Everytime I read these comments I feel like I work in another industry. Who cares about the gaps in your resume? Truly, have recruiters commented in anything but passing? Your interviewers?

I've hired candidates with large gaps in their resume and their reasoning for the most part was I wanted time off or I went traveling or N other things that have nothing to do with work. We. Did. Not. Care.

Pass the interview. This is the only thing we cared about at Big Tech Co.

I have the same feeling, unless your response to the question about the gap is "yea I was on the run from the law for a while because I killed some people while robbing a bank, then I had to spend some time in prison but I had a really good lawyer" I dont know how much impact it really has

It's not so much the (closed) gaps, but the time since last job. The first job after you take a year off will be harder to get. After that, most people won't care.

I don't think it matters as much as people here seem to think.

You're the current CTO of a unicorn looking for a more technical role with stability so you apply to be a staff+ engineer at Google. Now the opposite: you've taken a year off to take care of an elderly parent. In both cases, your resume is one of the lowest signals we have. You're going to need to pass that interview.

HR folks aren't even looking this closely as long as you have a resume with the right prior experiences. And almost none of these resume concerns matter with a referral.

All else equal, people with resume gaps are going to get sorted to the bottom of the pile. Maybe at the high end of the market, the FAANG staff level, there aren't enough applicants so it's not a big deal, and they'll get to those applications eventually. At the lower end of the market however, there's more competition and more likelihood that someone else from the top of the pile will get hired before they get down to the bottom.

Are you working for FAANG etc? I work a mid-level IT job, there is competition. I have no evidence but it seems like candidates who are currently unemployed (especially for a long time) will end up at the bottom of the pile. That at least would make finding a new job harder.

I've taken most of a year out to travel the world while doing nothing work-related whatsoever and nobody seems to care.

I would only hope to use that as a substitute for paid employment if you actually incorporate, give yourself a title, put your company on LinkedIn and otherwise treat it like a business. Noodling around on a side project that you might monetize eventually is not a substitute.

I disagree. Incorporating, giving yourself a title, and a LinkedIn page are things anyone can do. People who "play business" spend tons of time on this stuff, along with designing company logos, hiring accountants (for their zero revenue business), and lawyers (for NDAs to protect their non-existent idea.) I've seen it first hand. They'll do anything to avoid actual work: building and selling a product.

I suspect what Anon means is: if you plan to tell people your side project was your job, you should start treating it as your job.

I play around with some side projects where I don’t give a shit about user counts or GitHub stars or commercial viability, doing perhaps 4 hours work per week. If I told people this was me at the height of my powers, I’d expect them to be unimpressed.

Yes, exactly, I'm saying that what will matter to future employers is how much you treat the project as a job, and not the project itself, no matter how interesting or challenging it is from the technical side.

It won't matter as much as you think. They'll probably spend 5 minutes discussing it, if that. If you have a demo or something to show for your time, that will be a plus.

No need to incorporate or give yourself a fancy title IMO. "Founder @ sideproject.io" works well enough.

Probably! I've done this to good success (gotten better jobs when I come back to industry after failing)

me and my co-founder did the same this year

thanks to our project's success we now get more and higher offers now that we ever did in our lives

however, there's no way back for us

we left for a reason, with a concrete goal in mind

not just because we could