What to Do If Nobody's Hiring (and How to Slide Into Their DMs When They Do), with Rachel Nabors

Meet  Rachel Lee Nabors 🇺🇸🇬🇧! They are an award-winning cartoonist who transitioned to become a developer with a passion for teaching the world how to code. Rachel has worked at major tech companies such as Microsoft, AWS, and Meta. At Meta, they were a pivotal contributor to react.dev, the award-winning version of React documentation.

Rachel is also the author of the Tech Career Survival Guide, a series of Substack essays that may or may not become a book. In these essays, they teach readers about emotional resilience, managing change, and the practical aspects of working in tech. In this episode, Rachel will share their secret for landing high-profile tech jobs, as well as advice for owning your non-linear career path, especially if you're a career changer. You will also discover how to deal with a job market where opportunities may seem scarce and what you can do if nobody seems to be hiring. Plus: why you shouldn't email Dan Abramov, who to reach out to instead, and why collecting feedback from people directly is often better than staring at analytics.

🔗 Connect with Rachel

• 🧑‍💼 LinkedIn
• 🌐 Website
• ✉️ The Tech Career Survival Guide
• 🐦 Twitter
• ꩜ Threads
• 🧑‍🚀 GitHub

⏰ Timestamps

• How Rachel became a developer while being a cartoonist (01:29)
• How Rachel handled the career shift into professional development (03:08)
• Code can make things come to life (05:48)
• Very few people are given jobs just because they're popular (09:22)
• Break (11:07)
• How Rachel gets her FAANG roles (12:28)
• What to do if nobody's hiring (14:48)
• How can a new developer create value in the community? (16:28)
• How Alex did the same (18:41)
• Great Recession was tough, but it brought up some great engineering (21:17)
• Increase your chance to get lucky later (25:43)
• What to do if you don't have a linear career path (27:38)
• When changing career paths, it can feel like starting from scratch (31:26)
• Developing expertise is not a good thing! (32:14)
• Are your skills out of date, and how Rachel transferred her old skills into new roles (33:33)
• Barista engineering (36:52)
• Don't be ashamed of your previous work experience, however unrelated (38:40)
• How Rachel adjusts to change and challenges and helps others do the same through The Tech Career Survival Guide (40:56)

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