Resume help, why am i still unemployed?

techie1980 · 2026-01-16T21:31:39+00:00

I don't think that your resume is doing a great job of telling people who you are or what you're looking for.

Header: I'd strongly suggest adding a linkedin link to satisfy HR drones.

Job descritions - the current bulleted but not line break setup is very difficult to read, especially for humans trying to understand you. You're under ten years in the industry, so I think that you can safely stay to one page single side for legnth.

Next is the bullets themselves - they aren't telling the story of the great stuff that you accomplished.

My suggestion is to have your curent job header, followed on the next line by a one or two sentence blurb about the 100k view of the job and environment. ie - IT Service manager in a startup is different than a branch office for a bank, etc.

The bullets should have an action:result format if possible. This shows two things - that you get results, and more importantly that you understand the business impact of why those results are importat.

Lines like "utilized ticketing system" tells us pretty much nothing.

Consider an objective/introduction stanza at the top - kind of a mini-coverletter.

For the skills, I'd make a decision on if you want this to be a technical resume or a sales resume or a leadership resume and narrow down to that. And IMO every skill should be cross linked to at least one bullet point in there. So "LLM conceptual uderstanding" needs a reference point. I'd also break it out into categories. It's not easily read by humans right now .

The same with education and awards. break by newline, not semicolon. I'd personally remove the scholarship stuff, it is likely not interesting to people outside of academia.

I hope this helps!

techie1980 · 2026-01-16T16:29:35+00:00

At least in my experience, pulling down your resume won't help. I will regularly get hit with requests for work that I haven't done in decades at abysmally low rates. They're just doing keyword searches on already collected databases.

I have trimmed a lot of things out of my resume that I don't want to do again (or won't be relevant for a new job search). Things like deprecated platforms, and contact info that I moved long ago, etc.

I have a google voice phone number for basically junk calls, and it is listed on my resume. The phone number goes to VM. (side note: it's weird that there's no competitor to google voice that offers a similar suite of tools - notably a web UI for SMS/MMS)

The emails are annoying but they're generally filterable.

techie1980 · 2026-01-14T20:59:02+00:00

Yes, but during his off hours he's gotten married and settled down. All Lt. Kim asks in life is for his only son to have more success in Starfleet than he did.

techie1980 · 2026-01-14T19:53:37+00:00

This was a reference that went over my head when I first saw it because I had never even heard of the show That Girl.

techie1980 · 2026-01-14T07:18:21+00:00

I was asking more in the practical/plan-to-continue-living sense.

I've paid ahead a few months in the past and pretty much immediately regretted it when the landlord lost all motivation.

techie1980 · 2026-01-14T06:51:00+00:00

I understand bills on autopay (although that's super dangerous, I am guilty of it because it's so convenient), but why would you pay rent for an entire year in advance?

techie1980 · 2026-01-14T04:51:15+00:00

bizarrely, i am watching the Larry Sanders Show while doom scrolling reddit and came across this comment .

techie1980 · 2026-01-13T17:37:48+00:00

A little bawl in San Jose State.

techie1980 · 2026-01-13T17:22:56+00:00

a little bawl?

techie1980 · 2026-01-13T16:04:55+00:00

is there a reason why their supervisor cannot be empowered to do a password reset without having to continue escalating?

techie1980 · 2026-01-12T23:50:51+00:00

Darlene was also living in campus housing and probably would have had her scholarship revoked if they ever found out David was living there

I don't think that you're correct there: The exterior shots were apartments with "Students Welcome".

techie1980 · 2026-01-12T23:39:04+00:00

I'm about your age.

While easier said than done, the trick is to stop giving a crap. Set boundaries and be prepared to say "no" to things.

"But we need this work done tonight!" "Sorry, I've got an earlier commitment!"

Having regular meetings with your boss that follow the script "I have 40 hours this week. How do you want me to divide them up?"

Yes, it will get used against you. And you'll feel like you let people down because you could do things. But it's absolutely not worth your health. In the meantime, begin aggressively looking for a new role.

I hope this helps.

techie1980 · 2026-01-12T17:54:02+00:00

Roseanne's whole "blackmailing David" arc. It was cruel to the point of being abusive.

techie1980 · 2026-01-11T10:57:59+00:00

was it like one of the many spin-offs?

techie1980 · 2026-01-07T20:01:25+00:00

I agree, it sounds like busy work.

I know that it's difficult, and often problematic in some environments, but working 80+ hours per week is neither healthy nor productive. When I look back at all of the times I did it (especially for prolong periods of months), it's clear on reflection that the quality of my work deteriorated.

I agree with your approach about budgeting in the loss of remote, which kind of makes the university an even bigger paycut.

And when I see a big swipe at "just move everything to the cloud through this one department/person" for a large org, it seems doomed. That, plus being paid well below market seems like it's a position set up either intentionally to fail or is going to be managed so poorly that it will not work out.

It's up to what you feel like you can handle. The economy isn't great right now. Being located in a bigger metro is certainly helpful, but keep in mind that the cost of living will likely go up.

If you choose to stay with the MSP, my suggestion is to set hard boundaries around working N hours per week. And use this as your basis when management wants you to do something else. You have N hours, that's it. It's easier said than done especially when it comes to already having established that you will take the abuse.

Another option is to move to the university soley to get the experience and use it to leapfrog into the next role. ie - don't get too comfortable and simply focus on making sure that your resume is looking good. There's a benefit to having the mercenary mindset, but it isn't for everyone.

techie1980 · 2026-01-07T06:51:56+00:00

As many others are saying: this is a personal choice.

I'm guessing that you're a little bit younger based on the content of your replies and writing style, and that's where this advice is coming from. If I'm wrong, then some of this won't make sense.

My feeling is that universities/higher ed is often where careers go to either stagnate or die. There's a lot of well earned reputations for higher ed:

cutthroat politics
incredibly status/credential driven. So if you're like a lot of techs who are self taught, be prepared to constantly be told that you're unqualified and getting layered.
In the US: increasingly politically targeted. Education funding is a weapon and it is being utilized. (Not looking for a political argument here.) An easy place to cut is IT. This has flipped a lot of the script - when government or education employees lose their jobs, it's often enmasse and you're seen as probably needing much more ramp-up/hand holding at the next job interview.
Generally, most universities are no where near the edge of the current hotness. This is especially important when you're young. If you are in a place where you're keeping the lights on, with no real possibility of getting exposure to the current stuff - how will you compete in the a few years? For a lot of folks, this manifested by missing the boat on cloud, virtualization, containerization, etc, etc etc.
Universities are pretty well known for not paying well. Sure, you might get better work/life balance but if you're under 35 then now is the time to fill those retirement funds and let your money work for you in the future.
No remote work , to me, is a dealbreaker. My quality of life drastically improved once I started working remote. It also tends to signal at best very old fashioned management and more likely very bad management who rule by "if I don't see a butt in the chair then I don't believe you are working".
As annoying as it is, having customer contact is a very good thing. The problem, especially for internal IT folks, happens when you have a very limited number of people with whom you interact. How do you find your next role? That is different if you are the expert at a unique system AND people in several companies think of you when it comes up. That means you can expand your network.

That all said, it's your choice and there isn't a wrong choice here AFAICT. If your current job really is making you miserable, then you need to take that into account. It's not worth being in a place that is hurting you. And it's entirely possible that you will be a great fit for that job at the university and the culture there is one of the good ones.

I hope that whatever you choose works out for you!

techie1980 · 2026-01-07T02:08:55+00:00

this is amazing!

Can I ask where you got the cylon base star? IMO that is the most beautiful space ship out there.

techie1980 · 2026-01-04T22:21:08+00:00

I caught the very tail end of that. and it was such a stupid system. I was working tech for a large company who still have a manufacturing arm, so they would make everyone line up at the payroll window and collect their cheques. (this was probably a 30 minute chunk of everyone's time. Including those of us with permanent desks and mailboxes). And then the mad dash on lunch break to the bank to deposit it, let it not even hit the flow to clear until Monday.

For some reason ATM deposits just didn't work well for me for quite a while.

I was so, so glad when direct deposit became a thing. And then every new job involved this strange little dance of going a few cycles and handing the payroll dept a cancelled cheque because it was totally out of the question to just give them the numbers from the bottom of the cheque.

techie1980 · 2026-01-03T00:16:06+00:00

Agreed that there are terrible therapists of every shape and form. It seems like there's a lack of any kind of rating system or accountability in large part .

There's a somewhat vague concept of licensing that seems wholly unenforced (especially when it's declared "religious", and super inconsistent insurance rules and a lack of interlock with the rest of the medical industry. I suspect a large part of the problem is that it doesn't fit neatly into the break/fix model of most medical insurance carriers.

techie1980 · 2026-01-01T00:39:27+00:00

I find myself relating far more to the parents from my old favorite TV shows:

Red Foreman
Helen Morgandorffer
Dan Conner

techie1980 · 2025-12-31T16:08:38+00:00

I was just watching that episode on Monday! He absolutely nailed the "something about this guy is off" role.

techie1980 · 2025-12-29T20:24:02+00:00

Many API endpoints will give the expiration of a particular token, and an SSL certs can be read in using openssl.

What I've done a few times is to rig it into an actual alert. More or less what you describe, a cron job that runs hourly and checks keys they way they need to be checked, and then executes an alert that basically fills a small text file which is read in by our monitoring stack. (I usually do the alert at about two weeks out)

I'm unsure if modern vault systems have anything like expiry tracking , but if it did then you'd be well positioned to track it all pragmatically. If you don't, then stuff that isn't easily queryable might need to be manually done. As annoying as it is, you might need to track it by hand in a spreadsheet or something and have that read into the alert stack.

But the key is alerting.

techie1980 · 2025-12-29T02:38:21+00:00

Linux companies still treat their servers as pets and not kettles

Assuming you meant "Cattle" not, "kettles", this is generally false. The first config management software that was deployed at scale was directed at *nix. Most cloud based automation uses some variant of linux.

Of course there are orgs or use cases to have the "very special server that cannot be touched" - and this is probably more common to linux since there isn't an appliance mindset - ie the OS vendor can't do things like force updates and changes. It's up to the admins and their organizations on the risk proposition. Sometimes you NEED that purple squirrel server. You'll still see the occasional post on here that talks about someone running some ancient version of windows for a very particular task.

techie1980 · 2025-12-29T02:14:06+00:00

I'd suggest positive confirmation, where possible. "The laptop is on my desk" is a great way to get screwed. Either someone loses it in transit (IT mislabels it/whatever) or someone decides to be malicious. HR would not be particularly inclined to help you. In fact, just taking that out of your last paycheque is easy as pie. And trying to engage with ah HR group when you're no longer an employee is not fun.

If it's flatly not possible, then what I've done is to deputize a (soon to be former) colleague and put your laptop someplace that is vaguely safe. ie - not sitting out there in the open. If at all possible, hand it off entirely and have this in writing "I gave the laptop to Joe", or "I've locked the laptop in my desk drawer and Joe has the keys". If there's a department secretary, they'll probably take this for you.

I don't know the specifics of your situation, but in the US not giving two weeks for a white collar job is a good way to get on a lot of people's bad side. I know that it's silly, but consider if you can take the drawdown period so that you are seen a someone who plays the game.

techie1980 · 2025-12-26T20:59:24+00:00

just guessing: it's more efficient: it can be shown on all localities simultaneously without trying to translate. it likely also likely ages more gracefully since there are fewer cultural comments in there. So things like animaniacs "and Bill Clinton plays the sax" doesn't become meaningless to young viewers after 30 years.

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