troutskey

I have no qualms about getting asked about the gap or short duration of my employment because I am sure most will on some level be able to empathize with my situation. It's the idea of automated filtering machines or some person who has to go through 100s of CVs a day filtering me out without giving me a chance to explain that worries me. But that's a chance I'll simply have to take, I suppose.

What you mention about your current employer is eerily like the situation that ultimately led to every aspect of being just giving up. My last place of employment was an electronics startup making a portable version of an Amazon Go store. I joined fairly early and worked on pretty much every aspect from programming arduinos to migrating an old version of the web application, the mobile app and server code. I used to work about 17 hours a day and initially I really enjoyed solving all these different problems. But it eventually got to a point where those were the only problems I could solve and it ultimately came to a head, oddly enough, when I was buying milk at a store. I bought 2 packets and knowing how much 1 packet cost I couldn't calculate the cost of 2 packets. I just broke down right there and knew I needed to take a break. The feeling that I could write a daemon to reconfigure iptables rules on the fly without referring a manual but not multiply a small number by 2 is shattering.

Regarding LeetCode: I made it seem like I am bad the problems themselves, which is not the case at all. I can solve most of those problems in a whiteboard interview because I can always talk to the interviewer. It's when I'm given to a problem alone with just a timer staring me in the face that I freeze up and no matter how hard I try I can't get over that seemingly silly little hump.

Thanks a lot for your advice!

It's not the LeetCode problems themselves but the time element that makes me freeze up. Not to toot my own horn but I'm quite good at solving LeetCode-type problems, if only there wasn't a blinking time indicator counting down like some foreboding doomsday device.

I'll just send a bunch of applications and see what comes of them. If nothing materialises, I'll definitely apply to Recurse Center.

Thanks!

I can understand your point-of-view but honestly, working in the tech industry is all I've ever wanted to do. My poor health resulted mainly from my last job where I worked 17 hour days for around 10 months before my body and mind just gave up. I know now not to push myself that hard but evrn so I can't imagine myself working in anything except tech. :)

The thing that worries me about the gap and short bursts of employment is me getting filtered out before I even get to speak to a human being. But I don't think there's any way of getting around that short of lying, which is something I'm absolutely unwilling to do.

Thanks for your response!

I don't use any networking sites such as LinkedIn etc. but I've kept in touch with a couple of people from each of the places where I've worked. The biggest challenge with getting them to recommend me is that most of them have moved to a different country (mainly Canada and Germany). I'm not really keen on moving to another country, hence my apprenhension at having to apply cold.

Oh I wish I had the confidence to say something like that!

The burn-out happened to a major degree at my last place of employment. I was an early employee at an electronics startup and I was working around 17 hours a day migrating an early version of the web application from PHP into Node, programming arduino and raspberry pi boards, adding various payment modes to an android application, and writing server code in Haskell (a language chosen for no good reason other than it sounded cool and nobody except me could even read the code, the person who wrote it initially having left). 10 months of this ultimately took its toll.

Recurse Center seems interesting. If my job applications don't work out, I'll definitely consider applying.

Thanks!

Barring some serious illness, neither I nor the doctors I've been consulting see any future events of such sort. The only thing I've worked on these last 4 years is getting to a point of career-sustainability. All I can do is tell whoever asks that I won't be needing such an extended break and maybe, if pushed, get a doctor's note signing off on my health. But that seems a little school-like :)

I'm not by any means bad at ds/algo. Back in university I worked on pretty much all the CLRS problems. It's just that I freeze up in time-bound situations and outside of actual interview situations I don't know how to get used to solving those questions under pressure.

It's funny you mention Haskell because it happens to be one of two languages (the other being Python) that I have any significant industry experience in!

The short stints were the result of an unfortunate combination of poor judgement on my part, ill-timing, and outright deceit. There's not much I can do about them at this point though; blot or not, they shall have to remain on my CV.

Getting the applications started and see what happens seems like the best thing to do. It's just that when every now and again I used to open up HN, I would see these clumps of articles filled with Dall-E, ChatGPT etc. and these interesting new innovations, I managed to convince myself that everyone but me now knows everything there is to know about these fancy technologies and that made me a bit worried. But my worries are very likely misplaced.

Thanks a lot!