Oh man, only if you truly knew how off-base this is :) My parents moved to the US with $2000, two kids (I was 11), and two carry-ons. But I'm not here to compete in the Victim Olympics.
> Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers.
Good thing attending a hackathon is free. Good thing you can interact with literal SV royalty here on HN for free. Good thing you can contribute to famous OSS projects with minimal investment...
> In the situation I described above, where you absolutely need that job, all the people you mention have a good chance of forgetting about you due to day-to-day politics. Guess who won't? That recruiter. Because they get a cut of your salary.
Yeah, I disagree with this. I've been "forgotten about" and "ghosted" by more recruiters than I can remember. Not to mention that half the time my area of expertise wasn't even lined up with what they were looking for, and as soon as they hear about a potential pivot (front end to back end, engineering to product management, etc.) they jump ship. But people I've impressed (old bosses, old PMs, people I met through hackathons, obviously old founding partners) are always willing to come up to bat.
"A recruiter is your pimp and you're a prostitute. Work with them so they get you better dates." Was all she really told me on the matter.
From there, I reached out to recruiters and worked with them. I ended up choosing to just take contract jobs for the 1099 pay and flexibility. Plus, the guy I ended up working with was able to pimp me out more often and made more money. I got more and better work. Plus, they're stellar on re-writing your resume for you.
7+ years after leaving that, I still have a few emailing me with jobs. No one forgot me because I didn't let them. Recruiters are only shitty bottom feeders to folks with shitty, privileged attitudes. They like working with partners, not self-centered assholes.
Also, I call bullshit on your pivoting/jump ship comment. They jump ON folks that they can pad their resume and pimp them out for more money. The more roles you "could" fill, they can translate to a vertical and horizontal experience spectrum that crushes the competition, which they then sell you for double even though you're still only doing one job. They're the salesmen. Let them sell you.
That and my parents came with $15 bucks and a kid to the USA with the state funded sponsor disappeared with their grant the day before they landed. But hey, just like you, I didn't mention that to podium in the Victim Olympics. One thing I learned about all of us first-gens, we're all equally angry cunts.
Speak for yourself :)
it's survivor-ship bias at its most obvious. Most people are not getting jobs by doing something extraordinary at a public event and getting offered it right on the spot.
Yes, thanks for naming it. Most of the stories above this comment all have it to varying degrees. It’s funny to me how they all write that they do not want to put forth an entry for the ‘Victim Olympics’, yet they all do share their story anyway...
The fact that this term is even used by these folks (and this is the first time I’ve seen it), to me shows that there is an (possibly unconscious) underlying contempt, as well as a lack of Class consciousness. Which is quite scary for the power dynamics present in Silicon Valley and the still-early-days -digital realm, what with the dogmatic idea of ‘Intellectual Property‘, etc.
Instead of ‘Victim Olympics‘ we would all benefit from talking about ‘Magical Voluntarism’, as well as to take part in further critiquing the underlying systems.
I got a good college education and have a cushy software gig. Now I sit on my butt all day drinking LaCroix watching the checks come in. I sure as hell consider myself privileged.
Just because you started out lacking privilege, doesn't mean that you don't have it now.
There is a huge element of luck or privilege in having the intellectual space to be obsessed with code/math/business/design/etc at all, which factors in heavily as a filter, but yes, you need to do hella work as well. Being naturally smart is super helpful, too, and can cut the amount of work by a large factor, but by itself it's not enough.
If you think for a minute your experiences can be translated and reproduced by the masses, you're kidding yourself.
It doesn't work. Too many variables in life to capture all of them.
I'm imagining 20 years from now someone making IntervieweeBot, who will pass all the tests and STILL not get the job because the interviewer didn't like that indignant look in the robot's eye. Or MLHire, a machine-learning algorithm that reliably fails to predict what the employee will want to be doing at the end of their contract. It will make millions in a Series A, become hugely popular, then promptly forgotten after [Elon Musk-like in 20 years] fails to deliver.
EDIT: 80% chance of male pronoun considering the industry, but wasn't sure.
My parents also say this, except they say $40. But US immigration policies generally require immigrants to have some way of supporting themselves. While my parents didn't have much cash, they did have college educations and my father had been accepted to a PhD program — which is privilege.
I'm not trying to assume your parents' particular situations — just that there are things we unconsciously take for granted.
Refugees/Asylum-Seekers don't follow the same requirements. It's super hard to nail down as there are different types and most (that I've been aware of) are case-by-case situations. You have war, religious, political, stateless, there's many types and yea... I wouldn't discount what your parents told you. There might be more to the story they don't want to share.
Edit:- Apologies if I sound like I'm using a lot of anecdotal evidence/ grand-standing, but I had to disagree with that comment, and the best evidence I had was my own, although there are a lot of similar stories in the Street.
Edit 2:- I should add this too, since it is highly relevant to the linked topic. The people who referred/hired me later mentioned that a key reason for them taking me on was my startup experience, which was what the original link's author would call a "side project".
To be clear, I would always 100% recommend trying your approach. It's how I even got my start, back when I was 17. It really does work.
But it's also more effective when you're a young, wide-eyed student. People see in you what they saw in themselves: a young person, eager to learn and to do a good job.
The older you get, the more strings that attach. And you lose the charm of being a young ambitious person. People have more history by which to judge you. No one expects a sub-3 GPA student not to have resume gaps, or a degree, or leadership experience, or any of the expectations that come with age. It's just a fact of life. Even if it's technically ageist, I'd rather play the game and win, not argue the game isn't fair or that it should change.
The moment I read bottom-feeder, "bottom-of-the-totem-pole, recruiter," etc, my recruiter buddy from St Louis immediately popped to mind. We weren't friends outside of work, but he placed me at two big financial companies over the course of two or so years. When I was fired from the first one solely due to showing up late (because undiagnosed narcolepsy), I was worried the recruiter's firm wouldn't want to do business with me anymore.
I shouldn't have been worried at all; they care about their cut, and I cared about not running out of money.
But I probably would have worried a lot more if I had secretly thought of him as some bottom-feeder loser, rather than a key who could open a door that was mutually beneficial. Because (a) business partners can sense when you think poorly of them, unless you're really, really good at hiding it, and (b) it would blind me to the fact that I needed him.
He was a cool guy on a personal level too. Had a house, dog, family, took me out to lunch a couple times, etc. He was doing better than I was at that point, for sure, even if I was in a stronger position long-term.
I guess the takeaway is, do the cold-email thing if you can (twitter DM works shockingly well for this); if not, try to find someone you know who might be looking; then recruiters as a fallback plan. But boy oh boy, if those "bottom-feeder recruiters" weren't there for me, I would have been screwed. :)
The privilege is simply thinking that you're better than the recruiter doing his job, or the woman at the store bagging groceries, or anyone else. A little twist of fate, being born to slightly different parents, not having the right mentor in your life, not having access to a computer when you were young... any of these things could easily have put you in their shoes, almost regardless of inherent ability. So it was just super shocking, I suppose, to hear such "honesty" about my cool recruiter buddy with a dog.
However, in the common use on the Internet, this word very often just stands for "you're better off than ${some group}, so your opinion is invalid and you should repent" dismissal/personal attack combo. Which makes knee-jerk reactions to its use, if not justified, then at least not unexpected.
LinkedIn exists for exactly this reason: as a directory of hiring managers you can connect with.
Cold-emailing / cold-calling people for finding roles is a good way to accomplish this, if you craft your pitch right and do your research well on how you can deliver value.
That's basically what branding is about, isn't it? Identifying where and how you can make a difference better than other people, making that your elevator pitch, and broadcasting that to people who need that difference in their lives.
I'm not impressed by the other comments arguing reaching people in positions of impact is next to impossible, at least in tech. There are two high-schoolers right now in the latest batch of YCombinator who literally cold-called Sam Altman for funding, and got it (see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/08/11/2-t...).
This isn't even that crazy a way to connect with people. I once knew a recruiter who was fanatically inventive about connecting with people - he once got a cybersecurity consultant who was perfectly happy with his existing job to switch roles by (1) using the Wayback machine to find copies of the engineer's (taken-down) personal website, where he had his Foursquare link, (2) using the Foursquare API to figure out he enjoyed playing chess at his local club and would frequent a bar, (3) showing up at said bar, striking up a conversation about chess with him, getting him to talk about his job, casually slipping in that he's a recruiter for company X looking for someone exactly like him, and leaving a business card behind.
This is not an endorsement of that guy's method - just a reminder that there are crazier things in life to do than picking up the phone and trying your luck.
