In this hunt, I think I've applied to about six hundred places thus far, and have gotten about a dozen interviews, and all of those have turned into rejections. I think it's largely due to 2023 being a horrible year for me that ended with me having to change jobs three times, which looks bad.
While I know that it's not personal, it's just business, it's hard to not start taking these things personally and develop a bit of an inferiority complex. I don't think humans are meant to spend months at a time trying to prove themselves to other humans constantly. It has started making me a little depressed.
What do people here do to avoid getting depressed upon waking up to dozens of rejections every morning?
TheMongoose•1d ago
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.
tombert•1d ago
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.
TheMongoose•1d ago
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.
tombert•1d ago
TheMongoose•1d ago
tombert•18h ago
Only issue I have is that I have absolutely no idea how to promote the stuff I'm working on.
PaulHoule•1d ago
TheMongoose•1d ago
sherdil2022•1d ago
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
PaulHoule•1d ago
(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.
tombert•1d ago
PaulHoule•1d ago
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.
tombert•1d ago
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.
creer•23h ago
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?
tombert•22h ago
creer•21h ago
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!
tombert•21h ago
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.