wishiknew

I'm a CS grad who's never had a programming job and who's been unemployed since April. Unemployment services told me in June that I hadn't worked enough in the past two years to get anything from them. They told me that if I registered with them, it'd take me 6 months to get any money. At that time I was being taken on a 2nd interview by two companies, so I figured, I'd rather focus on that. I also started doing freelancing for an entrepreneur. He needed somebody urgently and there wasn't much work at the beginning so I told him we'd worry about money later on.

A few months forward, I still don't have a job and I'm getting broke. I've done many more hours of development for this guy, at an absurdly cheap rate. I did these in hope they'd improve me resume. My problem is, he still haven't paid me anything. He always seems nice, but then postpones it. He doesn't have much money himself, and I do am asking him to do a full-fledged contract, so that unemployment services would recognize it and skip the 6 months delay - this has a cost as he has to pay somebody else to do the paperwork. We had a group phone call with that person in August where we agreed on the principle.

I have two possibilities right now. 1. I asked him to send me money without doing a contract, so that I could buy food and pay rent a few more months, hoping I find a job before that dries out as well. This seems to meet less resistance with him, but will he actually pay? 2. The code I've been working on is on my server, he's using it to show it to clients, meaning I could shut everything down until I get what I need.

What do I do?

So I'm looking for a job and I'm starting to gather quite a few email addresses of people who've been dicks to me…

One has interviewed me a few months ago and told me things like "great feeling, I feel you're motivated, hit me up in a few months and we'll hire you". I wrote to him as expected, never got an answer. I called a few weeks ago, he said he'd call me by the end of the week. I called once again after that, his secretary told me he'd call back. Nothing ever since.

Another has interviewed me on the phone for thirty minutes and told me his company was interested in hiring me but I had to do a test project first. So I woke up one Saturday (I was working full time at that point) and spent a day working on said project. I sent it and was told it would take two weeks to get a reply since the guy who was to review my project was on vacation. Three weeks later, I ask for some news. No reply. Two months later, I ping back: no reply.

Another is a friend's acquaintance. He's a freelance entrepreneur. We ate pizza and discussed about working together a few months ago. He basically told me "yeah, call me when you're free and I'll introduce you to the tech I'm using". I write to him and he says "right now I'm working on this and that, what about you? When do you want to come?". I tell him and get no reply.

(I have more examples in mind but have to stop here because of the length limit.)

For a few months I didn't care much, but I'm slowly starting to understand that most companies are just like that, rude and unrespectful. If you don't like me, why do you make me believe that you're willing to hire? And what does it cost you to tell me 'no'? You're not busy to the point where you can't do this. So yeah, what do I do with those addresses? Spam lists? Fake outstanding applications where the fake candidate never replies to them?

I own a website with a decent amount of traffic but my visitors couldn't care less about me, it seems. This is a music website and it features a set of handy tools (which I didn't write). I don't feel my visitors are telling themselves 'yeah this guy only gathered various tools he found on the Internet and added ads next to it' because the comments I've been getting for years are really positive ('thanks, this is so useful!'). My problem is that whenever I try to sell something to them, they don't care at all. And I'm not even trying to sell them rubbish. The first thing I tried is to put a banner on my hottest page, describing an ebook I felt I could write, to see how many people clicked on that. Then recently I recorded quality tracks in a studio and made a lesson for beginners (most of my visitors are) with them. I made that for free to gauge the interest. In both cases the CTR is about 1%. They're not even giving me a chance! It seems they're in this habit of using my tools and are able to ignore the rest. The only thing they like is the AdSense banner, which I've never quite understood as I hate ads. The thing is, AdSense only pays well from October to January, the rest of the year is meh. So what should I do, a blinking red banner saying "check this out"? I hate flashy alerts but perhaps most of the Internet uses them for a reason? Has anybody been in a similar position?