Three full months have passed since I was laid off from my job in January, when I wrote Forced Reductions: The Emotions of Being Laid Off, and my work situation hasn’t meaningfully changed since then in spite of how busy I’ve been trying to figure out what my next move is going to be: in addition to sending out flight after flight of cold applications, I’ve also engaged my personal network, both weak and strong connections, for lots of Skype conversations and catch-up chats to let people know I’m looking and ask for their help with referrals.
Tapping referrals has turned out to be unusually necessary, given what the tech job market looks like right now between the current high interest rates for investment borrowing and other factors making companies be a little more conservative with their forward looking hiring, like the change to R&D tax accounting over the last two years and the looming threat of AI disruption across the white collar world, which everyone has been buzzing about.
In spite of sending out over 130 cold applications for appropriately leveled (and under-leveled) roles during that time, both remote and local, my response rate even for phone screen responses has remained below 1% (I have had one phone screen from those). My only real engagement has come from direct referrals from friends and former coworkers and managers, and even there it’s been a highly competitive grind. From five direct referrals, only one of those has turned into an active loop that might go somewhere.
It’s surprisingly taxing on my self-confidence, in spite of doing my best to keep my morale high and remind myself that the right fit will eventually present itself if I just stay in the game. I’ve had a somewhat nontraditional career path with several entrepreneurial detours, one much more successful than the others, and I’ve worn a lot of hats as a result and developed skills across a range of business verticals, which can make it difficult for recruiters to slot me into specific roles and difficult for me to know how to market myself. In a more favorable hiring environment, this breadth was a strength—in the current environment, it can feel like a liability when one of the biggest challenges is getting noticed in a sea of people angling for the same small sets of jobs. The jack of many trades is invariably never the best fit for the one highly specialized role.
It has been particularly encouraging, if not ideal, to understand that I’m not experiencing this environment alone. When I wrote about seeing some other tech managers discussing this on Twitter recently, I had a host of people reporting similar experiences and I also know very talented and motivated people in my network who have spent far more time looking for jobs than I would have expected at any time in the last two decades. It was nice to see one of them finally land a good job in the last few weeks, which gives some hope at least!
But the overall environment still leaves me with a lot of questions on my approach and a lot of unease. I have so much empathy particularly for recent grads or people who went back to school trying to find work in this environment, and it makes me wonder what the future of technology jobs are going to look like a year or two out. Will things still look like this if the cost of money remains tight? Will it loosen? Will they change the R&D tax policies back to how they were? What happens if they don’t?
In 2020 I had largely resolved to move away from the technology sector as a career, and I returned to it both because it turned out that I couldn’t keep away (using that time to launch my own tech company and learn a lot through direct experimentation and technical development with both LLMs and the blockchain) and because I had a volunteer opportunity at the end of 2022 that reminded me how much I love running operations and shipping interesting products with a high-functioning tech team. When I went back to that after a long and careful job search to try applying those skills in a slightly different sector, it was disappointing to run into downturns resulting in layoffs.
It’s tough to know that there’s something I’m really good at doing that I just can’t find an outlet for at the moment, and it’s also tough to realize that at three months I probably just need to be more patient and lower my expectations for the speed of opportunities arising in a much harder economy (for tech jobs at least) than I’ve job hunted in previously.
When cold application isn’t working, and your referral network has been largely been exhausted with minimal leads, what are you supposed to do? At least in my case, I genuinely don’t think this is a skills or retraining issue. There’s not really a certification or bootcamp or skill set that makes me markedly more attractive of a candidate than I am now. I suppose I could go get a formal PMP certification or spend a few years pursuing an MBA, but realistically I have clearly demonstrated experience at Fortune 500 companies actively performing activities related to those skillsets and can showcase them in an interview with a high degree of confidence. To the extent that either too much seniority or too little depth in a particular area are problems, I can’t anticipate those specifically or resolve them in anticipation of an objection except by targeting a different type or set of roles.
It’s really weird to be in a position where I’m not really sure what I could or should be doing to improve my odds of landing a good opportunity other than a vague sense that I could maybe be networking more than I already am, as that seems to be the only avenue that’s yielded some material interviews so far. So many of the possible things I could do, including writing more essays or longform content either here or on Twitter, lies in the weird liminal space of, “might help, might not, hard to say, and can’t do all of it anyway.”
A lot of the time I feel like what I should be doing is something that sounds like, “quit whining and git gud.” But I also feel like this is unnecessarily harsh, maybe.
I know that everything is going to be fine eventually, one way or another, and that what that looks like might involve adjusting my strategy or my expectations—I expect I’ll figure that out and make things work. But there’s a reason I think that the young woman with two college degrees who was upset about the job market right now struck such an emotional chord with so many people: it’s strange to be in a place where you want to work, are willing to work, in some cases have the necessary direct experience and skills to do the work, and to not even be able to get to the stage where you can talk about whether a position is a fit on either side because so many people are competing for those jobs. It’s also weird how long those jobs are staying open in a lot of cases, though! Feels like a matching problem on both sides.
Anyway, I do have at least one open loop I’m still feeling pretty optimistic about, and I’m doing a lot of reading and writing and applying and networking in the meantime while I try to find the right next opportunity. I have plenty of other things to keep me busy too, with my wedding next month and the ongoing family planning preparations I’ve been making with my partner, which have been both engaging and exciting.
Ironically, despite being unemployed, it’s hard to remember the last time that I’ve had as much optimism and hope for the future I’m excited about building in my life than I do right now. The journey wouldn’t be challenging or interesting if it didn’t get a little rocky sometimes, right? I’ll be okay. I always have been before, and I’ve been in far more dire straits than I am now. The challenge right now is just to keep a clear head, stay positive, do the best I can, and keep my eyes open for both pivots and opportunities that make sense as they arise.
It’s also a good personal reminder for me to stop, smell the roses, and enjoy the parts of life that are good right now for what they are. As always, I feel so very blessed in my life, and this too shall pass.
Thanks for writing this, and best wishes for both your career and your wedding!