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Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

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Re: Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

#81

Post by mfjordvald »

groby_b wrote: post #63
moron4hire wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're focused on the wrong thing. The resume comes way too late in the job acquisition process to really matter. The vast majority of jobs are filled through networking, not applying cold with a great resume. You need to work on meeting people in your field, at the companies where you want to work. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Go out to meetups. Be a friendly, helpful person. Make friends, lots of them…

I still doubt the "networking" part. I've got my first job in the states because a recruiter called me. Same for the second job. The third one was through being acquired. The fourth one, you could call networking if you call showing up for a recruiting event networking. 5th one? You guessed it, recruiter called. Sixth one? Yep. Exactly. Before that, I worked in Germany. 1st job, applied cold. Second one, applied cold…

Interestingly I'm the exact opposite, of the 4 jobs I've had all have been through network, from the very first grocery stocking job to IT and product jobs.

When I hire the first thing I do is also reach out to my personal network to see if anyone is looking for work or know anyone who is.

My wife did just manage to land a job with a cold application, though, so it's not like either way doesn't work.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

#82

Post by FennNaten »

Everything depends on your experience, but in my opinion, companies that would only hire based on tech stack aren't worth working for anyway. And marketing yourself on your stack is a bad idea. Ask yourself, what kind of problems are you able to solve? Which domain do you know? When you find the answer, sell that. If you know really well how to solve some issues, you can solve them in any language. And you're not paid for the code you produce, but for the problems your code solves.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

#84

Post by jondubois »

If you feel confident with a new stack because you've used many other similar stacks in the past, you should just lie and tell the recruiter that you have 6 months or 1 year of experience with it. Recruiters don't want to hear about messy reality - So if you're qualified for the work but not experienced, lie.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

#85

Post by TurboHaskal »

tristram_shandy wrote: post #7

Don't write anything on your resume that would indicate "number of years experience" -- list your jobs, explain key achievements, don't distill anything down to a number. Your resume should NOT explain who you are, or go into real specifics -- it's an advertisement for you, as simple as that. If they want details, they'll have to schedule an interview. Once you have the interview, you can talk about your experiences,…

> they will not tally up years of experience or record your answers directly > into an Excel spreadsheet.

About half of my interviews started with an HR phone call where they spew their laundry list of technologies and ask me to disclose the years of experience and how do I rate my skills from 0 to 10 for each element in the list.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

#86

Post by Kluny »

tristram_shandy wrote: post #7

Don't write anything on your resume that would indicate "number of years experience" -- list your jobs, explain key achievements, don't distill anything down to a number. Your resume should NOT explain who you are, or go into real specifics -- it's an advertisement for you, as simple as that. If they want details, they'll have to schedule an interview. Once you have the interview, you can talk about your experiences,…

> they will not tally up years of experience or record your answers directly into an Excel spreadsheet.

They absolutely will ask for the exact years and months if you haven't listed them, and they'll think you're hiding something if you prevaricate.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

#88

Post by zwischenzug »

hasenj wrote: post #38
moron4hire wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're focused on the wrong thing. The resume comes way too late in the job acquisition process to really matter. The vast majority of jobs are filled through networking, not applying cold with a great resume. You need to work on meeting people in your field, at the companies where you want to work. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Go out to meetups. Be a friendly, helpful person. Make friends, lots of them…

I always hear this, but I've never been hired through networking, nor have I ever seen someone hired through networking. I suspect that to be more the case in very large companies. Luckily I have never worked in one.

I got hired in an industry (finance) I had no experience in after giving a talk at a meetup, then an 'interview' in a pub.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

#89

Post by patio11 »

What did you do to get a response back from jobs you've submitted an application to?

Round an unsolicited job application down to a no-op; this is not how the majority of jobs get filled. Instead, you should find someone with decisionmaking authority in the company, talk to them, and get them interested in you.

The "N years of experience" thing not a requirement. It is a polite fiction. It was put there by someone who may not even be associated with the team that is doing the hiring. But if you come through the front door, there exists a team of people who will aggressively filter on that fiction because if they don't filter on it then the larger organization will ask "What is it, exactly, that you do here?"

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to only have these people involved to schedule the interview that a decisionmaker has already committed to giving you and/or collect the resume that they need for their records now that you're hired.

Senior engineers applying to junior roles are selected against fairly aggressively. This is an unfortunate shibboleth, but it is a widely used shibboleth.

Senior engineers should apply to senior roles; the vast majority of hammers swing in approximately similar fashions and as you get more senior you're not being hired to hammer in nails-per-hour. You're (hopefully) doing things like helping younger employees understand the difference between screws and nails, pushing back on the person who asked for 100k nails on a house that has been uninhabited for 6 years, developing processes to avoid wood rot around your nails, etc etc.

Incidentally: Serious software shops are largely aware of this. If a company thinks that a Pythonista with 5 years of Python experience cannot be a Rubyist in single-digit weeks, that company is probably not a great place for software people to be.

Re: Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack

#90

Post by Kluny »

WalterSear wrote: post #26
nate_martin wrote: post #13

It's a little annoying when companies put framework names in their job titles. Asking for a "react engineer" or a "boost programmer" will likely turn away a lot of people who would actually be a good fit for the role. My suggestion is to just be open with the company and tell them what you do know and how quickly you can get up to speed. Something like: "I haven't used React on a paid project before, but I have a lot…

Chances are that the gatekeeper won't know enough to be interested.

You have to get past ignorant gatekeepers. Do some google stalking to find out who's in charge of the team you want to join, and reach out on social media to let them know you'll be applying. Then include "so and so is expecting my application" when you send it to HR. Or something like that.
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