Moms who stayed home when your babies were small, how difficult was it to find a job after?

Anyone can respond

I read a lot of horror stories about highly educated women with lots of experience in a specialized field having trouble reentering the workforce because how much it changes over the years etc. I get it. Although, it is not an option for me at the moment to find a job. I have a masters degree in computer science and 7 years experience as a software architect. I fully expect to take an entry level job at first and work my way up again. What I'm worried about, is if this is even possible.

Am I ruining my life?

Does anyone have any interesting stories?

in workingmomsby RaspberryTwilight

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NandiniS

10d

I have done this very successfully as a woman in tech, took a break of 6 years and within 2 years of coming back to the workforce I was making excellent money again. I have one tip to add which is counterintuitive and may surprise you.

When you rejoin the workforce you will be tempted to ask for a low salary/wage just to get your foot in the door. DON'T DO IT. Ask for more money than you can dream of, otherwise you will not be taken seriously as a professional and nobody will call you back. I literally got ghosted after an interview because I asked for too little money, and didn't get any callbacks for over 6 months because I kept lowballing myself with recruiters even.

PurplePanda63

10d

That’s interesting. I took a two year break and have found I’ve been asking too much.

NandiniS

10d

Just to make the discussion concrete, when I went back to work I was asking for $30*-ish an hour. I would tell recruiters "I'm willing to take a pay cut to get back in the game." This got me no callbacks and one time after a direct interview with a company I got ghosted because this was a laughably low amount to ask.

Then I started asking for $60*-something per hour and immediately (like within 2 weeks) landed a contract role at $58*/hour. Since then I've jumped to better and higher paid roles easily.

(*Note: these numbers are inflation-adjusted from about 8 years ago which is when all this happened for me.)

PurplePanda63

10d

Huh that’s interesting. What’s your field? I’ve got 10 yrs of experience in engineering it found I was asking for too much in both salary and hourly for my location

NandiniS

10d

I'm a technical writer. I'm surprised to hear that it's so different for engineers! I apologize, I always thought this was applicable to most people in the tech industry.