Laid off for the first time in my career, and twice in one year

I have seen one behavior with ATS that was actually tracked down and might hit fellow HN readers. A recruiter I worked with at a company asked me why I didn’t have any experience with artificial intelligence. I said it was all over my resume - I’ve been in the field for more than a decade. He said that it didn’t show up until that ATS.

It turned out the ATS didn’t properly parse ligatures like “ffi”, “fi”, etc. It rendered them as a blank space, so “artificial” became “arti cial”. I turned over ligature rendering in my resume and started to get more callbacks.

Upon further inspection, I discovered that a lot of LLMs also have problems with ligatures and just ignore them when fed a pdf.

So, maybe those annoying job apps where you upload a resume and still have to fill everything in an HTML form aren’t the worst thing.

Latex and git has been advantageous to authoring a resume for me. It separates the layout design ant content.

“Oh no it’s 2 pages with only education on p2.”

Quickly comment out a bullet and print off a fresh 1 page pdf. I don’t use dumb words or phrases now to fit layout, at least far fewer. And git makes me less worried about deleting when it isn’t working.

One pattern i use, that i think makes things simpler, is to have a layout/contact template with definitions, then different context specific main latex files inputting from a sub directory of section blocks: experience, skills, education, etc.

I’d thought I was slick with word table layouts for sections, until a counselor told me the table structures persist in the supposedly flat pdf.

I wish there were an standard optional JSON attachment with a ridiculous small kb size limit to upload along with a human readable resume to help out the user data AST parser.

Blaming the ATS is a popular myth.

There may be edge cases where some obscure software can't parse a weird resume format, but in general if you put anything remotely resembling a common resume format (Company name, dates worked there, optional description and/or bullet points) it will be parsed properly.

I'm in a big Slack where people ask and give career help. Several hiring managers have offered to test people's resumes on their company's ATS over the years. Nobody has ever found a combination that actually failed the ATS except when it was an obvious problem (like someone who made their resume in Illustrator) or an obvious user error (exporting a resume as an image).

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.

From my experience, if you are randomly applying via an ATS without a prior outreach , you’ve already lost.

Especially for remote positions, there are hundreds of people applying for every open req and it’s hard to stand out

I'd recommend before others go too far down the ATS rabbit hole to checkout the wiki from /r/EngineeringResumes

https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringResumes/wiki/index/#wiki...

(In short, they might not be as important as you think they are)

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.

I wish I could just send JSON…

Please see the job history array.

The other approach is to apply to smaller companies that will actually have human read your CV. Depends on where you want to work of course.

I've used LaTeX, online resume generators and Google Docs templates, but they were unfruitful. I've applied to 350 jobs and only got one screening recruiter call (then was ghosted). Despite having 2+ YoE and published research as well as having worked as a contractor for FAANG (I even made one loads of money in stock after they applied my recommendations)!

Yeah, I just have a text file and convert it to HTML for people that want to view it on the web. Has never been a problem. I'm not a graphic designer and if that's a skill you want, you got the wrong girl.

I have done two different types of resumes; long and sort. When I was learning about resumes in high school and college, they said to just list your jobs and maybe some key skills. I have been told this is useless to recruiters. So I rewrote things to have a couple paragraphs about major projects at this jobs. I have been told this is too long and nobody has time to read it. So now I have both and you can pick the one you want.

I got laid off recently so this is fresh in my mind, but I got a job through my network instead which did not involve a resume or interviews. That's really how it should be. (I'm kind of just waiting for the founders from my last startup to start something new... they didn't survive the reorg either, which was a "sort by salary descending and only keep the last 3". The joys of having your software startup bought by an indecisive large company that doesn't do software ;)

+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.

Coming back here to really thank you for this. I converted my resume into LaTex today then to pdf. Began uploading it to a few listings and where I would previously have to go back in and correct things this is no longer happening. Much thanks.

> 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

The design always struck me as a clumsy attempt to take up space.

I wonder if there's an open(-source) ATS system out there against which we might test such simpler templates?

Thanks for posting this!

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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.

    > Heck I'd likely go job hunting just out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be interesting at the least

I definitely agree with you: Looking for a job (or "keeping your doors & windows open to new opportunities") while having a job is much, much easier -- mentally. In my industry, most connections with head hunters are made through LinkedIn. You can set a special flag in your profile that says "I'm looking for work", but this is only visible to professional head hunters (they pay a lot of money for an account with these special privileges). It works very well. Normally, the calls start with: "Them: Are you looking at the moment? Me: No, but I am open to new and exciting opportunities. Them: Oh, great. I have something for you." Do that enough, and eventually something very good lands on your doorstep.

I have 3 rock-bottom criteria for responding to a recruiter:

1) They use the correct email address, the one I used on my resume and to apply for jobs, and didn't dig out my personal one somewhere.

2) They don't say something stupid that reveals they didn't even look at my resume. ("I see you have C# experience", uh no I don't)

3) They include anything at all that's supposed to interest me, even if it actually doesn't.

The vast majority fail at step 1. I've only ever had one email from a recruiter that passed all these criteria.

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.

More than half of recruiters will ghost me after I've jumped through the hoops (phone call, CV, filling grid, security clearance forms, etc).

When I first become a hiring manager I thought I'd be the exception and provide everyone with detailed and honest feedback.

I didn't last very long. Candidates would see the feedback as an invitation to prove me wrong or argue with my assessment. I got a few very angry e-mails from people who took their rejection very personally and made it clear that I was their enemy. One person (who was actually very unqualified) even went on a mini rampage across the internet, trying to "name and shame" my company and even my personally for the rejection. There were even threats of a discrimination lawsuit.

So I stopped. It's back to something like "We've decided to proceed with other candidates"

Going the other direction.. most of the time I've seen feedback given to a candidate, they freaked out about it and got defensive. Not worth the risk.

Another issue is that positions which are advertised are often already filled by some acquaintance, but we need to go thru the motions of posting the job, sifting thru resumes, interview questions, leetcodes, etc. and interview theatre before we go and hire the acquaintance.

Sometimes, HR doesnt know and the interview panel may not know.

It’s banal because nobody is going to share the truth for fear of retaliation unless they’ve never done this before

> their reasons for rejecting you are absolutely banal, and you’d have been better off not hearing anything.

If it's banal, I'd like to know. Otherwise you're still left wondering whether it's anything that hinders you in the longrun.

Being from both sides, I would say it depends.

But especially after a take home assignment, feedback should be given 100% and face to face. It's almost embarrassing to spend X hours/days of your (spare) time only to be rejected with an email and usually some random reasons, without having the chance to explain why you built this toy project that way, how much time you spent and what would you do with more time or in production or even showcase some live coding on top of what you did.

But everything has become really inhumane, no-one cares. That's why AI is dominating and ruining the field.

True that. I just got some "honest feedback" that I didn't agree with at all. I'm all for criticizing myself, but this feedback totally missed the mark. I didn't have deep enough experience with "object oriented programming". What does that even mean? I've been creating and using objects every day since 2007. I literally... don't know what to do with that feedback. It's like the carpenter interview, "Have you ever built brown houses? Our client is very interested in brown houses."

With regards to what they're saying, the first thing to do is reverse the perspective. The applicant is hearing a yes or no, so if it's a no they want to know what they did wrong to improve themselves.

From the interviewer's perspective - we get someone who is average, then another person who is average, then someone who has trouble with basic questions, then we get this person who may be as average as the first two, then we get someone who answers every question correctly, and has a deep knowledge of the domain if you drill down, then you get an average person again.

There's nothing really wrong with the person, they did as well as four other people. It's just that someone else came in who was a standard deviation above the majority of the people in the bell in the normally distributed Gaussian curve.

Got rejected after a take home, and the feedback from the recruiter was 1. a reviewer thought I used a library incorrectly (they actually misunderstood how the library worked) and 2. I didn’t implement something that the instructions had explicitly said not to implement.

I didn’t argue with 1 because I figured it was pointless and it sounded like the recruiter was having a rough day. I politely pointed out 2 as a courtesy and he said “huh, the other guy yelled at me about that”.

Although honestly, I left the process thinking “lol” instead of “I’m a dumbass” like I might have absent the feedback.

If it's not BS it's stuff that should have been obvious from the interview.

They were looking for a network engineer who could program a little and you're a programmer who knows a little about networks or something like that.

The job market is bad because a lot of people joined tech when there was a lot of open roles (and a lot of SV money). The money has returned to its pre-bubble level, so there's fewer jobs. But the same number of people looking for work as during the bubble when they switched careers. Most of those new workers lack deep skills, so the existing jobs are going unfilled. Most of the listings I see now are for senior and above.

Been programming since I was 14, pursued a career in another field so that I could program for fun. I have considered pivoting my career to software development many times. Seeing people far more qualified than me have nightmarish job hunting experiences always makes me think twice. When people with 10+ years of experience can't find a job, there's no reason to believe self-taught programmers without degrees ever will.

Starting a business seems like the only real answer. Struggling only makes sense when it's for your own company.

You and the other million of devs think the same, that's why the indie dev market is exploding and twitter is full of influencers posting their app revenue..

Yes because it’s harder to land a stable job, it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.

Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.

Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.

And you need to make enough to pay for health care.

the most importat skills to learn:

1. Sales = learn to knock on a 100 doors to get one sale.

2. Marketing = learn to communicate your value prop to specific companeis and hiring managers.

3. Delviery = learn to deliver products/projects end to end with all the management that goes in between.

If you know all 3 you'll never be in a position where you don't have income. It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now ... don't just do a 8 hour job and go home and watch tv.

Keep trying to sell your services to others ... at least 2-3 hours after work to other companies/startups/other industries. Its a big world - smeone needs your services - your survival depends on finding those people nad packaging your skilsl so that they buy.

> If you code, you should be building a business on the side.

This is incredibly far from being the universal claim you say it is. 99% of software developers work for someone else, not at their own business, and most are perfectly happy.

By all means, building a business is great for many reasons, sometimes including financial reasons, and you should do it if you want to. But not wanting to is not an "excuse" and you shouldn't feel pressured to do so.

100%. people wanna blame companies for laying people off, doing leetcode, having ATS systems that don't parse resumes correctly.

if people realized - aimed at software engineers - that the same company you're applying for - someone went through the pain of creating the initial product, marketing it, selling it. I'm sure you can do the same - maybe not at the same level but at 80%.

unlike in zero-sum games - real life you can have multiple winners - 80% will get you there.

I do wonder about that. If you had it in you to start a business then I doubt you would have been sitting around waiting for the next downturn to do it.

A lot of companies will frown upon such things.

"I have a mortgage and a family" is fine. Those people are highly motivated.

Related. But people should also keep in mind that layoffs throughout the industry are extensive. So don't make the mistake of only keeping good connections with your team and managers. Try, to the extent that it's possible, to keep good connections across whatever enterprise you work in. We could easily enter an era, especially in tech, where all of your team and managers are unemployed at the same time you are. Or they otherwise may not have the ability to help you. You should always have a plan for using connections in the event you find yourself in that situation. A prudent pillar of that contingency would be to expand your network as far as you can. Even the facilities guy or the guy in marketing may prove useful one day. No connection is too low or too high.

> 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.

You say that, but everyone I know is working themselves to death. Companies just don’t want to hire. And why should they, if people will keep up the pace?

Using Google site search is a great way! For example - site:lever.co “Software Engineer, Machine Learning” OR “Machine Learning Engineer”. This is helped me search for a lot of jobs that weren’t advertised.

You can do this similarly for greenhouse.io, ashbyhq.com, myworkdayjobs.com, breezy.hr, workable.com, dover.io, ats.rippling.com, icims.com and other popular ATS websites.

In the last 12 years of employment I've pretty much received all my jobs through the friends, friends of friends, and former colleagues network. There was one job which I actually applied for on their website and had a standard interview process for, but I had former colleagues already working there, so I include that.

I am in Game Development so it is a much smaller community than the overall tech industry and you're more likely to know people in different companies as people slowly disperse after completing a project.

I think as you get older you kind of have to find jobs in this way, relying on your network and reputation, rather than doing a fresh cold application each time.

I miss StackOverflow jobs – it showed that jobs were probably published there because someone technical advocated for the platform.

Find a job you find interesting and have a compelling value add. Find that job’s hiring manager on LinkedIn/Other Social. DM the hiring manager and start a conversation. Has worked for me multiple times. You cut the line (or black box) and start to build rapport instantly.

LinkedIn is a place to show your social status.

If someone (I don’t know if it is true in your case or not) has a generic set of skills like - “full stack developer” or “front end developer”, there are hundreds of people applying for the same job and it’s hard to stand out.

You have to lean on your network.

Also doing frontend, but my friends from the other side of the stack fence tell me that employers have been piling up responsibilities, so when you apply for a backend position, you're automatically assumed to fit a DevOps role as well.

Anyway, I've found that back in our field it's largely React roles which were affected. Angular jobs are fewer and typically lowballed, but not nearly as much as the rest.

This is the one I wrote about my lessons: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/05/04/how-to-go-thro...

Not true. Often managers are caught unawares of layoffs until they are executed.

i knew someone who was QA his boss approved his PTO to go to the dentist. however that day turned out to be the layoff day so HR threated him to come to the office. was hilarious. god i hate HR. anyways if you ever go on PTO turn your phone off completely.

The disconnect is that the news is completely wrong. I can confirm that it’s an employer’s market from personal experience as well.

Just because a position is advertised does not mean the position is going to be filled - a lot of companies advertise a job that doesn't really exist. They do this for several reasons - to look like they are more successful than they are (if they are hiring they are expanding), and some just collect resumes. They might even do a few interviews, which helps their team practice doing interviews even if the company isn't going to hire. I'm sure there are other reasons.

I've been in the tech job market about 30 years, and this might be the second worst time for people in tech, the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s being the worst. My boss knows it too, he knows I can't leave and find another job that pays as well right now. A couple of years ago I was still getting about 20 recruiter contacts per week, and now I'm lucky if I get 1 per month.

If you haven't noticed how bad it is, I have to wonder why?

My guesses:

Fake job postings to give the appearance of growth for funded companies who are struggling to grow to meet investor expectations.

Posturing to distract from the actual practice of hiring less-expensive talent overseas while pretending to be on Team America.

Political spin to avoid losing face/clout during an election year.

In short: some form of lying (or at best, twisting) to avoid the shame of not being as successful as one might look on their <insert social media here> profile.

These stories are bought and paid for, to pressure lawmakers to make it easer to hire H1Bs and/or offshore to lower wages. Much like recent stories about the shortage of engineers or workers in general. Shortage of suckers willing to work below market, that is. None of these companies will consider training existing engineers for a month either.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> Could you clarify further? Front what I hear on the news, there are hundreds of thousands of open engineering/ai positions in the US and we cannot find workers to fill them.

The only thing that matters is the ratio of job seekers to open positions.

There are always a lot of open positions because there are a lot of companies. Even during recessions most companies will be opening to hiring the right candidates.

When there are more candidates than positions combined with a lot of layoffs, companies get more selective. Companies are hiring, but they're being more careful about who gets hired.

The other disconnect is that the employers are trying to fill positions at a certain price point which is usually much lower than most people will accept. Asking why we can't just take those positions when desperate is basically asking why you can't work for significantly less than you have been making for the past 10 years. People have houses and families to support. In some places those jobs pay so little that you can barely make rent with roommates. They exist solely to prove there aren't any qualified US workers for H1B purposes.

A lot of really good people can be had in certain US states if you're willing to pay them a lot of money relative to their local market. I've gotten several applications from some pretty overqualified people simply because the pay for the associate position is higher than their local employers are offering for mid-level people. If you then turn that around, it suggests that some of these employers struggle to fill positions because they actually have to compete on the nation-wide market for people.

Lots of job postings are fake

> engineering/ai

Most software engineers lack credentials to get hired to build ai, unless you view conventional software engineering as ai.

The time to build out ai tracks in universities was back in the Obama administration. It’s ridiculous that all of a sudden the whip is being so harshly cracked for everyone to re-skill. I applied to CS grad programs for two straight cycles, with strong GRE scores and a solid CS undergrad degree, and not a single non-remote university program offered me admission, seemingly due to enrollment caps as bottlenecks.

I ended up joining a well-known online MS program, and I feel that it is teaching me so little for the effort I put in that I don’t think my ai skill has improved over what I had from outside of the program, but hey, if the system is broken, what can you do? I can learn nothing, remotely, and use that degree to get an ai job where I do genuinely valuable work, but I’m definitely not allowed to make those genuinely valuable work contributions in a remote role.

The opportunities available are extremely limited or they don’t make sense/aren’t very good. Just smile and play the game… or is it the game that’s playing with candidates?

how do you even get those?

All of these signals are problematic.

Your references are already vetted and testimonials left on a public profile,

No one is going to give you a negative reference on LinkedIn. That doesn’t provide any meaningful signal.

Actual qualifications, like job training and certifications. Even Scrum Training.

Certifications don’t prove competence. Anyone can memorize enough to pass a multiple choice test and there have been brain dumps for them for decades.

I went through the 6 certification .Net “Architect” path back in 2010 basically as a guided learning path with a goal at the end. I knew even back then they were worthless as far as competence and never put them on my resume.

More recently, at one point I had 9 of the then 12 AWS certs as late as 2021. I have 6 of the 9 current ones now and I’m working on the other 3 by the end of the year.

I got my first one without ever opening the console in 2018. They also served as a guided learning path so I would know what I didn’t know and I could talk the talk. But I don’t consider myself knowing a service until I’ve used them.

They are all very shallow marketing certs except I’ve heard good things about the Kubernetes certifications and that they require hands on problem solving.

I want to know you were actually taught the right way at least once, by a reputable source

How would you know that? I have a degree in CS. I graduated in 1996. Is the source I was taught COBOL and FORTRAN from “reputable” or “relevant”?

A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can use arbitration to seek damages if you lied

Arbitration is biased toward the client and the clients industry. The judges don’t get hired if they consistently make judgments that are against the industry that hires them.

A standard set of tests administered by experts chosen at random.

What I am looking for when hiring is specific to the company. But they have that already - leetCode style interviews that don’t give a signal to whether they are “smart and gets thing done”.

This whole post feels like a elaborate troll. Still, I cannot resist replying.

    > testimonials left on a public profile

    > Actual qualifications

    > A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can use arbitration to seek damages if you lied.

Forget about tech for a moment: You can re-write it for hiring people in oil and gas field operations, and it seems just as absurd. Re-write it again for a hospital trying to hire nurses. Still absurd. I picked both of those industries because they are very much learn on the job. Yes, certs exist, but there are many people who work most of their career in those industries with few-to-no certs.

Linked in and Glassdoor already exist, though I don't trust Microsoft to administer. Needs an open alternative.

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It's illegal in my state in the US. Also if you do FMLA in the US it would be illegal if you're the parent who gave birth. Outside of a few states here in the US you're basically expected back at work as soon as you get out of the hospital unless you have a doctor's note.

Actual title is weird. How is it both the first and second time?

> I keep my resume and longer form career document up to date at least once per quarter. I list out the details of major accomplishments in STAR format while it’s still fresh. I have both a technical summary and a business oriented summary for non technical people.

I have a bookmarklet that opens a new gmail compose window, with the recipient being "me+journal@employer.com", and the subject being today's date. As I'm working throughout the day, I jot down what I'm working on.

I also used to review these every Friday, and type up a summary, and every few months - or as I'd remember to - update a "hype doc" that's basically like an internal resume that my manager can use to help argue for a raise for me, or whatever.

I also copy this data, without any stuff that might be considered company property, to someplace local I can access if I'm fired.

These posts are so badass. Thank you to share. Please keep writing. We need more of these.

Literally, your handle "scarface_74" says it all. When PIP comes through the door, you raise your automatic rifle and shout: "Say hello to my little friend!"