Locating: How did you find the job? Did it find you?
Interviewing: Was there anything you did that made a difference? Different strategies that might not be intuitive?
Surviving: Every job has its flaws, what have you done to maintain your ability to earn an income despite issues that had made previous jobs difficult / unpleasant / untenable.
Currently unemployed, quit my job working for one of the states in the US earlier this year because they were not treating software development as a first class citizen. It's hard to get work done when you can't get any testing, can't get any infra or PM support, have to do everything yourself in a vaccum. Have to run apps on a server in the closet.
First time in my life I "chose myself" and quit a job instead of staying in something that was very negatively affecting my mental health. It's been hard to find a way to get back into employment without addressing fears of hostile, toxic work environments.
Fingers crossed for some ideas or directions that can give me some new things to try instead of just doing the same shit that fails over and over again.
> quit my job working for one of the states in the US earlier this year because they were not treating software development as a first class citizen. It's hard to get work done when you can't get any testing, can't get any infra or PM support, have to do everything yourself in a vaccum. Have to run apps on a server in the closet.
You don’t quit a job until you have another one lined up. You do your work the best you can for 40 hours a week and leave. If you don’t get all of your work done and they fire you, at least you kept getting a paycheck longer. Don’t let your pride or frustrating keep you from exchanging labor for money to support your addiction to food and shelter.
> Surviving: Every job has its flaws, what have you done to maintain your ability to earn an income despite issues that had made previous jobs difficult / unpleasant / untenable.
You saw that last response I had? I care about doing the best job I can given circumstances outside of my “circle of influence” for 40 hours a week and then I go home. Every pay period money get deposited in my account and depending on the job RSUs get deposited in my brokerage account every vesting period.
As soon as I get off work, I don’t think about it until the next day.
> First time in my life I "chose myself" and quit a job instead of staying in something that was very negatively affecting my mental health. It's been hard to find a way to get back into employment without addressing fears of hostile, toxic work environments.
What you described is neither hostile or toxic.
But now to your question, I’ve been working a lot longer. But I changed jobs in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2023, and lasted year.
1. External recruiters who reach out to me.
2. Reaching out to recruiters who I have kept in touch with for well over a decade.
3. Reaching out to companies where I had a specialized skillset - no “full stack development” or web development is not specialized
4. My network that I always keep warm.
I don't know what to tell you other than the only different course of action was to kill myself and I didn't want to do that. Repeated trauma in multiple workplaces has effectively robbed me of my career. It's not all the fault of the employers I had, but it's also not 100% my fault either. I struggle with self worth because I cannot understand what my value is anymore. The experiences I have keep telling me I am worth less and less. People are less willing to hire me, to pay me, to even listen to what I have to say.
Having all of this playing in your head 24/7 makes it impossible to view authority as anything but abusive and willfully ignorant. I know they aren't all like that... but then why does this keep happening to me?
I want to go back but I don't know how. It's more than just someone being fussy there is something seriously psychologically wrong, but outwardly I "look" fine so I must be faking it / doing it for attention.
I am tired of pandering to the people who refuse to see me.
> What you described is neither hostile or toxic.
I... didn't even describe the toxic work experiences I have had. The entire impetus to take the actions I did are not written in this post on purpose. I don't want to muddy the waters with conjecture and hearsay. Having been through a nightmare and being told "that wasn't toxic" is the kind of mindset that I am terrified of interacting with (being abused by) in the workplace.
I say this not because I know you, but because much of what you describe is "pretty normal" for this industry. And once you start doubting your self worth; once you need the recognition from others, well, let's say there's not much of that going around.
There's no shame in deciding its not for you, and exploring options in other fields which are more compatible with your needs.
Leave your work at your job. Neither your employer nor your manager are thinking about you when they leave work and they probably aren’t thinking about you too much while they are at work. If you got hit by a truck tomorrow, they will have an open req for your position before your body gets cold and you will only be briefly remembered if someone does a “git blame” on code you wrote.
I was in a similar position from around 1999-2008 during my second job. I was in a mutually destructive codependent cycle at work where they wouldn’t fire me because I was cheap labor and I wouldn’t quit because 5 years in I let my skills atrophy and I my personal life was in the shitter.
Speaking of which, I was in a shitty marriage (divorced in 06 and remarried in 2012) that also affected my self worth and failing at a side real estate business. My only saving grace then is I took up teaching fitness classes that I was good at.
I said never again. I stayed at that job another 2 years after my divorce, did the bare minimum while I got my head on straight, up skilled and got another job and from then on I treated my job as a throwaway commodity where I worked 40 hours a week, did the best I could and stayed in my lane and have money deposited into my account.
That was my second job. My 8th job was at the most toxic company in the industry - Amazon.
Amazon put me “on focus”. This is where they continuously escalate the requirements to get off focus and then they give you an official PIP. At that point you can either try to overcome the PIP or in my case get $40K severance. But if you fail the PIP, you get 1/3 of the severance. If you try to dispute it and fail you get 1/2 of the 1/3.
I didn’t stress. I knew how the game was played. I did just enough to get my next vest of stocks, I went on vacation even though most people thought it was a bad idea and when the PIP or take severance conversation came, I didn’t even let them finish explaining what I had to do to get off PIP. I asked them where do I sign to get my severance and how much it was.
Then I took another vacation…
My coworkers were stressed about having to go through the process and bewildered why I was so calm.
Funny enough, I got a job quickly after being Amazoned and the same thing happened a year later - another layoff. I did the same, I saw the writing on the wall within three months of starting. I didn’t stress. I didn’t cancel our vacation to Hawaii.
My job doesn’t define me.
4 jobs via Facebook (notably a top 50 YC backed unicorn). One direct referral. One from a job board. One from a university alumni group where I was the committee. One from LinkedIn.
I "blog" a lot on social media, so most of the FB jobs "found me". But for my first job, I went through my friend list one by one and asked for jobs because 3 months on job sites weren't turning up anything. In the recent 5 years, LinkedIn has far surpassed FB for leads.
Job boards are terrible. One rejected me while I was interviewing (got the interview via HN). One rejected me while I was in the office.
Recruiters bring in a lot of high quality leads (highest being TikTok). But 0% success rate for me. One told me that I was ghosted for a role, but when I applied directly for that exact role later, I got it within 2 weeks of application.
Sending out emails/DMs to C-levels and asking for a job actually has a good interview rate, but for startups. Most couldn't afford the usual rate, but if I were desperate, I'd do this.
Before this current job I was a JavaScript developer. JavaScript for employment is like elementary school teacher in the public school system when compared to the US education system. Sure there are many elementary school teachers that are absolutely amazing, but most will never hold the same intellectual capacity as a tenured university professor.
My learning from this is if you wish to do more then don’t find yourself in a place where you are competing with entitled children.
Interviewing: I just treat the interviewer as partner rather than a rival that is stopping me from getting the job or something. Being honest and know what you are talking about is key.
Surviving: Didnt really need to, all the companies I worked in were good enough.
Interviewing: lots and lots of practice. Took me 3 attempts to pass, 3 consecutive years.
Surviving: one half at a time. It's hard at times but not that bad that I want to resign.
Surviving: I survive as long as I need to according to circumstances, but no longer. Until I leave inappropriate place.
Interviewing was different. They asked a lot of weird questions like “if you were a sandwich, what flavour would you be?” And “you need to find out the weight of a boeing 737 but you don’t have scales, how are you going to figure it out?” (I said “I’d just google it”). I was perplexed by these questions and thought I’d bombed out. The other thing they had me do was a 10 minute presentation on why I wanted the job, and what I hoped to gain. Still to this day, I think I did nail the presentation. I kept it clean. A few years after I got my Job, one of the guys on the panel of my interview was talking to me giving me a pep talk for an exam I needed to sit, and I asked him why they asked me those weird questions and he said “we just wanted to see how you’d handle stress and ambiguity” he also told me I did one of the best interviews he’d ever seen. That was pretty good feedback years after the matter but I’m never quite sure if he was just being nice.
In terms of surviving, healthcare especially the area I work in is not for the faint hearted, some days it really is utter carnage and overwhelming. Staff can be arseholes to each other, and management don’t care if you were hoping to go home on time - you’re probably going to stay late. I cope with my job in several ways, some of them consciously others less so. I exercise every day, it helps with my health but also my mood, and gives me time out. I study things that are separate to what I do for work - like planning for a back up career. But at work, I also dissociate, not consciously but I do, I turn off my emotions at work, and I don’t care too much about anything or anyone. It’s not to be unkind, it’s like self preservation or something. I also just treat my work as the money generating goal that it is. My identity, my aspirations, and my self-worth are not tied to my work, work is a thing I do to get money to live. I am no longer as altruistic as I was when I originally went into healthcare.
I'm responding because I also quit a job years ago to preserve my mental health, so your post resonates with me. When I quit, I was becoming increasingly depressed. I did not have a new job lined up. I did have several years of $$ runway. I also considered it an option to move to a cheaper COL area overseas, if needed, to keep afloat.
Since then, I've mostly taken gig work to provide for myself (freelance/consulting software development - mostly mobile app development, but also web app stuff).
I don't know how typical your experience was for "state work". If I were you, I might try to leverage my previous experience into a new state job, which might turn out better.
My answers to your bullet points aren't really relevant, since I left my last FT job over 10 years ago. But I'll give them anyway.
Locating: In one case, I got a referral from a friend who had interviewed with the company and didn't like the place (he was right, I was more desperate and took the offer). In all other cases, I found the job via a recruiter. However, I don't recommend using a recruiter, and I think you're better off using your network, if you have one. Using recruiters was unpleasant for me, to say the least. I'm not saying all recruiters are bad, just that the ones I interacted with were far from awesome. At least they got my foot in the door before pumping me for the interview questions on the way out the door.
Interviewing: I read a couple of books on interviewing, did a very small amount of l33t code style practice (which I found boring and didn't seem helpful). I looked for sample interview questions and practiced writing down responses. I think live in-person mock interviews would have been helpful, but I didn't have anyone to practice with. I looked back on my old jobs and tried to imagine creative ways of making it sound like I'd been a positive contributor (which I was, but sometimes you feel powerless to make much of an impact at the time, so everything you did seemed pointless looking back at it).
Surviving: My "job lifetime" - defined as how long I can stand a job without feeling like I'm going out of my mind - seemed to be about 1.5 to 3 years (the first 6 months is the honeymoon phase where I'm learning a lot, and then gradually I start to know what's what, and I get disillusioned). It seemed to decrease after each job, which is probably why I decided to go with gig work after my last position. I wish I could tell you about surviving, but I didn't "survive" my jobs very well. You might want to try gamifying things, something that never occurred to me at the time. Since you're planning to quit anyway, pretend that whatever you do doesn't much matter, and just do your job however you want (within reason - nothing illegal!) so that at least you are getting something out of it. Maybe this wouldn't have been possible with your old job. In my jobs, I definitely saw coworkers get away with things that I thought were "wrong," but were clearly tolerated by management, so I think I had more leeway than I realized at the time.
Take work less seriously? It's there to pay the bills. It's a waste of your time on earth, but you also probably don't want to be on the street, which would also be a waste of your time, and much more unpleasant. You might try gig work, if you can find it, and see if that agrees with you. Usually the gigs are a little more transactional, and sometimes you find ones that are actually fun with cool people. Churn is expected - no one finds it strange that you left a gig after 3 months.
You can take the opposite tack and try creating your own work out of what you love, a la Will Shortz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Shortz My feeling is that this is just not possible unless you're pretty narrowly passionate about one thing. And not everyone wants to make their passion into a profession.
In 2019, China’s game industry was hit by license (banhao) restrictions—without a license, games couldn’t enter the market. Many studios shut down. Unfortunately, I was laid off in June with no severance. My boss was a founder; he treated people well, and none of us blamed him.
After the layoff, my girlfriend and I often ate at a local barbecue shop. We got to know the owner, learned the ropes, and three months later—by October—we opened our own barbecue restaurant. Business started strong, but the good times didn’t last. In November, African swine fever broke out. For a barbecue shop that relied heavily on pork, it was a heavy blow: pork prices nearly tripled, other meats also became more expensive, and our customers were affected. Our daily revenue fell from around 6,000 to about 5,000.
Soon after, something bigger hit—the pandemic. Right before the Lunar New Year, the government required all businesses to close for public health. We stayed home, but the storefront rent still had to be paid. Although the strict lockdown didn’t last long, the pandemic dragged on and the economy struggled. After a year of weak sales, my girlfriend and I agreed that I would return to the game industry. I found my current job, and she continued running the restaurant.
In April 2021, my girlfriend and I broke up. I lost the energy to keep managing the restaurant, and by October we closed it so I could focus on my career. My first project at the new company—Nation of Darkness—spent two years in development and performed reasonably well at launch. We then began a second project just as the company was facing a cash crunch and needed results quickly. Unfortunately, our team lead didn’t deliver and was replaced. After the change, I felt increasingly out of sync with the new lead. About a year later, I left to team up again with my former lead, and together we started building the SeaGames platform.
That’s my work experience—every move was one I actively pursued. If you notice any errors in my English, I’d really appreciate your feedback.
