Having a hard time landing another job

Hello Everyone,
for the past year or so I have been trying to land a new job.
I have taken a lot of time doing leetcode problems and learning algorithms during the past year since some of the companies I interviewed for asked questions similar to leetcode.
Although I was able to pass their phone screens and land some on-site interviews, I didn’t get any jobs
other companies I apply for just land me with a recruiter and then get an email that says they are not moving forward with me.

A little background about me, I have been a web developer, mostly working by myself at non-tech companies. my first job was at a digital agency, but left there due to the minimum wage i was getting paid, and lack of growth. I did work with other developers but this job lasted about nine months.

my second company is where I began my journey as a solo developer. I basically did everything for the company’s website, but most of my time was focused on pushing pixels around to make the site look pixel-perfect for marketing. I also did other tasks like running excel reports and helping around with IT stuff.

My current job also involves just me as the developer. And although I have made some good contributions to the company, I am just tired of being the bottleneck every time there is an issue. i get asked questions about the simplest stuff that other people should have been able to figure out. When i need to be absent for whatever reason and people have an issue, they rather wait until the next day for me to figure it out even though most of the time they could have figured things out on their own. Nobody seems to want to learn some of the stuff I do, like content management, because they feel it’s too ‘Techie’ for them, even though the tasks are so easy that even a toddler could do them.

At this point I am running out of patience that I think getting a job at a fast food joint might be better than having to go through a bunch of rejections and depression.
I feel that companies are scared to hire me because I have been working solo for most of my career, and thus think I won’t work well with others.
My introvert nature and anti-social skills don’t help either.

If possible, can someone take a look at my resume, critique it, and maybe give me pointers as to what I should focus on to improve my skills instead of doing leetcode all the time.

2 Likes

Paul,

Looking at your resume you have a few things going on right and a few things I’d adjust. Your bulletd items are good. They show impact and you have numbers to show it. Turn it up even more by showing customer impact or revenue.

As for adjustments your skills section needs work. HR needs to see you have the skills in the job req quick and easy in your resume. Right now your skills would qualify you for some basic python or php jobs. Make sure those skills align to the job you’re applying to. One example is you list React in experience but not as a skill. If you have React you also have javascript, NPM, and a few other things. Also, I’d double check using business specific acronyms. EDI and RMA stand out in that regard.

Hope this helps. I wrote a book on getting jobs as a SW dev, and I have a free chapter on resumes if you’d like.

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can you link the book im kinda interested ! and thanks in advance.

dude you resume looks amazing. honestly having started coding recently and thinking i would land a job after 2 to 3 years but seeing that a person with your credentials still couldn’t land a job and is thinking of working at fast food joint is kinda soul crashing …so hang in there bud, and find a job; if not for you do it for us the people who’s aspiring to be like you one day. :fire:

LoL this universe always playing games on us.

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Contact a recruiter (any recruiter). I would very rarely suggest this, but you’re currently employed as a developer with decent work experience – getting interviews should be laughably easy.

What kind of jobs are you applying for and where are you located?

Your resume is fine (nothing special, but worthy of pulling you in for an interview for junior/mid roles). Your current role sounds a lot more backend than full-stack, but that’s normal.

I wouldn’t focus on skills OR leetcode unless you’re aiming for a FAANG company. The issue here seems to be your application or interviews.

The reason I don’t mention React in my list of skills is because I only used it once.
I don’t want to lead a company on only for them to find out I don’t have much experience in it.
not sure if its a good idea to still put it there.
other things that i don’t put in the skills section are NPM, JQuery, Ajax. these skills are simple and i don’t want them to take up space for other important skills.

my current job and previous job were both through recruiters. I don’t want to use recruiters unless I lose my job.

They usually don’t have any good jobs available and they have left a bad taste in my mouth.

The recruiter that got me my current job basically lied to me, telling me that the company was looking for someone that could build a software team within the company and it would be up to me how to run it. none of this happened. the company was just looking for someone who could do maintenance and support.

I was aiming for top companies at first, which is why I was doing leetcode. although I got some interviews with two FAANGs, but I failed.

I thought I would be prepared for lesser known companies having interviewed at some FAANGs, but their interviews were different.

They asked more obscure questions about specific language APIS and frameworks that I have never worked on or used, but it was the type of question that could have been easily looked up in the documentation.

I am located in Los Angeles and there is quite a lot of jobs posted, but i don’t have the skills for most of them.

The programming languages and frameworks used seem to be all over the place. I can never really tell which ones I should focus on if i want to land a job.

Paul,

The main thing about the skills section is that it needs to be aligned to the job positing in an honest way. If you have the skills that are listed in the job posting but don’t list them, they won’t look at you.

The idea is to tailor your resume to the job you’re applying to.

Hi Paul,

You are probably doing this already, but the reason you want a new job is also important. It should be a positive reason and not because of negative things about your current position.

Good luck

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What is FAANG?

FAANG is an acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.

People use it as shorthand when talking about the top performing tech companies.

Ah. Ok. Thank you.
For some reason knowing the underlying sources of the acronym made me chuckle.

it’s just a thought, but maybe you should write a cover letter? Cause your CV looks good for me, but maybe cover letter could help you to show yourself not only as a professional but also as a good prospective team-mate? Do some research, choose what vacancies are fit for you, and write tailored CV/cover letter for each. This advice is just from my own experience, the cover letter helped me to describe myself far better when I was looking for a web dev position, and it worked. I used this web-builder to write it since I wasn’t sure I could do it the right way www.getcoverletter.com/cover-letter-examples/web-developer/. If you decide to use it, keep in mind there’s a lot of templates, and it could help you to write suitable cover letter to each position. Hope this will help you.

Hang on, how did you get interviews for two top-tier tech companies but you can’t get (or get past) interviews for other companies?

There is this stereotype of the introverted genius developer doesn’t play well with others but Gets Shit Done. But it’s just that, a stereotype, and it’s a fairly corrosive and baseless one at that. If you have to work with other people, which is what most jobs involve (being a software developer is most definitely not an exception to this), you have to be able to work with other people. If you make it plain that you don’t work well with others, you are not likely to get hired (regardless of if, on paper, you have a superior skillset to other candidates!). I’m not saying that is the case here – you may just be venting in your original post – but you need to be very careful w/r/t indicating things like that in an interview situation, or to recruiters. If you do happen to indicate that, then it’s a massive red flag to the interviewer/s.

Yes, it definitely sounds like you need to get out of your job. I do realise how frustrating this is, that other people just won’t do things you consider trivially easy, but you’re the one who has been hired to do that job. And if that workload placed on you is too high and you are not getting support, you are definitely making the right choice in looking to sever ties from your company. But you need to empathise here: software development and maintainance requires fairly high levels of skill, almost limitless amounts of patience, and even simple stuff is complicated for the average person to grok. If a company lawyer or accountant or salesperson (to pick three roles that take high levels of specialised skills) asked you to take on their basic tasks on top of your own, would you really be ok with that?

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No Microsoft, eh? They’re doing all right last I looked.

how about FANAMA. or FabMiAlAmApNet

FANAMANA

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not sure how i got interviews for two FANGs. must have been luck.

The problem with other companies is that they ask for very specific languages. libraries, frameworks, etc in the job description that I may not have worked with.

In some interviews, I have been asked very specific questions for an API I don’t know off the top of my head.

what I like about FANGs is that they test more of your problem solving skills and allow you to use a language of your choice for the test. Other companies seem more concerned whether you know things off the top of your head instead of your ability to solve problems.

In terms of working with others, I have always stated to interviewers that the reason I am looking for a new job is to have a chance to work with other developers since it’s something I lack in my current position. I hope this hasn’t been raising any red flags with them.