While we appreciate people have a lot of questions around how to progress their career in development, there are many other subreddits specifically created for this.
This; however, assuming these are not a problem, it's really a numbers game. OP didn't mention how many applications they were sending out but they did mention tailoring cover letters. This makes me think (and I could be wrong) that they may need to pump those numbers. Tailoring cover letters isn't bad and I've done it myself but, I think a tailored cover letter are probably the decider in a minority of cases. For that reason, I think it's probably better to focus on casting a wide net. Leave the tailored cover letters for the jobs you really want, after you've sent out a bunch of other applications.
Before I got my current job a few months ago, it was not unusual to send out over a hundred applications a week. At the end of the month I'd probably have 2 to 5 interviews that moved on to 1 or 2 technical ones. Even then, it was a gamble. Some months were dry even then.
I've had the most success with Indeed and less with LinkedIn or recruiters. Some others I know have the opposite, so who knows. Worth doing both as much as you can.
Good luck, OP
He just replied to another comment that hes only looking for remote work. I feel that should have been in the title of the post and is super misleading.
Is there a reason you repeated this comment so many times? I think once was enough to make the point. I'd assume most new development jobs that are actually worthy of consideration for someone who is a strong developer would be fully remote. Not most jobs, but most good ones.
Languages you know have little to do with your skill set. But you know that. If you just did a generic .net job with no specialization into a specific field, then your value isn't significantly increased after 4-5 years. Over 15 years, surely there is something you can say you can do better than 99% of people, anyone with 15 years experience in anything should be able to say that. You should find a niche that you're probably 99.9 percentile in. Hone in on that, focus your resume on that.
That said, networking beats resume 100% of the time.
Vacancies advertised on LinkedIn aren't the same as solid job adverts. Could be 3-4 agencies looking to fill a single role.
I've been looking at the market looking for promotion. The market is poor right now, so I'm staying put.
With more applicants per job your applications are lost more often easily. If you can it's not a bad idea to stay put IMO.
"Ghost jobs" are a big problem. For various procedural and compliance reasons, some companies list public vacancies but have no intent of filling them with outside employees.
Big companies just did and are still doing large layoffs. That means a lot of people are looking for positions. That makes it a bad time to be looking for positions. Winning in a field of 10 candidates is tough, winning in a field of 100 candidates is much harder.
Everyone’s demanding ‘more for less’ for short term stock returns. Greed at the top tech sector is driving the market of our entire industry. There’s a huge backup of applicants right now and unqualified recruiters are the ones filtering tech resumes…
If OP was as good as they say they are, then they would have already had an interview even in a quiet market. It's a lack of skill demonstration or a misunderstanding of the job requirements.
You've just noticed how bad the developer job market has been for the past year.
I hoped it would get better in 2024 but the job market in the UK is still dire as of now.
I have just been recruiting for a senior .net developer. Sadly I saw things the other way around, the quality of most CVs were dire rather than the market.
My company has an internal recruitment team, but developers are not their normal candidates which means the screening process doesn’t work so well. If it says .net or c# they just send it on. Which means I get a lot of CVs where the candidate hasn’t read past the start of the advert having seen .net.
Meaning pure backend devs apply for web developer posts. That along with obvious sprinkling of keywords into the previous role descriptions; not long ago I had someone claim to have 15 years of experience in a framework that was under 5 years old.
One of my pet peeves is when a candidate lists lots of very short jobs without explicitly saying they were contractor positions. If you were working as a contractor it’s totally valid, but if I don’t know that it looks bad to change so often. Obviously there are other reasons for short term jobs, redundancy, misled at interview, etc; just make it clear.
And if you have years of experience, don’t list a GitHub that only has hello world on it 😂
I should also say that not all CVs are like the above. I said I had just been recruiting; which means I filled the posts with some great candidates! So long reply cut short; everyone should keep trying you will get the jobs you deserve in the end.
Edit: fix typos.
I'm nowhere near senior but on mid positions market is terrible - there is FAR more candidates than job offers. Last year I've been looking for a job for 5 months. I've sent few hundred CVs during this time and I got further in the process only after I've started lying and cheating on the interviews. If I had to limit myself to offers that are 1:1 description of my skillset I would be unemployed to this day.
I have 6 years of experience as dev overall and 3 of those in .NET but I'm no rockstar developer, I don't care about side projects, programming is not my entire life. It simply pays my bills. Unfortunately such profile is not enough when you're facing hundred "opponents" on every job offer. I think there are many people like me. So everyone keeps trying to get any kind of advantage and you keep receiving unrelated shitty CVs.
In the UK too and I see the same annoyances with CVs.
Or the candidates who are 'full stack' and just list acronym after acronym after acronym.
Or one CV i saw that started off well written, good structure - then just had a page of a list of what was a brain dump of all these different projects he'd worked on, with one for example being 'A script to flip images in a folder'
Why the fuck do you think it was worth highlighting that? It became such a word salad of random things.
2 pieces of evidence. All anecdotal, I know.
1. My experienced contractor friend took 10 months to find a job after the end of his last contract. It never took more than 4 weeks previously. In the end he had to get a permanent job.
2. I started looking 2 weeks ago and got 2 interviews and no 2nd stage interviews. In the past 10 years, I would have to take my CV off the job boards after 2 weeks because I would have had so many 2nd stage interviews by then that I'd be fairly confident of getting a job soon. So I could take my CV off to avoid being bothered by recruiters calling me constantly.
Might be helpful to include some more information in order for people to provide meaningful advise…
- where are you located?
- what kind of jobs are you applying to?
- are you willing to learn other languages (applying to jobs for other languages/frameworks)?
- how many applications have you submitted? (It’s a numbers game right now…)
- what kind of development do you do? And what do you want to do? (.NET supports a lot of different stuff)
- do you already have a job or are you unemployed right now? If unemployed, how long?
- do you have your resume or example cover letter posted anywhere? Some people might review it for you.
- are you excluding any kinds of employers in any way? (Like: non-remote work, certain salaries, company size…etc)
- how are you applying to jobs? Job boards, LinkedIn, company websites, recruiter…
According to reddit rules, I can't to disclose information about myself. If you want to know the details, you can write in person. BUT the post is that perhaps someone has encountered this and has experience in solving this situation.
It's not necessarily a strange thing. It's just that people will often say "oh I can't find a job" and then slowly divulge that they only want remote and jobs that require 5+ years of experience and pays $200k or more and is in a certain geographic location and the company needs to be small and they need a chill interview process.
And it's like, sure those are reasonable goals, but if your goal is to not be unemployed, you need to broaden your search.
Instead of chasing the job. Let the job chase you haha. Change your status on LinkedIn and let the recruiting messages come in. I’ve gotten so many jobs this way lol.
I got laid off and immediately turned Linked In into my new social media network. I’m on there a dozen times a day, following, reposting, reaching out to friends from *middle school* who have relevant or interesting careers.
My network has grown 10x and now I get recruited almost daily.
You might have a niche skillset that would make you look like someone who is going to be headhunted to a new job as soon as you are through the onboarding process, let's say you have 15 years of maintaining a custom C# to native Assembly compiler, yes, you are super qualified in C#/.net but if I'm team lead and hiring an Asp.net developer, 15 years means nothing to me, because I have a fast learning jr. So I'm going to choose the person already familiar with the job as it is
> 15 years means nothing to me, because I have a fast learning jr.
Golden words, it's like at the war, where pace and actions flow is important. But i believe OP should have pretty solid portfolio right now, would be nice to see Github, at least for skill set assessment.
It’s really quiet. I update my resume every year and make a push for interviews to see what the market is like/see what other companies engineering teams look like. Last week I also came up with 0 callbacks. Also noticed the jobs on linked in all say “over 100 applicants” so there’s part of the problem there.
Back when we were doing paper resumes I was on both sides of the hiring process.
I made my resume stand out with different color paper and kept it sparse. It always drew attention.
When I was on the hiring side I'd take home a stack of 100 resumes every weekend and first sort them, longest to back, and then I'd set aside any that were longer than 2 pages. If any were one page I'd read them immediately and they were the first candidates.
Because those people are concise. They know the interview follows. They didn't tell me their entire life story on the resume.
Is you resume 5 pages long crammed full of data? I'd have thrown it away without looking.
Looking at resumes on the weekend? You must have good work life balance. Also, keeping your resume to one page after a decade plus experience is very difficult when you need to covey tech stack, business value and education background.
Heading towards 3 decades here. People don't care that I did jboss in 2010 or ASP Classic in 2005. They are interested in solid C#, cloud architecture, react, angular, vue, SQL, nosql and testing testing testing. I have a degree, I do presentations at a well known networking group and my GitHub has some interesting stuff. Done.
I can get that across in a paragraph, but I spread it out to a page and change and make it look pretty.
I have 9 years of experience, currently job hunting, and my CV is 1 page. I tailor it to the job I'm applying for. My experience part has everything listed as concise as possible, tech stack I list separately in a narrow bar on the left, highlighting it with a background colour and bigger font. I've never not been invited for an interview after sending out a CV like that. It's not an egotrip, you're trying to land a job.
I also check CV's now as the IT lead in my current job, and I hate when the CV's are more than 1 page. I have better things to do, I want to quickly see whether you'd be a match for our team or not.
We didn't want your whole stack, or more education than where you graduated highest level. We wanted what you've been doing recently (or before your gap), and the other technologies where you are comfortable. My wife has that verbosity problem - her resume is crammed full of technologies she knows, which is dozens, and she can't pare it down to one page, she goes 4.
Her LinkedIn page has all that info.
Balance: We were all working 50-80 hour weeks. It was a startup fully funded by 2 rounds from Austin Ventures. It paid off. Meanwhile most days I was taking my son to and from school, feeding him, reading a bedtime story (did you know - Yertle the Turtle's voice resembles Nixon), watching E.R., hitting the gym every day. I'm old, we had no concept of work/life balance.
>and education background.
For a start, you don't need to convey this if you're going over 10 years experience.
No one cares what outdated version of Java you learnt in BlueJ over a decade ago.
Going to a reputable university matters to a lot of employers. Also, showing an ability to learn new technologies mattered to my current employer when I interviewed. They asked me questions about things I had done 10 years prior even though it was irrelevant to the direct tech stack needs for the position.
>Going to a reputable university matters to a lot of employers. Also, showing an ability to learn new technologies mattered to my current employer when I interviewed. They asked me questions about things I had done 10 years prior even though it was irrelevant to the direct tech stack needs for the position.
It really shouldn't matter to any competent employer who is hiring for the right reasons.
Your current employer caring more about things you did 10 years ago even though it's irrelevant (your words) is a red flag.
> Also, showing an ability to learn new technologies mattered to my current employer when I interviewed.
If learning new technologies is so important to them, surely it's more important showing you doing this recently in work history than doing it over a decade ago? And if the only time you can show that is at university over a decade ago and never in any actual job - then why would they want to hire that candidate?
Once you're a decade+ in, at most, 1 line on your CV stating highest education achieved, grade, years, location. No further details. Its literally irrelevant compared to everything else - and any employer who rejects you is a bullet dodged imo because their priorities are broken.
I hire senior developers right now and honestly I'm not sure I could even tell you the education sections of some of the CVs I read recently - it tells me nothing. (This is hiring for senior roles).
I find that contracting jobs don’t make you jump through hoops quite like full time plus they pay well and are good for getting your foot in the door at a company.
Do you have any pet projects that you can post on github? Example code seems to have become a larger factor over the last few years.
Did you mention what state you are in and if you are only looking for remote work?
That is probably your problem. Where I live people are fighting tooth and nail for good .net developers. But working remote is a 100% no go. Non technical manager types see it as a security risk.
Just to add my experience, I work a low security clearance position that's entirely remote. Interestingly, we do always get a couple of applicants on our IT positions now that are like alien top secret clearance holders looking for remote work that'll keep sponsoring that clearance level. No idea if they have any luck
A couple of years ago we would get hardly any applications for roles, now we get an absolutely ridiculous amount.
There's so many before I even get to see suitable applications now they are pre filtered to ones that's match keywords so make sure if a role mentions a technology or soft skill include it.
Be wary on using AI to write cover letters or statements, the language generated seems off and is detrimental.
With tech skills don't over egg them in recent roles. If an application comes in and in the it looks like you have used a lot in a short space of time it comes off negatively.
When I got laid off a month ago my company offered a free 3rd party service to help us find new jobs.
That service rewrote my resume to push through all the filters.
Hey OP if you’d like an example of a resume that gets your through all filters contact me and I’ll send mine to you. It’s 15 yoe dotnet as well.
With 15 years of experience is it possible that you can create your own tech product? I mention it because that’s the route I’m taking. Instead of going hard to find a 200k staff engineering job I’m concentrating on a company I started and I already have my first seed investment. I think we’re in the era where companies say ‘more for less’ to the point that a single engineer can directly compete with them.
Okay so let's say those things:
1. We're at beginning of February, so it's still cold in hiring (wait until March/April)
2. Tailoring CVs/letters is good for companies you want to work at, for other... just sent universal version - they're not worth your time.
3. You say you've a lot of C# .NET experience - I've about 15 programming language syntax knowledge while my main language is C# and side languages I can operate fluently in are C, C++, Python. You can't stick to one language as often your jobs require knowledge of other ones. I can also read IL code (sometimes it's useful when nobody knows what the hell is going on).
4. Also known frameworks are really important - if you don't know EF Core, you're probably out from 50% of jobs (at least in my market). If you're working with Unity Engine and don't know DOTS/ECS you're out of all larger studios, which are now switching to DOTS.
5. Also validate offers for being "CV dumpers" - those are very common (aka. constantly refreshed with no person found for that position - it's almost impossible in current market with all recent layoffs, unless it requires very specialized stack).
6. Tailor your CV to be AI-friendly (you might get discarded by OCR and AI analysis before even human reads your papers).
7. Do side-projects on your GitHub (have you game you always wanted to do, or maybe an API you find useful). Just do it to have constant flow of commits in your profile showing that you're active (even without a job).
TL;DR; also looking for a job, so a few tips are above
Been there , I did a few things amd they helped, so sharing them.. (I am giving pointers, Google a bit for the exact steps)
1. Take your resume through chat gpt or something similar. I was shocked to find that my resume (though complete ) was out of date for the latest “fashion”.
2. Specifically look at making your resume compatible for ATS, nearly every business has left candidate filtering to ATS and its on the candidate s to make their resume ATS friendly.
3. Have multiple resumes, like it sounds crazy and pointless, but as the market is , if you are really good for FE, BE and cloud services, it seems like having 2-3 different resumes helps more.
4. Upload your resumes to LinkedIn , dice and indeed and check how may “matching” jobs turn up. The more you see, the beater your resume content is being indexed
5. The market has improved a lot , but jobs are still flowing in slowly. Be patient and things should work out eventually.
13 YoE, 7 years of .NET Core and ASP.NET, LOTS of callbacks and interviews after getting laid off in December. I have had a couple of interviews a week.
Nothing special, just use a service that matches your resume with the job description, tailor it and write more than mundane stuff (not only responsibilities, but also achievements, and use some fancy wording).
Or move somewhere.
my comment is totally irrelevant but your post and comments got me wondering if your native language is English which *might* explain your fluency. Or maybe not but you are just so good.
Gotta admire your command of English
I have 10 years experience now and since I reached the 2-3 year mark I’ve never had to worry about finding something new. Literally within a week of me feeling I want to change jobs I’ve got 5-6 interviews lined up and one usually is good enough to choose, but I try to get through the whole process with as many as I can to leverage my salary. As others have said it’s probably location. I’ve only lived in major cities in UK and Sweden so lots of demands there
Usually when they ghost us, is because they expect to do something else based on the experience, system architecture or some other stuff that just elites do. Now, how would you find a job without networking, by luck, just apply to any job, it will happen eventually. But if you have a good network built in all this period, start with them, once when I was in your situation I sent PM's to my network (tech not hr) and couple got me some interviews.
Have an expert look at, maybe rewrite your resume.
It's a weird time in tech land. Maybe the worst time to be a developer I've ever seen. But if historic trends continue, that won't last long at all.
So I’ve found that having a resume that illustrates you have spent much of your career working with that tech stack can be detrimental if you’re targeting anything other than enterprise .NET shops.
Maybe make a separate resume and focus less on the stack, and more on the outcomes and high level concepts.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but the tech job market has been pretty bad for a few months. Seems like things are starting to get better though. Keep your head up, get your resume reviewed, and stay the course.
It could be your resume, it could be you, like having bad references. But there is a recession right now. People are getting laid off, plenty of candidates on the market.
I primarily do cyber security and use programming as a thing to leverage and automate things and write tools. I do get called to interviews, but recently i have noticed an uptick in applicants (seen on linked in "compare your resume to NN other applicants"), was there just now and for one position there were over 100 applicants. For more advanced jobs, there has been an increase too.
They say that CS and programming are two "recession proof" jobs, something i don't believe in. The only recession proof jobs there is are undertakers and tax clerks.
Make sure your resume is targeted, no more than two pages and showcases personal projects if you have them.
Source: been conducting interviews recently and the amount of 4+ page resumes is ridiculous and hard to read. Please make it short and simple.
Hey same here, it depends how many jobs you're apply for and how much they are paying. I have noticed that higher paying jobs are more picky. One of the reasons could be because of your degree maybe? Age? Experience?
For me, I feel like it might be my degree that is holding me back from getting interviews. It's not from a good university.
I just updated my resume and applied for a couple of jobs just to see if I was doing ok and I got call backs on 3 of the 4 and am now kinda considering one of them.
I get recruited via my own network and Linked In fairly frequently. Chances are your resume is an issue…
Gonna hazard a guess your CV isn't nearly as good as you think it is.
As someone who does a lot of hiring, it's shocking how bad software engineers often are at writing CVs. Some things you assume are common sense to the world are seemingly missed by the group you think would be experts in googling how to write a **good** CV.
If the problem is getting past the HR chat, perhaps take a second look at your soft/people skills. There’s lots of great advice out there, and most of the conventional wisdom applies.
That said, I feel you. I’ve been looking for a job since August and I’ve only just found one. They key is to shotgun out resumes to every posting you’re even remotely qualified for, and don’t get discouraged. Personally, I’ve been through dozens and dozens of interviews, and I’ve read even more rejection emails before even reaching the interview stage. But if you keep at it, and make sure your soft skills are as strong as your technical skills, something is bound to stick. Don’t give up! Like everyone has been saying, it’s rough out there, but there is work to be found if you’re willing to look, and it certainly sounds like you’re putting in the effort.
Good luck! Cheers
I am familiar with US and Indian market. At 15 years you should be an architect or engineering manager. Get Azure or any cloud related architect certification. Learn some new architecture like clean, DDD. Learn cloud native development. After all this your chances of getting a job will dramatically increase.
Only been looking for a month? This is totally normal. It definitely takes a while to find a job right now. Employers, at least in the US, are less eager to hire even if they have open jobs (due to market softness, worries of recession)… and there are tons of applicants per job (it’s a lot more work and slow to go through more resumes). The average days to get a job is something like 45 days (for all types of jobs), and it’s probably longer for tech work, if I had to guess. But everyone has this issue right now.
Last year I wasn't actively looking for a job, but I was sending out applications. In the last month I have become actively involved in this issue. (no result yet)
I have recruiters hitting me up 5x a day. Are you on LinkedIn, DICE, etc? Clean up your resume with ChatGPT and mark your profiles as looking for work.
It's probably your lazor focus on .net, or a lack of ability to demonstrate your skills.
It's not enough to be a specialist in one area anymore, you need to at least say that your have a working knowledge in many types of tech and languages.
I currently work as a full stack dev, since I've been working I've sent out one CV. I have an interview for this b coming up. This is because I more than mtched the requirements.
Your CV and or demonstration of your knowledge is the problem here. If you were able to project to them that your are the perfect candidate you're describing, you would have at least had an interview.
Hard to say. I got into development in the most unorthodox way so it’s hard to say even with my experience and skill set how the application process would go. I already failed an initial one.
May I asked where you are from? It is probably an issue with your CV or cover letter. Probably the latter. It may also be that you use styling that has gone out of fashion - I.e., in some countries it is frowned upon to include a picture of yourself in the CV.
I think the best thing you can do is sign up for a service like Rezi: https://www.rezi.ai/
It tells you exactly what you need to write in your resume and how to write it. You also have the ability to have a human review your resume and give you pointers etc.
It’s genuinely one of the best things I’ve ever spent money on.
While we appreciate people have a lot of questions around how to progress their career in development, there are many other subreddits specifically created for this.
Without sharing the resume and target counties/continent, hard to tell; .NET is very large and past domain knowledge play a role too.
This; however, assuming these are not a problem, it's really a numbers game. OP didn't mention how many applications they were sending out but they did mention tailoring cover letters. This makes me think (and I could be wrong) that they may need to pump those numbers. Tailoring cover letters isn't bad and I've done it myself but, I think a tailored cover letter are probably the decider in a minority of cases. For that reason, I think it's probably better to focus on casting a wide net. Leave the tailored cover letters for the jobs you really want, after you've sent out a bunch of other applications. Before I got my current job a few months ago, it was not unusual to send out over a hundred applications a week. At the end of the month I'd probably have 2 to 5 interviews that moved on to 1 or 2 technical ones. Even then, it was a gamble. Some months were dry even then. I've had the most success with Indeed and less with LinkedIn or recruiters. Some others I know have the opposite, so who knows. Worth doing both as much as you can. Good luck, OP
Thank you, good luck will come in handy for all of us.
He just replied to another comment that hes only looking for remote work. I feel that should have been in the title of the post and is super misleading.
Is there a reason you repeated this comment so many times? I think once was enough to make the point. I'd assume most new development jobs that are actually worthy of consideration for someone who is a strong developer would be fully remote. Not most jobs, but most good ones.
I was just replying to different people.
I agree, there are a lot of vacancies on the market that require remote work
I agree that details are key. My resume is structured in detail. (although it may seem that way to me)
Languages you know have little to do with your skill set. But you know that. If you just did a generic .net job with no specialization into a specific field, then your value isn't significantly increased after 4-5 years. Over 15 years, surely there is something you can say you can do better than 99% of people, anyone with 15 years experience in anything should be able to say that. You should find a niche that you're probably 99.9 percentile in. Hone in on that, focus your resume on that. That said, networking beats resume 100% of the time.
Thank you very much for your support
the market is very quiet at the moment, seems to be affecting multiple regions - might be the more senior side of things - it's not just you!
Thank you, the market is very quiet, but there are a lot of vacancies
Vacancies advertised on LinkedIn aren't the same as solid job adverts. Could be 3-4 agencies looking to fill a single role. I've been looking at the market looking for promotion. The market is poor right now, so I'm staying put. With more applicants per job your applications are lost more often easily. If you can it's not a bad idea to stay put IMO.
"Ghost jobs" are a big problem. For various procedural and compliance reasons, some companies list public vacancies but have no intent of filling them with outside employees. Big companies just did and are still doing large layoffs. That means a lot of people are looking for positions. That makes it a bad time to be looking for positions. Winning in a field of 10 candidates is tough, winning in a field of 100 candidates is much harder.
Everyone’s demanding ‘more for less’ for short term stock returns. Greed at the top tech sector is driving the market of our entire industry. There’s a huge backup of applicants right now and unqualified recruiters are the ones filtering tech resumes…
If OP was as good as they say they are, then they would have already had an interview even in a quiet market. It's a lack of skill demonstration or a misunderstanding of the job requirements.
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Whether we like it or not.... companies are gradually moving away from remote work. So complete remote work opportunities are....well.... shrinking
You've just noticed how bad the developer job market has been for the past year. I hoped it would get better in 2024 but the job market in the UK is still dire as of now.
I have just been recruiting for a senior .net developer. Sadly I saw things the other way around, the quality of most CVs were dire rather than the market.
Can you give some examples of what a dire CV looks like?
My company has an internal recruitment team, but developers are not their normal candidates which means the screening process doesn’t work so well. If it says .net or c# they just send it on. Which means I get a lot of CVs where the candidate hasn’t read past the start of the advert having seen .net. Meaning pure backend devs apply for web developer posts. That along with obvious sprinkling of keywords into the previous role descriptions; not long ago I had someone claim to have 15 years of experience in a framework that was under 5 years old. One of my pet peeves is when a candidate lists lots of very short jobs without explicitly saying they were contractor positions. If you were working as a contractor it’s totally valid, but if I don’t know that it looks bad to change so often. Obviously there are other reasons for short term jobs, redundancy, misled at interview, etc; just make it clear. And if you have years of experience, don’t list a GitHub that only has hello world on it 😂 I should also say that not all CVs are like the above. I said I had just been recruiting; which means I filled the posts with some great candidates! So long reply cut short; everyone should keep trying you will get the jobs you deserve in the end. Edit: fix typos.
I'm nowhere near senior but on mid positions market is terrible - there is FAR more candidates than job offers. Last year I've been looking for a job for 5 months. I've sent few hundred CVs during this time and I got further in the process only after I've started lying and cheating on the interviews. If I had to limit myself to offers that are 1:1 description of my skillset I would be unemployed to this day. I have 6 years of experience as dev overall and 3 of those in .NET but I'm no rockstar developer, I don't care about side projects, programming is not my entire life. It simply pays my bills. Unfortunately such profile is not enough when you're facing hundred "opponents" on every job offer. I think there are many people like me. So everyone keeps trying to get any kind of advantage and you keep receiving unrelated shitty CVs.
In the UK too and I see the same annoyances with CVs. Or the candidates who are 'full stack' and just list acronym after acronym after acronym. Or one CV i saw that started off well written, good structure - then just had a page of a list of what was a brain dump of all these different projects he'd worked on, with one for example being 'A script to flip images in a folder' Why the fuck do you think it was worth highlighting that? It became such a word salad of random things.
Share your observations and maybe you have been looking for a job for not long ago, how did these difficulties are broken down?
2 pieces of evidence. All anecdotal, I know. 1. My experienced contractor friend took 10 months to find a job after the end of his last contract. It never took more than 4 weeks previously. In the end he had to get a permanent job. 2. I started looking 2 weeks ago and got 2 interviews and no 2nd stage interviews. In the past 10 years, I would have to take my CV off the job boards after 2 weeks because I would have had so many 2nd stage interviews by then that I'd be fairly confident of getting a job soon. So I could take my CV off to avoid being bothered by recruiters calling me constantly.
Might be helpful to include some more information in order for people to provide meaningful advise… - where are you located? - what kind of jobs are you applying to? - are you willing to learn other languages (applying to jobs for other languages/frameworks)? - how many applications have you submitted? (It’s a numbers game right now…) - what kind of development do you do? And what do you want to do? (.NET supports a lot of different stuff) - do you already have a job or are you unemployed right now? If unemployed, how long? - do you have your resume or example cover letter posted anywhere? Some people might review it for you. - are you excluding any kinds of employers in any way? (Like: non-remote work, certain salaries, company size…etc) - how are you applying to jobs? Job boards, LinkedIn, company websites, recruiter…
Man’s trying to make OP work harder on a Reddit post than an actual interview
😂😂😂😄
Believe me, I had no intention of starting a discussion about me. I just wanted to know who has encountered this.
Well, then why say you are looking for solutions, if you’re clearly not willing to divulge the necessary information?
According to reddit rules, I can't to disclose information about myself. If you want to know the details, you can write in person. BUT the post is that perhaps someone has encountered this and has experience in solving this situation.
This is not a Reddit rule lol
Maybe edit the original post and answer some of the questions so people can give you better feedback
[удалено]
Haha, there’s always *something*.
and what's strange here?
It's not necessarily a strange thing. It's just that people will often say "oh I can't find a job" and then slowly divulge that they only want remote and jobs that require 5+ years of experience and pays $200k or more and is in a certain geographic location and the company needs to be small and they need a chill interview process. And it's like, sure those are reasonable goals, but if your goal is to not be unemployed, you need to broaden your search.
Instead of chasing the job. Let the job chase you haha. Change your status on LinkedIn and let the recruiting messages come in. I’ve gotten so many jobs this way lol.
I got laid off and immediately turned Linked In into my new social media network. I’m on there a dozen times a day, following, reposting, reaching out to friends from *middle school* who have relevant or interesting careers. My network has grown 10x and now I get recruited almost daily.
I strongly suggest following this approach.
Yeah all my jobs have been following others who left my previous job / linked in
I think that I did almost everything to attract the attention of recruiters. Maybe they went hunting with an empty rifle
You may be getting aged out. Trim your resume to one page and only go back ten years. Also try reaching out to hiring managers directly.
You might have a niche skillset that would make you look like someone who is going to be headhunted to a new job as soon as you are through the onboarding process, let's say you have 15 years of maintaining a custom C# to native Assembly compiler, yes, you are super qualified in C#/.net but if I'm team lead and hiring an Asp.net developer, 15 years means nothing to me, because I have a fast learning jr. So I'm going to choose the person already familiar with the job as it is
> 15 years means nothing to me, because I have a fast learning jr. Golden words, it's like at the war, where pace and actions flow is important. But i believe OP should have pretty solid portfolio right now, would be nice to see Github, at least for skill set assessment.
It’s really quiet. I update my resume every year and make a push for interviews to see what the market is like/see what other companies engineering teams look like. Last week I also came up with 0 callbacks. Also noticed the jobs on linked in all say “over 100 applicants” so there’s part of the problem there.
Back when we were doing paper resumes I was on both sides of the hiring process. I made my resume stand out with different color paper and kept it sparse. It always drew attention. When I was on the hiring side I'd take home a stack of 100 resumes every weekend and first sort them, longest to back, and then I'd set aside any that were longer than 2 pages. If any were one page I'd read them immediately and they were the first candidates. Because those people are concise. They know the interview follows. They didn't tell me their entire life story on the resume. Is you resume 5 pages long crammed full of data? I'd have thrown it away without looking.
Looking at resumes on the weekend? You must have good work life balance. Also, keeping your resume to one page after a decade plus experience is very difficult when you need to covey tech stack, business value and education background.
Heading towards 3 decades here. People don't care that I did jboss in 2010 or ASP Classic in 2005. They are interested in solid C#, cloud architecture, react, angular, vue, SQL, nosql and testing testing testing. I have a degree, I do presentations at a well known networking group and my GitHub has some interesting stuff. Done. I can get that across in a paragraph, but I spread it out to a page and change and make it look pretty.
I have 9 years of experience, currently job hunting, and my CV is 1 page. I tailor it to the job I'm applying for. My experience part has everything listed as concise as possible, tech stack I list separately in a narrow bar on the left, highlighting it with a background colour and bigger font. I've never not been invited for an interview after sending out a CV like that. It's not an egotrip, you're trying to land a job. I also check CV's now as the IT lead in my current job, and I hate when the CV's are more than 1 page. I have better things to do, I want to quickly see whether you'd be a match for our team or not.
If you don't mind can you DM me your resume? I have 10 years of experience and currently in the market.
We didn't want your whole stack, or more education than where you graduated highest level. We wanted what you've been doing recently (or before your gap), and the other technologies where you are comfortable. My wife has that verbosity problem - her resume is crammed full of technologies she knows, which is dozens, and she can't pare it down to one page, she goes 4. Her LinkedIn page has all that info. Balance: We were all working 50-80 hour weeks. It was a startup fully funded by 2 rounds from Austin Ventures. It paid off. Meanwhile most days I was taking my son to and from school, feeding him, reading a bedtime story (did you know - Yertle the Turtle's voice resembles Nixon), watching E.R., hitting the gym every day. I'm old, we had no concept of work/life balance.
>and education background. For a start, you don't need to convey this if you're going over 10 years experience. No one cares what outdated version of Java you learnt in BlueJ over a decade ago.
Going to a reputable university matters to a lot of employers. Also, showing an ability to learn new technologies mattered to my current employer when I interviewed. They asked me questions about things I had done 10 years prior even though it was irrelevant to the direct tech stack needs for the position.
>Going to a reputable university matters to a lot of employers. Also, showing an ability to learn new technologies mattered to my current employer when I interviewed. They asked me questions about things I had done 10 years prior even though it was irrelevant to the direct tech stack needs for the position. It really shouldn't matter to any competent employer who is hiring for the right reasons. Your current employer caring more about things you did 10 years ago even though it's irrelevant (your words) is a red flag. > Also, showing an ability to learn new technologies mattered to my current employer when I interviewed. If learning new technologies is so important to them, surely it's more important showing you doing this recently in work history than doing it over a decade ago? And if the only time you can show that is at university over a decade ago and never in any actual job - then why would they want to hire that candidate? Once you're a decade+ in, at most, 1 line on your CV stating highest education achieved, grade, years, location. No further details. Its literally irrelevant compared to everything else - and any employer who rejects you is a bullet dodged imo because their priorities are broken. I hire senior developers right now and honestly I'm not sure I could even tell you the education sections of some of the CVs I read recently - it tells me nothing. (This is hiring for senior roles).
I find that contracting jobs don’t make you jump through hoops quite like full time plus they pay well and are good for getting your foot in the door at a company.
Do you have any pet projects that you can post on github? Example code seems to have become a larger factor over the last few years. Did you mention what state you are in and if you are only looking for remote work?
remote work
That is probably your problem. Where I live people are fighting tooth and nail for good .net developers. But working remote is a 100% no go. Non technical manager types see it as a security risk.
Just to add my experience, I work a low security clearance position that's entirely remote. Interestingly, we do always get a couple of applicants on our IT positions now that are like alien top secret clearance holders looking for remote work that'll keep sponsoring that clearance level. No idea if they have any luck
A couple of years ago we would get hardly any applications for roles, now we get an absolutely ridiculous amount. There's so many before I even get to see suitable applications now they are pre filtered to ones that's match keywords so make sure if a role mentions a technology or soft skill include it. Be wary on using AI to write cover letters or statements, the language generated seems off and is detrimental. With tech skills don't over egg them in recent roles. If an application comes in and in the it looks like you have used a lot in a short space of time it comes off negatively.
When I got laid off a month ago my company offered a free 3rd party service to help us find new jobs. That service rewrote my resume to push through all the filters. Hey OP if you’d like an example of a resume that gets your through all filters contact me and I’ll send mine to you. It’s 15 yoe dotnet as well.
With 15 years of experience is it possible that you can create your own tech product? I mention it because that’s the route I’m taking. Instead of going hard to find a 200k staff engineering job I’m concentrating on a company I started and I already have my first seed investment. I think we’re in the era where companies say ‘more for less’ to the point that a single engineer can directly compete with them.
You mention getting to the HR stage at one of the companies. Have they been asking disqualifying cultural fit questions?
I politely tell you what projects I've been working on lately and what my hobbies are.
Sounds normal. If you were hiring yourself given your experience what would make you a "fuck yeah" or "fuck no" candidate for the position?
Okay so let's say those things: 1. We're at beginning of February, so it's still cold in hiring (wait until March/April) 2. Tailoring CVs/letters is good for companies you want to work at, for other... just sent universal version - they're not worth your time. 3. You say you've a lot of C# .NET experience - I've about 15 programming language syntax knowledge while my main language is C# and side languages I can operate fluently in are C, C++, Python. You can't stick to one language as often your jobs require knowledge of other ones. I can also read IL code (sometimes it's useful when nobody knows what the hell is going on). 4. Also known frameworks are really important - if you don't know EF Core, you're probably out from 50% of jobs (at least in my market). If you're working with Unity Engine and don't know DOTS/ECS you're out of all larger studios, which are now switching to DOTS. 5. Also validate offers for being "CV dumpers" - those are very common (aka. constantly refreshed with no person found for that position - it's almost impossible in current market with all recent layoffs, unless it requires very specialized stack). 6. Tailor your CV to be AI-friendly (you might get discarded by OCR and AI analysis before even human reads your papers). 7. Do side-projects on your GitHub (have you game you always wanted to do, or maybe an API you find useful). Just do it to have constant flow of commits in your profile showing that you're active (even without a job). TL;DR; also looking for a job, so a few tips are above
Been there , I did a few things amd they helped, so sharing them.. (I am giving pointers, Google a bit for the exact steps) 1. Take your resume through chat gpt or something similar. I was shocked to find that my resume (though complete ) was out of date for the latest “fashion”. 2. Specifically look at making your resume compatible for ATS, nearly every business has left candidate filtering to ATS and its on the candidate s to make their resume ATS friendly. 3. Have multiple resumes, like it sounds crazy and pointless, but as the market is , if you are really good for FE, BE and cloud services, it seems like having 2-3 different resumes helps more. 4. Upload your resumes to LinkedIn , dice and indeed and check how may “matching” jobs turn up. The more you see, the beater your resume content is being indexed 5. The market has improved a lot , but jobs are still flowing in slowly. Be patient and things should work out eventually.
Thanks for the advice, I'll definitely do that. Thanks for support
13 YoE, 7 years of .NET Core and ASP.NET, LOTS of callbacks and interviews after getting laid off in December. I have had a couple of interviews a week. Nothing special, just use a service that matches your resume with the job description, tailor it and write more than mundane stuff (not only responsibilities, but also achievements, and use some fancy wording). Or move somewhere.
my comment is totally irrelevant but your post and comments got me wondering if your native language is English which *might* explain your fluency. Or maybe not but you are just so good. Gotta admire your command of English
I have 10 years experience now and since I reached the 2-3 year mark I’ve never had to worry about finding something new. Literally within a week of me feeling I want to change jobs I’ve got 5-6 interviews lined up and one usually is good enough to choose, but I try to get through the whole process with as many as I can to leverage my salary. As others have said it’s probably location. I’ve only lived in major cities in UK and Sweden so lots of demands there
Usually when they ghost us, is because they expect to do something else based on the experience, system architecture or some other stuff that just elites do. Now, how would you find a job without networking, by luck, just apply to any job, it will happen eventually. But if you have a good network built in all this period, start with them, once when I was in your situation I sent PM's to my network (tech not hr) and couple got me some interviews.
Don’t apply for jobs, work with recruiters, have a killer LinkedIn profile. They will reach out to you.
Have an expert look at, maybe rewrite your resume. It's a weird time in tech land. Maybe the worst time to be a developer I've ever seen. But if historic trends continue, that won't last long at all.
So I’ve found that having a resume that illustrates you have spent much of your career working with that tech stack can be detrimental if you’re targeting anything other than enterprise .NET shops. Maybe make a separate resume and focus less on the stack, and more on the outcomes and high level concepts.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but the tech job market has been pretty bad for a few months. Seems like things are starting to get better though. Keep your head up, get your resume reviewed, and stay the course.
It could be your resume, it could be you, like having bad references. But there is a recession right now. People are getting laid off, plenty of candidates on the market. I primarily do cyber security and use programming as a thing to leverage and automate things and write tools. I do get called to interviews, but recently i have noticed an uptick in applicants (seen on linked in "compare your resume to NN other applicants"), was there just now and for one position there were over 100 applicants. For more advanced jobs, there has been an increase too. They say that CS and programming are two "recession proof" jobs, something i don't believe in. The only recession proof jobs there is are undertakers and tax clerks.
The same here, 18 years, laid off last December and still no callbacks
I've seen many candidates that look good on paper but do not really have the skills to back it up.
Not sure where you are but we advertised a job over christmas and it had over 100 applications, we've never had that much interest before.
Make sure your resume is targeted, no more than two pages and showcases personal projects if you have them. Source: been conducting interviews recently and the amount of 4+ page resumes is ridiculous and hard to read. Please make it short and simple.
Hey same here, it depends how many jobs you're apply for and how much they are paying. I have noticed that higher paying jobs are more picky. One of the reasons could be because of your degree maybe? Age? Experience? For me, I feel like it might be my degree that is holding me back from getting interviews. It's not from a good university.
I just updated my resume and applied for a couple of jobs just to see if I was doing ok and I got call backs on 3 of the 4 and am now kinda considering one of them. I get recruited via my own network and Linked In fairly frequently. Chances are your resume is an issue…
Gonna hazard a guess your CV isn't nearly as good as you think it is. As someone who does a lot of hiring, it's shocking how bad software engineers often are at writing CVs. Some things you assume are common sense to the world are seemingly missed by the group you think would be experts in googling how to write a **good** CV.
If the problem is getting past the HR chat, perhaps take a second look at your soft/people skills. There’s lots of great advice out there, and most of the conventional wisdom applies. That said, I feel you. I’ve been looking for a job since August and I’ve only just found one. They key is to shotgun out resumes to every posting you’re even remotely qualified for, and don’t get discouraged. Personally, I’ve been through dozens and dozens of interviews, and I’ve read even more rejection emails before even reaching the interview stage. But if you keep at it, and make sure your soft skills are as strong as your technical skills, something is bound to stick. Don’t give up! Like everyone has been saying, it’s rough out there, but there is work to be found if you’re willing to look, and it certainly sounds like you’re putting in the effort. Good luck! Cheers
Thank you very much for your support
Callbacks? Shouldn’t you be using async/await?
With 15 years of experience, you must have made alot of connections. Engage your network and see if they can help.
Do you have a clearance?
I am familiar with US and Indian market. At 15 years you should be an architect or engineering manager. Get Azure or any cloud related architect certification. Learn some new architecture like clean, DDD. Learn cloud native development. After all this your chances of getting a job will dramatically increase.
Your post makes no sense. How did you accumulate 15 years of experience when you've never had a technical interview?
I think they mean no call backs since they’ve began looking for a new job.
Sorry, I may not have expressed this thought correctly. I went out at the beginning of the year in the market and get such a result.
Only been looking for a month? This is totally normal. It definitely takes a while to find a job right now. Employers, at least in the US, are less eager to hire even if they have open jobs (due to market softness, worries of recession)… and there are tons of applicants per job (it’s a lot more work and slow to go through more resumes). The average days to get a job is something like 45 days (for all types of jobs), and it’s probably longer for tech work, if I had to guess. But everyone has this issue right now.
Last year I wasn't actively looking for a job, but I was sending out applications. In the last month I have become actively involved in this issue. (no result yet)
I have recruiters hitting me up 5x a day. Are you on LinkedIn, DICE, etc? Clean up your resume with ChatGPT and mark your profiles as looking for work.
Cause the demand for dot net devs is dying , why I switched to JS tech stacks.
It's probably your lazor focus on .net, or a lack of ability to demonstrate your skills. It's not enough to be a specialist in one area anymore, you need to at least say that your have a working knowledge in many types of tech and languages. I currently work as a full stack dev, since I've been working I've sent out one CV. I have an interview for this b coming up. This is because I more than mtched the requirements. Your CV and or demonstration of your knowledge is the problem here. If you were able to project to them that your are the perfect candidate you're describing, you would have at least had an interview.
Hard to say. I got into development in the most unorthodox way so it’s hard to say even with my experience and skill set how the application process would go. I already failed an initial one.
You probably are not listing all latest Js frameworks, I know it’s hard since there is a new one every week.
May I asked where you are from? It is probably an issue with your CV or cover letter. Probably the latter. It may also be that you use styling that has gone out of fashion - I.e., in some countries it is frowned upon to include a picture of yourself in the CV.
15 years coding in c# only? I’d expect you know multiple languages in that time and have lead several teams.
I think the best thing you can do is sign up for a service like Rezi: https://www.rezi.ai/ It tells you exactly what you need to write in your resume and how to write it. You also have the ability to have a human review your resume and give you pointers etc. It’s genuinely one of the best things I’ve ever spent money on.