“I don’t think I have anything new that hasn’t already been said.”
I don’t think I have anything new that hasn’t already been said. Applied a bunch, more times than I can count at this point. Often times I’ll never hear back, on the rare chance that I do, I get the same general boilerplate most people have gotten.
What’s really stung in the past year is that I reached out to 2 people I knew. We weren’t close, just acquaintances, but because their respective companies were looking for people I messaged them asking for more info. I never once asked to cut the line or ask for any favors, it was simply me trying to get more info about the position. Crickets....
Which leads me to something that I don’t think is talked about enough, and that is the hiring side of the equation and how no one seems to really have a good process for evaluating potential candidates. Time and time again I hear from HR/recruiters: “too many applicants”, “we can only have <number of seconds> to look”, “we can’t give feedback”.
Every time I hear one of these reasons, I can’t help but think - “isn’t this kind of on you?”. Are HR orgs around the world really this bad at time management, unable to write down reasons for a rejection and somehow are unwilling to try to come up with a better process?
Assuming you make it past the recruiter screen, as far as interview processes go, that’s usually pretty shit too.
Being an engineer, at this point in my life, I’ve amassed a SUBSTANTIAL amount of publicly reviewable code. Yet, time and time again, I’ll get asked to do live evaluations using tools I don’t have time to get familiar with.
Recently, much to my amazement, I applied to a large game platform (not my first choice but given the times) and ran into one of the strangest requirements in that I had to do in an evaluation. Essentially, I had to use their desktop application...which only works on Windows and Mac and I’m on Linux.... :/ I can’t just buy another computer right now, especially with storage and memory prices being what they are and no one I know has a free computer....
I’m basically rambling at this point so I’ll stop but I’m out of ideas of what to do other than continuing to make work on my own in the hopes someone will notice and consider hiring me for something. I’ve been lucky situation-wise but life outside of working was already pretty bad and I’ve already been doing work I wasn’t 100% thrilled about; to have programming just taken away all together really sucks as it’s something I genuinely enjoy doing.
Going back to school seems pointless given everyone in tech seems to be hopped up on LLMs and convinced there is no need to read the code anymore. I could study something else but there’s no telling what other industries will get impacted down the line, not to mention there isn’t anything I’m particularly interested in.