I’m fucking tired of explaining to business ghouls that I AM FUCKING DESPERATE. I’M INTERVIEWING WITH YOU BECAUSE I WANT TO SURVIVE. I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT MY DREAMS OR WHETHER THIS JOB OR YOUR COMPANY LINES UP WITH MY CAREER GOALS. WE ARE HOLY-SHIT PAST THE POINT WHERE I’M ABLE TO BE CHOOSY. ALL YOU FUCKING NEED TO DO IS READ THE FUCKING RESUMÉ THAT’S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR GOD-DAMNED EYES, ASK ABOUT MY QUALIFICATIONS, AND TELL ME WHETHER OR NOT I’M A GOOD FIT.
NO, your company isn’t special to me, and it isn’t special to ANYONE but you and your business-ghoul friends. Your company is merely the LABEL that will decorate my paycheck and LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE, AND I’M SICK OF PRETENDING OTHERWISE.
And WHY the FUCK are you calling me to literally REPEAT SHIT YOU’RE TOO FUCKING IGNORANT TO READ ON THE GOD-DAMNED FUCKING RESUMÉ?
I’ve applied for at least 200 engineering jobs (I recounted the ones on job sites; but even that’s nowhere near all of them) this year and gotten zero offers. This job search is LITERALLY DRIVING ME INSANE, because I can no longer fucking afford antidepressants and I’m on the verge of blowing up in people’s faces all the goddamn fucking time. I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE.
Try [insert nearby industry here]
Funny story: turns out, there are people who studied for degrees in those nearby industries. No I can’t land a software developer, data scientist, IT, etc., job, because (1) I’ve applied for all those several times and not even gotten an interview and (2) my school produces students who actually studied those topics as a major!
So thank you genuinely to the dozens of people who have recommended that, I really do appreciate the help … but that only works if you’re an appealing candidate in general.
Why are you unhirable?
Bad GPA (~2.8; many firms have hard cutoff > 3 or 3.1), no experience/internships, no support/professional network, recent downward trajectory on transcript, autistic, mentally ill getting more unstable by the day, terrible attitude that’s impossible to fully hide, no charisma to accommodate for my deficiencies, no access to a time machine. I KNOW how I got here, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
At least when I worked in food delivery I managed to make non-trivial money. AT LEAST I WAS HAPPY while being exploited. Now I’m thousands of dollars in debt, literally a hundred pounds heavier, psychologically and emotionally BROKEN, and no closer to getting a real job than I was before.
Marginally useful advice: if you are in the USA, try the US federal government. Right out of college I got a GS-7 to 12 track over 2.5yr with your exact GPA. That was in 2010 but I know we still have trouble hiring enough.
Downsides: this is a 3mo+ process. Hiring in the Fed is slow. So it isn’t a stick fix but might be a long-term one.i graduated in an area with 3 great engineering universities so I know how that is
You may have to move closer to DC, a field office or a military base. Depends what you apply for.
Upsides: competitive pay, easy to change jobs within gov, very good benefits, extremely stable job.
Usajobs site can suck sometimes but you can apply for ALL gov jobs at one site. And reuse your resumes.
I actually did apply to a government [1] agency that had a booth at my university’s career fair last month. They had a special representative just for my major. It sounded like they were having trouble hiring, and they warned me it would be 100% travel, which I would 1000% sign up for. I applied the next day. Haven’t heard anything back from them or the other government positions I applied to, but hearing that it could take forever gives me some hope that they haven’t lost interest.
[1] Not defense, defense-adjacent, or any agency generally useless for mankind. Don’t want to dox myself, but I would be designing equipment that keeps people safe.
Yeah, gov hiring takes months. 3mo from application to tentative offer for an outside hire would be fast. I got my first job a similar way: handing our resumes at my uni’s huge engineering career fair. I got a call in October for an interview (so 1mo since resume) and my start date was February. So about ~5mo.
I’d go onto Usajobs and apply to anything that you would accept. Most people need to apply to dozens of jobs (this is the same unfortunately as commercial, but only 1 portal) until they get more specialized experience. A big problem with gov hiring is that this long lead time means a lot of potential hires find commercial gigs before the gov finishes the process.
You are right about government hiring taking forever. It took me about 5-6 months from the time I applied to my first government job to actually starting.