I'm fucking tired of explaining to business ghouls that I AM FUCKING DESPERATE. I'M INTERVIEWING WITH YOU BECAUSE I WANT TO SURVIVE. I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT MY DREAMS OR WHETHER THIS JOB OR YOUR COMPANY LINES UP WITH MY CAREER GOALS. WE ARE HOLY-SHIT PAST THE POINT WHERE I'M ABLE TO BE CHOOSY. ALL YOU FUCKING NEED TO DO IS READ THE FUCKING RESUMÉ THAT'S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR GOD-DAMNED EYES, ASK ABOUT MY QUALIFICATIONS, AND TELL ME WHETHER OR NOT I'M A GOOD FIT.
NO, your company isn't special to me, and it isn't special to ANYONE but you and your business-ghoul friends. Your company is merely the LABEL that will decorate my paycheck and LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE, AND I'M SICK OF PRETENDING OTHERWISE.
And WHY the FUCK are you calling me to literally REPEAT SHIT YOU'RE TOO FUCKING IGNORANT TO READ ON THE GOD-DAMNED FUCKING RESUMÉ?
I've applied for at least 200 engineering jobs (I recounted the ones on job sites; but even that's nowhere near all of them) this year and gotten zero offers. This job search is LITERALLY DRIVING ME INSANE, because I can no longer fucking afford antidepressants and I'm on the verge of blowing up in people's faces all the goddamn fucking time. I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE.
Try [insert nearby industry here]
Funny story: turns out, there are people who studied for degrees in those nearby industries. No I can't land a software developer, data scientist, IT, etc., job, because (1) I've applied for all those several times and not even gotten an interview and (2) my school produces students who actually studied those topics as a major!
So thank you genuinely to the dozens of people who have recommended that, I really do appreciate the help ... but that only works if you're an appealing candidate in general.
Why are you unhirable?
Bad GPA (~2.8; many firms have hard cutoff > 3 or 3.1), no experience/internships, no support/professional network, recent downward trajectory on transcript, autistic, mentally ill getting more unstable by the day, terrible attitude that's impossible to fully hide, no charisma to accommodate for my deficiencies, no access to a time machine. I KNOW how I got here, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
At least when I worked in food delivery I managed to make non-trivial money. AT LEAST I WAS HAPPY while being exploited. Now I'm thousands of dollars in debt, literally a hundred pounds heavier, psychologically and emotionally BROKEN, and no closer to getting a real job than I was before.
Dude I’m much older than you, not nearly as well educated, and feel the exact same way, with a job. But I was in your position last year and I fucking get it. This is my advice, lie, lie your ass off, I don’t give a fuck if you haven’t been doing anything exciting or not since you graduated, YES you fucking have, get on the selfhosted or sysadmin on here and find something someone else did and say you did it. And when asked to present it(this will not happen) you had a power surge and lost everything or something, your cat knocked a water bottle on your setup, it doesn’t matter. You are slowly rebuilding because it’s difficult to get back in that headspace due to the frustration.
This bit worked for me when I was interviewing but your mileage may vary, watch a bunch of pro wrestling clips and specifically watch how they talk about themselves. That is how you need to talk about you, and I know you don’t fucking care, this is all bullshit, but thinking about yourself as the baddest motherfucker that ever is gonna walk into whatever shitty company you’re applying to will help you get what you want.
Everything is fucking terrible in the IT world right now. But remember most people doing the hiring are dumber than a sack of hammers, manipulate them.
I hope this doesn’t seem like I’m talking down, I really feel for your situation, but playing dirty is necessary. You ain’t doing anything wrong
This is great advice. It’s all a game and if you wanna win, you’ve gotta play it and cheat codes are fair play!
The problem with lying is that I'm not built to do it. I can barely remember the truth; how am I supposed to keep track of my own lies?
That being said, I literally just lost out on an opportunity because I told the truth. The recruiter asked a question "do you want X type of job" and I answered (truthfully) "yeah I'd love to do an X type of job" and they responded "well our company doesn't have X jobs, you'd be better off somewhere else." They quickly ended the phone call at that.
Like they couldn't have done this over email or in the application form? Did they really have to call me? And no shit I'd be a better fit somewhere else in their business-ghoul fantasy world where everyone gets what they want, but in the REAL WORLD I'd be better off if they hired me to do literally anything, and there's nowhere else I can fucking go!
I've had a few employers ask for my GitHub profile or samples of my code as an optional field, which leads me to think that they're going to ask for those things once I get far enough in the interview process. I've actually used in interviews a software project I wrote by following a YouTube tutorial to discuss my familiarity with DSP, but I'm terrified for the day they ask to see my GitHub profile...
Engineering interviewers at least are kinda pro-proprietary-software. Interviewers have bragged that the company uses proprietary software as if that's a feature. I've had to stop asking the question "what software can I teach myself to be better prepared for this role?" because the answer is usually "all our software is proprietary, you can't train yourself for this" in an annoyed tone, as if I crossed a line. The self-hosted projects are free and open-source and imply my position against proprietary software. Unfortunately, the lack of open-source alternatives [1] in industrial systems ensure firm's exclusivity in the industry, so even a preference for open-source software would be taken as a negative.
That being said, I am looking into self-hosting just for my own sake. But I haven't had the time to do it properly.
I'm gonna give this a shot!
Thank you for reaching out. Life hurts right now.
[1] I would definitely be interested in developing such (free and) open-source industrial automation systems, but (1) I don't have the time, expertise, or experience to do it alone, (2) I would need access to industrial systems to test on, and (3) I would have to find a team of people basically willing to burn the possibility of a career in engineering, because the big proprietary-software players would not take kindly to some nerds disrupting their profits.