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Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#11

Post by weare138 »

It's not you. It's an unfortunate current trend in the industry. Most companies are outsourcing recruiting now which is what's causing the hiring crisis in our industry. The *vast* majority of recruiters do not have technical backgrounds or even understand what they're hiring for anymore. They're just mindlessly regurgitating buzzwords and blindly relying on recruiting software to find candidates.

Don't blame yourself. I know that explanation doesn't help your situation but it's nothing you did wrong. I wish as someone a little older who's been skulking around the industry for longer than I'd like to admit to myself that I had a better answer for you but this is legitimately a major problem in tech that has only gotten magnitudes worse over the recent years to the point I have completely given up on the corporate world. This is a serious problem our industry needs to collectively address. Our industry is going down the wrong path and dragging us along with it.

Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#12

Post by WinLychee »

if you apply to roles within finance you'll have a better shot of landing something. Also, do a quick project using k3s and / or docker to get the basics, so it sounds like you know what you're doing. You can be creative with the truth.

Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#13

Post by roland35 »

Maybe try getting an AWS certification. Just going through that process will definitely expose you to enough of AWS to answer any possible interview question, and would probably help get you pass any resume screening too. It worked for me, and I started out as an electrical engineer!

Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#14

Post by softwaredoug »

akkpxl wrote: post #7
softwaredoug wrote: post #5

You're running into a classic problem. Employers AND job seekers being overly focused some kind of perfect skills-to-role match. When the reality is, the best employees want to be challenged by new experiences. And employers say their best employees can grow outside of their comfort zone and evolve with their role. The best you can do in these situations is project enthusiasm to learn & grow. How do you do this? One…

> The best you can do in these situations is project enthusiasm to learn & grow. How do you do this? One way is to explicitly share all the ways you've done this in the past. This feels like circular reasoning. How do you "explicitly share all the ways you've done this" with just a resume or on a job application? Side projects? It would be helpful if you could give some concrete examples.

You say “oh wow learning underwater beekeeping would be really cool! I once had to learn to manage an ant circus. I learned how to do this on my own, here’s how… I imagine they’d be really similar in X, Y, Z ways. But probably different A, B, C ways.”

You give a thoughtful, enthusiastic response that emphasizes your love of learning, your humility, and highlights analogous experiences. No bullshitting needed at all.

Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#15

Post by MassiveBonk51 »

logronoide wrote: post #10

Try to learn on your own about the topic and then obtain an entry level industry certification about it. They are easy and cheap, you should consider them as an investment. The hiring company will not check that kind of details with your previous ones.

I have the entry level ones for Azure/AWS. Working associate ones for AWS currently. It's mostly me trying to fill in my knowledge gaps but do these mean anything without production experience?

Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#16

Post by jraph »

Not every dev position requires knowing containers and public cloud.

In my company, the infra team takes care of this. And not everything is on AWS, Azure or GCP. Most things are probably not actually.

> I basically never got a chance to do this at my job since everything is hosted on-premises using VMware's Cloud Foundry

Yes, still very common I would guess.

For public clouds I don't know, but learning a bit about containers is worth it, at least for debugging things you have developed running on production in a container.

Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#17

Post by logronoide »

MassiveBonk51 wrote: post #15
logronoide wrote: post #10

Try to learn on your own about the topic and then obtain an entry level industry certification about it. They are easy and cheap, you should consider them as an investment. The hiring company will not check that kind of details with your previous ones.

I have the entry level ones for Azure/AWS. Working associate ones for AWS currently. It's mostly me trying to fill in my knowledge gaps but do these mean anything without production experience?

I think we are talking about different things: first you need to remove the blockers from HR when screening your CV. Certifications will help. Once you get the interviews you have to train yourself to pass the technical tests, and that’s a different story. If you want to get real technical expertise about a hot topic and have a good technical interview, I would start collaborating with an open source project that matters in the subject you want to shine. Regarding “production experience”, I can guarantee you that most developers in large organizations even with a DevOps philosophy they don’t really have production experience (because they are not allowed to interact directly with the environments). Also be honest with the seniority of the role you are going to apply. Production responsibilities are strongly linked to senior roles.

Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#18

Post by Buttons840 »

treis wrote: post #6

This is one of those areas where everyone lists it as required for the job but in practice you very very rarely use it beyond the basics. Pretty much everyone has an infra person and in most places it's all automated off of the git commits. You'll very rarely touch the cloud and when you do it will be for trivial stuff like updating secrets. Add whatever cloud/container tech they're looking for into the skills part o…

Even easier than taking a course is to ask GPT about the tech and then talk with GPT about the tech. Ask it questions to make sure you understand. Repeat what it tells you back in your own words. Ask GPT to give you a mock interview. You'll learn a little about the tech and a lot about how to sound like you know the tech.

Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#19

Post by anthony_d »

Are you sure your large financial institution doesn’t have some group doing public cloud work? Mine does and we struggle to hire outside. I’d love to find an internal candidate who’s interested in padding their resume for a year or two.

I’d guess most big firms have some group working with public cloud; you just need to find them.

Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

#20

Post by 1letterunixname »

What you see as lacking you can achieve for yourself with self-study. Nothing is stopping you from trying things and learning outside of a current or former employer. Always be learning.

Disclaimer: Former AWS consultant, MAANG SRE/PE, once HPC/private cloud sysadmin and self-taught coder with EE/CS.

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