At one point I was working in the gaming industry and really wanted out. I was talking to a hiring consultant and asked if it'd be helpful to give my notice now so I could be available for an interview at the drop of a hat... to which they responded "Hell no, not only will you put yourself at financial risk - it'll likely take you longer to find a new job." I've been unemployed and snapped up for a job before - but it was that gaming job and I wanted to hop over to a place that offered a better work-life balance.
It's been my personal anecdotal observation (enough qualifiers yet?) that unemployed folks are similar to the last pear in the supermarket. Sure, that pear might look fine and be perfectly ripe - but two hundred people picked two hundred pears from a pile... and no one picked that one. When you are unemployed and looking for work I suspect you end up getting rejected by a number of places out of hand since, while there's no solid evidence proving it, you might have something wrong with you as an employee since no one is currently employing you. Once you've landed a position - especially if your LinkedIn shows several title bumps during your tenure - all the vultures salivate over how likely it is that you're a high value employee.
With engineering in particular, solid reliable team-players are worth their weight in gold, and, from the outside, there is a strong perception of vast differences in employee skills that I think is mostly driven by the extreme wage disparities we can observe "Sure I've got Sharon and they're a really solid developer - but I only pay them 45k, those hackers in SV make 250k plus bonuses. I can only imagine how amazing they are!" I think this is somewhat further entrenched by the extreme role experience with similar problems plays - and the really deep levels of specialization we have in our industry. Database specialists are absolute wizards when it comes to database stuff and can resolve problems in a fraction of the time someone who's never touched a DB would[1] - and yet both of those developers might be employed as full stack developers. Engineering is really complicated and our field has yet to fracture as much as it really ought to into specialization - so the majority of folks dip their toes into a lot of different pools.
This is totally based on opinion and personal experience but I think that specialization is what really makes it hard to "break in" to engineering - and that specialization makes overcoming the unemployed stigma even harder than in other fields.
1. This isn't an insult to the other developer btw - it's just a lack of experience and possibly a pre-disposition. There are plenty of people who are wizards with a database that will just fumble like they've never seen a lego before if given a ticket to resolve having to do with ops - or systems programming.
It's been my personal anecdotal observation (enough qualifiers yet?) that unemployed folks are similar to the last pear in the supermarket. Sure, that pear might look fine and be perfectly ripe - but two hundred people picked two hundred pears from a pile... and no one picked that one. When you are unemployed and looking for work I suspect you end up getting rejected by a number of places out of hand since, while there's no solid evidence proving it, you might have something wrong with you as an employee since no one is currently employing you. Once you've landed a position - especially if your LinkedIn shows several title bumps during your tenure - all the vultures salivate over how likely it is that you're a high value employee.
With engineering in particular, solid reliable team-players are worth their weight in gold, and, from the outside, there is a strong perception of vast differences in employee skills that I think is mostly driven by the extreme wage disparities we can observe "Sure I've got Sharon and they're a really solid developer - but I only pay them 45k, those hackers in SV make 250k plus bonuses. I can only imagine how amazing they are!" I think this is somewhat further entrenched by the extreme role experience with similar problems plays - and the really deep levels of specialization we have in our industry. Database specialists are absolute wizards when it comes to database stuff and can resolve problems in a fraction of the time someone who's never touched a DB would[1] - and yet both of those developers might be employed as full stack developers. Engineering is really complicated and our field has yet to fracture as much as it really ought to into specialization - so the majority of folks dip their toes into a lot of different pools.
This is totally based on opinion and personal experience but I think that specialization is what really makes it hard to "break in" to engineering - and that specialization makes overcoming the unemployed stigma even harder than in other fields.
1. This isn't an insult to the other developer btw - it's just a lack of experience and possibly a pre-disposition. There are plenty of people who are wizards with a database that will just fumble like they've never seen a lego before if given a ticket to resolve having to do with ops - or systems programming.