Ask HN: Can't get hired – what's next?

Adjust your definition of a “real career” as one making over 150k. Another adjustment is thinking 4 months is a long time, especially given you know you could improve interviewing.

Check out data fields. I’m in data analytics, no I don’t make 150k, but it’s a good living and I consider it real. I do a lot of good and save government a lot of money with my tech skills.

If you want to stay in the bay area and leverage your experience, perhaps you want to become a technical co-founder for someone?

Otherwise it might make sense to move out of the bay area to where there are lower costs of living and then lower your salary expectations to match.

Bear in mind that being a good corporate drone or middle manager requires different soft skills and attitude than being the CEO of your own company. You have to march to someone else's drum which can be hard.

You need to prove to yourself and others that you can be a regular developer now, you're in a position where you might need to sacrifice salary, job description and/or working conditions to get a foot back on the ladder.

Beyond salary, the culture of working hours in the bay area might be a bad fit for you. If you're looking for a boring (in a good way) salaryman programmer role you might need to see where those sort of companies are centred.

Note, I live and work outside the US so I can't give specific US advice.

You have set a high goal of $150k salary without a clear way to achieve it, or a clear passion, if I'm reading correctly.

What is your depth of knowledge in? You say software?

Law would be an risk idea if you don't love it with all your heart, even people who love law hate it by the end of law school.

From the tone of your post, you might be suffering from a bit of burnout. If that's the case, then I would recommend taking any extremely low paying and low stress retail job for the rest of this year. Perhaps, when January rolls around, having had a chance to mentally decompress, you might once again consider a position in the startup world. In this job market, given your situation, you're going to have a really tough time applying for jobs at large companies while hoping to beat out all the other job applicants for that $150K+ position. If you're willing to consider taking a lower salary, I would recommend that you focus on applying for jobs at tiny startups where money is tight and the base salary they are offering is $100K or less. A lower salary means that there will be fewer job applicants that you have to beat out for the position. Right now, it might sting to take a lower salary, but, the job market might pick up in a year or two, and then it might be a lot easier to land a high paying position.

I don't really know what it's like in America but 150k here is insane. If you really can't land a job, it's either time for an attitude adjustment or perhaps a third bite at the apple.

FWIW it's a very challenging job market right now. It took me 7 months to land a job, and I know other people are struggling even longer than that.

Networking seems to be the only way to get past the HR filters.

I’m in the same boat, but fortunately have a job right now. I’m not sure what I’ll do after this current one.

Seems like the interview pipeline is geared towards new grads and junior engineers and penalize senior and staff. At what point do I stop having to do these silly coding interviews?! At what point does my resume and 20 yrs of experience speak for itself? So called senior/staff interview loops are a joke with toy system design questions. What do you really learn asking “design twitter” 100 times?

The only answer I can come up with is networking. Basically, don’t bother interviewing. 4 of my last 5 jobs were via networking—no interviews.

Sorry to hear you are in this situation. I've been there as well, but sticking in the middle of this is more than nerve wracking and a serious health issue... First, I agree that AI will be shaking up several jobs. But I think that lawyers will also have there aces up the sleeves to keep their business running. Nonetheless, working as one isn't very healthy as well as you always are under pressure to gather enough billables... Niche is always a solution to the mass grinding. Secondly, an advice I once received: looking back at your past jobs, was there something you enjoyed doing besides your main tasks and clocked voluntarily some extrahours, because you were passionate about it? Like the controller, who stepped forward and got a health and safety training, without being paid extra for it, the controller, who wrote a small software tool for easing work processes, the software engineere, who created an onboarding portal for new employees.. Sometimes, people realize, that they already did something, they really enjoyed but never thought about to make it a focus and not just somethin "useful, besides no one else takes care of it"... This hint really helped me to realize, what I was actually good at all the time even though it had nothing to do with my day job and my previous roles.

I wish you all the best in this current situation and hope, things will fall in place quite soon.

Why can you not pass tech screens? You mean leetcode questions? I know a guy who just made youtube videos solving them and eventually he got good enough to get a job at Google.

Regarding law school, I would point out that law grad salaries are bi-modal. If you get in big law, you would start at $210k, if not you will start at a lot less. Presumably, with your background, your easiest pathway to big law is patent litigation, but I would say there is still a lot bias favoring EE degrees over CS, but less so than in the past (as I recall from interviewing a long time ago that was true, but at my firm, I think its less of issue, but your experience may vary).

Law school is expensive and I don't think there is a cheap option in the bay area (even the state school is expensive but in other locations, it can be cheaper), but they do give out scholarships.

I wouldn't choose law school unless you think you could do well in the actual legal career environment. I don't know what you mean by "good contacts for law school," but if that means you know people in the field, I would suggest talking to them about it. Get as much information you can get.

Any worries that law is not going to be a viable career with AI seems farfetched by me, particularly in litigation.

Back when the dot com bubble burst I ended up in the same position and had to switch careers in order to keep the rent paid, and programming became just a hobby instead. I kind of prefer that as everything I've heard about modern commercial software development sounds like hell (especially if, like me, you have no interest in web stuff). Being able to work on what I want to, at my own pace, in languages I like, is nice

I definitely miss the paychecks that come with tech jobs, though.

Been there after the dot com bust - in my case I eventually got hired by a startup where I aced the brain teasers and 6 months there gave me the tech stack to get hired at a big company that carried me through to retirement. Six months of 996 may be the price to get back on the ladder.