[mltony]

I had a 5 years gap in my career - all medical. Recently, right after that gap, I was intervieweing with multiple companies - most of them didn't even ask me, even though I was worried as hell. In the end I got almost all job offers I wanted. The only notable exception that didn't even grant me a phone screen was Amazon, their recruiter told me that ML has advanced so much in those 5 years that all my prior experience is totally irrelevant to them anymore. Oh, really. Whatever. In the end I ended up joining Facebook.

So with your 12 months gap and your prior experience, I would say nothing to worry about.

[cryptica]

What I learned in my career so far is that all these things that supposedly harm your resume are actually good things; they serve as a filter for exploitative and undesirable companies.

For example, I bet the real reason why Amazon didn't hire you is because they want to hire people who are afraid to take any time off; people who don't have a personal life. They want people who they can fully control.

The requirements of a company says a lot about the company. Having a 'bad' history can actually help you in finding the right job for you. For example, I'm pretty sure that if you put in your resume something like "I want to get paid a lot for minimal effort because I'm lazy" and you distribute a few thousand copies of your resume, you will get responses and you will find what you asked for.

The worse your history is, the fewer responses you will get; you can easily mitigate that problem by scaling up the number of resumes you send. You have to be prepared to move cities and/or countries though.

IMO, if 10% of applications result in an interview offer, you're not doing your job search correctly. You need to design your resume and your strategy so that you only get less than 1% response rate.

Gaps in your resume are useful in filtering out undesirable companies. Also, changing companies often is also good for filtering out undesirable companies. You want to work for companies who think they're special ("not gonna happen to us" type of thinking), then after you start working for such company, they're more likely to give you a raise when you ask for one because once inside, your history of quitting gives you leverage; they know what will happen if they don't give you a raise.

[gervu]

> ML has advanced so much in those 5 years that all my prior experience is totally irrelevant to them

Most people involved in hiring are either not involved with the work being hired for, and thus have no idea about that side of things. Or else they're total amateurs at hiring itself who have, by virtue of having some measure of authority over it, deluded themselves into thinking they are awesome at it.

Arrogance and bias will lose you an awful lot of qualified applicants.

It's not even that hard to work around that problem, if you're willing to shut up and listen. You can easily factor an objection as a concern instead of shutting them down entirely, which lets the applicant either show you that it isn't a major problem after all, or respond in a way that confirms that maybe it is.

[Aperocky]

I can understand if he's a PhD level scientist recruit. That it takes a while to digest all the newest methodologies if he hasn't been following.

A data engineer should have no such problem. Anecdotally, when I was recruited to Amazon, all of the people who made the shots are either SDE or SDM. It could also be a way of telling you that "This role has already filled", as it is likely with all of the people lining up for data/machine learning roles.