Maybe I'm alone in this. But I think be honest, you don't have to go into details. I have family and friends that have been (or still are) in bad depression. Based on the stats nearly everyone you talk to will as well.
I have being on the hiring side too, and if I asked you about that gap and got an honest reply about depression, that would tell me a lot. 1. you have identified an issue and worked to resolve it. 2. you are aware of it and may see it "coming" early next time (if it comes again).
I have been burnt too many times from people misrepresenting themselves in interviews (not being real to themselves to "sell" themselves) that I really value open and honest people. I think they know themselves, better, therefore their weaknesses and strengths too.
Could you hit rock bottom if I hired you? Sure, but it wouldn't be a complete surprise, and we could work together to prevent it and make sure you have the help needed before things got bad. (As if I hired you, it was for your skills and drive and fit and I'd want you to stick around to continue that).
Employers and employees can work though a lot if we both are honest and both are bringing something to the party (a job someone wants and the skill/desire to learn/perform).
Note I do not work in the US, and this is my experience.
Interestingly I have the opposite experience in Melbourne, Aus. I used to stand/walk/chase down empty cabs trying to get home but none would stop or just say things like "not far enough" or "i'm not going that way". This was true even at cab ranks.
Now I stand waiting for an Uber for a few minutes and 1. it turns up 2. they never complain about distance or direction and 3. I get home safely.
I do however mostly avoid crazy surcharge periods.
Had to reply, could not agree more. People may hate it but there is an art to writing a resume and it's focus, just like a company needs to focus, so do you to get a job.
I really want to disrupt the real estate market. Real estate agents in particular. I think it is a broken system, especially on the rental side.
Never dug into the law (here in Australia) but I want to make available the tool for people the manage their own properties, some standard rental contracts etc.
People already look for property online, then you have to deal with the agents, you should just be able to deal with the one - hopefully trusted - site. You search, find, go to a open inspection, apply online, get notified that you have it. Get sent contracts etc. Organise a meet for keys and signing. You'll then manage communication through that with the owner or a proxy.
You'd need to hire a bunch of resources that are vented to do open inspections and manage some calls etc. but on scale they'd be cheaper than a bunch on real estate agents.
I haven't written anything real in Go yet, but there is a lot of articles about it, and many parts of it do appeal to me. I like how they didn't write another language for the JVM, I like the c inspired syntax, I like the concurrency model they have, etc. It also seems to be getting a lot of praise in
web development circles.
But am I the only one that cringes at going back to writing & and * for passing parameters etc. for web development? I know there is sometimes a need for really managing memory but... I'd love a simplistic language built around the ideas of Go (small runtime, fast, type safe, compiled etc.) for building web apps.
Interesting, I'm in Australia and in IT and know many people in IT making salaries of 6 figures.
That being said I've heard similar things about US. Clearly everyone will experience something different. Also for Tech, US clearly has more (not that we have none) opportunities.
It's interesting, I wanted to teach myself iOS development and the best way for me was to come up with a project and see it to the end. My project was location aware reminders. I wasn't going to get rich or anything, just was solving a problem I had and learning a new framework/environment.
Seeing Apple's new Reminders app has really de-motivated me to finish it. Also before you point out TaskAve or any others, I only learnt about them today, in this thread. I purposely didn't go looking for location aware reminder apps as I knew it would de-motivate me to finish mine, and hence not learn what I wanted.
Although I can't miss reading what is coming in iOS 5 :)
Oh well, I'll have to think of something else to keep me interested.
I have being on the hiring side too, and if I asked you about that gap and got an honest reply about depression, that would tell me a lot. 1. you have identified an issue and worked to resolve it. 2. you are aware of it and may see it "coming" early next time (if it comes again).
I have been burnt too many times from people misrepresenting themselves in interviews (not being real to themselves to "sell" themselves) that I really value open and honest people. I think they know themselves, better, therefore their weaknesses and strengths too.
Could you hit rock bottom if I hired you? Sure, but it wouldn't be a complete surprise, and we could work together to prevent it and make sure you have the help needed before things got bad. (As if I hired you, it was for your skills and drive and fit and I'd want you to stick around to continue that).
Employers and employees can work though a lot if we both are honest and both are bringing something to the party (a job someone wants and the skill/desire to learn/perform).
Note I do not work in the US, and this is my experience.