Job Search Ideas for the recently Laid Off

I was recently out of work for several months, and during that time I tried a number of strategies to find another position. When some of my ex-colleagues also got laid off, I wrote up a list of some of the things that I had tried. Here it is, in case it can inspire others to come up with similar ideas in your own fields. (Written circa April 2002.)

I have worked mostly in the programming tools area (compilers and debuggers) for the past several years.

My former employer paid for a three-day course from a relocation consulting company in San Jose. I found it to be worthwhile; the instructor of that course, Trudy, was very helpful in inspiring some effective resume rewriting and networking ideas. She has since started her own business; see http://www.success-mastery.com/ .

Compiler Jobs: http://www.compilerjobs.com/
Nullstone's Christopher Glaeser runs this site.
DICE.com: http://www.DICE.com/
I had it set up to send me one email each day, containing matches for my job search. I wrote a Python script to examine each such message to see which items are new, and which are the same as ever. I run it on Mac OS 9; you're welcome to try it out if you want.
craigslist SFBay: http://www.craigslist.org/
I've found a few things here that were worth responding to.
Monster.com http://www.monster.com/
HotJobs http://www.hotjobs.com/
EDG Customers: http://www.edg.com/customers.html

The three below are places where you can bid on programming projects. I haven't yet seen any projects there that looked like they'd work out. I saw these referenced at the Kuro5hin weblog, http://www.kuro5hin.org/ . The item is "Be Your Own Boss", at

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/3/19/16299/4706
http://guru.com
http://www.programmingbids.com/
http://www.projectspring.com/

Networking: user groups

People keep saying that "most jobs never reach the want ads", and "networking with people you know is by far the most successful way to get a new job". With that in mind, I've started attending some local user group meetings. I have links to a few of the groups on my weblog, at these spots:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100945/2002/04/03.html#a91
http://radio.weblogs.com/0100945/2002/04/08.html#a98
http://radio.weblogs.com/0100945/2002/04/13.html

These are groups like

ACCU The Association of C/C++ Users

BayPIGgies SF Bay Python Interest Group

SVJUG Silicon Valley Java Users Group

SVLUG Silicon Valley Linux Users Group

SVCS Silicon Valley Computer Society

BayXP Bay Area eXtreme Programming Users Group

Other networking
I've been the secretary of MBOSC (the Mountain Bikers Of Santa Cruz) for 4 or 5 years. MBOSC has a fairly new (as of about a year) webmaster, who works on Java at Sun. I talked him into getting my resume to the relevant groups within Sun (the Java/JVM group and the Forte compilers group). And another officer is in a company that does a Java-based email app; he helped me get my resume to some hiring managers there.
One acquaintance of mine ( Don Steiny, founder and President of Infopoint -- see http://www.infopoint.com/about/team/index.html ) runs the Central Coast chapter of a business organization for "angel investors". I went to a couple of meetings, and found one possible job lead from that: a company right here in Felton that has a product written in Java. The one little problem with that for me was that their CEO was there looking for funding, so ... he didn't actually have the funding to hire me.
http://www.angelinvestors.org
http://www.ccangels.net/
Other stuff I've done in hopes of making connections: I reviewed a book about Jython (and got a free copy); I did the proofreading for one of the chapters of the French book about OCaml; joined the Pragmatic Programmers' Language of the Year project to do some more study of Haskell and to share what I've learned so far; hacked on Radio Userland, learning a bit of Dave Winer's Usertalk scripting language. Too bad none of these fun things pay anything :-(
Other technical areas; other job areas; other physical areas.
Looking at QA jobs, tech writing, teaching (local universities and community colleges); and looking at possibilities outside of the bay area.

I hope this helps some of you! Good luck!