A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

If you were my little brother, and you told me that you had applied to 100 jobs you were strongly qualified for and got zero offers, I would put on my big brother pants and make some fairly pointed observations about your skills, beginning with lead qualification. I would then advise working on skills like lead qualification over sending out 100 more resumes into a process which, as your big brother who loves you has to point out, you must have designed to fail. It should not be difficult to get radically better at it, because a) you've got nothing but free time and b) the place where you're starting from is not terribly advanced.

Also coming from the place of big-brotherly-introvert love: if you are aware that networking is important and networking takes place at events that you don't go to, this suggests a fairly obvious strategy that actually works.

There are a shocking number of people here with no outward empathy, understanding nor willingness to see outside of their own limited experience.

The world is not the tech industry. Not everybody has the same perspective as you. In fact, more people find themselves in this chap's shoes than in yours.

You're likely posting on here because you're under some illusion that you're an entrepreneur. How can you build a successful product if you can't put yourself in another's position?

I feel his pain. We just got done interviewing someone who had studied "web page" design. It's sad because whatever he was taught for those 4 years (while getting a 3.96 GPA) amounted to a very limited skill set. His designs were half there but his ability to actually apply or use them to a problem weren't.

This is a recurring theme in many applicants that walk through our doors. There's tons of degrees I've never heard of that make me think "There's a degree in that!?" Most have no applicable skills. Most don't even know what they need to know. Finally, most don't have a way to learn it without a mentor to guide them.

"Owning a home that's bigger than 500 square feet. (hint: that's not big.) "

That's U.S. entitlement for you. 500 square feet is perfectly reasonable, I live on about the same, and I rent it (and I'm 31 years old).

A 500 square feet small apartment in Barcelona is about 200.000 euros right now, and 80.000 here in Uruguay.

I agree that it's not ideal for raising kids, but it's not something to whine about.

Edit: as others pointed out, most have a lot of work experience by 29 years old. I had 8 years' experience at the time and I expect people in the U.S. to have even more since they graduate earlier and have summer jobs and all that.

Also, he says he can make 36.000 dollars/year?, well you can save a bit and try your hand overseas. During hard times, people emigrated in the past. My grandparents did, and endured hardships. In the U.S., you might have read about pilgrims. I doubt they complained about not being able to afford a dog. And being a foreigner has a charm that will make you popular with girls (not to mention the U.S. passport if it comes to that).

Please tell me when it was ever easy. Rumors of the job market being easy in the past are vastly overstated. Before the Internet, before entry to IT was as easy as it later became, I graduated high school as valedictorian and took the highest paying job I could find based on my skills: factory labor in a box factory. I got married a year after high school, we had a son, and THEN I started junior college. Before I got my associate degree in IT 3.5 years later, we had two more children. I worked the factory job for 5.5 years. When laid off, I worked in convenience stores, chem labs, other factories, whatever I could find (and finding short-term work was not easy--sometimes spent weeks finding a job, only to be called back to the factory.) In my last semester, I worked an unpaid internship in a bank IT department while still working the factory job at night. The bank hired me. I have worked on the same software, following it from owner to owner, ever since. I have done extremely well. But I was in no way prosperous until I hit my mid-30's. We lived in apartments for years, then a mobile home, and finally a house when I was 31. So from age 19 through about 35, you might say it was a struggle. It's not that I don't sympathize with 20-somethings who think they have it rough, but I would like to tell you that for most people, getting along is NOT easy and NOT guaranteed. This whole business of getting the right degree and then networking your way to fun and glory--if you can pull it off, cool. If not, perhaps you ought to start grinding at whatever you can, save up some money, and keep grinding for the chance you want. Oh, and get off my lawn (kidding--I know I sound like that guy.) Good luck, but more than that I wish you the benefits of every second of your own efforts--eventually.

While we're providing isolated, non-representative examples: I graduated in 2009 from a crappy Podunk school whose average SAT was 980 (on the old 1600 scale). It only costs about two grand a semester. I majored in CS. I had an internship at a credit union, then a job in insurance lined up before graduating, and then two years later I was hired by OkCupid. I have sent out exactly three resumes in my life, and never been rejected. I don't have any extraordinary accomplishments that I'm omitting.

As far as I can see, the economy is fine. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

> Am I bitter about all of this? Not entirely, because it all just sort of works itself out. If I can't get married (dating is tough when you're broke) and have kids, I don't need a home bigger than 500 square feet, nor is more study to obtain employment that I'm not only happier with and better at than what I already do but also more lucrative really necessary, since I'll only be supporting myself. As for the issues revolving around savings, investments, and retirement, you may be surprised to find out how much happier one can be if you simply accept that you'll be working until very close to your death

He has a hard time applying for jobs which he may or may not be qualified for and he's resigned himself to living alone in a 500 square foot apartment until he dies... Yikes. With an attitude like that I'm sure he interviews really well.

My best advice to anyone in this situation: time management, and cool projects.

Bottom line is, if you're spending 100% of your time trying to find a new job, then your time is not well managed. Set aside some of that time to contribute something positive to the world.

A few suggestions:

Volunteer at a local nonprofit. They are constantly overwhelmed with work, and will love the help, even if it's only 20% of your time. It will be great for networking, and you'll have a good feeling about it, not to mention something to pad the resume with. Also, you'd be surprised how many places you think are official are nonprofits who could use the free help.

Go to meetup groups. Spending money on a conference for networking is not useful when you can get the same thing for free. If you're technical, there are LUGs, programming language groups, database stuff, etc. Consider book clubs of people with similar interests.

Start a blog and actively maintain it. Rather than brooding on why the system is keeping you down, study up on things and write articles to teach others. Once you get a flow going, people will start linking to your articles and you'll have some recognition.

Just a few starting points. You can easily spend 1 day a week (20% of your time) working on a cool project like that, and still have plenty of time to search for work. And the next interview you get, you'll be a lot more confident.

I was hesitant to criticize this person because I know how shitty the job search can be for recent grads (or anyone for that matter), but a few things bug me about the letter.

- It is written with a tone that lacks accountability and instead seeks to blame the situation on outside factors. To a certain degree this is true, but the bit about nepotism bothered me. There are plenty of people who are able to get jobs without being related to the CEO.

- Does it mention what industry or city/region the author is looking in (I admit I skimmed some of the article because it's really long and was making me depressed)? I know I'm somewhat insulated because I live in New York and I'm a developer, but I am trying to be unbiased. I went to a good (not top 10) state school, had a really bad GPA, and graduated right in the heart of the recession. I still had many good opportunities and a job within 3 months. The same goes for almost all of my friends, many of whom are not engineers or programmers. Maybe the author should consider looking in a different geographic region.

- The part about probably never being able to get married and have kids because of money seemed a bit melodramatic to me. People who aren't rich have been getting married and having kids for thousands of years.

- Is moving in with his parents an option while he looks for a suitable job? I got the impression that he has parents with at least some means because of the bit about sending him cash if they felt bad. This would seem like a good idea rather than spending everything you make on rent.

The moral of the story is that I understand the job market sucks, but if he is really as qualified and hard-working as he claims, it shouldn't be that hard to find something.

I'm a bit confused. He says he got his undergrad degree around when Lehman collapsed, which was September of 2008. So if he's 29 now, why didn't he graduate until he was 25 or 26?

And if it took that long to graduate, I'd like to think he was doing something worthwhile in those extra years that would have easily turned into a job.

There is no secret sauce. Work begets work. I started working as a [very bad] programmer and [mediocre] sys admin when I was 13. That job got me the job I had throughout college. The job in college got me the job I have now. Six years later and things are good.

My anecdotal observations are that the longer people I know waited to get their first job, the longer they've remained unemployed or stuck in dead end jobs.

I can empathize with his frustration as my wife, early 30s,is going through similar issues searching for jobs. Most people, wife included, don't realize that job search is not about blasting a 100 uninspiring resumes on Monster.com and hoping they get noticed. I've tried to explain to her the concept of networking her way through companies to reach individuals in decision making position and also to keep tweaking her resume to align her existing skills with the job description she's applying for, but hey, it's always easier to get frustrated and vent.

Rubbish. It certainly sounds like he has made an effort to at least bring money in, and has had jobs.

However, this tells me it is not hard to find a job, just hard to find a nice job. This is different. Having a nice job is an incredible luxury nobody has an inherent right to...

This opinion is compounded by various complaints about immigrants "taking" jobs. The truth is everybody feels they are entitled to do something amazing - regardless of if they are good enough. Some of us have to suck it up and stack shelves or staff factories...

Aspiring to more is great and everyone should do that imo. But reality might mean working a lot of crap jobs in the meantime to survive.

Survival is shockingly easy in today's world. Not surviving requires a concerted effort in fact...

To sum up. I think this complaint is valid when worded properly - its just completely unimportant.

> these places assume I'll leave as soon as something "corporate" pops up.

This sentence struck me as a little odd. Is the USA at a point where McDonald's expect a burger flipper to commit to a career with them?

Maybe I'm biased because all the non-skilled jobs I worked were before/during university, but I never got the feeling that anyone believed I'd retire from there.

Yes, we had the whole rigmarole at the interview "I want to work here because you do great customer service blah blah", but I was never asked about spending my entire career there.

I even know a guy who was begged by the McDonald's staff to work weekends there (after he left for a corporate job), because he was better than all the other staff.

While this may not be the case with everyone of this age, it seems to me that a lot of people purchased a crappy education, and are now surprised to find themselves in debt with a worthless degree. As a 25 year old, I'm finding this is true of about half the people I left High School with.

Like buying almost anything, it's possible to pay a lot of money but still end up with something crap.

The real shame is that kids are not taught to think about education in the same way they they would consider the value of any other purchase.

He's 29 and can't get married because the job market sucks and now he's a 21st century spinster? Jesus help this precious snowflake.

Why am I not surprised he's not finding someone willing to hire a 29 year old with zero work experience.

Others have a CV reaching back 5+ years at that age.

Don't put that much time exclusively into uni unless you intend to stay in science or aim for a cushy cubicle job that hires on the premise of paper-planes.

I think the thing that concerns me most about the authors post is the implicit assumption that selling ones labor to a company and being managed, coddled and generally told what to do and how to do it is the only way to make money.

It seems like the author has never thought of creating their own job. It's pretty humbling to walk around the neighborhood offering to cut lawns or paint fences and building up business that way but sometimes it needs to be done. The author must have _some_ skill worth selling after all those years of schooling. Even if they make less than minimum wage initially they can do something.

The fact that the author isn't running their own business isn't what concerns me, it's that it's something that doesn't seem to have even been considered. To me, this seems like a societal problem as well as one for the author.

In terms of advice, I can only offer my own experience: I quit my first job at 18 (worked full time through college) to work for less than minimum wage at an ISP because I valued experience.

I moved. Twice. First to London, then to the US. If you are in a town where you have seriously gone after all the jobs you can and still can't get anywhere, it's time to look at places that ARE hiring and move there.

I was willing to make atrociously bad amounts of money (I was living in a country with no minimum wage law) for five years in order to get the experience and proof of ability to execute that I needed to move and get a "real" job.

In my mind, the 29 year old author's only real hope is to create their own job - they have nothing to show an employer that they have any kind of tenacity or desire to work in a specific industry and so they will need to get their experience elsewhere.

This sucks for the author. I get that but I see no other feasible way for them to explain why they are 29 with no relevant work experience in their field. More generally, this sucks for society - we seem to have convinced a large amount of the population that the only way to make money is to sell ones labor to someone else and have that person tell you what to do and how to do it. In short: there is a dearth of autonomy in the world.

Boy does this hit close to home. I was almost exactly in the same place 2 years back. Dropped out of PhD, start looking around for a gig, then promptly rejected by almost every top IT/telco related Japanese companies. My solution was similar to @patio11's advice: a) iterate and refine your process, b) hack something on something, anything, on the side, and c) go to the events where networking actually takes place. All of these will give you both tangible and social proof to bring to table once you eventually get through to the interview round.

He missed one step: MOVE. If you're where jobs aren't, don't be there.

The unemployment rate in North Dakota is 3%.

I recently reviewed a large number of resumes from CS majors from a wide variety of universities. They were collected through career fairs sort of things.

Nearly all of them were crap. There was a constant and persistent inability to demonstrate what they had to offer my company. There was a massive focus on class projects and a complete "meh" in terms of work history.

Now, some of these people might have been excellent hires. But they could not demonstrate their aptitude. The people I did contact did have a differentiating factor: it was that they did something... almost anything... out of the ordinary in their life and put it on their resume.

People I contacted included a YC company intern, someone who liked Haskell, and someone who had gone from total programming novice to real-time operating system coder in 4 years.

Danger signs included gaps in employment (why does $applicant's resume stop in 2008?), inability to spell correctly, and lack of knowledge of the tech world.

It's not hard to apply Sturgeon's law and lift yourself out of the drek that I saw. If you want help resume building, feel free to email me. I can help you tune your resume to demonstrate your awesome (at least to another CS geek! :-) I can't say anything about what other fields look for ).

I feel the pain, but I also don't think there's much else someone in an HR department can do for you. There are no jobs and especially no entry-level jobs since they are the lowest priority to fill/create. What do you propose they do for you?

It's frustrating and wrong but it's not HR that put everyone in this mess. Edit: and it's definitely not HR that's going to get everyone out.

If you send out 100-200 resumes a week and it's not working, the obviously thing to do is to send out more right? I can't tell you how much this article rubs me the wrong way as I'm a firm believer of working smarter over working harder (although both would be pretty awesome). Yes, the system is kind of jacked at the moment especially with the way that jobs get posted, but you can't just bang your head against it all day long while complaining...

IMO, the easiest thing to do is actually volunteering some time (crazy right?) for a non-profit organization to:

1) Build up skill sets with real experience 2) Network with people of influence 3) Give back to the community

Paying it forward has always worked well for me and it makes a positive impact. Who doesn't love a win-win situation?

The general tone of what this person says just screams "you're doing it wrong." It lacks optimism, and the attitude is, as has been said, one of entitlement.

> "Those 14 steps assume everything goes well and roughly according to plan."

Yeah, definitely, if you plan to fail. Playing the numbers game with applications (sending off hundreds a month) is doing it wrong. He says he does research and tailors his applications to each one. With so many, they can't possibly be tailored enough. Those kinks will have been optimised out to save time.

Job hunting is a difficult and thankless task. But go about it the wrong way, with the wrong attitude, and it'll never get any better. Cutting the "woe is me" attitude and focussing more positively on what you can do to fix a shitty situation would be the first step.

I was in a position of thinking I'd never amount to anything, a couple of years ago. I spent 7 years in a supermarket, with only the faint tease of career prospects and progression (rapidly pulled away when I actually went for them). I thought I'd never get out, and I applied for all sorts of jobs (though not on the mass-production scale this fella has), slowly becoming bitter about them hiring other people over me.

Then I thought, "what can I do to get out of this rut?" I'd taught myself how to design and develop a website many years ago and for some bonkers reason didn't capitalise on that at the time (that's 7 years of good career progress I consciously chose not to take - no one's fault but mine). I got back into it and got a contact who gave me good work that I chose to do for free. It wasn't long before I was approached by an agency with the offer of a job. My first full-time position, at 23 years old. That was only 12 months ago.

It's been onwards and upwards ever since, even with recent redundancy.

Maybe if I'd done what this guy did, I would still be sending off 100 applications to any old job every month. The time spent doing that could easily have been spent making myself a more attractive prospect. After all, you're not being paid to 'troll' a jobsite 7 days a week, so you may as well do some unpaid work that puts you in a better position instead.

I suggest that anyone who feels like the guy in this article does get a copy of Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and read it cover to cover or listen to the audio book.

I've never gone to university and I was much worse off than that guy was success wise, but I managed to pull myself up and I make a living contract programming now.

Don't give up. Also, don't assume that the only correct path is through the front door.

Can't say I have much sympathy for him. He's 29, and despite having reasonable writing skills seems to have expected a Beemer and a blonde upon graduation.

He also seems to signal that he's far more into what a job gives him than what he can bring to a job in terms of skill. This is something that is easily sniffed out, even just through his writing. Oh, he gives the usual "hard work, sacrifice, and a bit of luck," bit, but then goes on to blame HR, the economy, etc instead of applying any rigor to his own skills and experience.

It's never been easy to break into a job. The idea that a college degree is a Golden Wonka ticket to riches and Everlasting Gobstoppers needs to die.

If you don't have the entrepreneurial spirit to create your own job/startup/career, then you're going to be a piece of phytoplankton, carried by the vagaries of the ocean's currents. There are jobs for people lacking this motivation, but they're not the ones with "I wanted the tailored suits, the chance at a high income, the BMW, the prestige, the respect, and the power."

And I have to say that this isn't particularly credible from what I've witnessed:

"due to job-hunt and financial issues, my age group finds it extremely hard to go out and be in social settings, so the usual networking and schmoozing that previous generations indulged in isn't nearly as possible for us"

And finally, playing the blame game with the faceless and apparently evil minions of HR is just ridiculous. In my experience, HR tends to weed out people so as not to waste a hiring manager's time. And in 90% of the people I've seen hired, the manager took their resume to HR to have it vetted after already having received recommendations for the applicant. In other words, if you're trying to get to the hiring manager through HR, you're doing it wrong.

This is EXACTLY how I feel about life.

Would it help if the number of non-STEM field seats are regulated every year based on employment statistics ?

I don't have anything against non-STEM fields and believe everyone should be allowed to choose what they want to graduate in, just letting people graduate while piling up debt only to end up jobless seem tragic.

Maybe knowing how to network properly is important... You can't just meet someone and say "Call me when you hear anything!" I got my current job essentially through LinkedIn. I reached out to employees at the firm/agency I wanted to work at to hear about what it was like to work there, etc. After a couple weeks we talked again and I asked how to get started in the industry, if they had anything available, etc.

Networking isn't a one-off kind of thing, essentially you are trying to be something of a 'friend' to this person, benefiting both parties.

I think what we are seeing over and over again as articles similar to this run in papers all over (HuffPo, NYT, WaPo) is this point: Most young people are bad at searching for jobs! Just like we're bad at dating, we're are bad at job searching. Obviously not everyone is bad, but a large majority of people who are unemployed or underemployed do not have a system in place that makes there job search efficient or effective. I'm currently working on addressing this problem, so hopefully stories like this can stop.

How can it be possible to write 100+ good applications in a week? That seems unrealistic to me.

This is so true. Everyone wants to say we're not trying hard enough but we really are the guys with the awesome grades, extra-curriculars, part time jobs, and involved in sports plus finding time to be social.

The silver lining is that if you're in the right industry it can be easier. Last week I sent out 10 resumes and got 4 interviews for web development positions. My chances are good at every company I interviewed with but only time will tell if I'm not being too optimistic. Your location has a lot to do with it too im sure. I live in Chicago so it was relatively easy to land those interviews but if you're not in a major metro area (New York, Chicago, LA, etc.) then surely it's a lot tougher to break in. The solution is probably to move. Half the people at the companies I interviewed at told me they moved from places like Kentucky, Mississippi, Michigan to where the jobs were.

It's tough though no matter where you are and what you're trying to break into.