Back in 2013, my daughter was born and within 2 days I was laid off from my position as IT Manager at a small MSP in Dallas.
No college degree at the time, no savings, wife and I were not working. The one thing I did have though (fortunately) was experience in the industry - about 8 years of IT experience (dev, systems engineering, architecture, management).
I freaked out initially - the stress of a new kid, no money kind of ate at me. For not only was I a dad (a young one at that), but also now my family has no income (wife was on maternity leave).
The first thing I did was head to a local coffee shop and busted out my laptop.
I hadn't edited my resume in a few years. I deleted everything and started over. I knew this crappy employer wasn't going to dictate my families future. I also knew what I was worth.
I immediately got on LinkedIn and started connecting with everyone I knew/asked for references and then started connecting with hiring managers at prospective companies.
I created a burner phone number (google voice number) and used this on my resume - then created a Monster, Dice and Careerbuilder accounts (to attract headhunters) and filled out those profiles entirely.
Having not spent a lot of time in a few years looking at salaries in different segments of IT, I spent a few hours figuring out what in the hell I wanted to do - and what would make me some $$$.
I found that in the Dallas/Fort Worth area (at the time), Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and VMware were heavily searched terms by recruiters on LinkedIn and Indeed.com.. I started looking at what I could do to leverage my current knowledge/skills and find a lucrative position.
After spending a few hours researching, I found that I could leverage my systems (Windows/*Nix) administration experience and help developers deploy their code. I was pretty good with Python and was interested in learning Ruby.
Bingo - DevOps!!
I found what interested me - the best of both worlds and I started targeting my job searches/applications towards that.
By the end of the day, I had a call from a local recruiting agency looking for Cloud and DevOps engineers. By the next morning I was on the phone with the hiring manager - and by the end of the day (3 phone interviews later) I had an offer in my inbox ($90K more than my last job).
In summary:
What you went through completely sucks. Don't beg. Show people that you can get shit done. Do the work, be the prize.
I am a single dude with no family of my own, but I will say a few things:
A) When you are looking for a job - make friends with headhunters. Do everything you can to get unsolicited phone calls/emails from them as much as you can. Post your resume on Monster and make a really good/clean profile. I also recommend doing this on StackOverflow and Indeed as well.
The whole point is to get these headhunters to work for you. Yeah you will eventually start getting 20-30 emails a day from them and the same number of phone calls. A lot will be for jobs in completely random cities. Filter them out, anything that looks pretty good - follow up on it. (For the love of god, use a burner number, you will regret it later if you don't)
B) Use LinkedIn and Indeed to your advantage. With Indeed for instance, you can setup a profile as a company and search key terms in specific geo areas looking for talent. As someone looking for a job - you can do the same thing. Make your employee profile, then make a profile for "your" company and see where you stand in the listings.
On LinkedIn, I highly recommend upgrading to a Job Seeker paid plan (if you can do it - they sometimes have a free trial too). That will give you access to see who has viewed your profile (for longer periods of time), where you stack up against other candidates for LinkedIn job posts, plus you get a few InMail credits to use.. USE them! Find companies in your area - from startups to big corporations and just start connecting with anyone you can. When you get to a Director of IT, or VP of Engineering, start asking about potential opportunities within the company. Develop a connection with them and the folks in HR (actual internal recruiters). Polish your resume, your CV and LinkedIn profile. Don't be afraid to send messages (shit have a form message ready to go if you need to).
Lastly, don't ever give up. As other posters have said - you can get a job, if you make it your fulltime job. A big part of finding a job is hustling.
If you have less than 2 years of dev experience, I highly recommend brushing up your GitHub account, maybe working on a small coding project to showcase your skills.
I don't know where you live, so it is not fair to comment on salary - as that is super variable according to where you live.
Holy shit dude. My comment is OT but holy shit. That's a hell of a story. Good reminder to many of us that putting in active work on profiles (linkedin etc) will probably pay off even in normal scenarios. Thanks for posting this. I hope brokedev (OP) saw/sees it.
Back in 2013, my daughter was born and within 2 days I was laid off from my position as IT Manager at a small MSP in Dallas.
No college degree at the time, no savings, wife and I were not working. The one thing I did have though (fortunately) was experience in the industry - about 8 years of IT experience (dev, systems engineering, architecture, management).
I freaked out initially - the stress of a new kid, no money kind of ate at me. For not only was I a dad (a young one at that), but also now my family has no income (wife was on maternity leave).
The first thing I did was head to a local coffee shop and busted out my laptop.
I hadn't edited my resume in a few years. I deleted everything and started over. I knew this crappy employer wasn't going to dictate my families future. I also knew what I was worth.
I immediately got on LinkedIn and started connecting with everyone I knew/asked for references and then started connecting with hiring managers at prospective companies.
I created a burner phone number (google voice number) and used this on my resume - then created a Monster, Dice and Careerbuilder accounts (to attract headhunters) and filled out those profiles entirely.
Having not spent a lot of time in a few years looking at salaries in different segments of IT, I spent a few hours figuring out what in the hell I wanted to do - and what would make me some $$$.
I found that in the Dallas/Fort Worth area (at the time), Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and VMware were heavily searched terms by recruiters on LinkedIn and Indeed.com.. I started looking at what I could do to leverage my current knowledge/skills and find a lucrative position.
After spending a few hours researching, I found that I could leverage my systems (Windows/*Nix) administration experience and help developers deploy their code. I was pretty good with Python and was interested in learning Ruby.
Bingo - DevOps!!
I found what interested me - the best of both worlds and I started targeting my job searches/applications towards that.
By the end of the day, I had a call from a local recruiting agency looking for Cloud and DevOps engineers. By the next morning I was on the phone with the hiring manager - and by the end of the day (3 phone interviews later) I had an offer in my inbox ($90K more than my last job).
In summary: What you went through completely sucks. Don't beg. Show people that you can get shit done. Do the work, be the prize.