You know how this goes by now. Band name at the bottom of the post. Leave a comment if you know who it is before you get there.
Like the title says, this is just a quick update about what I’ve been doing since I was laid off from Instructure with the rest of my QA team. Before this layoff we had been hit up by companies like Blackboard and Moodle, so we didn’t expect to have a hard time finding jobs. Turns out there’s been quite a disaster in tech hiring. I was laid off in october 2024.
October – December
When I was laid off, I received a severence that allowed me to live a few months at my normal income level, but after a couple of weeks applying to job listings and not even receiving a response of rejection we knew we need to do a bit of preperation for a bit longer, maybe while on unemployment. So we paid off cards and shut off subscriptions. We also stocked up on some food that we could store in the deep freeze. My application progress was pretty lax at this time. Maybe 3 applications per week.
January – October
When I was able to apply to unemployment benefits I still had a few thousand dollars from my severence so this were still not horrible, but the reality of the job market was starting to get real. I upped my job application game. I ran my resume through optimizers and compared each against the other until I had something I felt was a good balance between my skills, experience, and brevity. I used these new resumes to apply to 10 or more job postings a week. I actually received a few responses, a couple interviews and was in final running in two or three.
All the time the background chatter on Linkedin an Reddit and a few other job news boards was that job searchers were having difficult times all over the tech fields. My experience was not unique. At one point I had read that for every job posted more than 300 applicants would submit their resume with in the first days. On average people with senior level skills were having to apply to 120 jobs before getting an interview. I kept in contact with my team members, and all were experiencing the same situation.
November – January
Once October was over, so was my unemployment. I was applying to over 50 jobs a week, sometimes up to 40 in a day. I stopped applying to only Sr QA jobs. I’ve been spamming entry level jobs for business analyst, QA, development. But I also applied to non-tech jobs. I applied for writer positions, farm hand, gas station attendant, grocery store employee, Sams Club cashier, delivery driver, security guard, tech support, and more. Sams club is the only one who got back to me. With a rejection letter.
Now I’m in a weird spot that my experience is working against me. A lot of the entry level positions see me as taking a job just until a better one with a need for my skill level comes along. They don’t want to hire and train someone who could be gone in weeks or months. For non-technical jobs, they see me as someone that expects too much pay, too demanding or indipendent, and yes, likely to leave for a better job at any time. My mom told me that I should just leave out the tech skills from my resume or application. the problem is I worked in software for over 20 years, so if I leave those jobs out, I have a 20+ year gap in my work history.
I’ve been messing around on LinkedIn’s learning library to pick up new “certifications” as a way to dress up my profile for those that need to see those things. I’m working on using javascript and chatgpt to create ai enhanced projects.
Lastly, I’ve tried working with some of those micro-task services. You do make money, so that’s the good news. The sad news is how little money you make. I made $7 on mechanical turk working 2 full days worth of hours. Other services doing data annotating may pay better. They claim up to $40 but that’s only if you can get on one of their high priority jobs, otherwise you’re back down to the little bucks.
Now
I am scheduled for a job fair at the local dealership on the 12th, their partner bank will also be there with positions. But I have very little else promising. And I have grown a great hatred of platitudes.
And finally, the band. This is Kim Dracula. He came from TicToc and my wife and I like a lot of his music, but my brother-in-law, who comes from a Frezno Mexican family that would have never exposed him to this kind of music or act, described him as “Weird.”
Gen X Nerd 