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Comment by scelerat | Hacker News Reader

Been looking for a year and a half for something full-time and permanent. No luck so far. Chopped about fifteen years off my resume, and that seemed to help get more interviews, but I think that backfired because then they were surprised by my wrinkles and bald spot and figured if I was lying about my experience, I was lying about other things too.

One thing that does not help was a string of startups I worked for which all eventually ran out of funding, so I have like four companies in four years. Also, no thanks to Patreon, who hired me to do one thing, went through a bunch of managers and could never get the ball rolling, then laid off a bunch of people nine months later. really hard to explain to a hiring manager without sounding like I'm mad and resentful. Because I'm mad and resentful.

Picking up odd jobs here and there. Small part time gigs, some substitute teaching, bar-backing and construction work.

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> Small part time gigs, some substitute teaching, bar-backing and construction work.

Was in the same boat.Did the audio-to-text transcribing gig on amazon mturk. It was a tossup between that & odd jobs at Walmart at that time. Recessions in usa is pretty brutal.

If you are so inclined, I suggest getting a cert & then hitting the shady indian outfits. They always have jobs so long as you have a recent cert. Can be anything - cert in GCP, or AWS or some cloud infra work will do. You have to study...but you have the time.

> If you are so inclined, I suggest getting a cert & then hitting the shady indian outfits.

Large companies outsourced to Indian companies like TCS, WIPRO, Infosys, CTS, etc. The latter wants to fill some positions onsite; here, TCS, et al source resumes from these 'shady Indian outfits'.

Also another phenomenon I observed: companies want presence during the US day time, so they outsourced to companies in Brazil and other South American countries. A friend's been out of job for a year, and reached out to an ex-manager at a tech company owned by a PE firm. The manager is willing hire him through the outsourcing company but for South American wages: this company pays $60 per hour to the outsourcing partner, who takes 30% cut. So, that is about $42 per hour on 1099, without any benefits. And this contract gig may last for four months.

Welcome to the new world, where we see three classes of techies: (a) those who work for FAANG and other elite companies/firms (b) those who work for non-elite companies (c) contract work force, whose contracts last for three to six months.

>> Chopped about fifteen years off my resume

Just a suggestion. It may instead be preferable to put a `Other Work Experience` section with a bullet point highlighting either tech skills or domain or a mix with the duration.

``` Java, J2EE, .NET

Various Companies

mm/dd/yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy

Enterprise app development

- Design and implement various travel, finance applications/modules ```

edit: formatting

Not the OP, but I'm also old, and this is a fantastic suggestion. Thank you!

Get set up and start fishing for c2c and 1099 gigs. You will be surprised how much they pay. A lot of people are billing two clients and everyone is happy.

Probably you are better off putting some or all of the fifteen years back on, but abbreviate those positions down to a one sentence/line summary.

Also, work on your narrative for those startups / patreon... "I learnt a lot in a short time" or "they were having financial troubles so they had to lay off some of their best people", or something not mad and resentful.

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