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

Meet Rachel Lee Nabors 🇺🇸🇬🇧! @RachelNabors is 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 (https://nearestnabors.substack.com/), 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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelnabors 🌐 Website http://nearestnabors.com/ ✉️ The Tech Career Survival Guide https://nearestnabors.substack.com/ 🐦 Website https://twitter.com/rachelnabors ꩜ Threads https://www.threads.net/@rachelnabors 🧑‍🚀 GitHub https://github.com/rachelnabors ⏰ 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 l