I'll go ahead and say Atlanta. If you're familiar with the area I live up I-75 in a suburb, and with traffic being the way it is I'm trying to stay from I-75 down to I-285, then over as far as the Perimeter Mall/Alpharetta area. Duluth, Norcross, downtown and Buckhead are a bit far, quality-of-life wise and I'm not that desparate yet.
Thanks for the input. I think I have something approaching a plan.
Continue to have the recruiters do their recruiter thing, doesn't hurt.
Start sending out resumes myself, from LinkedIn, from indeed.com, etc.
Start getting some kind of J2EE certification, when I get something put it on the resume.
Pick a project using the technologies I think I need, when I get something put it on the resume.
Wait for summer to be over and employment picks up (?)
When I get a job I'll update, link back to this post.
Stagnated...maybe, maybe not. Over the past few years I've taken an interest in functional programming and machine learning, lately doing some programming in Clojure and looking at Scala. I've been "keeping current" with these technologies, but none of that is J2EE, Hibernate, JUnit, JQuery. We all love to hate Larry Ellison but I'm starting to think he was right when he said that the computer industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.
I will be creating something, but right now I feel like I have to do something that uses the fashion instead of something I love. A project motivated by fear instead of love? I cringed while I typed that, but there will come a time when the savings runs out and the family will still need to be fed.
Yeah, just like Facebook and Gmail, "if you're getting something for free, you're not the customer, you're the product". I'm definitely feeling like a product.
But I thought I was doing things "in the ways of my people", that posting your resume to sites like Dice etc. just gets you lots of spam from recruiters etc.
Bear in mind that I haven't looked for a job in, lets say, over 12 years, and really don't know the best way to go about it. I'm on LinkedIn, of course, I get the occasional "jobs you may be interested in", someone else mentioned indeed.com, any other suggestions for good sites?
What's a good way to list a "personal" site on a resume?
Do you put the source code anywhere for employers to peruse? And I mean this in the nicest way, but you know how some things are developed nowadays, how much is original original and how much is using example code? Does that make a difference when explaining your site?
How do you host puppyshowdown? For a personal project site I figure I can a) use my VPS, but it's only 512M of memory and I'd probably do a J2EE-based site, b) get a Linode or something, but too expensive for the memory, c) get a static IP at my home internet and leave a computer up, or d) figure out an Amazon EC2 site.
So, here I sit, trying to figure out what to do to maximize my chances. I've worked on some home projects off and on, but lately my time, and my attention, has been talking to recruiters, researching companies that I'm about to interview with, that kind of thing. I'm looking for some general advice, but it wouldn't bother me to get comments like "You should have done X, Y, Z, five years ago, but you didn't, sucks to be you" so this can be a cautionary tale for others.
Moving isn't really an option.
I consider myself a developer, programmer, whatever you want to call it, and not a "Java developer", but it's where I have the most experience, and if I went off to semi-master PHP, Ruby on Rails, or something else I'm afraid I'd be in a worse position than I am now where no one looks at me because I don't have the experience.
Some questions:
So far I've been going through the recruiters, haven't really hit sending resumes directly through what I see pop up on LinkedIn, or Dice, any of those. I've sent my resume directly to companies twice, heard nothing back. For a senior developer, is going direct and trolling the career sites a way to go, or will I just get spammed and waste my time?
I've heard that hiring slows down in the summer, is that the case? Is it me or is it the season?
Would a J2EE certification help? It might not make a difference to the startup guys here on HN, but would Java experience, no J2EE experience but J2EE certifications get me in the door somewhere?
What technologies are in demand? I see J2EE (whatever that means to some people, that's a lot of technologies in there), Hibernate, JUnit, HTML/CSS/JQuery.
Do home projects & code on Github make a difference at the non-startup companies I've been talking to?
I have time on my hands, and can to "anything", but I don't know the one or two things to do to actually get me back to work.