

Ask HN:  Keeping yourself hire-able while not working?    - mpg33

I have roughly have 2 years experience in the software industry, 1 year in dev role and 1 year in testing/qa role.  I left my job as a developer a couple months ago and am currently unemployed.<p>My question is what i the best way to make myself appealing to prospective employers even though i am currently not working?<p>Thanks
======
toomuchcoffee
Sorry to say this, but really the best, and to some extent only viable way to
keep yourself always "hirable" is to always be employed.

This is because about 80%-90% of the time, employers (and even more,
recruiters) aren't looking at all at any of your intrinsic traits, but rather
at _proxies_ , e.g. where you went to school, who you worked for.. and how
long you worked there.

That is to say, to a large extent their logic goes like this: "I don't have
time to parse all of this candidate X's attributes and traits; but I can _see_
that entity E (school,employer) has conveyed the following attributes
{a1,a2..} to candidate X in the recent past. So as a matter of expediency, and
to get make some headway this inbox of resumes before I need to get coffee
again, I'll just X++ or X-- accordingly."

And it also happens that one of the must highly valued attributes they have is
whether the candidate was recently (or even better, _is currently_ ) employed
by some company they consider to be cool (by whatever criteria).

Of course, it's perfectly fair to say you wouldn't want to work for an
employer with such a shallow way of looking at the world... and that anyone
who's willing to just close their eyes, and look at the _real you_ not only
won't ding you for taking off a year to live in a squat in Barcelona with your
hot girlfriend, work at a coffeeshop, and not only start to learn from
scratch, but make commits to the source tree to some emerging language Y
that's decades ahead of its time, albeit with precisely zero value in the
current job market... but might even find you a potentially much more
valuable, well-rounded candidate for having done so.

But the vast majority just don't think that way, course.

    
    
      "MUST HAVE:  PHP 5.4 w/ Code Igniter, mastery of the latest jQuery plugins..."

------
patio11
You're in probably the best job, in the best industry, at the best time, in
the history of ever, to not have to care about a gap diminishing your
perceived value to employers. They need coders. If you can code, they'll deal.

If you absolutely have to address it, and you don't, "I took a few month to
explore some projects and refresh myself, and now I'm itching to get back into
big challenges like $MY_WHAT_A_LOVELY_COMPANY_YOU_HAVE_THERE."

------
codegeek
In today's market, if you are umemployed, it is extremely difficult to get
through large corporations even though not completely impossible. Your better
bet is to go with startups or smaller companies. Have something to show.
Github? SO ? blog ? etc. Do your homework about the company before you
approach them. Don't just say "Hey I am a brilliant coder who can do xxx".
That puts you in competition with several others. Instead, _know_ as much as
about the company. For example, if you say "hey I know you guys build x and I
have done y in similar space and can offer you my service to further
build/enhance x". Then, you catch their attention because you are talking
about _their_ problem not _your_ problem. At that point, they may not care
whether you are unemployed or employed.

------
masterzora
I've got two gaps in my work history and I explain them fairly similarly: I
didn't want to jump from one thing to another immediately if I didn't have to.
The first gap was largely spent playing video games and pointedly not doing
anything remotely resembling work for most of it, the second is full of travel
and independent small projects. In both cases the response I get from
companies ranges from "makes sense" to "sounds like a good idea".

------
arkitaip
Work on stuff that's quantifiable and visible to recruiters. Like contributing
to GitHub, Stack Overflow and other code communities.

Work on your code portfolio. You should have your own site where you collect
and publish work and ideas. Lots of people use GitHub for this too.

Keep your brain in shape by taking a course on Coursera or Udacity.

~~~
toomuchcoffee
Most recruiters don't their ... from their ... (fill in the blanks).

Most hiring managers at bigcorps aren't nearly so clueless, but a lot of them
take a, how to put this, _long-term_ view of things... and don't always know
about from GitHub or SO, let alone what cachet they have in hacker
communities.

So again, it can be a, let's not say perfectly viable, but viable-ish strategy
to bank on one's commit history on GitHub, and other proxies like Stack
Overflow... if you're content, and secure enough in your market value to stick
to the 5% of the employers that value these kinds of markers very greatly.

But for the other 95%, not so much.

~~~
arkitaip
You are right: better target that 5% that are startups, startupish BigCorps,
etc.

------
tokenizer
Applying to jobs, working on projects, taking contracts. You know what to do,
you just want us to tell you to do it. Do it bud!

------
johnnyg
Email johnny.goodman@cpap.com with some times you have an hour free to run
through a FizzBuzz etherpad. If you have the fundamentals down, we're hiring
contract positions.

As many others have said, just don't explain the gap. Instead say "hi, I can
code, interested?".

~~~
toomuchcoffee
_Instead say "hi, I can code, interested?"_

Groovy for startups -- as are things like having a cool Twitter handle, making
pithy remarks in SO, etc. If you're exclusively interested in startups, that
is.

But for the vast majority of employers out in, you know, the general universe
out there -- not so much.

------
UnoriginalGuy
Develop software... Write an app, make a web-site (E.g. using Amazon's AWS 12
month free tier), solve a problem, whatever.

Just have something to talk about in the interview.

