[vonseel]

I’ve almost finished reading through your entire original thread from a month ago, because I’m kind of in the same boat as you.

Why do you decline nearly every piece of advice the community here offers? It seems like each time someone makes a suggestion, you come up with a reason why their advice doesn’t work for you.

I’m just pointing this out because otherwise you seem well-spoken and eager to find work, but perhaps you are making things harder on yourself by being inflexible.

Anyways, good luck with the search, I don’t really have any tips but stop calling yourself a mediocre developer and talking poorly about yourself. You may be just as good of a developer and just as smart as anyone at some big tech company, but the other guy had opportunities you didn’t get which led to his success.

[anon50118810]

I didn't actually ask for personal advice in either the other post or this one. The other post was to raise awareness, start a discussion and possibly generate some sympathy toward job seekers. This post asked for general advice on finding developer jobs toward the lower end of the market and on working with recruiters.

A tech equivalent of some of the advice given is when someone asks for help with library X, and a bunch of people recommend they use library Y instead. That might be good advice except if the first person has unspoken reasons why they have to use library X. This happens all the time.

I don't hold it against anyone for trying to help even if they're answering a different question. It comes from a good place and it might help someone else, and I sometimes engage with it, but in the end it's just not very helpful to me personally.

I'm not sure we can talk about HN as a monolith but I think there's a bias here where posters who are successful in their careers run into the just-world fallacy in the hiring context. If someone is struggling then they must be doing something wrong, or they just aren't good enough. It can't be that things sometimes aren't fair, and that the best way to help is to answer what's being asked even if the situation is something you're having trouble understanding.

I've described myself as mediocre to keep the conversation general and to head off accusations that I'm sabotaging myself with a huge ego. However, based on lots of objective evidence and my own subjective opinion, I'm actually a good developer. Based on past experience, many of the employers who have turned me down sight unseen would have been happy with me as an employee had they given me a chance. As I've said elsewhere though, there are issues with my overall situation that I'm unwilling to discuss here, and things aren't always fair.