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I don't have "real startup" experience with, you know, investors and stuff. But I do have failure experience. Without funding, the line between failure and not is way more blurry; but you fail the same. Sometimes those failures come with emotional problems, sometimes not. When failures don't come with emotional problems, cleanup is easy. Get a job and do financial cleanup. When the failures come with emotional problems, well, then it's harder. For me? I think it's a bad idea to go to my contacts when my performance is below a certain level, because... I'm just not performing up to my usual standards, and actually doing a job with people who expect me to perform at the level of most of my friends would be a challenge when I'm fully functional. And when I'm really messed up? expecting me to perform at the level I've been capable of performing at in the past is a bit unrealistic. But, the problem is that my job is absolutely central to who I am. I'm not going to get better until I get a job and feel like I'm making forward progress at that job. That's just how I work. So... personally? I go through body shops when I'm like this. Why? Mostly because employers don't go for the body shop until they've exhausted their contacts. They don't know any more good people, so they'll settle for warm bodies. And depressed-me can meet those standards, usually. I'll probably even have enough skill-margin for them to put up with the downsides of me still being messed up. And eh, I've had good luck with getting help from the managers; I mean, my big problem is staying on-task, and that gets way worse when I'm not in a good place, mentally, and my experience? managers in those situations seem to be pretty cool with me asking them for help with that sort of thing. I think they know the score, too. They know they're gonna get second-raters from the body shop, and they're willing to put some effort if it looks like some effort can turn you into something useful. When the economy is good like this, most of the gigs you will find are "contract to hire" - meaning you work for them for a year, and if the economy is still good in a year, they'll offer to hire you on full-time, which gives you a nice path forward, if you still need training wheels after the first year is up. When the economy is bad, that expectation isn't set, but the rules are about the same either way. Oh yeah, to get a body shop job? put your resume on DICE. take the calls, listen carefully, reject jobs you aren't qualified for (the body shops aren't qualified to do that, and you will go to a lot of interviews for jobs you aren't qualified for if you don't take charge of the filtering) But yeah, especially if you are in the bay area, body shops are like a million times better than e-lance |