[HN Gopher] Laid Off in My Career, and Twice in One Year
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Laid Off in My Career, and Twice in One Year
Author : luu
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-01-07 21:14 UTC (1 hours ago)
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| duxup wrote:
| The biggest pain / fear related to layoffs for me isn't the
| immediate actual loss of income...
|
| It was that I have to go job hunting and how demoralizing and
| toil heavy that process is. Heck I'd likely go job hunting just
| out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be
| interesting at the least, but naw it's too much of a pain.
|
| >Recruiters. Don't discount or blow them off.
|
| That's all they do for me ... I suspect there's a subset of
| people who are very attractive to recruiters and they actually do
| things for those people and I am not in that group. The advice
| surrounding recruiters is always so disconnected from my
| experience that it seems strange.
| Salgat wrote:
| The leetcode grind is my biggest dread. I can do it and I do
| well, but I'll be damned if it isn't a lot of mindless rote
| memorization that immediately leaves my brain the second I land
| the job, never to be used again (even in my job) until the next
| time I apply around.
| diamondfist25 wrote:
| I wonder what's the value of even doing leetcode when AI can
| solve it in 10 seconds...
| zamalek wrote:
| The highly specific/specialized problems leetcode has
| presented have never held value, outside of a very small
| set of companies (i.e. MOFAANG).
| nickff wrote:
| It's not about testing ability to solve those problems,
| it's about testing conformity, determination, and IQ (while
| being job-specific and thus legal).
| luckylion wrote:
| Might depend on the niche you're in, or your location. My
| experience with recruiters (on the hiring side) mirrored what I
| heard from friends who got hired through recruiters: they're
| basically match-makers.
|
| If you're not a well-known name, you can have your job-postings
| but you won't get any applications. Either you spend time on
| advertising and try to convince people that you're really real
| and actually really want to hire, or you just get yourself
| someone who introduces you to people who might be a good fit.
| That's a recruiter.
| jongjong wrote:
| Tough times. I feel like this is caused by massive capital
| misallocation over decades. The vast majority of tech companies
| should not exist, if not for the financial environment propping
| them up. Now with interest rates going up, there is less cheap
| money and companies are forced to lay people off and/or shut down
| themselves.
|
| Reality is that there are too many software developers chasing a
| small number of value-creating opportunities in a sea of useless
| or highly inefficient tech companies.
|
| In the meantime, there aren't enough people to produce food,
| build houses, collect garbage, etc... So costs of essentials
| keeps going up. It's hard for software devs to transition to
| physical jobs so it's going to be a tough one.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > I feel like this is caused by massive capital misallocation
| over decades
|
| Absolutely a large misallocation. And this is not just about
| the number of engineers. It is also about number of managers, 2
| pizza teams, entire management chains merely doing
| promotion/PIP management, entire sets of VPs and execs with no
| market experience or engineering experience. Even a large
| number of PE investors and angel investors who just landed on
| money but actually don't have any skills beyond betting far and
| wide.
|
| Highly paid roles have been paying people who are just doing
| administrative work. This is misallocation. And all of a
| sudden, this misallocation has come to bare.
| thr0w wrote:
| I think this gets to the heart of the current situation. The
| hard truth is that a lot of office workers are actually
| unskilled labor hidden behind the right kind of social
| conditioning and "professionalism".
| kjellsbells wrote:
| One little tip I learned the hard way: an applicant tracking
| system (ATS) can claim to have imported your fine-looking Word or
| PDF resume, but that does not mean that it has correctly parsed
| it and populated the key fields (eg skills) that it shows to the
| hiring manager.
|
| The problem seems to be that ATSes struggle with the "modern"
| style of resume, much beloved of Word template authors, where you
| might have a left column with your contact details, github, and
| maybe some skills and then a borderless table on the right side
| with your positioning statement and job history.
|
| I went from zero callbacks to 80% after I junked Word and rewrote
| my resume in a much more old fashioned, linear format. I used
| Overleaf (LaTeX) like it was 1999 and exported to PDF.
| mjevans wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the exact layout syntax these ML idiot
| savant agents want to read? Lack of an industry wide standard
| data interface makes this terrible.
| willquack wrote:
| Get a boring LaTeX template like "Jake's Resume"
|
| I've spoken with two technical recruiters who say they prefer
| reading templates instead of hand-crafted Resumes on top of
| them also parsing better in the ATS system ):
| kleiba wrote:
| Can confirm a similar attitude from an HR person - they
| prefer a single-column, easy to scan resume that follows a
| tried and trusted standard structure and layout.
| paxys wrote:
| Word/Google Docs -> PDF conversion is perfectly fine, and
| every system will understand it. Just don't try to get fancy
| with layouts and stick to headings, subheadings and bullets.
| People reading the resume will appreciate this as well.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I can only speak for what worked for me. A shorthand
| heuristic might be that if the resume can be read in linear
| fashion by a screenreader without any weirdness or non
| sequiturs, it's probably pretty good (another argument in
| favor of paying attention to accessibility!)
|
| In my case, I had a simple layout with sections clearly
| delineated and very simple formatting (bulleted lists). Dates
| were spelled out eg September 2024 rather than 9/24. UTF-8
| throughout. No difficult latex packages, just classic ones
| like enumitem and fancyhdr.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Extracting this information from pdf is hard and nobody does it
| well. Extracting it from a .docx or .odt is much easier.
| Unfortunately, the services seem to render the document to pdf,
| and then fail at the harder task they've created for
| themselves.
|
| I just applied for a job. The extraction was completely wrong
| but the site reassured me with "Don't worry if our system
| extracted the information incorrectly. We'll look at your
| resume directly." What a waste of effort.
| duxup wrote:
| I wish I could just send JSON...
| pdimitar wrote:
| I wonder if there's an open(-source) ATS system out there
| against which we might test such simpler templates?
| Dansvidania wrote:
| I would try with https://www.open-resume.com/resume-parser
|
| they offer the option to parse your cv and see what "comes
| out on the other side"
|
| I am not sure whether the idea of the parser is to be a
| starting point to then use the editor, or a test.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| +1 here. I have two resumes. One looks nice/modern and its what
| I send recruiters/managers once I have an interview scheduled.
| One is an ugly, to me, plain looking word doc that application
| tracking systems can gronk.
| calmdown13 wrote:
| When applying for jobs via LinkedIn it's very important to use
| a PDF. A huge number of people submit Word documents, however,
| LinkedIn doesn't render them in the browser. Given that most
| roles get hundreds of applications, unless someone's previous
| roles really catch my eye, I am probably not going to download
| anything.
| adamc wrote:
| Actual title says "for the First Time in My Career". Edited title
| is kind of weird.
| bagels wrote:
| Actual title is weird. How is it both the first and second
| time?
| ge96 wrote:
| Random thought
|
| I used to reject 6mo contract offers but after being a laborer
| the 2.5X pay increase even for 6mo made sense. So I accepted one
| and now I'm here typing this on a 16" mac at a new job. I am now
| thinking about making better choices financially.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I sincerely wish this chap luck. I suspect that he'll be OK.
|
| _> Keeping good connections with your coworkers and not burning
| bridges is one of the most important things I think you can do in
| your career._
|
| Words to live by. I wish more folks internalized this phrase.
| purple-leafy wrote:
| Hey I got laid off too. It actually has worked out as a positive
| over all.
|
| Job searching is a shit process though.
| imranq wrote:
| I think its amazing that posts like this exist, and more should
| definitely be written so that people don't feel powerless after a
| layoff. Too often we tie our identity to institutions and it
| isn't doing anyone any good (well maybe it helps the
| shareholders).
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(page generated 2025-01-07 23:00 UTC)