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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?

#21

Post by akkpxl »

softwaredoug wrote: post #14
akkpxl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sorry, this still doesn't answer my question. What are we giving a response to? A job application or an interview? OP says they're getting passed up since they don't fit the checkboxes.

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

#22

Post by [deleted] »

Buttons840 wrote: post #18
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.

[deleted]

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

#23

Post by BobbyTables2 »

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.

I’ve interviewed candidates who did NOT want to learn/grow. Pretty much said so when asked…

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

#24

Post by lovich »

logicalmonster wrote: post #4

1) Just learn it on your own and embellish your experience. Your new employer is not going to contact your previous employer and ask for details about their containers. 2) Many jobs use containers, but if you get out of the high-tech bubble, you'll find plenty of lower tech companies that haven't even started looking at containers. You'll be just fine with the right company.

Too add onto that, even a lot of shops that use containers are set up in a way where the resident container expert is configuring everything and the rest of the engineers just need to be able to do some basics like `docker compose up` or `docker compose down`

i.e. stuff you can learn in a few hours of tutorials and then building some toy project to exercise the skill

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

#25

Post by chalcolithic »

I'm in the same boat, I've found a job but that wasn't easy - cloud experience is needed everywhere. I'm gonna build my next project on kubernetis/aws (side project with a hope that it'll make some money, not just a pet project, so I'll list it as a professional experience) although there's zero need for it technically.

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

#26

Post by DesktopMonitor »

akkpxl wrote: post #21
softwaredoug wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, this still doesn't answer my question. What are we giving a response to? A job application or an interview? OP says they're getting passed up since they don't fit the checkboxes.

The above advice is sound and addresses OP's post content as much as it needs to. Try taking a holistic view of the comment you're poking at by integrating it with everything else that's been recommended above and a path forward for OP and similarly concerned people clearly begins to show itself.

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

#27

Post by akkpxl »

WinLychee wrote: post #12

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.

I think this is good advice. Would you be able to give an example of a project to do or a good starting point?

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

#28

Post by WinLychee »

akkpxl wrote: post #27
WinLychee wrote: post #12

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.

I think this is good advice. Would you be able to give an example of a project to do or a good starting point?

Get a few RPis and get https://k3s.io/ running on them. Get familiar with kubectl. Deploy a few apps to your cluster, tail some logs, restart containers, scale them, etc. Install Prometheus, get monitoring working, make some dashboards with Grafana. This point is to gain familiarity with "modern" cloud infrastructure, but in a low stakes environment where nothing can go wrong. Then, you can talk about your experience, and it will technically be true!

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

#29

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

roland35 wrote: post #13

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!

It definitely won't make you answer any possible interview question, paper tigers often have issues with putting things together, cicd, iam and practical IaC setups.

It's pretty easy to tell theoretical experience from actual experience.

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

#30

Post by p0d »

Get a Hetzner vps for buttons. Put a docker image on it with nginx and java. Create a simple site and push it to a bare git repository on the docker image. Tweak the bare repo config to checkout files to the public web folder after it receives the push. When asked about cloud deployments and containers say, "doing it".
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