One year ago today, on May 13th 2023, I was laid off. Today, I started the first day at my new job. Over the past year, I became a mother and discovered parts of myself I never knew existed.
I want to share some of my learnings from this journey. But if you’re looking for tips on cracking coding interviews or nailing behavioral questions, this isn’t that kind of post. Those often detail how many big tech companies the authors interviewed with, the offers they received, the prep resources they used, and even provide a funnel of their interview pipeline. They always conclude with, "It wasn’t easy. I cried and worried, but here I am. Good luck!" While I respect and appreciate their candor, they often leave me feeling anxious and inadequate.
This post is for anyone searching for a job, regardless of the type or stage you’re at. I want to reach out to those who feel cold and frustrated on their journey, as I once did. Here’s one of my personal philosophies: success stories don’t motivate me unless they detail the hardships and how they were overcome. I want to learn from mistakes and obstacles, not from someone else’s cheerful party.
Reclaim Your Identity: You Are More Than Just a Job Title
After my layoff last May, I was deeply depressed and couldn’t focus on anything. Pregnancy added to my free-floating anxiety, since I was worried that could have enough income to raise the baby. After Thanksgiving, I started looking for ways to earn extra money alongside Job Hunting, unsure how long this "technical job winter" would last. That is when I started blogging and writing down all my learning while reviewing technical concepts, leading me to my series, ‘Courage to Learn ML’. The courage wouldn’t just be to review ML basics, but to find the courage to start finding job again after my delivery. For the first post, there were twenty views almost immediately after I published via TDS, and on that first day, I made $0.06. I was ecstatic. That paltry sum felt like a life preserver, a tiny but mighty affirmation that I could still contribute, still matter.
What I would like to share is the following: For most people who leave their last job, whether they quit or were laid off, the most significant challenge and frustration is the loss of their social identity. To regain balance, try to find new ways to connect and contribute. Start your own business (you don’t need any permission or offer letter to do that), blog, volunteer with local NGOs, or just spend quality time with your family. Those small incomes, contributions, and comments will be a light through the dark moments; the love, wisdom, and courage you give daily are what truly define you.
Rediscovering your identity is a journey, and every small step and the tiniest of victories, even $0.06, matters. You are valuable, you are needed, and you are more than your job title. Take the time to say goodbye to your old job and routines. Now is the time for something new.
Find Your Job Hunting Crew
During my job search, I read ‘Never Search Alone’ by Phyl Terry. It’s a simple book with a great premise: identify a group of others in your job search and provide mutual support. Luckily, I was a member of a fabulous Job Search Council (JSC). We followed the book and did a lot exercises for job search together, but the most significant benefit for me was the emotional boost. Although we each went for different roles at various levels, we were all in the same emotional boat. We all had families to support, and everyone felt wholly devastated and anxious about the future. We shared weird yet wiled stories about some arrogant interviewers, about someone being ghosted right after talking to hiring managers, shared tips to tweak our resumes and LinkedIn in exciting ways, and created a bond. Even now, I still attend the JSC meetings every Friday that I can because they’ve become part of my family. I do care about them deeply after being in this Job Search Squad.
For those frustrated job seekers, find fellow job seekers to share the journey – kind of like a gym buddies for losing weights. Support each other, and be up in the highs and lows together. It will keep you going without burning out from self-doubt after being ghosted and failing.
Network Makeover: Reconnect and Refresh
As a typical introvert, I would sweat when running into former colleagues. I would start to script numerous ways to say hello in my mind before they even found me. To avoid ‘over’ socializing, I would leave a job and stay quiet, rarely contacting old coworkers. But with the waves of technical layoffs this year, I found myself needing to network to get back to work. Reluctantly, I messaged former colleagues and expected no replies.
Yet, ironically, the results were astonishing. My old manager from my second job offered an hour of feedback and motivation, pointing out areas for improvement. Another one, whom I thought did not have a positive impression of me, called to ask me to drop by the old office and looked for openings in his team.I also made new friends with whom I could hang out, although we did not always share lunch.
One tough encounter came from my last direct manager, someone I respected. She postponed our hangouts multiple times, and when we finally met, it was awkward. During the conversation, she said that my layoff during pregnancy was perfect timing. I was so shocked and disappointed, even though I know she means the pregnancy is buying me some time at least give me good excuse to find a job later, but I still hurt because she is also a female and even her don’t even not understanding the difficulties of pregnancy and postpartum. She didn’t realize my jobless status made me too anxious to fully enjoy parenting. After that meeting, I reached out to her for a recommendation, but she refused. I accepted this painful reality and acknowledged that while she was a good coworker, she didn’t want to be part of my network. So I stopped connecting with her.
My takeaway: don’t be afraid to ask for help, even if you think the person won’t assist. Don’t be too upset if they don’t want to help. Be grateful to those who accept and understand those who do not. Be a minimalist.
Don’t Over Plan, Just Do It.
When I started preparing for interviews, I created a detailed plan focusing on complex machine learning concepts. Two days later, I changed my plan because someone mentioned in their blogs that these concepts are only asked in later interview stages, with coding algorithm questions coming first. A week later, I was back online, searching for materials on ML system design. Because, according to some posts, this is the hardest part of a machine learning engineering interview. Over the next two months, I modified my plan multiple times, from version 1.0 to 7.0. Despite having a solid plan, I devised a plan so detailed it could have been a NASA mission.
One day, I shared my brilliant plan with the smartest person I know. He took a look and said, "So, your actual preparation progress is zero." Ouch! Yes! I spent more time on planning than doing. My version 1.0 plan needed 4–6 months, while version 7.0 promised 3 months. But here’s the plot twist: the endless planning yielded almost zero benefit.
What I learned is that you often land the job when you’re only 80% done with your plan, or even less if the job market is hot. Also, interviews reveal many things that need tweaking, making your plan more personalized. not based on someone else’s job-hunting share posts. So, dive into the messy preparations with your version 1.0 plan. Jump in! Even a bad plan beats no plan. Also, try to picture yourself as the hero in an RPG game – you’ll figure out your way to achieve your goal, one quirky quest at a time.
Every job hunter knows that overplanning can be a trap. However, it’s hard to avoid because anxiety often drives the search for shortcuts. The key is not to focus on the results but on the process.
Recruiters Know Best, Pick Their Brains
By the end of February, I had gone a bit panic. I had applied to several jobs, but my inbox remained suspiciously 0 interview invitations. I still spent my days glued to the computer screen, scanning through jobs, and, in my mind, ticking off every requirement. "I’m the perfect candidate," I thought. But why aren’t they sending me for interviews? Perhaps the 9-month gap? Should I mention that I spent those months being pregnant, parenting, and blogging? I was busy and try to stay active in the field, after all.
The problem was that I had no idea how recruiters viewed my qualifications. Over time, I was getting more panicky as I wondered if my gap made me less valuable in this tough job market. Recruiters are like gatekeepers to the interview process, so how did they see me? Just as I was about to throw in the towel, a recruiter named Amanda, reached out to the JSC community and offered to chat with anyone interested. I jumped at the chance and sign up for one of the open spots.
During our session, she reassured me that the gap wasn’t a problem at all but pointed out that my resume was too wordy and stuffed with technical jargon. Instead, she told me to highlight my most significant accomplishments on LinkedIn and not to include my gap months in the summary. She encouraged me to prepare a set of questions to ask interviewers, those repetitive questions can help me to compare their answers and assess the company fit. She also taught me a great way to introduce myself on calls, like asking what type of person the job requires and then highlighting my experience to match those requirements. This method quickly helps in two ways: finding out if the hiring manager understands what they need and showcasing your qualifications effectively.
After our chat, I started building connections with recruiters. Whenever I got a call about a position, I ended the conversation by asking for a little favor, a chance to ask one more question. I utilize the chance to inquired about my resume, linkedin, the current market, and the hiring process. I even gossiped a bit to gather more info. During one call, a recruiter suggested I include a link to my blog in the summary so managers could easily check it out. This trick proved very helpful when I started applying for jobs again with my updated resume.
My takeaway? Work with recruiters, chat with them beyond the initial basic call, and get their professional opinions. Gather every piece of advice you can to better market yourself. Think of it as getting the inside scoop and using it to sell yourself like a pro.
Market Yourself Right: Resume Reality Check
From the painful experience of one who applied to thousands jobs but got zero interview, I learned some small but powerful lessons about resume. At the beginning, I believed my resume was good enough because I devoted so much time to it. I crafted each term to follow the famous Google XYZ rule. I was so sure of my resume that if anyone questioned its effectiveness, I would become defensive. But the reality is, my resume was not good enough to pass those resume screenings. So I started to work on my resume by treating it as not mine. Here are some key things I have learned during this painful process:
- Make your achievements visible and valuable to the audience. A resume isn’t just for industry insiders. Most readers of your resumes are recruiters who may not fully understand the weight of your accomplishments. Be clear and direct with accomplishments. For instance, a 3% increase in model accuracy might be mind-blowing for people who work in machine learning area, but it might not mean much to non-ML recruiters or engineers.
- Understand your job and highlight the exemplary aspects. If your job emphasizes outcomes, focus on describing those outcomes. If it requires specific technical skills, highlight those skills. What I want to say is: weight different parts of your resume to match with your job. In my last position, for instance, my machine learning model brought revenue growth – an obvious and significant outcome. But as an ML engineer, I should focus on the algorithms, techniques, and methods used to achieve that, not the impact size.
- Value the reader’s time by making their life easier. If your resume is detail-packed, give some keywords and a summary. Help recruiters see your strengths quickly. One of the key tricks is adding specific keywords from the job descriptions to your resumes. I took a lazier approach of just going through job descriptions for keywords and then making a superset covering maybe 80–95% of them before including that in my resume. For example, I specifically mentioned A/B testing for experiment design and highlighted deep learning methods for algorithms. That change gave me an 80% chance for a recruiter call after applying for a job.
- Treat yourself like a product, your resume is your advertisement. The resume is all about the language and presentation – margin, blanks, and font size. Most of the time, I felt my resume was too fragile because of the time spent on it. A good resource I found was the Reddit community r/EngineeringResumes, especially the wiki. It has helped me rethink my resume twice rather than wait for recruiters to notice it.
This article, as it turned out, ended up much longer than I had expected. I started writing about these learnings in May and didn’t publish it until June. I keep rewrote most of the content again and again, because I wanted to make it personal and genuine yet encouraging for my readers so they could take away some kind of enjoyment from it and get a bit of strength to survive this bad job market.
A bit update about my current life: While the ordinary routine days have led to a lot of hustle and bustle, my baby, Ellie, has grown smarter. Being a mother and a machine learning engineer, I am debuting and trying to teach her using machine learning techniques. These are exciting methods and interesting experiments. And probably one day, I’m going to write about this learning process. For now, I hope you enjoy my insights, and I look forward to sharing the second part of my learnings soon.
Since you’ve made it to the end, it looks like you really enjoy my writing. So here’s a little shameless self-promotion about my other posts.
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