I'm Close to Giving Up

8 months and 1,200 job applications later, I'm still unemployed

Jul 01, 2025

Something happened to me on Saturday night. I think it’s something really fucking bad. Others might think it’s nothing at all. But to me it was the very definition of a crushing blow. Read on.

I Loved My Job

I was working for Cariad, a new-ish division of the Volkswagen Group. I was working on the software platform for premium electric vehicles from Porsche and Audi that will be coming out in a couple of years. I was also responsible for all of the coordination between U.S. engineering and product teams and China DevOps and Ops teams. I started as a contractor, then I was converted to an employee. I was told that I had solved problems that no one else had been able to solve and that I was seen as mission critical. In a little over two years, I had 4 trips to Beijing and 2 trips to Germany, plus maybe 10 trips to Redmond. I loved it. But I also knew Cariad was in trouble and that I wasn’t going to be there forever.

I Lost My Job

When VW announced that they were investing $5 billion into Rivian, primarily to get at their software, that told me that the end would be coming soon. I survived two rounds of layoffs. I did not survive the third. I was no longer “mission critical” - the mission had changed. I had just started my job search. I thought I was safe for another six months. I was wrong.

The timing was interesting. My apartment lease and my car lease were both close to their end date. I could pack up, sell off or donate whatever I didn’t want to bring back to Asia, and that would be that.

Except, I kind of wanted to stay in the US awhile longer. And there was this company, another division of VW, that said they wanted to hire me but it would have to wait until January. (All verbal, nothing on paper. Of course.)

So on the basis that my next job seemed to be right around the corner, I signed a new apartment lease and bought a (used) car.

I Spend 8 Months Getting Nowhere

January rolled around and that VW division basically ghosted me. Naturally I wasn’t waiting only for them, I had been applying for jobs constantly since getting laid off.

Over the course of the past 8 months I have applied for more than 1,200 jobs. More than half of those rejected me without an interview. Most of the rest never bothered to contact me after sending an automated email that they received my application.

I am getting found daily by recruiters and agencies. Probably half of those contacts were for jobs that I thought were a good fit. I’d send my resume, pass their own internal interview process, sign a “right to represent,” and then never hear from them again.

I reached out to any contact I had in the U.S. to let them know about my situation. Some of them really tried to help me.

I have used A.I. to create tailored resumes and cover letters for me. I have signed with several companies that rate how closely your resume matches a job description, and then further tailors it and fills out the application for you. I get rejected from jobs that some A.I. thought were 98% fits.

I had interviews at roughly 10 places. There were one or two places where I thought I really stood a serious chance, where the interviewer treated me like a long lost brother, where they said things like “that’s the best answer to the question that I ever got!” and then they’d reject me a couple of days later.

I’m convinced that age discrimination is one factor in my lack of success so far. I don’t provide the date of my college graduation. My resume only goes back a dozen years, not the full 35 years that I’ve been doing this stuff. I have “de-seniorized” myself - between 1996 and 2019 my job titles were Vice President or Director, and I’ve reduced those down to things like “Senior Program Manager” so that I don’t appear too senior.

None of this seems to matter.

Job Searching Is Completely Broken

Social media and A.I. are making it easier than ever to find job listings. Not only is it easier to find job listings, there are many companies offering A.I. agents that will automatically tailor your resume, write a cover letter, and apply for jobs for you. Some of these companies promise they will apply for 100 jobs within 30 seconds. So it’s no surprise that when a new position is posted on LinkedIn, 100 people have applied in the first hour, hundreds by the end of the first day.

The only way HR departments and hiring managers can deal with this glut of applications is to use AI-based ATS (Applicant Tracking System) software.

Your resume has to be “ATS-friendly” - understood by the ATS system, an almost impossible task given that there are over 400 companies doing this, although just a couple of them seem to have most of the market.

Your resume has to contain all of the keywords that you, or some A.I. agent, thinks are in the job posting.

In the past, where this was a manual process, someone might look at your resume and think, “this doesn’t tick all the boxes but this person looks interesting, I’m curious enough to want to interview them.” That doesn’t seem to happen any more. And why would it? The odds are your application will never been seen by human eyes. And with hundreds of applications, the HR person can set a high threshold for rejection.

The whole AI thing goes a step further than you might expect. Apply for a job with some companies and you’ll get a phone call 1 minute after you submit your application. It will be from an AI chatbot, ready to start the screening process by interviewing you. But for everything it can do, there is one important thing it cannot: provide you with any feedback about how you did in the “interview”. Do you have any concerns? “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that.” Will you recommend that I move on to the next step in the process? “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that.” It’s probably hugely helpful to HR but I think it’s also hugely disrespectful to candidates.

What does all of this mean? To me it means that one has to acquire and excel at a skill that has nothing to do with the jobs one is applying for.

What does all of this NOT mean? I tell recruiters I will relocate practically anywhere at my own expense. I tell them I will accept salaries that are one-third to one-half less than I was making on my last job. It’s not enough.

How Long Should I Keep Trying?

Back in October, as soon as I told my wife I’d been laid off, she said I should pack up and return to Hong Kong. She (and others) doubled down on that following the U.S. election.

But I wasn’t in the mood to give up just yet. I wanted to stay in the U.S. a little longer and of course I’m so special that as soon as companies see my resume, they’ll kill themselves offering me jobs. (Is there a good font for sarcasm?)

So, as I mentioned, I leased a new (and smaller and much cheaper) apartment and bought a (used) car.

When January rolled around and that company didn’t hire me as expected, I checked on when my unemployment checks would stop. I told my wife if I didn’t feel that I was at least close to a job by then, I’d give up.

Soon it was May and I ran through the six months of unemployment checks. But I was part-way through the interview process with a couple of companies so I held on. By June, neither of those resulted in offers. Amazon was interesting - the hiring manager told me that she believed that I belonged at Amazon but not as a Program Manager, I should be applying for Customer Success jobs instead. Interesting comment, and I’m sure I could do that job well, but I feel she got it wrong.

Now it’s the end of June. I’m not close to an offer anywhere. My wife has taken a job working in a “fast casual” restaurant. I’ve mulled over becoming an Uber driver and I’ve applied for a few remote customer service/help desk kinds of jobs.

The weird thing is, if I break my apartment lease now, it would cost me more than if I continue to pay rent until the lease is up. The only other major expense I have in the U.S. is car payments. Where I live a car is an absolute necessity and selling the car so soon after I bought it would probably mean losing several thousand dollars.

So … stick it out for a few more months (which means dipping into my savings each month) or pack up, sell off what I can (a full apartment’s worth of furniture, appliances, TVs, you name it) and ship the rest off to the Philippines or Hong Kong and return to HK where I’d try to get some sort of contract job, local or remote.

While I’m deciding on that, I continue to apply for jobs and continue to post to LinkedIn.

Going Viral On LinkedIn?

On LinkedIn, you can put an “OpenToWork” banner and hashtag on your account. This is an open invitation from scammers in pig butcher farms in Cambodia to start the process of separating you from your funds.

What counts on LinkedIn is that your profile must be considered an “all-star” in order to place highly in the search rankings. The algorithm changes frequently, but one key piece of it at the moment is that you are someone who contributes useful content to the LinkedIn Newsfeed.

I have been working my profile for years. I have more than 5,000 connections and followers. I have 100 skills listed, with endorsements on most of them. I have recommendations written by almost every manager I’ve ever had as well as many of my peers. LinkedIn said I had an “all-star” profile.

Beyond that, placing good content in the Newsfeed can get your face and your “open to work” hashtag in front of more people. This means that that the AI-generated garbage in the Newsfeed has increased exponentially. In fact, there are even sites out there that will charge you to use their AI prompts to create content. (If you want to see how bad it can get, check out this subreddit.)

I have been trying to post on LinkedIn at least twice a week since I was laid off. I’ll admit, I was searching for that magic post, the post that would go viral and get in front of thousands of eyeballs. Finally, on Friday, I did that. I posted something that went mega-viral. And I was fucked.

I posted this on Friday (with perhaps some slight text changes):

If you’ve been job hunting for months and wondering if it’s just you—it’s not.
🔹 Recent data shows tech job seekers are averaging 5–6 months in their searches, with many taking longer—especially at the senior level.
🔹 Applications are up 45% on platforms like LinkedIn (11,000 per minute!), but interviews and offers haven’t kept pace.
🔹 Roughly 1 in 5 unemployed professionals in the U.S. have been out of work for 27+ weeks. That number is growing.
🔹 For white-collar workers, even with years of experience, hiring pipelines have slowed and competition is fierce.
The job search has become AI vs. AI—candidates using AI tools to tailor and submit resumes at scale, and companies using AI to screen, score, and auto-reject those same applications. Somewhere in the middle? Real people with real skills trying to be seen.
If you’re in this boat too, you’re not alone.
If you see a post from someone in your network asking for help, don’t just scroll past. A simple like, comment, or share can go a long way in boosting its visibility and helping it reach the right people.
Feel free to comment, message, or connect. I’m ready to work—and ready to help others in return.
#JobSearch2025 #AIinHiring #LongTermUnemployment

I used ChatGPT to help me write it but the end product is all mine. I also asked ChatGPT to generate an eye-catching image to go along with the post. Everything it came up with was boring. So I searched a bit and came up with this:

I knew that would be perfect.

When I woke up on Saturday morning, my post had 6,000 views. As the day went by, the number of views started escalating exponentially. When we went out on Saturday afternoon around 4:30, I was up to 60,000 views, 300 likes, 100 comments, 50 shares, plus at least a dozen link requests.

We went to the movies (“F1: The Movie” - see it) so I put the phone on silent. When the movie ended I looked at saw lots of notifications from LinkedIn (and one job offer) but I figured it could wait until I got home. We had dinner at Torchy’s Tacos and got home around 9 PM.

LinkedIn Fucks Me With a Rusty Spoon

I went to the computer and saw that I had somehow gotten signed out of LinkedIn. When I signed back in, I got a message that my account had been restricted.

(Before you say anything, I didn’t have the greatest password in the world, but it was unique to LinkedIn and I had 2FA set up. This means that someone reported me for content that went against their policies. I can’t think of anything I would have posted like that, but I do have a tendency for “salty” language, maybe you noticed.)

In order to lift the restriction, I first had to prove who I was, and that they used a third party service called Persona (which likely has nothing to do with the Ingmar Bergman film).

After I went through their crapola of uploading my ID and photos of me, it then told me that it would take up to 5 days to verify my identity. A LinkedIn subreddit has a megapost on this topic and that’s telling me I might have to wait up to 10 days.

It kills me that I am a Premium Member, that I’m paying them $40 a month, and they don’t offer any type of premium support.

Meanwhile, my profile has been taken down as well as all of my posts, including the viral one. Any messages or connection requests that might have had to do with offering me interviews or jobs is gone into the ether. When everything is restored, which I’m sure it will be, will those messages still be there? Will my viral post be restored and continue to attract eyeballs?

So, yeah, I’ve been on LinkedIn probably for 20 years, I’m paying them $40 a month for access to tools and learning and other things, and they are kicking me when I’m down. Is it because I said I prefer AWS to Azure?

With no LinkedIn profile, today there were no emails from agencies. The phone only rang once, and it was an agency asking what the hell happened to my LinkedIn profile, and telling me they probably couldn’t submit me anywhere without it.

I said to my wife, “Maybe this is a sign, this is the sign to just give up and pack it in.” She said “Yes” before I could even finish the sentence.

I really don’t know right now. In 2012 I was unemployed for nine months. Nine really horrible months. I was in Hong Kong so no weekly unemployment checks and I hadn’t started collecting Social Security yet. Somehow I survived those nine months. I know I will survive this. But I don’t know what the answer is right now. I do know that this stress is aging me. I don’t know if I’m staying in the U.S. through the end of the year or just through the end of summer.