Frustrations with interviewing in this wild job market

TravisTheHuman said:

One reason I always been jealous of IT/software/developers/web/etc is that (my perception is)you can do personal projects on your own with little to no monetary investment.  Are there any projects in this realm that could A) demonstrate your skills or B)make you money?  
 

If I knew how to code or make an app I have a backlog of many ideas I would go make in a heartbeat if I had the spare time to do so.

 

By comparison mechanical engineering is a lot harder to execute personal projects.  3d printing has improved and so has hobby level CAD software but it's still far from free and can be extremely expensive depending on your goal.  Additionally it can consume lots of real physical space.

 

 

Yup, get a free GitHub account and work on your own projects and on public collaborations. Then you can show actual working, real projects with actual code much like for me, a technical writer, can provide writing samples of the work I've done. 

No degree, no people skills, no desire to learn. Good lord no wonder you aren't employed. You could have gone to school to be a lineman and been halfway through your apprenticeship if you started when you were complaining about the job market last year. You'd be making halfway decent money and getting some fresh air which you likely need anyways. 

RacetruckRon said:

No degree, no people skills, no desire to learn. 

lots of openings for sheetrock, paint, concrete or roofing work.

In reply to ShawnG :

No there isn't. Not for this guy. He wouldn't last a week. 
 

Those trades are about raw production. Physical labor. Long hours, hot sun, heavy lifting.  No hustle= no pay.

My company has an overall workforce of about 1700 construction workers (all trades). 85% of them are Hispanic.

dculberson said:

Do you live with your family and get some kind of allowance? No value judgement intended - I'm just baffled at how you managed to stay housed and fed and even spend some money on your car. I hope you can take care of yourself somehow. 

Nope, but I'd saved up a good bit of money and spares while I was at my last tech job which I've since burned through and taken on some debt, and for much of the time I haven't had a full-time job, I did gig work to slow my descent deeper into poverty. It helps that I can live very cheaply. I can probably count the number of non-business-related things I've bought for myself that I didn't need since the fall of 2023 on my fingers, and probably half of them are bike spares. If I hadn't crashed the Toyobaru in the summer of 2024 I could've kept running events with it like nothing happened with that money (assuming no major failures), but instead I've only entered 2 events since the beginning of 2024, including the one I crashed it at.

ShawnG said:

RacetruckRon said:

No degree, no people skills, no desire to learn. 

lots of openings for sheetrock, paint, concrete or roofing work.

While I understand the sentiment, and as primarily a concrete guy I'm trying to not be offended lol, people skills are huge for the trades really and you gotta learn a bunch of specific tasks.

Otherwise an experienced crew will chew him up and spit him out in about a day.

TravisTheHuman said:

 

I'll admit to being a bit confused here also.  You are soured on the IT industry and don't want to invest resources in it, yet a lot of your commentary is about how difficult it is to find employment in that industry.  Do you want a job in that space, or are you looking to transition to something else.  If so, what?  

RE:  Degree stuff...  Its a box you will likely need to check for a technical degree.  It might not be a flat out requirement, but it will make your chances of not getting filtered out so much better.  If its possible to pick up where you left off with your degree, I'd do that in a heartbeat.  No matter what industry you are headed 4, just having that "piece of paper" with a 4 yr degree on it will be helpful.

Also, as much as the "AI Mania" bothers me also, you know damn well there are LLM applications wayyyy outside "general AI" (Chat GPT-ish) that may still be of interest to you.

I'm more looking to transition to something else but I'm not totally ruling out IT jobs yet, at least 1/4 of the jobs I've applied to have been IT jobs.

Even if I have all the knowledge to get a degree, the process of getting it seems pretty daunting, even if it's just sitting a ton of exams and writing a thesis paper. I'd also have to consider what it would cost. Honestly I can't say for sure that I haven't forgotten a bunch of obscure computer science theory.

I had an idea to make an object recognition LLM to automate a big chunk of the work for a business idea I tried in 2024 if it took off (it didn't) and I think content recognition is generally a lot more useful than content generation, but I don't think it's something I'd want to get into as a career.

TravisTheHuman said:

One reason I always been jealous of IT/software/developers/web/etc is that (my perception is)you can do personal projects on your own with little to no monetary investment.  Are there any projects in this realm that could A) demonstrate your skills or B)make you money?  
 

If I knew how to code or make an app I have a backlog of many ideas I would go make in a heartbeat if I had the spare time to do so.

Demonstrate skills, probably not in a way that would impress many employers today. If I built a very complicated website using very specific technologies (ideally hosted on one of those expensive proprietary cloud platforms) that might impress a web dev company, but that's about it. My programming skills probably wouldn't impress anyone hiring for a dedicated software development job, the work I used to do was a mix of admin, cybersecurity, development and tech support.

Make money, probably not either. I slapped together a pretty simple website for that 2024 business in about 15mins and I guess it helped make money, but the business never recouped startup costs.

SV reX said:

In reply to ShawnG :

No there isn't. Not for this guy. He wouldn't last a week. 
 

Those trades are about raw production. Physical labor. Long hours, hot sun, heavy lifting.  No hustle= no pay.

My company has an overall workforce of about 1700 construction workers (all trades). 85% of them are Hispanic.

 

In reply to SV reX :

Ah so you don't know about the gig work I was doing last year. Running around lifting 50lb+ objects on the regular and doing hundreds of squats per day in everything from scorching summer heat to frostbiting winter snow. It felt like I was just destroying my legs each day but I'm happy to report they don't seem to have taken any significant long-term damage.

The work I did for my own business idea didn't require so much lifting but also involved spending full work days walking around outdoors in often E36 M3ty weather (first time out it was below -20C with awful ripping winds, that sucked!)

I am worried that anyone else recruiting for a job involving physical labor may also assume that because I used to work a desk job, I'd simply faint onto a chaise lounge like a cartoon Victorian woman if I ever had to lift anything. I like to highlight the physical labor in the gig work on my resume for that reason.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

I stand by my comments.  Your strengths lie in other areas. 

Antihero said:

ShawnG said:

RacetruckRon said:

No degree, no people skills, no desire to learn. 

lots of openings for sheetrock, paint, concrete or roofing work.

While I understand the sentiment, and as primarily a concrete guy I'm trying to not be offended lol, people skills are huge for the trades really and you gotta learn a bunch of specific tasks.

 

Otherwise an experienced crew will chew him up and spit him out in about a day.

Lol. Apologies. 

Mechanic and used to work in a tool repair shop.

There are some hard working guys out there. There's also some hired labour that I've met. 

Concrete is not a skill I have but I bet if I had a strong back and not much else going for me, I could still strip forms.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

50lbs? All at once?

Come toss hay bales. I'll show you how to work.

I did concrete work in summer in Oklahoma during my last summer before graduating college. 

I barely made it two weeks before I asked for my job back at a Deli. That E36 M3 is brutal. 

ShawnG said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

50lbs? All at once?

Come toss hay bales. I'll show you how to work.

QFT.  Did hay for 8 seasons, all day every day.  Had about 1000 acres of just hay at one point, plus did contract baling.  Farmer strength is real.  

In reply to 93gsxturbo :

"Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher."
–Anthony Bourdain

SV reX said:

I struggle with a thirty-something complaining about "ageism"...

The day you wrote that post was my 55th birthday.  If I lost my job, the odds of me getting another through resume sending would be very, very low.  It would almost certainly have to be through personal connections.  About a month ago, things looked sketchy (not exactly smooth sailing yet but better) and someone I was chatting (who I used to work with) with made a point that they had 3 job opening about to come out.

In reply to mfennell :

I lost a job because of age discrimination at the age of 57 (and won a legal settlement because of it).  Ageism is very real. 

But it feels wrong coming from a 30-something. 

ShawnG said:

In reply to 93gsxturbo :

"Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher."
–Anthony Bourdain

I paid for my first motocycle by washing dishes, a kitchen is an excellent place to develop life skills.

SV reX said:

In reply to mfennell :

I lost a job because of age discrimination at the age of 57 (and won a legal settlement because of it).  Ageism is very real. 

But it feels wrong coming from a 30-something. 

It feels wrong, but from my own experience ageism does kick in a lot earlier in some areas of IT than it does in more established fields.

A lot of people in IT (especially software development) work on assumptions of a 10-15 year total career length in this business and then move on to something else. Like, literally buy a farm or something like that. Heck, there's a fair number of people who think you're a failure if you're not a manager  five years in (I disagree, and I've managed development teams several times over my career).

Just in case you're wondering why a lot of modern software is so "great", I'm sure it's got nothing to do with people reinventing the wheel due to lack of experience.

People like me who are in their late fifties, still build software and mentor more junior developers are an exception, but becoming less so as a lot of the people who grew up with the first and second generation of home computers are around that age. Of course both the superpower and problem most of us have is that of Deja Moo, because we've seen this BS before several times.

But yeah, ageism is real. As is a lack of degree being a potential problem, although as I mentioned in this thread before, I never completed mine either.

Probably not the only problem in this thread, though.

Well we got good and bad news today. Apparently my fiance's 3rd (and in person interview on Thursday of last week) netted her a well-paying marketing job. 

She got home from Florida today and was complaining yesterday of not feeling well. She tested positive for COVID when she got home, 4th time she's had it since Nov 2020. She has an auto-immune disease, so she's even more susceptible to it. 

In reply to z31maniac :

Congratulations, and I hope she gets well quickly. 

SV reX said:

In reply to z31maniac :

Congratulations, and I hope she gets well quickly. 

Thank you kindly sir! Each time she's had it, it was less severe than the time previous. So hopefully that trend continues.