", I was hedging my bets by including both. I have no point of reference as to how good I am or if I'm good at all. I haven't worked around other developers for 2 years now. It's all been solo "side project" stuff. Feel free to shoot my an email if you want to continue this discussion. I do appreciate your critique.
If I can offer some unsolicited advice, I would recommend organizing things better. Have one page that you can refer people to that highlight your accomplishments and links to your github or Youtube videos that you want to highlight. Your blog or website doesn't offer this capability at first glance. Make it easy for someone to see what you've done. Remember that a potential employer may only have 30-60 seconds to take a look so make it count.
You're forgetting about depression Patrick. That can really cloud the mind and hurt productivity. And what about job search? Job search can be full-time in and of itself.
Trust me, if you are married and unemployed (and once upon a time I was both), your SO isn't going to let you sit in front of the computer and learn a programming language for 8 hrs a day while the car gets repo'd.
One thing I am unhappy about to this day is my experience with the career search arm of my alma mater.
It went like this...
Me, senior in college, on the job prowl. I walk in to the career services office, and they direct me to a window desk. The man sitting behind it has an immaculately put together suit. Boy, I think, this guy's a somewhat. No one else around here wears a suit.
I say, Hi, I'm looking for a job, what can you do for me.
Immaculately Dressed Gentleman (IDG) rises majestically and hands me a flyer for an alma-mater-branded subdomain of monster.com. "Go to this website, and create an account".
Shocked, I stare at IDG and mumble my thanks and confirm that yes, I did know how to create accounts and other Internetty things.
I've written about this before [1]. It's really not that hard to get a job as a developer. Companies are dying for smart, capable engineers, and it's just a matter of directing your efforts in the right way.
Two points I'd like to address:
- Experience beats GPA. I don't even include my GPA on my resume (not because it's bad, but because I don't think it's relevant), and, so far, no one has asked for it. Experience, on the other hand, has opened far more doors than college has.
- Direct your efforts. It's amazing how many more responses I get when I specifically craft a cover letter/resume just for that position that I do when I just send out resumes blindly.
Edit: To be clear, I just graduated from college in May, and accepted an offer in SF two weeks after graduation (without sending out any applications). I also had no money to move and the area I'm from has practically no tech industry. I'm not particularly smart or talented; I just happened to do a few things that built on top of one another.
Right now it's very easy to find a job as developer but it hasn't always been that way. If you'd graduated in 1992 like I did or in 2001-2 you might have had a very different experience.
As a hiring manager, you've got to sell yourself. If you've got all these negatives and they're the only thing on your resume or in your cover letter, it's going to be difficult to give you some of my limited time to talk about how you really could be better.
Do me the favor and sell yourself - WHY should I hire you, of all people, when you're competing against potentially dozens or hundreds of people (who, mostly, just fire and forget resumes at monster and career builder).
Nearly anything you can do to stand out from the crowd will be in your best interests.
Network your ass off. Go to user groups, meetups, anything at all. I've never hired someone cold, from Monster or whatever. Why should I risk it, when I've got some similar with a personal recommendation from a known-quantity?
> I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways.
That happened to me, too, when I was 18. I had grown up in a white-collar family, but it still didn't occur to me that I could, say, take a taxi to get to work on time when I missed the train. Until my boss yelled the suggestion at me over the phone.
In the year before that, I'd been doing minimum-wage work and lazing about reading computer science textbooks and writing C++ in a local university computer lab.
- I had no money to move. Any company that wanted me would have had to pay relocation.
- There are exactly 4 tech firms in the area, total employment of engineers is < 1000.
- I had studied general CS, generally trying not to be tied to a given TLA technology. This meant that I could not claim "years of experience with tech X".
- I had not had the time to do open-source work, I had been doing my studies. By the time I was aware enough to do interesting work, my studies were too intensive.
- I had had a bad semester immediately prior to graduation, and my GPA was not near 4. (over 3 tho).
- I had done academic summer research, not internships.
I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to. No. Luck.
I janitored for 6 months and dug up some university jobs, then back to graduate school, where I cadged the internship -> full-time transition.
I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways.
To this day, I have a good deal of sympathy for people out of work.
Based on my personal experience, I encourage hiring managers and recruiters to look past the keywords to the possibilities that the candidate has. A good candidate can move into anything they need to be, if you give them a chance.