Why am I suddenly unemployable?

You are apparently in the UK, but the job market in the U.S. has similarly been very spooky lately. I was laid off and have received almost no interviews outside of a single previous employer. My resume was flat out rejected, even from places that I had previously worked or was made an offer from as little as a year or two ago. It was really weird. As in, previous contacts would not even reply to emails or LinkedIn messages. I felt the same thing, thinking things like if I insulted someone's dog or something. I even got contacted by a former company asking if I'd be interested in coming back, and then when I responded, they responded with a flat "we don't see a fit". Just purely bizarre.

I am finding that more and more people are looking for extremely specific and narrow experience. Like, if you haven't used technology and worked in domain, they don't want to even speak to you. They'd almost rather higher a new grad who happened to work in than someone with experience in many languages and domains. It's really weird. I've been thinking a lot about how to make my own path, because it's exhausting trying to apply and work for myopic places.

I do hiring in the US not the UK, but I'm only (I'm guessing) a few years older than you so you probably had the "keep it to one page" rule pounded into your head.

I get a lot of resumes, and that is definitely not the case anymore. Two to three pages is perfectly fine. I would suggest:

1. Add a list of skills and/or technologies you're particularly good in. You can include stuff you've used but aren't current in, but make sure it's annotated as such

2. Add a high-level summary that hits the aggregated highlights of your career. Especially important for making sure that the resume reader quickly understands your specialties and focus, depth and breadth. Your Blender work is badass and should def show up in that summary

3. If you have education, I'd add a small thing about that at the bottom. For smaller orgs it doesn't matter but bigger ones it will make a difference. Ditto if you have any certifications

Overall though, I heartily agree that it's a vicious hiring market right now so don't take it personally. You look like a fascinating candidate! If we had open slots and our markets lined up more, I'd be shooting you an email. I'm a little weird in this regard, but I am particularly impressed by open source work that people do. It shows passion, motivation, and a willingness to make the world a better place, which are three things I really appreciate.

Beware the comments here from the US that don't apply to UK CVs - which are a different style. Personal intros are not important.

I can't see any job titles - which is frankly more important than the company and makes it easier to skim sections of experience

Definitely go into more detail than just "Worked on" and "Used" - anything on stuff the company uses in the CV is not confidential and you can put on your CV.

Finally put months on your CV - it's not clear if your most recent role was 12 months or 1.

The worst thing about your CV is the non-chronological layout and the second item the "University of Bedfordshire"

A lazy recruiter will see that as a watermark as your education and assume the rest is amateur stuff. This makes it look like you have less than one year experience.

For some companies/recruiters they often like to see month and year for each position. It can be a red flag as it looks like hiding of career gaps.

Lack of personal statement is a lesser problem. Recruiters won't necessarily care, but it makes a hiring managers job harder. The job positions should be seen as supporting evidence for the claims in that statement.

That said, despite these problems, the jobs market is at the slowest it's been for years. Particular for more senior roles.

My company has a hiring freeze despite being profitable and growing and we're cutting costs to avoid making people redundant.

I'm UK based and have reviewed hundreds if not thousands of CVs.

Loved your Hapland games as a kid.

Besides the standard callouts of “it’s an anomalously hard job market right now due to a recent layoffs flooding dev supply of interviewees, due to a post-covid hiring frenzy hangover, due to anticipated US tax code changes discouraging hiring, and due to high interest rates in the US currently discouraging risks including hiring” the thing that may be actually in your control is I notice is a lack of quantification of project deliverables and accomplishments on individual projects.

Looking at the first point as one example, it could be summarized “created app”. Especially as your most recent work, I’d want to see you go more into the experiences the app enabled - perhaps the user counts who were using it, what the experience was for them, any metrics you might have that you moved the needle on, or what your changes enabled people at the installation to do. Quantifying the impact of your work with each work item I think would go a long way towards making the CV better.

We're currently going through the largest tech downturn since the dot com bubble. It's not you, it's the market. Tough for everybody who is looking right now.

For the first time in 20 years there are more applicants than jobs again.

You aren't.

The economy is absolute garbage right now.

I'm in the US and the situation is similar here. I've never had an issue finding a job before either, but I've been unemployed since the middle of 2023.

Assuming you aren't under financial hardship, my advice is to spend more time on your hobbies and check back in around July/August. That is when the layoffs are projected to drop and hiring is expected to keep up.

It isn't you. I have a solid resume (I know because I've interviewed hundreds of people in my career), but the market is just much slower. In 2020-2022 I was getting 5-10 recruiters reaching out every week. If I thought something was interesting, I'd respond saying that I'm not really looking for anything new, but I'm open to a conversation. People would still be thrilled to speak to me, even though I was upfront that I'd only leave for something perfect.

Lately, I get maybe one person reaching out every month. I responded to one last week, even though I'm not looking, just to see what the job market is like. I was ghosted.

I think we're just not in a hiring frenzy right now. People don't want to leave their jobs and risk it on something new. Some companies are laying off. For the companies that are hiring, they are probably seeing many more applicants and a higher conversion rate.

Things will come around.

A bit of a different take, but given the amount of experience you have, I wouldn't put as much weight on using a CV at all.

With an updated LinkedIn you can reach out to past bosses, coworkers, and friends for introductions to other people in industry (whether they're hiring or not) – and follow that chain until you find something you're interested in.

Your CV doesn't tell me anything you accomplished, it just lists things you did. Hiring managers want to know the impact of your work, not a page of bullets that all say: "I did a thing."

Picking one at random: "Worked on frontend and backend systems for this health tech company." OK... and what impact did your work have? Can you cite a qualitative improvement on the business due to your work? If not, can you at least cite quantitative facts like: "Released 6 updates to the product."

I'm going to make a suggestion that sounds negative, but is intended to help you realize if your bullet points read well or not -- For each one, imagine a hiring manager at an interview asking you, "So what?". Then throw out your original bullet point and instead type in your answer to that question.

I've hired a maybe 10 devs in the last couple of years at a variety of levels, and this CV doesn't help much - it might get to a maybe pile, but there are a bunch of relatively small changes that I think would help:

1. Where are you? You should at least have your town or city on the CV unless you're in transit -- we're open to candidates that are moving, but local candidates usually get bonus points as things are just easier.

2. The CV is so compact it's hard to pick a career progression - it all looks static, and I'm not seeing any evidence of moving from entry level coder to picking up SW design skills to mentoring - it's all just 'created'. Some position titles might help here, plus some little details on how the role worked, not just the technologies (which I'd incorporate into each bullet point, rather that list at the end).

3. A summary that says in 25 words or less what sort of person you are, and what sort of role you're looking for - you might need a couple of variants for creative vs square jobs.

4. From 2 & 3 above, I'm not getting a sense of your personality and how you'd fit into a team.

I'd go for a 2 page CV with a little more room for extra things.

I think one of the problems with your CV could be that I can't really tell who you are and what kind of a job you are really looking for, unless I read the whole thing (and even then it's a wild guess!). Sadly, "software developer" is not really a thing anymore. You'd probably want to mention that you are full-stack, have X years of experience in Python (backend), and Y years of experience in Javascript (frontend). Databases (SQL / Postgres) Z years. Looking for full-stack roles, preferably contract (etc).

And I have to concur with those who mention that you don't list titles next to your job assignments. Not sure why, but it looks... strange.

Finally, where are you based? Are you looking for remote stuff, or onsite?... And be sure to include a phone number when you send it to anyone, especially agencies - they LOVE to start conversations on the phone, in fact, I don't know any serious agent whose first step is not to call you and have a 10 min chat, to prove that you are not some kind of weirdo. (Ignore this if you just removed your number for the post.)

My 2 cents: You have awesome 3D Graphics/Games development experience. The best way to leverage that would be to market yourself as a 3D Graphics SW Developer/3D Game developer (you may need to deep dive a bit into 3D Graphics principles, OpenGL). Almost every semi company (Arm, QC, BC, Intel etc) and even FAANG's have openings for 3D Graphics SW engineers and you are actually well qualified for those as background in games is highly valued for these roles. Note: you will miss working with GFX apps in these roles, but you will not miss the pay!!!

The problem as I see it is: are you a games/3D Graphics developer, full stack developer or AI/ML engineer? The lack of clarity in this difficult market may be one of the reasons.

Because we have gone from a feast to a famine.

I took some time off my normal job/contracting roles in 2022 to create and launch an app idea I had. Then, I only started looking again last year (UK) and it was tumbleweed. I only got a decent contract this December.

I also had a brief snazzy 1 page CV and a long 3 page buzzword CV, as PDFs only. But when I did a CV workshop with a recruiter he gave me several good advice.

First, recruiters hate PDFs, especially contract ones that need to add their template headers to etc. If yours is too much effort, they will just discard it. So I have both PDF and Word versions available.

Second the top half of the first page is what matters. They will glance to see if you are relevant. So highlight what you can do. But do not give them a wall of text.

Thirdly they only really care what you have done in the last couple of years. I used to detail great roles I had a decade ago. It is in fact for the recruiter nearly irrelevant. So I made the older ones very terse and expanded the recent ones. But not too much.

I still have my 1 pager https://eray.uk/cv/ivar/short/ but recruiters now get a new 2 page CV and mostly as a word doc.

In a famine, they may get 20 or even 50 CVs/resumes per role. They will only glance at a fraction of those. Make yours stand out. But most importantly call them repeatedly to remind them who you are so that yours get added to the relevant pile.

It's possible the University of Bedfordshire role at the top makes it look like you're a student - to a lazy recruiter who doesn't read. The first bullet point "as part of a research project" again suggests you might be back in college - again to a recruiter who doesn't read.

I may be wrong - just a suggestion.

I’d suggest using a standard linear format. On first glance, it looked like there was a gap of 5 years in your experience from 2010-2015 (there isn’t, but it took me a minute).

As others have noted, you need to emphasize what you’ve done. I’d eliminate every “worked on” statement with something like “solved X bugs, launched Y product, lead z engineers, improved K metric, owned B area, used d,I,g technologies of interest”

Anecdotally I’ve observed a shift away from LC style hiring to a blend of resume+SYS design/code review. I’d credit the shift with dual efforts to find cost effective engineers and a fear that LC has been overfit by interviewees.

As unfair as this may seem, your problem may be UX, rather than content. There is no focal point and ironically the shear volume of experience makes it hard to get a quick picture of who you are. I’d recommend a punchy executive summary at the top.

In my experience the 1 page constraint is less important so long as it’s easy to get a good picture of you on the first page.

Your C.V. isn't well laid out. In <10 secs I can't really figure out what you've done and what your primary skillset is.

Refactor it to more clearly lay out your specific skillset, roles, and what you achieved in them (improving business metrics).

It's not just you. It's not even just tech. The economists are wrong. By all indications the economy is strong, profits are up, overall employment numbers are the lowest they've been in a while. But here in the US, companies regardless of their bottom line, are laying off huge chunks of their employees. Some to correct overhiring in previous years, some to show Wall Street they've met their numbers, and some are still hedging against a downturn that was projected but did not come. Rates are not coming down, so companies are not borrowing cash to cover growing head count, and the ones who are hiring are drawing out the process. Our org for example, only added 4 new developers across our entire global footprint in 2023. We needed a lot more, especially backend devs, but were not allowed to add headcount. Every quarter we are being asked to do more with less.

Quick scan of your resume as someone who interviews 20-40 people/year (although not so much lately) ... I couldn't figure what you're actually great at. Strengths, passion and project type gravitation?

FYI, your resume is shallow but still better than a lot I see each year. For someone like me to decide who to interview and spend that 1 hour on, comes down to info presented on resume intended towards the people reading the resume and fit feel to the job description.

Tips:

- Post resume in "doc" format and not "pdf" this is because most recruiters and HR feed resumes to parsing engines that match content of resume to job description for keyword matching.

- Recruiters have a DB of thousands and thousands of resumes, for each job posting, they can only refer top 3. They only get paid if the candidate is hired and bonus if they stay more than a year! So know who your target audience is.

- Interviewers hate doing interviews too! Resume is easiest way to get a feel and reject allocating the interview slot time.

No way you are the author of Hapland, thank you I had lot of fun.

I don't have anything more to say than what has already been said in this thread, I would just recommend modernizing your CV by using Canva [1] , the site has lots of free themes and they are generally well done.

[1] - https://www.canva.com/

The main thing is the "work from home" movement. At first employers hated the idea of employees working from home. But then employers got used to it, and then they realized that they could outsource most work to a Third World country. Because once work leaves the office, there is no reason for the work to remain in the USA or Europe. It might as well as go some place cheap, like Brazil or India or Vietnam. Mentally, it took employers several years to fully adjust their mindset, but now that they've committed to being "remote first" they are realizing that they can outsource much more work than they ever did in the past.

There are a couple of lines of commercially interesting experience hidden away in your CV but it took a while to find them.

I would hire someone to rewrite, edit and reprioritise the whole thing.

Well I have recently found myself unemployed after mass layoffs at my company. Perhaps January isn't the best month, but it doesn't look overly positive in the US job market right now. I think even a good CV won't help too much because the market itself feels fairly cold. I would say you should try to rely on any network you have. That's what my plan is going to be, although my network in software engineering is considerably smaller than my network in accounting, but I don't see blindly firing resumes as a viable option. So while there is likely room for you to improve your resume, I think the job market itself is likely the bigger culprit here.

It's a shame there isn't an effective way on here to connect viable engineers who are talented and clearly care about the quality of their code to land work. Even the work at a yc startup site feels like it falls to the same shortcomings. If I could get a software engineering license similar to my CPA, I think that would be an effective way to quickly establish ability and reduce the hiring friction.

Take this with a grain of salt, but I don’t see any cloud experience, I see lots of “used” which tells me very little about how proficient you are. It’s hard to tell if you’re a junior/senior, you don’t demonstrate you have good knowledge of best practices or design patterns or show team leadership skills, DevOps? Agile? Kubernetes? Not to say you don’t posses those skills but your cv doesn’t demonstrate it that well… that’s to say the 1st page didn’t and I have a stack to get through and all this work I’m still expected to complete by close of business because I’m tech lead AND hiring manager, next.

We live in a world of techno-fuedalism, you are not alone. Every company wants an MIT graduate. They want someone "sexy" like a "rock star." One company's I looked at asked me "what is the most impressive thing you've worked on?" Like that really indicates the quality of my work.

Some quick feedback: It’s hard to parse your CV quickly because there are no actual job titles. I have to dig into the bullet points to get some idea of what your role was.

> Lots of coding experience; bosses have always been happy with my work. I've written stuff about programming online that has been well-received. Several personal projects under my belt, and plenty of OSS contributions too.

That’s the problem, you know too much. People in charge of hiring don’t want to be outshined.

Damn. I recognized your domain name... I absolutely love your games, and got so much playtime out of them. I wish I could help, but I'm in a similar boat today.

Maybe add your Github profile. I'm based in London and noticed the same a few years ago when I was looking, and decided to stop applying to UK companies, I find it pretentious and a big waste of time; for me, it was mostly the 4 or 5 interview stages that seemed ridiculous, also take-home tests that took 2 to 3 days, etc. Processes that took weeks of hard work. I can imagine it just got worse now. I've interviewed some people in the last 12 months, and seen a lot of CVs. When investigating, I found a lot of people lying. It seems that LinkedIn/twitter/TikTok are important for recruiters. I don't use it myself, but I've seen people asking for LinkedIn and Twitter for some reason.

Good luck with everything, it's not your skills!

You need to connect the dots between your employment history, your capabilities, and your interests. I could not do this any more when I lost my job last year and had to change to something new.

In my case I was a 15 year full time JavaScript developer. After years of frustration watching children run the daycare crying about needing more frameworks, not knowing how to program, and hyper insecurity I could not go back to that kind of work. I largely made myself unemployable. If AI eliminates the need for framework junkies who cannot be bothered to write original code maybe I will give it another shot. In the meantime I am entry level data science and enterprise API management now.

Yeah so I have many recruiters and recruitment company owners in my network. I get as many emails asking if I am hiring as I did asking if I am looking for work.

The UK tech job market is dead.

And there is more than one reason. One being brexit and an exodus of talent which was followed by jobs. Second is the increased restrictions of IR35. Third is an influx of visa bound cheap labour. I kept telling people that EU workers with equal rights increase overall pay, while visa bound people will decrease it. I know because I was at the some of the tables where this topic has been discussed and desired.

And finally, the economy. The UK is in a heavy recession and it’s not just anecdotes it’s statistics too. Poverty is at all time high with millions of people unable to pay energy bills or afford food. Sometimes these stats leak in the press. There’s a good reason why some people say it’s worse than in east europe.

None of this has a reflection on _you_. It’s merely a numbers game and identifying growth areas. Data engineering is growing and data engineers lack software development practices. Perhaps explore that area. Software security is another - there will be much more trashware written, particularly using prose generators. It will also go up in demand.

currently looking for work in the uk for the first time in 2 years and having the exact same thing. 100% of the recruiters i speak to call me because they found my CV, tell me about a job, ask me if i'm interested, i say yes, they say "great, i'll send over the job spec now" and then i never hear from them again. out of curiosity i picked one recruiter and repeatedly called him back every time he said he would send it and didn't, at first he kept saying he forgot, and then pivoted to saying that he did send it and to check my spam folder etc. it can't be anything i'm saying to them because even the ones who contact me by email and ask if they can call me never respond to me when i say something along the lines of "Good morning, yes I am very interested in this role and would love to know more about it, my number is XXXXXXXXXXX."

i don't know what they get out of this but i'm getting pretty fucking tired of being interrupted by 10 minute phone calls 5-6 times a day when the recruiters have zero intention of following through on any of it in the first place.

As others have said, rewrite the CV. It's not clear to me who you are and what kind of role would best suit you. Put a summary at the top making clear what you are best at and what kind of role you are looking for. Summarize your skills and achievments. Consider using simple graphics. eg List of tech skills rated with slide bar from expert to familiar understanding.

General advice, make at least a slightly different resume for each group / organization / company that you're applying to that are targeted to their hiring spiel and filtering forms.

The concept is not that bad, as you can break up the resume into blocks of info, and then just rearrange based on whatever the job posting really wants to emphasize.

Even just rearranging the primary skills (languages, frameworks, ect..) around into a feature block targeted toward the specific recruiter may help. Some people are diligent about reading through resumes and trying to give each a chance. However, when the tragedy of the commons gets bad enough, and people can just LLM-spam responses, the interest in "give each a chance" probably goes down.

Ex: UK.Indeed has 3100 software engineer jobs in the last 2 weeks listed. https://uk.indeed.com/jobs?q=software+engineer&fromage=14&vj...

A GitHub, Inc job has: "React experience on a senior level. 3+ years of hands-on experience in modern web stacks." Your resume has a listing for React, yet its not clear if that was a major component, or just some minor detail. "Worked on backend and frontend systems for this fashion retailer" And the description sounds like a lazy highschooler. To get the job you would have to tell them why you actually have web-stack skill GitHub would care about.

J.P. Morgan job has: "Proficient in coding in React, TypeScript, JavaScript" You have those, they're just mostly buried and not emphasized. The job also has "Familiarity with Investment Banking, FinTech, or Financial Markets" You (appear) to have those. "Worked on industry-leading tools used by cinema chains to manage their estates." However, it is in no way emphasized and if it was just sent out shotgun, would probably be ignored in favor of a resume that emphasized the React, Typescript and FinTech work.

You've gotten tons of great feedback already, so I'm going to keep it very brief:

1. As some others have mentioned, I had trouble extracting a career progression from the non-chronological format. I'll actually read a resume that crosses my desk, but, if you make me work too hard, I'll just move on to the next one. You're making me work too hard.

2. The design sense in the document is good, except that the typeface for the main text is fairly thin. Again, it's not that I don't like it, it's just that you're making me work too hard to get what I want out of this document. Go for a heavier weight typeface when you redo it.

That's all I've got for now. Good luck!

I get looped in on hiring quite a bit and the feedback I have:

1. Job titles. I need to understand where you were in the hierarchy. Its dumb but I do, for the same reason as

2. Salary Expectation. How much do you cost.

This is because the good hiring managers are job sizing. They want to consult their table of skills and responsibilities and justify paying you money. You have plainly declared your skills, but not your responsibilities or your cost.

Its one thing to hire a dev, but do you mentor other developers? Manage a team? "Worked On" doesn't give us a good view of your place in the team. Was there even a team? Are you a SENIOR developer, or just taking junior tasks?

If I have lots of applicants, and your resume wont feed cleanly into my job size matrix, then you arent getting an interview.

One PSA - Please file for unemployment! The government won't be as incentivized to help you until you're their liability ;) In the US we've seen labor force participation decline which allows governments to claim unemployment is lower than it is.

I was in this boat in October. The market was brutal back then. The contract market is pretty much dead now except for fintech. Sent out probably more than 100 applications, and didn’t hear back from almost every single one. One of the recruiters has said it’s picked up a little since then, so fingers crossed

I don’t see anything especially wrong with your CV. Maybe add a few sentences at the top about who you are, what you’re looking for etc.

How was Arts Alliance Media? I was going to go there as my first job after uni - but they pulled the offer literally one working day before I was meant to start

You have an impressing background!

I think folks reading this are seeing that you are too technical and lack of business acumen (while maybe not true).

For the work that you have done in each company they may be interested in the results of you creating these not that you created those. Did you ever find out what was the impact of your software development on the actual business?

Make sure to include numbers, people love data and lifts in sales, reach, clicks, awareness, revenue, etc.

You can save so much space by summarizing your language skills elsewhere instead of in each company. It also sounds redundant to say Used X, Y, Z because of course you needed to Use some programming language to achieve that. Group all of those elsewhere for those that you feel you are an expert with.

Best of luck!

I had a quick glance through the unusually formatted resume, and saw big glaring gaps in employment. Also, seems like you just graduated from University a couple of years ago ?

Those 2 things would just make me close out the tab and onto the next resume tab.

Looking again, I see the gaps are "filled" in other random spots on that resume, like initially, it looked like before 2015-2016, you worked only in 2008-2010 - thats a big 5 year unemployed gap ! Then, I found the missing parts on the left side, in arbitrary order.

It doesn’t sound like you’re applying online, so this might not apply but: Write the most fragile resume parser you can. Now make it so your resume can be parsed by it. This made a world of difference for me last go around.

I went from being contacted 4 times a week to once a month, maybe.

There's too many devs and too few jobs imho, so it's tougher.

Market will rebalance, and we need to cope with this new reality of jobs being harder to find.

There's a lot of great advice here already on improving your résumé - I agree with pretty much all of it.

Something that hasn't been mentioned yet though is the typo quite close to the start - 'impariments'. That'd be a red flag for me regarding attention to detail.

In this highly competitive market, résumé optimisation matters more than ever. Mine's certainly not perfect.

Like you, I'm struggling to find a new job too; but as a Senior Ruby Developer in Australia. Godspeed in landing something.

1. List your skills separately as well in a small box somewhere. I shouldn't have to read your entire CV to find out.

2. You didn't mention your educational background. Please list if possible.

I'd echo what some of the other people have said in that "worked on" is doing a lot of work in your CV. I get that you want to be brief, but you could go to 2 pages and add in the necessary detail.

EG instead of "Worked on" have something like "Was responsible for module that did XX. Optimised the code to serve an additional YYY customers per day on same spec hardware" i.e. more detail on exactly what you did.

I have had some success with this CV so feel free to take inspiration or copy bits: https://cv.gushogg-blake.com/

The main difference is I have a short para at the top as an intro. Also you can click each position for more details.

Code for it is on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/gushogg-blake/svelte-cv

Jonathan Blow predicted the collapse of web jobs about a year back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTkRPwnzE4w

Basically get out of web dev if you can. Do real programming and try and tackle harder problems.

Or even step into entrepreneurship. A talented programmer should be able to create a fast growing company within 2 years if they really applied themselves.

As someone enrolled in a bachelors program for computer science, this terrifies me.

Makes me wonder if I’m wasting my time and should be perusing something else.

It's not your CV, you clearly are an attractive candidate.

Btw so many people here have reviewed your CV and no-one has pointed out the typo ("impariment")!

Firstly, I know nothing of the industry and am just speculating so don't take my question the wrong way...

Wouldn't the the sudden cascade of layoff announcements at big tech employers be interpreted as a leading indicator by employers industry-wide? Like especially considering the way the news cycle has basically amplified each successive announcement?

Again, just a question because my input is admittedly of no value.

Do not listen to these CV nazis too much, your resume is fine. I am having the exact similar experience to you. Star employee for a decade and suddenly unemployable (a year now). I am pretty sure a lot of us are out there, they just do not want to expose their unemployment status publicly like you and me (and I understand that). The answer by ath3nd might sound "conspiracy theory" but it is closer to the truth. The thing affecting you and me is mostly because of (macro) games played much high above us.

Work on your social skills. Past a certain technical competence threshold, social skills are 60-75% of the job. Companies no longer want good programmers; they want redundant arrays of average programmers, which means that if you are an average engineer who is oriented toward collaboration and communication you are on the fast track to success in this field.

As someone else said, forget the one-page rule, you're cutting content that it takes some experience and good will to infer from what you wrote. Screeners receive a lot of resumes, and you don't want them to be left wondering if your experience is relevant or not, at least not on this market.

2 to 3 pages for someone with a few years of experience is perfectly acceptable in software development.

Nice. I don't have anything for you but maybe this will be useful:

My two cents: o Learn machine learning, artificial intelligence - fast.ai

o Learn Rust, Rust, Rust and some Go

o Scala is good. Keep it. All the stuff you learnt whilst using Scala and Python will be useful in _Rust_.

o SDE is huge. Try something other can webdev and gamedev.

No matter what others may say next frontier will be roughly these: - Artifical Intelligence - Quantum Computing

Get good at these. Now, is the right time.

It's not you. It's high interest rate. In a bid to get the inflation down, the fed has been increasing the interest rates. Currently, they are at a 22 years high. Unemployment rate is at 3.7%. Most of the big tech companies have been doing a mass layoff last and this year. The job market has to absorb them too.

Did any of you laid of web devs try making a CV site for laid off software engineers? Seems like the time is now. Here is an example. The frontpage contains a form to fill out (a CV template), and a login registration interface (similar to Hacker News). Once the form is filled out, website/your-username.pdf is the generated CV, that you can share only by linking.

Find a recruiter and and offer lunch or £ for a CV refresh. I read some good advice in the comments here but we are not your target audience

I too have had a lot of issues. Not sure if AI is filtering my resume. One thing is I do think I am Aging out. 5-10 years ago I was getting i terviews with my tech companies now nothing, even with more degrees and experience.

The other thing that’s killed me is short tenured jobs. Like it’s probably better to have a gap than a job less than a year.

It's not you, companies are squeezing candidates right now. Either through unreal requirements or really low offers.

I've been to a few final rounds where the hiring manager was already discussing specifics of what I'd be doing and then simply got ghosted by recruiters. Zero replies, not even the canned response saying they have chosen someone else.

Your 2022 work experience is so well written and impressive, which is partly why last year you had no trouble finding employment. Now, contrast that with the 2 bullet points in 2023; "Used C#, Unity." is an uninspiring way to describe your year of work. In 2024, your 2023 section will weight more than your 2022 section.

it has gotten extremely bad compared to 2023 or any other year in my career memory. and I am the same person. no: I'm better and more skilled and accomplished than ever before, with new achievements and attractive evidence (in public view) added to my CV this last fall. in any sane and objective world I'd be treated better than before

no

The UK job market is rough at the moment. It's not just you.

I posted a comment here a few days ago linking to this, check out the graph for London: https://hnhiring.com/trends

Not are there now fewer open positions, there are more people applying due to layoffs.

I am looking at your CV and have some feedback:

- You missed your work goals objective paragraph! Why are you looking to a job? What is your interest? LinkedIn and Internet in general are full of examples. Why do I need to hire you beyond your specific skills? How are you as a human? as a team player? How do you contribute to organizations beyond your formal work?

- I will not separate between full time work and independent, OSS, volunter. I will follow the typical reverse chronological order for work in a single column.

- Put a summary of your skills somewhere (Python, C++) and learn and experiment with Rust if you want to increase your chances!

If you ask me I would pay a few hours of someone to help you with your CV. It could be an average recruiter that has the hiring filters always present on his/her head.

You might want to talk about the output like impact more and reduce input. Big companies care about that a lot

I don’t have information that explains your experience but I can give you concrete resume advice based on my own experience as a hiring manager: https://www.cenizal.com/resume-advice-for-engineers/

Just in case: putting your value proposition on top of your resume, in very concise terms, helps. At least it worked for my resume [1], which employers and recruiters praise from time to time.

[1]: https://dmitry.cheryasov.info/resume/

I recommend including quantitative data, i.e. the feature I worked on increased user engagement by 15%.

I’m hitting the same thing with first round technical interviews, which prior to the end of 2022 almost always used to lead to further rounds, now I’m getting summarily rejected at that early stage.

There’s so many reasons coming to a confluence which are causing the higher bar.

You've clearly got an array of interesting skills and you could expose them more readily, perhaps at the top so people don't have to scan through the whole thing to get a gist of your skill set? Seem pretty interesting to me but it could use some polish.

During an economic downturn, businesses often struggle to find areas of growth. As a result, they tend to focus on hiring candidates with very specific skills and at a lower paycheck, with the sole aim of maintaining their current market share.

I realize it’s cliche at this point but are you considering that many big corporate IT shops are heading towards a “Let’s see if AI advances enough in the next six months to be able to crunch out that code before we hire someone” mode?

Not seeing anything fundamental wrong.

Perhaps your python focus is a current issue in the UK market?

Your name is fairly common, so I would advice you to include explicit links to social media profiles to minimise confusion by (automated) HR profile builders/analyzers.

I would not say it is you, it is the general market right now. Companies are uncertain about the economic outlook.

Hapland was a favorite of mine back in the day. I still search it up every few years! Good luck with your search.

I DISAGREE THAT IT IS SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR RESUME.

You said it yourself: You got lots of pings, resume or not. The resume is secondary to the state of the market.

Going through same. This is like 2007-2008 or 2000. You need a playbook here.

1. You are a media-related programmer, you better be stacking skills in Generative AI, showing your work, and becoming proficient in generative AI tools across all stacks. It hasn't happened yet, but Generative AI + your skills will be in serious demand (AI technologist / AI generalist developer or Creator). It hasn't happened yet and won't happen until the layoffs are done. Don't get caught off-sides when the hiring market resumes and suddenly everyone is demanding Unity + Generative AI skills.

2. Sometimes there is literally nothing you can do but wait

I have been in same position the last six months or so. Absolutely nothing is moving. I have been through multiple interviews, companies pretend to be wanting to hire (they actually arent). There is ZERO urgency in this hiring market, companies are in full on scale-down mode and pivot. We are still in waves of layoffs. After / during the layoffs and restructuring, companies must THEN reconsider a NEW direction to go on.

A new set of skills will go into vogue and suddenly everyone starts hiring in that direction. Unfortunately, you cannot control the timelines. It could take months or years before companies decide which direction to take next. AI is going to obviously be the #1 skill. Ability to show you can supercharge what you are doing by augmenting via AI and Generative AI will be in the most demand imo. But that is a strategy decision and companies are still winding down and moving out of their prior strategies they used the last decade.

3. This is the end of the old cycle and start of a new cycle

Expect it to take time to ramp the new cycle. Skills that were super valuable before are now less valuable. Companies are more focused on shutting down the old strategy than hiring the new strategy.This is a very uncomfortable in-between period and it could last another 6-18 months. The best you can do is focus on predicting the market and getting "into position."

The market may suck for longer than you think, you have to "wait well" and stack skills and networks. Unfortunately there may not be anything other than to wait, and let the market work itself out.

Gaming has been getting annihilated as a market.In a downturn, the shakiest stuff gets thrashed out first. Crypto, gaming are "nice to haves" from the perspective of the market.The market is going to contract down to only the essentials. Stuff people absolutely need to spend money on. All the "nice to have and fun" stuff is getting defunded.

Follow the money. It will flood into generative AI and AI productivity tools.

CV is now doing a 404 - happy to have a look - email is in my profile.

Let me make a completely unrelated and orthogonal observation that has nothing to do with this post.

You see the url that is in the OP? This one. https://foon.uk/robin-allen-cv.pdf

Copy that url, paste it into a new tab, but remove the f at the end. *BRIGHT LIGHTS AND SEIZURE WARNING*

EDIT - Oh wait, the result is different depending on the browser. On one browser (Firefox), I get a creepy looking 404 error. On another (Tor, which is also Firefox), I got a giant strobe light effect with a bunch of diagonal lines.

In the Tor browser, this message gets spammed a million times in the console tab.

"Blocked https://foon.uk/robin-allen-cv.pd from extracting canvas data because no user input was detected."

The strobing effect corresponds to the number of times this message gets spammed (~50 times a second).

Dude, you made Hapland!

Hapland aside, out of 5 conventional sections - Executive summary, Education, Skills, Work Experience, Miscellania - you have only one. It's not clear what you are looking for, what it is that you know and at what level. Single page is a good format, but it's secondary to the info presented and it's incomplete.

up your network mojo (not the tcp/ip kind).

Why are you not freelancing in the interim?

Because a bunch of obscenely rich people decided they want to use 'macroeconomic factors' as an excuse to rank in even more profits and bump up their stock prices, while throwing workers under the bus, tanking the industry and destroying our individual bargaining positions.

Oh, they also can't take a blame for overhiring during the pandemic, they were simply following the same 'macroeconomic factors' that are the reason for the mass layoffs now.

You'd think that the economy is some kind of terrorist with demands holding the gun to the CEOs' head. They just have to follow these demands and the economy simply happens upon them, absolving them of any moral and ethical responsibility for their lack of foresight and accountability.

Basically they are all mere automata that bows down to and is animated only by the overpowerful economy.

It's the same old in capitalist world, just this time software engineers are the ones affected.

The system is beyond fixing now, as you have always been treated as an expensive but totally expendable cog in their money making machines. We should have organized into unions and elected government that cares about humans (and nature), and not for the GDP and their own bottom lines.

Thank Elon and the FAANGs for starting the wave that flooded the market thousands of qualified good engineers as soon as they realized they need actual sustained revenue rather than the nebulous promise of never ending cancerous growth. When the market is that flooded with good people, of course our wages stagnate and our employability is in question.

It's called 'end-stage capitalism' for a reason, because the diagnosis is simple: there is nothing coming after it.

404

a hot take, fwiw:

pedantic: not a fan. why "some", why not all of them? > "Converted some Flash games to a custom..."

eh? you wrote the article there? odd phrasing > "I wrote an article about this project here"

left-right independent chronological ordering is weird and makes it hard to digest. suggest top to bottom single column would be easier to understand. you could make the OSS stuff a separate section or interleave.

Since 2010, you've worked at 3-4 different places for only a couple years each and worked on "frontend and backend systems", oh and did a bunch of OSS/volunteer work stuff. If I had to summarize the CV into one sentence that's what I get. I don't really see what skills you have, but you "used" Python, Django, Postgres, Typescript, Node.js, HTML Canvas, Websockets, etc. Well, every internet user "uses" those.

It just sounds ... weird ... and fishy. What actual skills are you purporting to have? Why so much time not getting paid? Were you unemployable? Or much worse - very successful independently? (sarcasm, but sadly too true)

Personally, I'll always give the benefit of the doubt and talk to a person to see what's up. But this CV/Resume in it's current form isn't helping you.

I'm not going to lie, we may not be typical, but where I'm at, when you are young and bounce around every couple years for a couple jobs, I don't see so much of an issue. But when you are mid-senior career, you don't look right. Way too many short shallow gigs.

Lots of folks will have opinions on this; adding mine just to give you an additional data point. Specifically not looking at other comments so that I can give you my direct take; I'm sure others may disagree and that's fine. :) I'm a hiring manager at a small company that recently hired two .NET developers.

* You're not alone. There are a lot of people looking for work right now, and less work to go around, it seems. I recently had 60+ applications for 2 developer roles without using a recruiter or anything but word of mouth through communities I participate in. From a pure numbers standpoint, this means applicants have to work harder to stand out, which sucks for applicants and also because it leads to people gaming the system.

* So much of the hiring process has been enshittified. Tools doing keyword scans have replaced a lot of human judgment, and resumes have started to adapt to keep up. I abhor the practice, but: you may want to have a separate resume for places that may use these products, so that you get past auto-screening.

* Your resume is nicely laid out. However, I fear it will likely get you auto-rejected as lots of screening tools can't parse it for roles. You may want to have a version that avoids the multi-column layout. Again, this will be a guess as to whether companies are using that kind of software or not.

* I highly recommend adding your role or the equivalent role to the subtitle, e.g. "Senior Developer (Contract)" or ".NET Developer (Contract)" . It gives a quick overview of what type of work you've been doing, which is helpful when I'm scanning 60 resumes. I would go so far as to suggest You make the role a part of the heading and keep the employer & date below. E.g. "Senior .NET Developer" up top and "Technically Creative (contract) | Oct 2021 - Dev 2023" below.

* Suggest adding start/end dates including Month & Year (e.g. "Oct 2021 - Dec 2022"). It gives a sense of timing.

* There's another tough choice you face: whether to share unemployment status. It's a double-edged sword for candidates. For me, people who state their situation get respect for the authenticity, and those who try to hide it make me suspicious. But I also respect that people are biased against unemployed people even though they shouldn't be, so I would suggest making that a per-application decision.

* I already get a decent sense of this, but you may want to tweak your bullet points to reflect accomplishments/impact some more. Shows that you understand business value (which I believe you do).

* Technology under each bullet point makes me as a reviewer do extra work. Some kind of summary of technology you're proficient in will be a good addition. Should you have to? Probably not. Would I still read this CV? Of course. Will lots of folks glaze over and move on when they have to do extra work while reviewing hundreds of applicants? Yes.

* I like that you include your GitHub. I definitely look at those and it never counts against an applicant (for me. Again, double-edged sword).

* I think the one-page resume is working against you here. With your experience since '05 I think moving to 2 pages and expanding on some of the suggestions above will work in your favor.

* The title at the top of your resume, "Software Developer", could probably do with a tweak. It's one of the first things I see. "Senior Software Developer", "[Stack of Job You're Targeting] Developer", etc. may go a long way. I recently gave someone an interview because they had "Systems Integration Developer" in their title and I was looking for integration work. It would be an effective technique IMO.

* Find your local & global communities on Twitter, Mastodon, Slack, LinkedIn, Discord, etc. -- many often times have jobs channels where things will pop up. Coming from a community comes across as a sort of implicit reference in terms of places you may participate. And there's usually little downside as you learn things, participate in discussions, and build relationships there that are nice either way.

I wish you the best of luck finding your next opportunity!

Welcome to the desert of the real.

While people are right to point out the down market, I think they're ignoring the obvious corollary. My theory is that you've been getting by with the weaknesses in your resume because the tech market hasn't seen a major downturn for awhile. From skimming your blog, it doesn't seem like you're an unskilled developer, but that's how your resume presents you.

Others pointed out that you don't mention impact, just responsibilities, and this is 100% the thing you need to fix. Apologies for the handwaving with somewhere (read this on my phone, replying on my desktop), but somewhere you said you were thinking like a dev and someone else backed you with a "we're not MBAs". I strongly encourage you to drop this dichotomy from your mental model. You should be curious about the impact of your work, whether it's to benefit the business, your coworkers, or some technical process. Your resume reads like that of someone who did what they were told and not a lick more. I've worked with people like that and I cannot give them ownership over projects. You're selling yourself as a liability.

But there's good news, judging from your blog you have had impact, so it just comes down to figuring out how to sell it. (sidebar: everyone is in sales, in this case you are selling yourself, this shouldn't make you uncomfortable, just think of it of making it easier for hiring managers to say "yes, I would like to take to this person / take a chance on them / think they will do well on the team).

Taking an example from your resume: "Wrote a server for participants to connect to and be given challenges to solve collaboratively in real time." How many participants? How much compute did you need to process this? What was the server response time? How would anyone look at this line and know you did a good job? Not just "well, they did the job, but was it good?".

Writing resumes for this approach is a skill. I'm guessing you will be a little unpracticed, but that's fine. I first switched my mindset on this about a decade ago and took 3 - 4 hours to learn the basics of LaTeX (I was tired of formatting in MS Word) and followed the advice laid out here: https://careercup.com/resume. You probably have enough experience where 2 pages might actually be fine. (it doesn't have to be LaTeX, I just gave it a try, found that I liked the end results, and have been slowly adding to my knowledge here or there)

Also, your GitHub profile is a mess. You're not putting a consistent good foot forward in your popular repositories. libtweak is pretty strong (imo, README could serve to have a "here's where I used it" section because I assume you used it for your games) but github-code-reviews is a much smaller scoped project. Pick your most impressive ones and figure out how to show just those. I've also found the advice listed here to be helpful: https://blog.boot.dev/jobs/build-github-profile/.

IMO, the two column layout has to go. Also, I'd separately call out your personal homepage and your GH profile. Expecting busy recruiters to click through GH and see your personal page is not a strategy for success.

tl;dr; you're presenting what appears to be good experience poorly, but the good news is that this is easier to fix than getting the experience in the first place