[stopComplaining]

Your attitude and mindset is honestly what's keeping you from actually getting a job again. Your prior "experience" literally did nothing to prepare you for a modern job in software/tech. Your constant rants / posts / unwillingness to listen to others from your many many posts, is more evidence that you want something handed to you instead of actually spending time yourself learning new things that will actually get you a job. Stop using HN as your venting ground and instead work on being an adult capable of self independence.

[djellybeans]

Sunken costs.

I've had my resume re-done several times, and took the aforementioned interview prep. Applied to almost a thousand jobs last year alone. It has not made me more employed. And yes, I do want a job handed to me because the lack of progress has made me very desperate.

I don't even trust myself to do the right things anymore. But I now prefer not to learn anything for work unless I am getting paid for it. There's no positive feedback cycle I can find otherwise.

[stopComplaining]

A couple of things: - If you were actually desperate, you would be trying to find ANY job. Even a minimum wage job because if not, you will be homeless in a month.

> "But I now prefer not to learn anything for work unless I am getting paid for it." - Do you know what compnay pays you to do this? Starbucks!! It takes them 1 hour of training to teach you how to make a frapachino and you'll instantly be productive. For a software compant to teach you from the ground up? MONTHS of investment when they can hire someone else who actually knows their tech stack and have relevent developer experience.

- Ever since the pandemic started and remote development started taking precedence, the amount of competition for tech jobs have skyrockted. But even then, for the past year and a half, we had one of the hottest tech job markets, besides the past 6 months of downtrend. Yet you could not find a single job offer in that time period means, hey sir, you don't have the skillset that a company will pay you to work for. So what does that mean you should do? You should STOP APPLYING like you're trying to win the lottery and actually go learn some software development skills. Learn Python and data structures and algorithms. Learn how to be a GOOD SKILLED developer and not an entitled brat hoping for the easy times like you had it 5 years ago. News flash, the world has changed and either you adapt or you get out of this industry.

I wish you luck and I hope you stop making these kinds of posts because everyone is going to tell you the same thing over and over and over and over and over.

[djellybeans]

Am confused by your second paragraph. You refer to "easy times" of 5 years ago, but also say "one of the hottest tech job markets" in the past 18 months. Not sure if this is meant to say that today is as good as it was 5 years ago for jobs.

I just can't see myself improving by learning on my own anymore. As another professional told me, "you're practicing, but with no guidance and nobody to step in and let you know when what you're practicing is the wrong approach." And when a person can spend many hours a week with practice and learning and receive the same result - no job offers - as someone who did little-none, it's entirely reasonable to conclude that learning new things is just a waste of time.

I still code once in a while, just to keep busy. Still haven't gotten a good idea of "exchange rate" for employability with the knowledge I obtained from my personal C and JavaScript projects.

I know that many companies won't train you from the ground up, but there are a couple. So I started looking into WITCH and similar consulting firms with a contract training program.

InfoSys and Deloitte have rejected me for some general SWE positions (not language-specific) but there are other similar places. Don't mind if I have to go to one of these body shops, they seem like my best fit for a software job right now.

[stopComplaining]

I'll say I appreciate you taking the time to get me to understand your situation a bit. To clarify, 5 years ago, it was much easier to get a developer job with less experience and less knowledge. Now there is a much higher bar, even though a year ago, there was a high demand for developers, BUT the bar is now raised. A lot of this is because of the emergence of coding bootcamps and the popularity of software development careers in general.

So again, there is unfortunately much more competition and much more to learn and apply to have a stable career in tech. As for what to practice and learn, I would start off with what you learned from your actual interviews you've had over the past few years. Remember what questions they asked you, and the ones you couldn't answer well. Find out those answers and truly understand why the interviewer even asked you those questions in the first place.

Remember that the job of an interview is to tell that a company is hiring a COMPETENT person who they perceive can do the job. When you can't answer people's questions, they don't perceive you as competent or a good candidate and will find someone else. Your job is to learn how to be competent, to answer common interview questions (basic programming, fizzbuzz, system design, data strcutures and algorithms, etc). You need to be coding more, like literally everyday. There are many coding practice coding sites where they will give you some typical coding problem and you can practice to implement them. Then you can go online to reddit or what not and ask people to review your code. This feedback loop will help you improve and further your chances of not only being a good developer, but ultimately getting a job.