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by lhorie 1874 days ago
Don't want to sound negative, but there needs to be at least some value proposition. An employer isn't going to be super impressed if the pitch is "I'd like flex hours, training, open to anything, gimme gimme gimme". Everyone is "willing to learn"; the difference is who talks the talk and who walks the walk. She needs to have some sort of target role and be at least able to demonstrate passing familiarity with some popular technology.

As for cold networking, two options are:

- talking to recruiting agencies, which often have a pool of employers that they have relationships with and can help open doors

- good ol' cold calling - research companies that you feel are good matches and are hiring, send a resume and go from there

A third potential option is to do freelance w/ local mom-and-pop shops, at least temporarily, to build up a small portfolio, dust off tech chops and getting the google-fu up to speed.

Often times, non-tech companies have less strict/technically challenging hiring processes. These are good companies to aim for.

For her old experience specifically, I hear that there is demand for COBOL in some government niches. Might be worth looking into.

2 comments

> ...there needs to be at least some value proposition.

This is spot on.

I'd recommend signing up and completing a relatively well-known coding bootcamp.

Edit to add, in 20 years a lot has changed outside of just specific CS skills:

Cloud collaborative suites, conferencing systems, Slack/MSFT Teams, JIRA, git, just to name a few.

20 years ago, I was at my first role out of college--we used Outlook, MSFT VC++ 6.0, VSS, and AOL Instant Messenger.

MSFT Teams -- my condolences.
I see this sentiment online, but using MS Teams at work, I have a great experience. 2-n way chat threads and video calls, team bulletin boards, and integrated apps like sharepoint, excel, custom internal software, etc.

I use slack, zoom, and discord for a mix of school and personal use, and appreciate what each of these offer, but wouldn’t wish to switch off of Teams for work. I do wish you could message yourself on Teams like slack. That’s a nice quick reference utility.

Why do you offer condolences for MS Teams though?

it's a lot better than using nothing, I'll give you that much. I think great is a stretch though.

However, the product is really rough around the edges and lacks the quality you'd find in other products (well, the other product, but there are also open source alternatives* that are worth looking at as well imo).

* https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/fokrr7/opensour...

My friend's father works with COBOL. Apparently it's quite lucrative. It isn't used much, but it's also hard to hire people for those jobs so they tend to be well paid.
Yeah, I read about some roles paying upwards of $200k, but I think they were in California (OP is asking about NY, which I don't know much about)
I am sure there are COBOL jobs in NY; plenty of old firms (banks and the like) have headquarters there. A quick Google search seems to confirm this.