can anyone help me in looking for jobs more effectively?

[hans007]

well after reading the "how to have a g35 right out of college" thread and being disgusted at myself as well as the thread (for different reasons). since unlike that guy i seem to not know how to be "successful" i'd like to ask for anyone's advice as to how to get a better job.

it seems to me its hard to get into the field i want to be in which is software development. i graduated last june with a CS degree at ucla which i now understand is nearly worthless since everyone and their brother has a CS degree now it seems. i've applied to god knows how many jobs on every job board, even in the $10 an hour range to just qa test stuff and i cant even get replies to these emails let alone offers. i currently am a "temp" getting no healthcare, days off, or holidays and i update and backup a mainframe and nt boxes in a freezing data room all night all alone. its kinda depressing and makes me feel like a total failure which is why i need to get out of there.

anyhow i think my problems are i dont have much work experience in this field , internships werent exactly being handed out and my gpa was not stellar, i'd say it was fairly average.

basically my plan now has shifted to reading o'reily animal books and maybe getting into open source so my brain won't rot should i ever get a real dev job. anyway if anyone has some sort of idea as to what i am doing wrong and any suggestions yeah let me know, i'd appreciate it.

 

[rudder]

My background is not in computers but I know work inIT as a sysadmin. Over the last couple of years I have been laid off several times since all the jobs I had were at small companies that tanked. The longest time I was out of work was 6 weeks. The only thing I did which I think helped was that for every job I applied I made sure my resume had some key words from the employers ad. I also wrote a new cover letter for each position I applied for.

Also be persistant. In the job I am at now I was initially rejected by the recruiter I contacted. They said I did not have enough experience with large networks. So I called them up and told them to please take another look at my resume and submit it. I ended up getting an interview and got the job.

EDIT: and I know people rag on certs, but I don't know what kind of software dev certs there are, but I would consider getting one. Even if its a MS database cert of something. Sometimes just the fact that I had MCSE on my resume was the difference in getting an interview.