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.
Let me give you some very good advice for getting a development job. This was given to me when I left the boot camp where I learned to code. I studied philosophy then bartended for a decade, so I had no experience. Yet I got a job within a week of leaving the bootcamp by following this advice.
Don’t keep applying. Apply to a few places, maybe 10. If that goes nowhere, then why would you expect anything different from the next 200?
Instead of just applying, work on projects. Deploy some cool impressive applications of your own. If you can’t do that, then you aren’t ready for a job and this is why your applications are going nowhere. If you can do that, do it. Keep doing it. Learn new technologies. If you don’t want to learn new stuff, then you aren’t up for a development job, because that’s half of it.
Basically, act like you’re already hired. Act like you have a job. Spend 35 hours a week learning, building, contributing to open source. Then spend 5 hours applying. That’s a far better use of your time. You’ll have stuff to talk about in your interviews. You’ll have stuff to show off. And you’ll be getting better and staying on top of new tech instead of stagnating while you apply. That’s what gets you a job. Not blindly applying. If you’re only applying to jobs, then your aren’t learning, aren’t doing, you’re dead in the water and that actually makes you unhireable.
When you become impressive enough, through the merit of the work you can show off, that 5 hours a week will be more than enough for someone to see your value and hire you.