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.<p>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.<p>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.
The biggest pain / fear related to layoffs for me isn't the immediate actual loss of income...<p>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.<p>>Recruiters. Don’t discount or blow them off.<p>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.
> I really wish companies would start giving honest feedback even if it’s hard for the candidates to heard at first. It would be a much better way for candidates to improve themselves and we’re all adults here and can take the feedback.<p>I’ve said it before, and I say it again. This isn’t true. When companies try to be helpful and give you well meaning feedback, you find out that their reasons for rejecting you are absolutely banal, and you’d have been better off not hearing anything.
> More than 150,000 layoffs were reported in 2024 and a whopping 264,000 in 2023.<p>I switched careers in my 30s to get into tech. It was big, difficult pivot. At the moment, I do not regret it and really like what I do.<p>But the job market is shockingly bad. I do not have an optimistic outlook, so I am looking to pivot again, likely a small business. All the extra cash I have after expenses, I put towards various side hustles. One big upside to being a SWE is that I can make whatever app I want and put it on the internet publicly.
If you code, you should be building a business on the side.<p>Especially if you are early in your career and its becoming harder to land a stable job.<p>you need to learn how to market your skills, get clients and deliver.<p>No more excuses to sit in a job and do nothing. This is going to be critical to survive.<p>Eventually I think companies are going to be much smaller entities than they once were which means your have to really buid your own biz.
15 years of experience. Laid off twice last year. 10+ years at 2nd last role, 3 months at last.<p>Like the article mentions, it's an employers market.<p>The thing I struggle is the question to why you want to work at a place. Either I'm short and to the point, or it ends up written like I used to when working for one of the Big Three.<p>And coincidentally, that is exactly the kind of stuff that ChatGPT generates.
I sincerely wish this chap luck. I suspect that he'll be OK.<p><i>> 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.</i><p>Words to live by. I wish more folks internalized this phrase.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
How are people searching for programming jobs? LinkedIn is garbage because it keeps showing jobs that don't even contain the word I searched for. I go directly to the big company's career pages, but it is hard to discover new jobs or new companies.
This thread has a lot of interesting anecdata so I’ll add mine.<p>Over 25 years experience in frontend web, searching since July, and the water is as ice cold as I’ve ever felt it. Low response rates, low interview rates, zero offers. Wondering if the backend grass is slightly greener at the moment or that’s just my perception from the other side of the fence.
>> If you haven’t searched for a job since then it will surprise you how much more of an employers market it is now.<p>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. You mention ZIRP, so I'm assuming you're probably in the US.<p>Practically every news show in the past two weeks has noted the importance of having a concerted US policy to help fill these open positions. They also mention the existential risk to the US caused by the massive shortage of engineers.<p>How does this square with you saying " If you haven’t searched for a job since then it will surprise you how much more of an employers market it is now." Where is the disconnect?
I also got laid off during parental leave. I had a strong feeling that it would happen but due to the stress of a medically dangerous pregnancy, I made the excuse that I didn't have the capacity to simultaneously focus on a preemptive job search. That was a bad decision.
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).
Similar to the article's author, I also once got laid off shortly after being hired; three months in my case. I was promised they were on a growth track to nine-figure revenue. One month of down subscription growth, the CEO panicked, and I was gone.<p>I still get mad thinking about it.
"How to Tell a Layoff is Coming" another tip from personal experience, a manager and key people always know. Be in the inner circle. Also I was once laid off on my Hawaii vacation, talk about perfect timing.
After the dot-com crash, I was laid off when the company I worked for went under. They specialized in creating e-learning courses for large corporations.<p>That experience taught me a valuable lesson: there are some industries you just don’t want to be involved with when the economy takes a downturn. Companies tighten their budgets, and the first cuts often come from areas like training and marketing. On the consumer side, people quickly drop non-essential luxuries like streaming services or food delivery.<p>If you work in industries that provide those kinds of services, they’re essentially “fair weather industries”—great during good times but highly vulnerable during tough ones.<p>Since then, I’ve made a point of only working in what I call “recession-proof” verticals. These include energy (avoiding risky sectors), insurance (because companies rarely skip paying premiums), and certain areas of banking (where money flows abundantly).<p>Another critical strategy is diversifying your skill set and building a strong internal network within your company. The more indispensable you become, the more secure your position. In more technical terms, this is akin to “obligate mutualistic symbiosis”—a relationship where both parties thrive because they rely on each other.
Random thought<p>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.
I really, really wish the industry would give the fuck up on resumes. It's such a stupid way to hire. Huge waste of time for all involved, inaccurate, lengthy, difficult.<p>As a hiring manager, I want:<p><pre><code> - Your references are already vetted and testimonials left on a public profile,
private on invite for those who haven't left their job yet
- Actual qualifications, like job training and certifications. Even Scrum Training.
I want to know you were actually taught the right way at least once, by a
reputable source
- A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can
use arbitration to seek damages if you lied
- A standard set of tests administered by experts chosen at random.
- Your requirements to be hired
</code></pre>
As a candidate, I want:<p><pre><code> - The salary range, hire type (contract/full-time), benefits
- The location
- A description of the project you want worked on and skills required
- Your company's pitch deck or equivalent
- Glassdoor reviews
- My name, age, gender, picture, etc are hidden until the company has clicked a button
that certifies they are interested in me based on my qualifications. I get that we can't
stop hiring bias, but at least make it more obvious when they pass up why they have.
</code></pre>
We can't we just agree as an industry that we should all pitch in and make this? There's enough capital here, and it's not like we don't know how to build these things. Certainly there's enough people here motivated to work on it.
Hey I got laid off too. It actually has worked out as a positive over-all.<p>Job searching is a shit process though. I applied for ~40-50 jobs, only got 1 offer. Small country too, so thats basically all the jobs I could find. But landed in a really good company, and have a bit of a break before I start.<p>So I've been using all my spare time to learn Graphics programming, C, and Audio Engineering.<p>I've made a little Wolfenstein3D-type raycasting engine [0] that I'm proud of, as I'm just a frontend coder for work.<p>[0] - <a href="https://github.com/con-dog/2.5D-raycasting-engine/blob/master/README.md">https://github.com/con-dog/2.5D-raycasting-engine/blob/maste...</a>
u guys are getting interviews?
2 years of experience and it's hard.<p>seems the old markers of dev competence are no longer there, some github projects, a degree were enough nowadays it's a lot harder even here in europe where the salaries are on the low end.
Firing someone during their parental leave is a special kind of messed up. The fact that it's not completely illegal in any reasonable country is horrifying.
Misalignment of interests is the core error of reasoning the traditional employee makes in offering up unquestioning faith and loyalty to a random corporation run by strangers; that greedy incompetence will somehow give them enduring security. This is decidedly not the case. Instead, more sensible employees should form worker-owned co-ops to both share in the treasure of livable earnings with potential immense profits and structure themselves for the maximum security of those who "sail on that ship" together rather than optimizing short-term profits of someone else.
I have been let go three times in almost 30 years and I’m on my 10th job.<p>The first time was at a struggling startup. We all knew they were struggling and the company was very honest with us and kept us abreast of all the companies that our VC backers were pursuing. I was in some of the interviews with potential acquirers.<p>Our backers promised all of us that “we would get paid for every hour we worked”. Of course they couldn’t promise us we would not get laid off.<p>All of us stayed until the bitter end. That day we all got laid off after being acquired for scraps, we went to lunch together and hung out in the office just joking around until the end of the day.<p>We all had something in our back pocket anyway and from looking at LinkedIn, everyone found a job that was either as good or better within a month. This was 2011.<p>Our largest customer arranged for me to get contract with them to finish out a project, the acquiring company gave the customer access to all of their code and gave me permission to keep my work laptop and waived my non compete.<p>They gave everyone a month severance. I was treated fairly and have no ill will toward anyone there.<p>The second time it was Amazon in 2023:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212</a><p>The third time it was a shit show of a company last year. But this is where I have problems with the author<p>> <i>How do you succinctly summarize and highlight all you’ve done there?</i><p>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.<p>It looks like he learned that lesson too.<p>> <i>I was being selective and only applying for places I’d realistically want to work</i><p>He has a newborn baby. His first priority is to work for any company that will allow him to exchange labor for money to support his family. Even if you do have savings, no need to use it unnecessarily.<p>I got a 3.5 months severance from Amazon the year before last and my stretch goal was to get an offer before my paid out PTO of 9 days was over let alone dip into my severance.<p>Of course I reached out to my network first and targeted outreach to companies specializing in my niche (strategic cloud consulting emphasizing app dev). I also spammed my resume to any CRUD enterprise app dev job as a Plan B.<p>I could always keep interviewing while working. I was working remotely.<p>I did end up getting a Plan A job offer within 9 days of leaving AWS. But I knew three months in that it wasn’t going to be a long term job.<p>When the end did come, I was already in the early stages of interviewing for my current job and had an offer three weeks later. But again, I wasn’t going to let the perfect be the enemy of getting any job and I kept applying for Enterprise CRUD jobs until the offer was finalized.<p>I did work on a side project in 2023. But I got paid for it. A former CTO had some work he needed done.
>Recruiters. Don’t discount or blow them off. They have a vested interest in getting you hired and 3 of my jobs have been found through them.<p>Recruiters are often and perform a valuable service. Agree that it can be invaluable to find one you want to work with.