Okay, we’ve all heard the horror stories about high tech layoffs, and how hard it is for techies to find work nowadays.
So, how long are techies going without work nowadays? Based on your own experiences/observations, that is.
Well, it’s been exactly a month and two days since my layoff…
…but what stinks is I’ve had exactly ZERO callbacks from all the resumes I’ve sent out. It’s unreal. The NY Times classifieds used to have more than a full page under the heading “PROGRAMMER”, now it’s a good week if those listings fill an entire column. I’m no slouch at programming. All the past times I’ve been unemployed, I’d get 5-10 calls for interviews each week until I found something. Now, it seems the well is really dry.
I know a guy who’s been out of work for more than a year already.
Sigh. Hopefully there’ll be something good just around the corner.
Jobhunting SUCKS.
I’ve been out of work for six months (long story, medical problems). I’ve been actively looking for work for two months. Most of these places don’t even send you a canned email saying thanks for applying. If you get a “thanks but no thanks” email, you’re doing well.
I have a job interview next week. One recruiter has refused to put my resume forward to his client because I have this interview! He’s scared (rightly so, I guess), that I would leave his 2-month contract in favour of a full-time, permanent job with the place I’m interviewing at.
Still, it sucks. It’s demoralising. The market is full of over-qualified, under-experienced people who will take shit money just so they can get experience. Meanwhile, people who’ve been doing the job for 10 years, with certifications etc, who deserve good money are being shafted on account of the afore-mentioned shitkickers.
I HATE having to compete with nimrods! “Why yes, Maxxxie, we’d love to have you, and your experience speaks for itself! But frankly, we’d rather pay a shitkicker crapola money and just hope it works out. Good luck with your job hunt. Maybe one day we’ll realise experience is worth more to us than the money we save by hiring an incompetent buffoon. Until then, have fun trying to find a job!”
ARGH!
Max.
My SO has been out of work for almost a year now. Sometimes he’ll email out a resume and it’ll bounce because the mailbox is too full. There are hundreds of resumes for every job listing. He’s very discouraged but we’re trying to remain positive about it. He has some consultant work lined up but nothing that’ll get us a mortgage. Good luck to all of you who are looking. The economy’s got to start turning around soon!
In my case, I sorta stacked the deck against myself (moving from Europe to the US) - still, with considerable experience (not that many people around who’ve done computer networks for over 10 years), glowing recommendations, certs, a kick-ass resume and, if I may say so myself, a pretty darn high competence level, it took me about 10 months to find a Cisco networking job worth sticking with.
Even so, the current job is rather below my competence level and nightshift, to boot. So Maxxie, you may direct a little of your ire my way, I’ll happily confess to selling out under the going rate for someone like me. There are plenty of CCNAs pounding the pavement out there who could do this job. But I need a a paycheck and this is what’s open. I’m not complaining, I know there are CCIEs looking for steady jobs out there :eek:
Stick with it. You never know when you’ll hit paydirt - I found my job through dice.com (and this is a Fortune 100 company), even though I’d practically given up on on-line job searching.
One thing to do that landed me a lead: I joined a Cisco user group, volunteered to do a presentation (they always need speakers), grabbed an arcane subject that I had experience with (complex BGP design) , invested a lot of time in getting my presentation just right and got on a few people’s radar screens that way. A month later, I got an email: “My friend needs a BGP person”. Didn’t pan out, but a lead’s a lead, right ?
But 12-18 months between steady jobs is not unusual from what I hear from other people in the user group. It sucks. There are highly competent people working at half the rate they used to, just to keep their homes. With noone changing jobs (do you want to be the new guy anywhere?), there are no vacancies to try to squeeze into. Feh.
Yeow. That’s depressing.
Any other stories?
Unix Systems Admin here, been outta work for six months, only been looking hardcore since the end of Febuary though (I took some time off and then moved to a different state and didn’t really get into the search until after I’d gotten settled) I’m fortunate in that I have a degree in business and am not focusing my job search entirely on techie jobs, which seem in really short supply these days. Even so, in the past 2.5 months I’ve had all of four interviews, one of which turned out to be for one of the those pyramid scheme 100% commision sales jobs. My current “hot lead” is to do some PHP/SQL development work (and maybe take over sysadmin duties) with the IT dept where a friend works. I’ve met with the IT manager a few times, hacked together a quick demo for him and have apparently impressed the hell out of him. He’s all fired up to bring me on board, only problem is that his boss won’t give him any more money until he completes at least one of the projects he was hired to do six months ago.
Some random good news came my way recently though. I came in second for a pretty good, quasi-techie positon where another friend works a month or so ago, I’ve been informed (shh don’t tell anyone) that the person hired has been doing an awful job is officially under review and only has a “a few weeks” to save his job. So help me generate some negative energy towards this guy! 
I’m starting to get the point where I’m seriously considering registering another domaim for IT consulting services, printing some business cards and brochures and then wandering around business parks flogging my services as an IT consultant to small businesses. I certianlly have enough time on my hands in any given week to give it shot.
Have I mentioned that this whole economy sucks?
Damn I shoulda gone into construction…
I grajuwated from a respectibable coledge last weak… hehe. Really, I did, with a degree in Computer Science, and Management Information Systems, a Minor in Math, applicable experience from internships, etc. and all the places (about 100) I sent a resume to either said, “better luck next time,” or said nothing at all. One is actually still giving me the run around from like three months ago… wish they would just say no and get it over with. So now I am a broker (I prefer the euphemism “loan officer” or “financial advisor”) for Rite Mortgage… anybody need to refinance their loan? Thank God I spent 100 Gs on a college degree, eh? … depressing.
NT admin, almost 20 years of experiance… laid off since Feb. Finally hitting that brick wall…out of money, mortgage payments due. Life sucks.
I’m in the Chicago area. I was out of work for about 6 month last year, and for about a month the year before (laid of from the same company twice.) I’ve known folks who’ve been out for a year or more though - mostly engineers who’ve been laid off from big telcos and haven’t been able to transition easily to other more business oriented industries. I had some more easily transferrable skills (relational database stuff) so it wasn’t quite so horrible for me. Friends that have Java experience have also had an easier time transitioning away from telco. Also, junior level people tend to have an easier time than senior level people. I had to take a major pay cut from what I was making before, but it’s a major pay increase over unemployment.
This reminds me, I need to update my resume.
Good luck to everyone out of work and doing a job search. It’s very tough to get through.
August 1, 2002!
For over 12 years I was the Tech Support department for a tiny but insanely busy desktop publishing software company. We bit the dust last July. I can’t tell if it’s the economy, my age or that there are simply a bizillion other techies out there looking, with better skills and verifiable references.
I recently applied for a job as a “Graphics Specialist” for my county’s library system. When I didn’t even get an interview I was really curious so I called and asked why. Seems they received 520 other applications for this one (rather low level) position.
Anyone out there want to hire a QuarkXPress diva? To date I’m only two versions and a few operating systems behind the times. 
Average of 3 resumes a week for the past 3-4 months. Not a damn thing. Not even an interview. Only maybe three “thanks for the resume, don’t send it to us again.” (Those people I at least RESPECT - they say No to my face. I’m glad they have the guts, and don’t waste my time.) I can’t get a computer job anywhere in the state. Probably not out of state either, I haven’t tried that. 
The whole job market sucks, sucks, sucks. I’m STILL hearing stories about “400 resumes the first day the ad went live, plenty of them from people with 20+years experience and master’s degrees.” WTF is this insanity? How the hell can so many obviously amazingly intelligent and experienced people be out of work?
The (laughably easy) invasion of Iraq was a pretty poor excuse for why the economy was bad. But now the economy is just shitty as hell for no reason.
Frankly, the longer I spend dealing with “business” types, the more I think they’re all a bunch of herd-minded cowards. “Everyone says things are going to be bad - quick, massive layoffs!” followed quickly by, “Look, everyone’s unemployed! Customer confidence is in shambles! It’s just like we thought!” Um, did it occur to you morons that if you hadn’t laid all those people off, they would still have jobs, still be spending money, and customer confidence wouldn’t be in the toilet? Self-fufilling prophecy, what?
I’m not unhappy that the dot-com bubble popped. That was insane too. The kind of stuff people threw money at… still makes me laugh. The problem now is that the pendulum has swung to the other stupid, irrational extreme: we have irrational pessimism instead of irrational exuberance.
I’m no longer patient - I’m grumpy. I can use an oscilloscope, solder a circuit, program a microcontroller, write device drivers, code any kind of socket app in raw C, hack perl and CGI, design a complex class system, and architect a major system. And I still can’t get a freaking job. What the hell??
I just spent the last two weeks reading up on RF and cell phone technology, and I got my mom’s cell phones working beautifully at her mountain home where you couldn’t even call out, much less receive calls. I have to spec and find an antenna, figure out how to mount it on the roof, calculate dB losses down the cable, etc, etc. Now she gets a consistent 3 bars of signal (without amplification!). Everyone who sees what I did is like, “damn, that looks pro!” The sheer amount of raw intelligence, hard work and dogged persistance that it took amazed even me, and I (obviously) rate myself fairly highly. And still I can’t get a job.
The job market is so stupid it hurts. Completely idiotic.
“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” -Keynes
-Ben
I’m not out of work, but I have noticed the effects of a lot of metro Kansas City, Missouri techies being unemployed. I work for a fairly affluent school district as a database/network admin, and although our techs don’t leave too often, we have a couple of positions open up every few years.
Last year, for a building tech position (general hardware and software job paying around $30K a year–which is fairly comfortable for our part of the Midwest), we had maybe 10 people apply. This year, for the same position, we had over two hundred people apply–this time the majority of them even had a fair number of higher education degrees.
And, because we’re a school district, we normally don’t pay our programmers much (maybe $40-$45K); which is why we usually end up with fresh-out-of-school college kids who do (normally so) an excellent job. A great jumping board, IMHO. This year, because our state is going through a budget crisis, we’re not replacing our departing programmer; some of us will be taking over his duties, trying to farm them out as best as possible. Still, had we posted that job, I’m sure that we would have had our pick of the some of the most experienced programmers out there. (Which isn’t to say that they would stay when the economy finally rebounds, of course.)
I do wish all of you techs (and anyone else, of course) without jobs all the best luck. And I will also suggest that if you haven’t looked into positions open in educational institutions (whether they be private, public, K-12 or post-secondary), you might give it a shot.
An ex-roommate of mine (NT/2000 network admin) lost his job back in January when his company was sold to a bigger fish in the pond. Thus far he’s had one interview (it went well, he said), but the hospital CIO never called him back. He’s thinking of applying for a job in retail management just so that he can leave the unemployment pay behind and earn better money. I send him all the jobs for which I occasionally still get tapped, but he’s had no luck so far.
I just can’t wait for the tech sector to pick back up because I hate to see so many of my friends (in real life and on the boards) without jobs.
Joined the ranks of the unemployed April 28th, 2003.
Became unemployed Oct 2001, did some training and got a few (short) temp jobs to tide me through. I didn’t get properly back into work until this March, when I started contracting. Between now and then, I think I spent at least 12 months of it unemployed and staying with a friend.
I was averaging 100 applications a day to find work, and through most of that I got no responses at all. (I’ve also been strung along by more than one agency). In a few cases I applied within an hour of the job being advertised and was told they had already had over a hundred applicants.
Tirial
I’m employed now, but I was out of work for almost exactly 7 months and have gone from Visual Basic Programmer to Administrative Assistant (who programs). I probably sent out about half a dozen resumes or more a week, counting those sent through websites. I was looking for work anywhere between Ohio and Maine, dipping south to the DC area. I got no interviews for permanent jobs, and only one for an assignment. I lost that one because I could not in good conscience guarantee it would be completed in less than a week. On the other hand, I only have an Associate’s Degree in Computer Science. My Bachelor’s was in Japanese. Before I was laid off, my employer was averaging 300 applications for help desk jobs; the administrative assistant job I got drew over 100 applications. The unemployment rate in my city is also as high as it’s been in years.
CJ
(formerly cjhoworth)
I was laid-off from a Wall Street brokerage firm about a year and a half ago. I have a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics and about 30 years experience as a programmer/analyst.
This is the worst I’ve ever seen the IT market.
yeah, I switched careers to move into telecom project management just to have things dropout from the bottom. Spent the past 11 months on severance, unemployment and the wife’s paycheck, stayed home and did the Mr. Mom thing. Just started a new job this weekin a related field. Spread out your search, don’t just showcase the hard skills, and STICK WITH IT! It’ll come. I promise.
C/C++ programmer here. Been out of work since October 15th, 2002. There really is not a lot out there, and what is there is VERY SPECIFIC (at times, simply outrageous) in required skills.
I had what looked like a great match not work out (Chemistry/SW development position) because of lack of GUI experience…they’re still looking, because a new recruiter emailed me last week about it. I had an interview in February for another good match job (although it was in Windows, rather than my forte, Unix) in which I completely left my brain at home, so I didn’t get the job.
I have been interviewing with a company for the last week or so. I found the position through HotJobs. It’s a Unix (Solaris)/C/PHP/MySQL position, which is pretty darn close to my sweet spot 
They asked for my references last night, and I have another phone interview with the second Chicago developer (looks like I’d be spending some time out there) later today, so it’s looking pretty good
Best tip: GOOD, JOB-SPECIFIC COVER LETTER! When I even bothered, I was wimping out on the cover letters (2-3 sentences) when I was applying to Monster/HotJobs positions. In this case, I really nailed the cover, highlighting how I was the right person for the position. Gotta think that helped.
Good luck, and hang in there…
My god, you people make me so glad I stuck with my current job. I almost left a couple of times, too. I have the feeling that I’d be unemployed right now if I’d taken what appeared to be a “better” job back when tech jobs were plentiful. I may work for a small company with no health insurance (which is loads of fun when you’re a diabetic like me) but I’m still paid well and, despite the fact that our company is basically a dot-com, we’re still going strong and my job will definitely be around for the forseeable future.