Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when hunting for a job?
7 tombert 22 5/30/2025, 3:57:00 PM
For reasons that are economic and personal, I've had and lost many jobs as a software person. I am in the job hunt again.
In this hunt, I think I've applied to about six hundred places thus far, and have gotten about a dozen interviews, and all of those have turned into rejections. I think it's largely due to 2023 being a horrible year for me that ended with me having to change jobs three times, which looks bad.
While I know that it's not personal, it's just business, it's hard to not start taking these things personally and develop a bit of an inferiority complex. I don't think humans are meant to spend months at a time trying to prove themselves to other humans constantly. It has started making me a little depressed.
What do people here do to avoid getting depressed upon waking up to dozens of rejections every morning?
Mostly I channel my depression and anxiety into spite which I then use to fuel other endeavors.
If working for the stupidest, most short sighted, group of humans that we have yet developed through decades of corporate nonsense is no longer the way to have steady employment then it's time to find something else.
I am sure things will eventually improve, and maybe this is a sign that I've tied far too much of a my self worth into my career, but it's sometimes hard to stay optimistic.
The best I can do is understand how deeply broken the hiring process has been for a while now, and that we have still found a way to make it worse in the past few years.
It also probably helps that while my personal endeavors have so far generated $0 and I'll need to address the cash flow situation in some way soon, they have generated more genuine satisfaction than my last job. Which is surprising because I generally liked the work in my last role.
Only issue I have is that I have absolutely no idea how to promote the stuff I'm working on.
It depends on the person and not where they last worked or didn't work. Never write anyone off till you have at least talked to them, 'interviewed' them and given them a chance
(2) Of course FAANG is not all the same. There's the story that AMZN is an awful place to work but I know some people who are happy and productive there who I'd love to snap up if I could. I've debriefed numerous ex-Googlers and they all seemed broken to me, a common story was "I thought I could have impact there, I thought I could learn something" but they couldn't. [1] I actually have a few cases of before and after interviews where I'm inclined to say "I told you so" I can't say I've really sampled Facebook, Apple or Netflix though.
[1] Google is less a company that does things better than other companies than it is a monopoly that doesn't have to do better on any metric, the one metric that matters is earnings, and they can always tighten the screws on their ecosystem to take a little more.
In general gap problems are tough and need some combination of hard work and luck to overcome. I had two times when I had gap problems.
For the first I was still processing my separation from physics, had spent two years as a nearly full-time activist (a bit unplanned) and had trouble with depression and chronic pain. I networked very hard and managed to get a new position created for me after about eight months of busting my ass.
For the second I'd spent a few years trying to start up my own business together with a salesman who couldn't sell anything. I gave up in December 2016 and rolled my car on the 31st, I created a workflow system that processed job listings and applications with plans to AI enable it. I saw a listing for a company that was doing something similar and was pretty sure I'd get the job and sure enough I did. They liked the story of my workflow system, and funny enough that code has been through various revisions and become an RSS reader and image sorter.
I really hate the software industry. I like writing code, I like building stuff, I like math, I like a lot of my fellow engineers, but the entire industry is pretty insufferable at this point.
Is a resume that just lists enough experience relevant to a position that bad of an idea? (and skips the noise?)
Did you try A/B testing that by any chance?
Of course any such problem would be poor design, but we know how little that means.
I keep my eyes open for people testing HR resume ingestion software, publishing findings or even side by side comparisons. And I have never seen useful reports. Anyone knows any, please let us know!
I thought about buying a domain name that looks similar enough to a LinkedIn URL shortener and writing a thing to track the data around it (like Grabify) just so I might be able to see where it's actually being ingested from.
One of the things I did was apply to less jobs. I know it sounds paradoxical, but I realized I was applying for dozens of jobs that weren't really a great fit for me just because I needed a job. And I even interviewed at a place I was fairly certain would reject me after the interview. Gotta keep a cool head and rule out the ones that aren't a decent fit – and you'll get less rejections, too.
Though the rejections for jobs I'm wholly unqualified for don't bother me that much. A little, but when the job is paying like $500,000/year, I don't get too depressed because, like, yeah, they probably get thousands of applicants for that, at least some of them are probably more qualified than me.
The stuff that gets under my skin I'm rejected for jobs where I'm reasonably confident that I am one of the more qualified applicants that they've gotten for that position. At that point, it's hard to not start feeling a little bad about myself.
Gotta keep in mind though that job seekers aren't looking necessarily for the most qualified people. Sometimes they also look for people they think they'll get along with more, which could just be because the other guy put he likes rock climbing in his interests. Totally random. Or because they're trying to fill a quota, etc. Just say ** them in your mind and go onto the next.
But it can be easy to forget that too. I prepare for the interview, I do my best to answer a bunch of technical questions, I try and be polite and straightforward with my answers, I try and be the very best version of myself, only to get a rejection two days later. It's just exhausting.
They'd be so much easier if I were allowed to be actually be honest with these things. I wish that I were allowed to answer the "why do you want to work for Company X?" with "because I need to exchange money for goods and services to survive and I am hoping that if I provide some of my time and expertise you will provide me some money", instead of trying to explain how I think that working on a website that generates AI videos of cats dancing will somehow save the world, which is what they actually want to hear. I think I am a bit too autistic to really get it; they know I'm lying, I know I'm lying, what's the point of making me go through that song and dance?
I realize it's just the hoops that everyone has to jump through, I get it, but it's just exhausting.
Because like you say, spending months on just courting depression - is not good. Deliberating splitting time gives you something to look forward to in the morning - and time for stuff that realistically you don't get to do otherwise. Not enough anyway.