anon50118810

People who are forced to receive worse medical care, for example because they can't afford necessary medicine anymore, are tangibly worse off than they were before. It's not a sign of an unhealthy relationship with work if someone is upset at not being able to buy medicine. Framing it that way is unhelpful.

This is my guess, I have no direct knowledge here.

Imperial College London's "Computing" degree is described at https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/courses/undergraduate/compu... as a program where you can "study the engineering of computer hardware and software alongside the mathematical principles of computing." So it's not just computer science. Compare this to the "Electrical Engineering and Computer Science" (EECS) degrees at MIT, UC Berkeley and other places.

As for changing the name on your CV/resume, whether that's okay depends on the hiring customs for your location and field. That said, I think you're overthinking it. Prestigious schools and employers and people sometimes use unusual names as a mark of distinction. You can get a "Computer Science" degree from any fifth-rate night school, but all the fancy employers you'll presumably be eligible for after graduating should know what a "Computing" degree from Imperial College London is.

I'm referring to class as a person's conception of themselves, and others' conception of them, as someone who can live the life they're living and can expect to continue living that life. Losing this doesn't just mean the loss of some sort of social authority, of having an impressive job title at parties, but also and more importantly it can mean almost everything in that person's life changing for the worse, indefinitely: worse neighborhood, worse housing, worse medical care, worse food, worse schools and college funds, worse retirement, worse jobs, worse hobbies, worse transportation, worse life expectancy. That would devastate anyone, and it's not so much about how a person self-identifies but about how much they can afford.

I disagree with your interpretation in the other discussion about what the Supreme Court ruling means for federal protections, but both Florida and Illinois also have state-level protections against LGBT discrimination, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_employment_discrimination....

None of this should come up during interviews, but in the tech industry in many or most places you should feel safe mentioning in passing a same-sex significant other or volunteer work with an LGBT group or something like that. Of course bigots can lurk anywhere but if this is really bothering you then, and I mean this with all respect and kindness, that might be something for you to work on personally. That you're worried about Chicago is a sign to me that you might need to recalibrate a little.

Also, questions about hobbies or favorite books or whatever you might be thinking of should be thought of as places to let yourself shine professionally. When they ask about books it might sound like they're open to hearing about your favorite bodice ripper but really it's a chance for you to talk about technical books you like or something else suitably impressive and relevant.

Resumes are like sales brochures, but for applications you should follow the instructions, see https://www.thebalancemoney.com/do-you-have-to-include-all-j....

There are many tech jobs out there that just ask you to send in a resume and cover letter and answer some questions. Saying it's technically possible to get an interview from sending out an unfocused 5-10 minute application to a big corporation using something like Taleo is not a strong argument in itself to do that.

Maybe you picked being gay as a hypothetical out of a hat but it's a terrible example. Unless we're talking about extremely repressive societies where there are literally no professional options available for LGBT people, almost no LGBT person would recommend going back into the closet to find work with a bigoted employer. LGBT people regularly run away from home as teenagers and become homeless to avoid bigotry, that's how serious it can be for LGBT people to live authentically. A key part of the emotional growth involved, what a lot of it goes back to is, as I said, having confidence in yourself and being willing to enforce boundaries.

Leaving aside this particularly bad hypothetical, lying about yourself to get a job probably won't set you up for long-term success. What's the end game of claiming you don't want kids when you really do, after you get the job and then become pregnant? Now you need the job even more and your employer both resents you being pregnant and for having lied to them.

If you're really saying it's okay to lie to employers if you're truly desperate, then sure, why not. If you're actually starving then a lot of things become options, but this isn't really good long-term career advice.

While interviewing in the U.S. you'll get a lot of casual questions about your current job, such as what you like best about it, what skills you use there or why you want to leave. These will come from the recruiter, the manager and your future peers. These are both technical and social questions. Refusing to answer any of these questions would be very weird socially, and even very restrictive NDAs should allow you to at least speak generally about what you're doing.

What I'm really talking about when I'm talking about the threat of extended unemployment is the threat of losing socioeconomic class. So much depends on class: where you live, what you eat, where you worship if anywhere, where your kids go to school, who your friends are. Almost everything. It's very difficult to diversify your social and professional network outside of your class.

In most cases switching from one tech job to another will keep you in the same middle-to-upper-middle class even if you have to take a relatively large pay cut. You can even lose your job without something else lined up and it's not a big problem as long as you're confident you'll find something similar soon.

All of that is at risk with extended unemployment or being forced to indefinitely work for lower pay in a different field. Consider all the life changes someone might have to make if they have to change from being a software developer making $150k to being a rideshare driver making $40k, after six months, a year, or five years. I don't know about buggy-whip makers but probably they'd be okay with losing their jobs if they were guaranteed equal work in the new car factories. What they really dreaded was having to work for less pay in the new factories, or becoming day laborers or similar. This is what motivated the original Luddites.

It's a good idea to practice if you're trying to get up the nerve to make the jump to a better job. But during a job search, you'll either get so many rejections that you'll get back up to speed quickly enough without needing to also obsess about it while you're employed, or you're hireable enough that you didn't need to worry about it either way.

We may be talking past each other. I'm talking about applications for unremarkable positions at large corporations where the application forms are either branded by the company or done through something like iCIMS, Taleo or Workday. You create an account and then you're faced with several steps asking for who knows what. The experience question might be "List all past jobs starting with the most recent" with no date limit. Later on you'll have to agree that you answered everything fully and honestly or you can be fired. Maybe I'm a fool for taking that seriously but the meaning is straightforward to me.

These are also the sorts of positions I think people are talking about when they talk about HR being a barrier, filtering on keywords, or how important it is to network around them before applying. So I don't think it's a matter of the company being stuck with software they can't do anything about, instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so. I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.

You can judge for yourself whether I'm serious or desperate or not. If your standard is 500 applications within a few days, then no. I can't even comprehend that. Are we talking like 10-15 applications per hour?

I don't care about the software as such, but so far I'm not desperate enough to provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong, just to maybe get the first 30 minute phone call from a recruiter. On top of this is the simple logic that any employer that puts up all these barriers is probably not really interested in hiring anyway. More work for less reward, so that my time would be better spent looking for more likely positions.

That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.

I'm not sure it's a good trade-off to interview constantly even when you have a job just to remove a bit of the learning curve if you lose your job unexpectedly.

Yes, remote only if at all possible. I'm surprised that non-tech companies care about looking busy, since tech is a cost center for them and I would guess they're hiring grudgingly at best.

I've looked mainly on LinkedIn and some smaller job boards, not Monster or Indeed or Dice or any of those.

Another thing is that I'm avoiding complex applications, the ones where you're immediately asked to create an account and once you do they ask you for a ton of information like every job you've had in your life. Are the jobs you're talking about often gated behind these applications?

Being unemployed, I can't support this. Keeping an offer on hold blocks the company from making the offer to someone else who actively needs it. Maybe you meant something else, like a handshake agreement with a manager friend who works there that they'll try to make room for you if you ever want to join.

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.

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.

There's really no way to hide you're currently unemployed, or at least not employed in the tech field, unless you make up an entire fantasy world. Not only will you have to put the lie into your resume, and maybe provide fake references, but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job.

We need to distinguish between being at some particular job and being in a profession or similarly in any job at all.

I think it's unhealthy to have your identity tied to your specific employer, job title and tasks that you do for them. You as a person should not be defined by the tickets in your current sprint.

However not having a profession or any job is much different and worse. Unless you're older and retired, or independently wealthy, then it means you're going to cut back on everything. You won't socialize with other people society deems successful, you won't date, you won't grow a family, you won't travel or do anything other than continue to exist. All parts of your situation will shrink and decline. You are running out the clock toward total destitution.

I'm making this point because it's easy for people who are having a successful career to say, oh, of course I'm not my job, while missing entirely that they see themselves as a person who has a good job and will likely get another good job if their current job ends. They don't mean that they see themselves equally as a software developer or a dishwasher or on the street and it's all the same to them, so sharing the perspective that you are not your job in a discussion about extended unemployment is maybe not very appropriate.

Whether this latter reality is healthy or not, I don't know, but people have identified themselves as successful based on their trade or other social categorization for thousands of years, so at least we can say it's not new.

It's important to quantify how long your time off was for this anecdote to be meaningful. No good employer will bat an eye if you worked at a place for five years then spent three months on a tropical beach. A year spent job searching with no luck like the OP is a different situation altogether.

In very large part what your interviews look like depends heavily on when and where you're searching, what type of job you want and what your background is. It's hard to overstate this. 2018 might as well be an entirely different universe.

That said I would be a little suspicious as a mid/senior-level developer if I got hired at a place that didn't ask me to do any coding for them at all beforehand.

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.

In my experience you're overstating the need to be able to instantly brain dump complex algorithms, except maybe at the FAANG level where I have no experience. It's far more important to be comfortable solving any simple coding challenge on demand in front of people in a high-stakes situation like an interview.

I think it's healthier to instead develop the social skills and confidence needed to answer any questions confidently while enforcing boundaries about what you will and won't answer. Outright lying can come from a place of weakness and fear which isn't good to encourage.

"Laid off" should be one of the safest reasons to give for leaving an employer, right up there with giving birth to a child or taking care of a sick loved one. Layoffs from big companies are in the news now and there's rumors about how employees were chosen, but by and large saying you were laid off from some random company shouldn't mean anything other than that employer restructured and you had bad luck. Certainly you as a job applicant are under no obligation to speculate during an interview about why you specifically were let go.

I've had very little luck with third-party recruiters myself, personally. My take is that because the job is theoretically easier to get, there is much more competition, and the recruiters are more ruthless in removing applications that don't meet the exact specifications from their client.

Also it pains me a little for you to say that reading one book is a big sign of having lots of free time. Maybe you're not a huge reader but I hope you normally do stuff you enjoy, reading or not, whether you're employed or not, if you don't mind my saying so.

It would be great if you could share your insights about finding work at these non-tech companies, either here or at my recent post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108841. I've applied to far over 50 places and would be satisfied with that sort of thing at least for the near term.

For both your and the GP's comment, it would be great if you could share some details on how job searching with "local low prestige consulting companies" works, either here or in a recent post I made at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108841.

Asking for feedback is okay if you're in the right mindset. Understand that unless you completely failed something, it's probably them, not you, and any feedback you get should be seen as likely rationalizing a decision they made for who knows what reasons. So as long as you don't take the feedback too hard or too personally, you might get some ideas for how to improve your chances with the next employer.

Being spoiled for choice with offers is great if you can manage it, but not very useful if you're OP who couldn't find something for a year.

Also, having a job gives you a basic social identity to use to interact with people, and positive cash flow lets you be expansive and outgoing. It's very easy to take this for granted, or assume focusing on work is ultra-materialist, if you don't have a lot of experience going without. I agree that it's healthy to not worry so much about the day-to-day minutiae of a specific job, but this is a lot different from the inevitable decline that comes with not having any job at all.

I strongly recommend only sharing minimal information about your job search with employers. Don't share when you started looking, because if it's been a while then you'll look bad. Don't share that you think you're far along in the process at some other place, because if that falls through then you'll be embarrassed if it comes up again or it might look like you were lying to put pressure on them.

The fact that an employer could speed things up for you if you have active prospects elsewhere is a little insulting because it's the flip side of saying we know we can put you on the backburner because you're unemployed and struggling.

You can say whether you're actively or passive looking, or if you have a firm offer on the table, or if you're especially interested in employers in some particular area if it makes you look good with this employer. Otherwise don't bring your search up and politely deflect questions if you can.