[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.