Lost my job in early 2023. Couldn't find anything (25 years of exp, director of engineering managerial/technical type, great at what i do by past coworkers/bosses admission). By EOY I had to sell my house, figured I could use the (significant) profits to buy time or I could travel and make the time a little more enjoyable, so I set out to explore most of Europe thinking, well I'll for sure find a job before I run out of money! Another year went by, hundreds of applications, no job. Back home now, living in rather inadequate accommodations thinking "any day now!" Applied to ~400 jobs in the last 1.5 months (because at this point I'm applying to everything that moves), 3 interviews, 3 ghostings. Everyone's rejecting for real shitty reasons, I could go on for a bit about that.
1) as the child of a parent who was a smart, hard working accountant/financial analyst who was out of work for 2 long stretches in my youth, I have learned when you lose your job, you do not fuck around — you attack it with the same urgency as if the house was on fire as in immediately; 2) after 25 years, you’ve got to have some network — swallow your pride and use them.
I have been there, and I saw my father — there is nothing good about it. You have my sympathy and I wish you the best.
Applying to 400 jobs is apparently not enough sense of urgency, got it. It's surely American laziness that's the problem and not the infinite slave labor they're competing with.
400 applications in two years is less than one application a day. The last time I was unemployed I was applying to five to ten companies a day all with targeted cover letters. I kept track of every application and followed up. I made it an eight hour a day job to find a job.
You are missing the point that a director level resource, could only apply to a relatively smaller number of roles. Entry level IC might not be worth applying.
So despite what they say, the limitation factor might also be number of posted jobs.
I know they said they applied to anything - but still anything for that profile might be a bit more broad - entry level IC to FANG may be which pays better or a role that is open to leveling or start up or any other combos.
I've done a few rounds of CV edits and reviews early on, it hasn't helped. It's worth noting that the initial CV I had was one where I never had trouble finding work with.
Edit: misunderstood "referrals" for "references" so edited my reply out. No, I've never asked for referrals from past colleagues.
Not having LinkedIn is ruining your chances. Candidates without a LinkedIn are going to come across as a scam in the very least, 90% of the time your application will just get tossed if you can't be found on LI.
Pretty much this. I know lot of people hate Linkedin but the fact is that if you are a job candidate and have little to no Linkedin, it's a huge potential red flag in today's world. Lot of scammers, overemployeds/moonlighters out there.
When I was moonlighting LinkedIn didn’t affect me. Every time I applied/interviewed and got hired for a w2 job, I just left my last non moonlighting employer on there, and checked the “please don’t contact current employer” checkbox. I hadn’t worked there in over a year.
Didn’t my new employer want me to update my LinkedIn? That never came up, but if it would have I would have delayed. Why should I support their business model.
At its most basic, this is a cult of qualification which no longer provides real value, it fails for a number of reasons I won't get into here.
When you disqualify arbitrarily, and can't find anyone because of that, its your fault for disqualifying everyone, not the market's fault for not having the ballerina that doesn't exist.
Want a programmer in a language thats only 10 years old with 15 years of direct experience? You aren't going to find it even when the creator of that language applies.
You pay to have the work done. That is the only legitimate requirement for hiring someone and remaining employed, and you can't go and change the requirements later when they show they can do more. Doesn't matter if they moonlight, are overemployed etc. That view to disqualify such people are in fact monopolistic practices designed to disenfranchise wages that are already low and distorted because of money-printing, they are not red-flags.
Its like the flawed type of thinking that "We need someone to do this work, but this guy is so overqualified he'll leave first chance; so we won't hire anyone".
You hire to have a job done. You don't get to be an arbitrary slave master.
The moment you lose sight of this is the moment you ignore your immediate needs, and drive your company on a path towards failure, and if its a consolidated large company, that failure and bad decisionmaking will impact a lot more people because of the centralization/concentration.
Financial engineering can decouple the need for immediate action, but the tradeoff is that the risk of not doing things you should have done becomes far greater to your long-term sustainability, and its completely invisible. There is no place for deception and coercion in the hiring process. If the job doesn't exist, don't jam communication channels. Jamming channels is tortuous interference.
The point is that when you have 100 Resumes to sort through for 1 role, you will have to use process of elimination. In 2025, with AI/scams/bots/moonlighters, Linkedin Profile is a good way to sort through. I am not saying having Linkedin is the only thing that matters but when there is so much noise, you need to stand out especially as a real human.
Sure, there is naturally a sieving process in any hiring, and the issue of AI/scams/bots is simple to solve because it was solved before AI was around before people got lazy. Fraud and misrepresentation isn't a new thing or even "being unsolve-able except in just one way, your chosen route".
The answer is simple...
Require that they come in and show up physically to the office to verify their CV/application/Driver's License, and at that time since there will be cost on the business side, also cross-check if they fit other open positions you have, or if they are interested in hearing about other positions (the answer will almost certainly be yes). Rapidly promoting from within naturally bubbles the competent to positions without a lot of external risk like what you've described.
This is how you build a resilient pipeline of talent, and vet the soft skills people who would be good at the job that you'll never find through an interview except by moonshot chance. When you structure it from the get-go to exclude excessively and use bad indicators, you have bad data in and get bad outcomes out.
> LinkedIn Profile is a good way to sort through.
Its not, there are plenty of fake LinkedIn Profiles. You can't stand out as a real human when you have pigeonholed everyone into a circular peg and set the sieve requirements to a square peg. Forcing people to all go through a online centralized portal, even when they show up in person, is what promotes these perverse incentives. Not rocket science.
As a business you can do a lot to solve problems, and there's no way you can stand out as a human among the noise of digital artifacts where bots mimic real humans in the same digital environment. Go physical.
I've friends who are executives that do hiring, their main complaints were we've tried to hire people for X positions, and our top 10 candidates were all fake, we spent months on this with numerous interviews (cost) and have to start all over from scratch.
I pointed out the answer is rather stupid simple. Go old school verify the inputs are real at the beginning of the process, not at the end after you sunk all those costs. That's what they've been doing since then and it works.
Finding the right talent is a cost you have to pay that you can't push off on other businesses through use of products or services where that business may lie/misrepresent because each business is different, and if you depend upon that one pipeline for talent they can and will eventually cause issues where you can't find talent.
The attitude you seem to have mirrors the same things I see in people who simply don't want to pay the cost to get competent people, and by extension don't want to actually be in business.
Also, conditions worsen when you spoil an entire labor pool over decades through bad management in consolidated hands, it gets harder and costlier to find qualified labor. Its the nature of ponzi; costs go up unti outflows exceed inflows.
If you don't get ahead of the labor crunch, it will crush you, and most competent people given the adverse circumstances in hiring are now retraining resulting in brain-drain, a hollowing out and watering down of the competency in the labor pool. What happens when you can't find qualified people at any cost because your practices drove them to other sectors. They won't come back because they wrote it off as a bad investment. Its psychologically sticky.
People always have a choice, even when others try to make it so they don't.
In addition to possibly being a scammer, some people found my resume to be less believable without a linkedin profile. One interviewer thought I was lying about my previous job title.
Why would it matter what your previous job title was? Why would I care if your previous job title was ‘Grand Vizier of Khyrgistan’? Can you do the job I want you to do now?
If your previous job title was "Doer of a Thing" then a prospective employer is more likely to consider you for a job doing the same (or similar) thing, as it shows you have prior experience doing a thing.
No, it shows that you previously had a job title that calls you a doer of things. I find that these don’t generally correlate with ability to actually do those things.
noobs on HN have been claiming this since the site was created. It's so tiresome that it's actually against site guidelines to make this kind of comment. If you want HN to be a nicer place than reddit, try to follow the guidelines.
Agree with this, unfortunately. I have a coworker who routinely calls people without linkedins "sketchy" and obsessively looks everyone else, vendors, functional area colleagues, etc up on linkedin. I didn't have a very fleshed out linkedin myself because I value privacy and was surprised how biased some people are about it. I've also seen candidates who have otherwise passed interview panels get veto'd because the dates on their linkedins don't match their CVs.
I don’t have a LinkedIn and it has impaired my job hunts in the past but I always worry that creating one now (without the references of colleagues from decades of past work) would look worse than not having one?
Nah that’s not a thing. Get involved spend an afternoon setting it up and then it will suggest a bunch of people you’ve probably worked with in the past. They’ll be happy to connect and then it’s a good point to catch up and drop the “I’m in the market”.
If anybody used to enjoy working with you and they know of something it, should be easy enough from then on.
Do people still do endorsements on LinkedIn? There was an initial flurry when that "feature" launched but I haven't been endorsed for anything for I think the past decade. Really the only things I do on LinkedIn are update my job history and accept connections from coworkers.
Imho, anything past where you've worked on LinkedIn is a waste of time.
And arguably even a negative signal. Productive people have jobs to do instead of grinding Monopoly karma. Yes, this absolutely includes LinkedIn thought leadership.
I know MS and recruiters love to push the 'it matters' line, but I'd ask the reader -- who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
> who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
Who would you rather interview: someone who has a great resume, and a strong LinkedIn profile, and connections to a strong peer community who can endorse them, or a faceless rando that shows up in your inbox with a PDF, amongst thousands of others, with zero referrals?
I'm not endorsing LI grind -- I too hate it, but ignore at your own peril. OP seems to be in a rather precarious situation, so maybe it would help being a bit less dogmatic.
> who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
Wrong question. This is not about the hiring stage.
Who would I rather move on to a phone screen: someone with an empty or nonexistent linkedin profile, or someone with a profile which matches their resume and has many connections to other people who worked at the same companies?
While I hate to have to say it is the latter, that's where we are today with AI-generated fake resumes.
I have 344 resumes left to review tonight. Those that don't match their linkedin profile history have no chance (unless they are a direct colleague referral).
As I take a break on friday night from reading through an endless pile of resumes for a role I'm hiring...
I would suggest creating the linkedin profile but be sure to fully populate the job descriptions for each job (or as far back as you care to go) and spend some time looking up past colleagues from each one and send them invites to connect.
I'm finding that a completely blank linkedin profile (listing only companies but zero detail) is a bigger red flag than not having a linkedin profile.
But having a profile with job description info and a network of connections from each job adds credibility. When a resume looks borderline suspicious, I dig through the persons connections in linkedin to see if it looks like they really worked at each of those places. Even better if I find any shared connections, which is a stronger signal that I'm looking at a real person not an AI bot.
Also, building that network of connections can be a source of job leads on its own.
Man, for 15 years I’ve been working on projects that are not LinkedIn friendly. For example, online casinos where my coworkers all have pseudonyms. Or taking 1-2 years to work on a personal project that fizzles out. Not to menion, surfing for 2 years.
I'm in a terrible position for when I need to find a normal job, and comments like this don't let me forget it!
not a recruiter: I have never felt that recruiters pay attention to linkedin references specifically.
You can also make one, add people, and then ask for a few references. "I just finally made a linkedin in 2025 on a lark" is a perfectly cromulent icebreaker/reason to ask.
It is better to have 1 than not. I highly recommend you set it up now. Put a real picture. Too much noise these days and without a Linkedin Profile, lot of employers are not even going to look at you. Just stating facts.
Seconding. These days I will rarely talk to anyone without a verified LinkedIn or other presence like a clearly inhabited GitHub (and I’m not looking for hyperactivity by any means)
But why? Those things are easy to game, and speaking personally, I don't have an online software development presence like Github because I don't spend my off time working on anything I feel is worth sharing.
If i’m hiring for eng director in my industry I'm expecting at least a few 2nd/3rd common connections so i can backchannel. Without that i assume its someone who hasnt gotten along with anyone at beast or a scammer at worst
Numbers. I’ve read thousands of resumes over the past few months, screened dozens of applicants, and experienced a wide variety of weirdness and fakes both in resumes and on screen calls. Please note that I’m talking about raw “application box resumes”. Referrals and other semi-vetted sources don’t get this level of scrutiny.
I gave two examples of secondary sources, but what I’m really getting at here is that the numbers and noise are so, so high now (not to mention staffing firm fronts and foreign actors) that I usually need more signal than a solid-looking resume before investing even 30’ in a screening call.
Well, that sucks. The one thing I hate about Linked in is being up-rated on my skills by people who barely know what I do and certainly have never worked with me in any capacity or even discussed my work in any sense beyond "What do you do for a living?".
From where I sit, it's a tool for marketers and recruiters to gather data and it's otherwise completely useless.
One of my pet peeves are people who don’t understand what I call “gravity problems”. You may not like gravity. But that doesn’t mean you jump off of a 30 story building and hope to survive.
Whether I like LinkedIn or not is completely irrelevant. I play the game, add connections, post a few banal “Thought Leadership” posts, ask for recommendations, etc.
My remote job at BigTech fell into my lap in mid 2020 and at 46 because an internal recruiter reached out to me, I got my next job two years ago within a week after I started looking because of targeted LinkedIn outreach. My current job also fell into my lap two weeks after I started looking because an internal recruiter reached out to me.
It does absolutely no good being good at your job if no one knows it.
I think even in the current job market, someone would give me a job or a contract relatively quickly if I needed one based on my network, LinkedIn profile, and positive impressions I’ve made in my niche over the past 7 years.
How else would someone know about me and how would I connect with them? I can change my status to “Open to Work” and have 1200 people see it My specific niche is strategy consulting along with hands on keyboard work for smaller projects and before that, I was hired at 3 separate companies by a new to the company director/CTO to lead initiatives. At that level it’s all about knowing how to “influence” and communicate.
I’m not bragging, I’m old. I should have that type of experience and network.
How does LinkedIn factor into your experience and network is what I mean. You can’t tell me people cold call you through linkedin. If people contact you it might be through linkedin, but that’s only because their friends have been talking about you. LinkedIn isn’t what gives you work, it’s the fact that you’ve done good work for others.
I think that's the key difference. For strategy folks, it makes sense to demonstrate this kind of work through that kind of channel. But LinkedIn posts aren't relevant for non-networking roles.
The parent poster has “25 years of exp, director of engineering managerial/technical type”. He should be selling himself as a strategy person. In today’s market you have to be networking regardless especially for remote work. Even before I started doing the BS influencer mess, two of my last three jobs were based on internal recruiters reaching out to me.
So exactly how was a company in Seattle going to find out about me in Atlanta if not through LinkedIn to offer me a remote job paying 50% more than i was making? How were the next two companies where I worked remotely going to know anything about me?
In 2025 it basically means you're likely a bot/scammer. LinkedIn provides the social proof that at least you're a real person, with real business connections. It's sadly not optional.
I agree that it's not optional; in my book, a company mandating association with the degenerate cesspool that is LinkedIn as entry criteria for employment consideration is simply a non-starter, full stop.
If I disclose an email address that's directly traceable to my current employer---or even one provided to me by professional organizations I'm registered with---as adequate "social proof" (whatever that means) that I'm not "likely a bot/scammer", and a company's hiring manager is too blind to see the signal, then I'd write that off as a hidden trap passively dodged with confident relief.
Absolutely stupid advice for people who actually look for a job. You're participating in a social game, with well-defined signalling functions. If you'd like to actually have a positive outcome, you'll need to make use of the signalling functions commonly recognized, even if you don't like them.
(Plus, opting out of a commonly accepted path with the reason that you personally think other signals are as good and the other side is just too blind to see them sends a large amount of information about your ability to collaborate in larger teams)
You do you. There are jobs where you can get away with this, there are people with networks that allow them to play different games. But as advice to job seekers, it's actively detrimental.
> Hiring managers check you on LinkedIn 100 percent of the time.
YMMV. White collar work here follows connections and introductions - nearly exclusively. A few of my clients might have poked around Linkedin in passing but most have never used it.
As an aside, I deleted my LI because I've never had a legit contact thru it, only spam.
When I was a hiring manager (it's been a number of years) I always checked LI for applicants which looked interesting on "paper" but which had not come through a trusted source such as coworker from the past or present that I had respect for (both their technical skills and their willingness to be objective about others even if their observations were negative).
My primary reason for this was that unfortunately some resumes seem to include quite of bit of creative writing -- creativity which the applicant could bet only I, and my company, would see. If, however, the applicant had posted similar claims about past jobs on LI, it was public for all to see so somewhat likely to be less "creative" as most people find it embarrassing to get _caught_ claiming credit for work that someone else did or giving an overblown explanation of the import of their work. This is, of course, not 100% reliable as I've seen coworkers and past employees posting on LI claiming things they were "responsible for" or "implemented" when, in fact, they only had a tiny role (or, occasionally, even no discernible role) in.
Also, if I happened to notice a "connection" that I also knew, I could potentially ask them about the applicant (using due care to make sure that the applicant wouldn't be "outed" at their current job by my doing so).
> I always checked LI for applicants which looked interesting on "paper" but which had not come through a trusted source
This is a good observation.. rumination.. contribution? I can't find the right descriptive noun. Anyway, I get it. Perhaps the board is divided between regions inclined to use LI and not.
I have to disagree. I looked for a long time before I found my last gig (that ended in 2022). I had a LinkedIn and it wasn't much different, it took me months to find something. I still have a linkedin account to look for jobs, but that's it. No connections, no work history. What's relevant is on my resume anyway so I don't see what having a regular linkedin account would do. I deleted it when I found that job because, even as a job seeker, I saw no value in it and as a user, I saw no excuse to defend it.
You've applied to 400 jobs and had 3 responses and no success to be blunt your option about what you need to do to get hired is worth zero.
You refuse to change anything about your process, you aren't working to improve it, you are arguing against people telling them you don't need to do common/standard things.
This thread is a pretty good insight into why you are failing and what you need to work on.
Like I said, i had a legit linkedin account before i closed it and it never felt like it did anything for me. I have changed plenty about my process, from cv iterations and reviews, ai assistance to cater to job posts in cv and cover letters, etc. Of course i think all the information is great, but i also have first hand knowledge and experience. If you think all that's missing is a furnished LinkedIn account then i can tell you that it isn't accurate - in my experience.
I have a couple dozen open roles right now, at a 50-person company. Each posting gets thousands of applications. Most are fakes, or AI-generated, or AI-generated fakes. Realistically, we're going to respond to 1%, maybe 2% of them, because again, 50-person team. Half the time, you get someone named Ralph McGuinness on for a quick code screen and they have a thick Mandarin accent or something equivalently implausible.
The best first filter we have at the moment is to programmatically toss out any resume that doesn't have a LinkedIn, that has a hallucinated LinkedIn that doesn't resolve, that resolves to a name that doesn't match the resume, that has no connections or history, etc.
It's an absurd state of play that hurts those of us trying to hire and those of you trying to get hired, but also a trivial hurdle for you to clear, so stop arguing and just do it.
Of those 400 applications, my LinkedIn profile was viewed 16 times. LinkedIn is not as essential as everyone is trying to portray it. Especially outside of the US where people actually care about data privacy.
LinkedIn only shows you authenticated viewers. You have no idea how many automated systems have filtered you out because you didn't include a link in your resume/application or because, as you said, the account has no connections or activity.
Do you know of any such automated systems or are you just making that up? I've never heard of application systems or ATS that looks for a linkedin URL in PDFs, extracts it along with employment information and validates it against what's in the resume, or a form that validates that a given entry leads to a valid LinkedIn profile, and that the profile corresponds to the one that was submitted. Recruiters; yes, and those will show up - and they haven't.
Every job I've applied for in the last two weeks has asked for a LinkedIn link on the application. I have more interviews this month than you've had in three years.
Just saying.
I hate LinkedIn too but i very much consider it an important part of the "finding a job post pandemic" game.
to put it bluntly, the game has changed. what you knew from before is not correct now. if you keep applying your previous intuition and experience to a job search in todays market, you are going to be in for a hard time.
You are delusional if you think having a good LinkedIn doesn't improve your chances of getting hired... Maybe not for every job, but for many of them, surely.
I guess my experience hasn't shown value. I think people think of LinkedIn like Facebook - it only works if everyone agrees to stay hostage. I don't like the platform, I don't like that Microsoft is being all Microsofty about your data (have you looked at the new settings lately? That they added without telling anyone? Settings → Data Privacy → Data for Generative AI Improvement) and being a data-aware netizen, fuck linkedin.
Hiring manager here. It's standard practice for every hiring manager I know to review the candidate's LinkedIn as an additional input to the hiring process.
Not finding a LinkedIn page for someone can range from a neutral signal to a negative signal depending on the hiring manager. I personally don't read anything into it, but I know many hiring managers who feel that lack of a LinkedIn page is a negative sign. I don't like it, but it's how the world works some times.
A seasoned LinkedIn page is also becoming very valuable for applying to remote jobs. Remote employers are getting nervous with all of the overemployed people and fake applicants. Having a mature LinkedIn page with a decent number of connections to real people is a major positive sign for remote hiring.
It's not something you will be able to see or detect as a candidate.
I’m a manager in a cybersecurity consulting firm. I’ve hired half a dozen people for my team in the past year. I always check LinkedIn as well.
If someone isn’t on it, the chances are significantly higher they are fake or trying be be “overemployed.”
Does not having LinkedIn mean you’re not qualified or not real? Certainly not. Does it mean I will pass your resume over when sorting through a stack of qualified applicants? Absolutely.
Those people probably have very strong personal networks and a willingness to reach out to them for opportunities or a very high profile in their niche.
> You are delusional if you think having a good LinkedIn doesn't improve your chances of getting hired... Maybe not for every job, but for many of them, surely.
This isn't universal in every market. Business is very insular here and work follows referrals and introductions. You have those and you have work. Without them, Linkedin won't help.
I'm 35yr in IT; I plug into my clients in a way that I learn their processes - inc hiring. Few white collar employers here use Linkedin. I've never worked with one who did.
Seriously. I could write 20 years of fake FAANG experience, connect with every rando posting AI slop since they just farm connections, and that would be better according to what i'm reading here.
Referrals are the only way right now. The front door is broken everywhere. I spent 4 years off and I managed to come back, but only referrals were worthwhile in getting me roles worth anything
One small note -- what got you an interview before 2020 will often not get you an interview now. The market (as you obviously know) is much tougher. The last two managerial roles I've opened have gotten literally thousands of applications within the first week and it's harder to stand out. If you've done a few rounds already, there's probably not much incremental value, though.
Absolutely ask for referrals. You gotta painfully get on LinkedIn for maximum effectiveness -- if you're looking at a company and an ex-coworker you got along with knows someone there, ask for the introduction. It feels awkward and weird but it increases your chances somewhat.
If you are trying to get a job based on your resume and blindly submitting it to an ATS, you are doing it wrong. Every open req gets hundreds of applications and it’s impossible to stand out from the crowd.
Even if i did i would never post it publicly. And yes i understand that it means i won't be getting thousands of strangers looking at my personal experience, one of whom might want to hire me. I wouldn't post my resume either. I'm just not comfortable giving my data to a company i don't trust and to share it openly on the public web. And yes i'm ok with the consequences.
I am not the original commenter but I think something that younger people forget is that when you reach 2 decades or more into your career, your network starts to dry up for you. This is in addition to your skillsets and work cultural fit being suspect because of your experience and age (set in their ways, old thinking, etc…).
I have been in tech for nearly 40 years. Almost every one of my former bosses is either out of the industry, retired, or dead. My network is useless to me. If my current job ends…I won’t find another tech gig.
Surely your current boss or recent colleagues aren't out of the market though.
I've been developing for over 25 years and my early bosses are almost certainly retired but I still have connections from back then in colleagues that are still wording I could reach out to. Unless you stopped interacting 40 years ago you should still have current people regardless of time in the industry.
How much do you interact with colleagues from 2000 and how much do they really know about your current capabilities? Probably nothing or minimal…”he was a helluva cobol dev back in ‘00” doesn’t sound like a valuable reference if I am a hiring manager in 2025 looking for a Rust dev.
Current colleagues and bosses would have to cycle out themselves and land elsewhere before they will be a help as a network resource.
Also, for current colleagues—-consider the case if your whole team gets RIF’d. At that point they are no longer your colleague, nor really a good network resource until they land. What they are is a competitor and a competitor likely similarly skilled as you, competing for the same roles that you are.
Your best network resources don’t currently work with you, but are secure in a gig, and someone you have worked with or for in the last 3-5 years.
Old connections can still be helpful even if they don't know your current skills as long as they can assess what kind of worker you are. I've personally recommended people I worked with 17 years ago because I can remember how valuable they were with no consideration given to current specific skills. I currently regularly speak with 3 people I worked with over 20 years ago and check in annually with another half dozen or so.
If you don't keep any connections with your previous colleagues then you are self limiting your career options. But the second best time to plant a tree...
this year's job market is really bad. my manager landed a new job last year but he have spent 5 years causally looking for a job ever since my employer got bought out. i have been looking to jump ship but gave up.
It was already bad before AI fucked it nine feet deeper. Now it's probably change career type of situation, but after climbing the tech salary ladder for 25 years (not US level mind you), it's real daunting to go back at the bottom.
This is sort of what I'm afraid of. I reflect on a lot of people I worked with in the past that are a little older than I am now and things were rough. They'd basically try and find side work and make a living off of it but nearly all of them returned to the workforce. Now, jobs are scarce so I'm really thinking that a career change might be in order. With self driving cars posed to take out a chunk of low skilled jobs and with the self imposed AI that will likely cost 25% of IT job shrinkage, the future looks really grim.
Crass's song from the 1981 Systematic Death last verse seems prophetic, "They'd almost paid the mortgage when the system dropped its bomb".
I’m curious about personal connections. I’ve got many fewer years of experience and have had great luck with finding jobs thanks to friends and former colleagues even in tough job markets.
That's something that I've really wondered about too, since I can't count the number of people I hooked up with jobs I asked myself why the pendulum wasn't swinging back. I relocated "to the countryside" a few years ago and lost my big city tech network, where I was very active and even central. Not being on social media means I have very few ways to reach back out these days.
Everyone thinks they know better, that's just the nature of people on internet forums. That's why I stopped asking for CV reviews - as soon as people know I'm struggling they come up with pointless edits. His point boils down to "you have no network, physical or digital" which might sound accurate with the information he's got, but isn't in reality because there's obviously more context than what I've shared here. I didn't just sit around brainlessly applying to jobs for two years. I've tried shit.
I don’t think I could easily get a job right now by applying to open positions. I haven’t gotten a job that way since my first job post graduation, and back then it was pretty easy to get into tech.
>> By EOY I had to sell my house, figured I could use the (significant) profits to buy time or I could travel and make the time a little more enjoyable, so I set out to explore most of Europe thinking, well I'll for sure find a job before I run out of money!
Very reckless finance management, so I wonder if this correlates with not finding a "managerial" job.
First, "set out to explore Europe" immediately says "expenses". Without an income, that's teenager-level mentality.
Secondly, unless the house was still on mortgage, definitely it's cheaper to live on your own property and only scrap money for bills and food than paying rent on top of those. Also, and I'm not generalizing here, but people in general have parents / relatives. If times were that tough, I would retreat to my parent's house and rent the city apartment, that definitely buys me time.
And last but not least ... there are blue-collar jobs out there as a last resort. A friend of mine who lost his QA job, couldn't find anything else so he apprenticed as an electrician and now has got a license and works as such. Says he makes about the same as previously. There's "stacking the shelves at Lidl" also, not paying much but at least you're making something. And if you're willing to put up with the hard physical work and risk of accidents, there's always decent-paying construction jobs.
I'd say 2-3 months of looking are acceptable. After 6 months, some "plan B" needs to kick in, including the very mentally difficult idea of letting go of the past. You may have been a managing director but for the moment, the only option could be Lidl employee.
There is actually meticulous financial planning required to stay afloat for 2+ years, and i do think it correlates with my professional abilities! Sure, it was reckless to leave but the alternative was to stay and fall into a depression from the routine, constant rejection and financial diet, so i picked what i had to.
I'm not entirely convinced wrt your meticulous financial planning.
I think I was earning less than you yet managed to save the vast majority over my 15 year career earnings. Then my partner died and I was left raising a toddler by myself. It wasn't easy, but at least I don't have financial problems, thanks to a little financial planning.
It’s possible there are unknown circumstances, but this person sold their house and used to proceeds to travel while unemployed. They don’t seem like a great long term decision maker.
Are his parents owners? Is he going to inherit their house? Or other assets? Can he stay at his brother's place once he uses up all the money from the proceeds of house sale?
It's really hard to judge without asking lots of questions first.
After reading through this thread, do you not think you might be being overly selective? You said you're only really applying to European jobs but hiring people that need working visas is usually a pretty big detractor. No LinkedIn can work, but in the LLM era you need something to prove you're real and you also stated you haven't been asking previous coworkers for referrals. It's very normal here to ask coworkers for referrals so I assume it's a cultural difference? But they usually get you to the interview stage. Your resume is likely not baring you but if you are applying to large enough companies that have thousands of applications on each role, they are using LLMs to filter them down. You should be running your resume against an "Act as a hiring manager" style prompt to see if you're getting filtered that way.
Canada, but I'm a rare case that I'm open to relocate anywhere (except the US) and have been working remotely since before it was made popular by the pandemic. So I've been applying literally all over the world for two years (though it's been mostly Europe due to personal preference and desire to relocate there).
The fact you're being questioned about this is insane.
There used to be a 0% chance of being tossed on a plane and deported somewhere else in the world when visiting the US. That chance is now non-zero, which is an unacceptable level of risk for many.
That and everything else going on. There's a reason Canadians have stopped traveling down south...
Honestly, I think macro factors -- namely, poor Canadian household finances due to increasing cost of living and declining real incomes in Canada coupled with a strengthening US dollar against the Loonie -- are what are killing tourism from CAN to US right now.
All of my personal network has stopped non-mandatory travel to the US. I wouldn’t be surprised people wouldn’t resist if their employer told them to go for business, but many Canadians are simply opting out of leisure travel to the United States.
There are plenty of other places to travel is the rationale. besides, if a strong greenback was the reason for decrease of leisure, wouldn’t it also be responsible for a decrease in business travel, too? Certainly businesses are also bound to macroeconomic shifts.
I don't know what to tell you but on the front of:
> There are plenty of other places to travel is the rationale. besides, if a strong greenback was the reason for decrease of leisure, wouldn’t it also be responsible for a decrease in business travel, too? Certainly businesses are also bound to macroeconomic shifts.
Canada has shockingly little choice when it comes to trade partners. They are literally physically attached to the US and trade is much simpler when working with the US, whether Canada likes it or not. CETA hasn't yet been ratified; Canada has bungled trade with China since harper; Mexico is at best a cheap labor destination that can replace India for Canada. The only real staying power Canada has is exporting raw materials, and even that effectively turns Canada into a resource extraction colony. That's not a happy ending, either.
Canadian businesses have fewer options than many would like to admit, so it makes sense they are keeping up their economic activity with the US.
Ok; all I can say is what the statistics indicate. It seems like at least some Canadians accept assignments which result in business travel to the US. As with the OC, this may result in more desirable employees to Canadian employers who wish to continue to do business with the US, hence the original question.
The left hand of the chart in the 2nd link provides some perspective for this year's numbers.
July 2024 through Jan 2025, the YoY numbers are always in the 7%-9% range. Averages to 7.7% across those months.
Feb 2025 to July 2025, there's only a single month (April) in that range. We've got 2 months at 1% YoY growth, one break even, and two negative. Those months average out to about 0.7%. If you include Jan 2025 to align to the calendar year 2025, you get 1.57%, which seems to be the number that becomes 'nearly 2 percent' in the text under the chart.
While it is still positive growth, it's 20% of the YoY growth trend for several months heading up to 2025. If you take out Jan 2025 (2/3 of which Trump was not yet president), it's only 10%.
In your opinion, what is false about it? Canada's growth segment in exports was minerals and tourism services. That's Canada's situation, unfortunately.
The CV info you posted basically says upper management. I'm seeing increasingly that companies centralize management in an office (either city satellites or a hq) and permit developers to either work remote within the geographic region with occasional onsites. I don't know of anybody that would permit a manager (much less someone that is a sr. manager) to be remote which is why I asked.
Do you really need additional clarification on why non-American citizen might choose not to travel to the US for literally any reason? If you do need examples, let me just gesture broadly to the entire US society.
Not really. I even live in one of the cities that is "under siege". It's basically another day.
People read headlines, lock themselves in a cage of their own making, and assume the world is on fire. People would do better trusting their own eyes and ears.
I’m in CA vacationing right now for a month, flew in last week. Literally the same experience getting in, and on the daily, as it’s been for the last decade of visiting annually.
I was talking to my +1 at work before I left, he’s just gotten back from living in OH for the last couple of years for his wife’s job. As much as stuff is seemingly a shit show at the highest levels (which we can all agree on, I reckon), the day to day hasn’t changed all that much. At least not for us privileged techies.
But hey, that’s just two datapoints, so what do I know really.
Yeah. That's actually the only way to get a TN -- to oversee technical work in a managerial capacity. Technical managers of software engineers are 100% able to enter under TN.
Sorry - I mean the "only way" as a manager, not as a software/technical professional.
You can't for example, use manager of a McDonalds to qualify as a manager under a TN as far as I understand it. If you are a manager, you need to be technical in nature.
Directors of Engineering in Eastern Canada make (or made, until recently) < 200k, CAD. That's 145k USD. So no, didn't have much of a golden parachute like the US do.
Are expenses so high there? That’s still more than twice what you’d make here in Western Europe, and you’d have an easy time saving way more than a year of expense here.
Are you by any chance applying to european jobs while residing in canada?
This is a big no no. At the least you should have an address in the country you are applying for and a local phone number.
Applying with a CV from Canada with canadian details would probably eliminate you from the process early on. I say this as someone who was trying to work in the UK while living in Germany. The minute I changed address/phone things started to look better.
You may even mention this on your CV sayong that you are looking to move or already moved to that country.
