Engaging in the dreaded job hunt can be anxiety-filled, demoralizing, and mentally-taxing. Especially in 2022, when the turmoils of the world seem to keep climbing past their peaks, stepping out of comfort, and entering a void where you may find opportunity or despair, seems rather irrational. But it must be done in order to progress forth. Gone are the days where one or two jobs in a lifetime may suffice the average person. Also gone are the times where steady employment is guaranteed. The world is changing, jobs are evolving, skills need adapting, and people are moving around from place to place, country to country, searching for value and meaning.
Towards the end of 2021, I left my job in search of greater pastures. After working in retail for my entire teenage career, I thought it best to escape the confines of minimum-wage work and challenge myself in the Tech industry. Entering my 20th year, I thought, would not be in retail, but as a software developer of epic proportions. How wrong I was.
As it stands, getting a job in the Tech industry is harder than it seems. The Reddit and YouTube angelic stories of leaving their dreaded 9-5s for the stardom of Silicon Valley are few and far between. What I encountered, for the most part, were dead-ends mixed with learning opportunities. I’m writing to share my experiences with both.
The dead ends mainly sprouted from unattractive and dull resumes. Not having applied to any jobs for ~4 years, staying warm and comfy at my humble retail position, my resume was…outdated. Expecting a magical beanstalk from sterile beans remains wishful thinking.
Another dead end I encountered many times was the infamous rejection email. I symbolize this as a dead end because it offered me no way of improving. Sure, I’m not good enough for the job; I can stomach that. Tell me why, though. Similar to a test in grade school, I may not get the mark I desired, but at least the teacher went to the trouble of putting x’s and comments around the paper to ensure I understood where I went wrong. If the job market were to undergo an extreme evolution, giving context to rejection would be a great starting point.
Mapping through these narrow cul-de-sacs, I opted to use my frustration and confusion towards the current state of the job market for good. In other words, I learned from my mistakes. I stopped using outdated resume templates; I crafted specific resumes for specific companies, using keywords and skills relevant to what they were looking for; I started building my network and focused on my connections; I shifted my mentality, from “what can they do for me” to “what problems can I solve for them.” This wasn’t an overnight shift by any means. Through pure trial-and-error efforts, I built my process from the ground up.
After you’ve shifted your mindset, everything becomes a learning opportunity. As Darwin noted, evolution is what has shaped the world around us. You must adapt to your environment in order to your survive. Luckily for us, we have the wisdom of those who came before us. Those who have been in the job hunt and escaped it, who write on Internet forums and create YouTube videos on the process one must adopt in order to succeed. I’ve learned a few things from them.
As a Philosophy student, thinking about work through the lens of a meta-philosopher has shed light on certain aspects of the job hunt. Specifically, demoralization. Every Reddit post, YouTube comment, LinkedIn article, and tweet seems to contain the same phrases: don’t give up, keep applying; don’t get demoralized, your time will come. It seems being demoralized at a lack of opportunity is common across the board. Why? My understanding entails an evolutionary perspective. In the past, work was directly correlated with survival. We literally could not survive if we did not pick berries and kill animals; if we did not plow the fields and keep out pests and poisons. Now, it’s rather different.
Survival and work are still intimately connected, just separated by a monetary system. However, just because our civilization has evolved doesn’t mean our mindsets have. We still connect our work with our purpose, our meaning in life. Our job, so to speak, represents our identity. Thus, with no job, we feel empty, with no identity—devoid of meaning. Now it makes sense why demoralization is so common—since we tie work and meaning together, not being able to find work (or change the work you do) reduces one’s self-perception overall. It’s a glorified ego hit. It’s difficult to hold yourself to high standards, or keep your mental health in check, when it seems like no one values your skills and abilities. Constant rejection letters (with no way of knowing what to improve upon), getting no calls back, and not moving forward makes one feel like the world is moving on without them.
My journey has not finished; in a strange way, I am content if it is just getting started. Work has existed in human civilization since time immemorial. However, as our technologies becoming increasingly more powerful and adept at understanding us and the world, and as these same novelties start displacing work and workers alike, we will have to ask ourselves the daunting question: With no work, what do we do?