[gherkin0]

There's also a bias against the currently unemployed. It took 6 months of hard work for a friend of mine to find a job after he quit one after 3 months without anything lined up, because it was such a bad fit that it was making him depressed. Up to that point, he had zero problems finding a job, the only difference was his employment status while job hunting.

[jakebasile]

Yes, I think that has contributed to it as well. In retrospect I should have started lining up interviews when I saw the company might fold, but I had never had any issue finding employment in the past so I didn't prioritize it over trying to right the ship.

[1138]

2 years ago I moved to SF from a shithole city. I had taken off like 3 years to work on my own projects. It was more difficult than I expected to find a job without any connections. Took about 3 months after moving here.

I think there's at least some bias against people who have taken time off because they appear comfortable not having a job and therefore the company has less leverage over them.

[gherkin0]

I think the bigger bias at play is the just-world fallacy. Employers assume that everyone who is unemployed must be unemployed justly because something is wrong with them (e.g. they're incompetent, slackers, toxic, etc.). That's the problem my friend had: the company that eventually hired him admitted they spent a long time trying to figure out what was wrong with him, even though they liked him.

[dba7dba]

I concur. Any gap looks bad.