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Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

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Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#51

Post by adiusmus »

firestri wrote: post #46
adiusmus wrote: post #13

Not the only one. Work for yourself on short contracts with others. I’m very suspicious of people who say they work more than 40 hours per week. I wonder about how many hours are high productivity and how many are wasted or low intensity. I definitely work no more than 50 and average around 40. I’ve met quite a few who do 60 hours and still meet real obligations. Life is not a rehearsal and is definitely not a sprint…

How do you find those contracts? I don't have all that much of a network, my former colleagues are either still at the startups I left or working for another startup.

Expand your network. Expand your bubble. Find real people. Ask them questions. Work out what they need. Provide it either directly or indirectly. I’m still working and learning about this approach.

My contract work is often “deliver this thing at particular milestones and get it into production by this date”. I politely reject contracts that don’t fit me. I’ve had clients call me back and adjust schedules around my availability as I’ve stipulated I’m already allocated for particular weeks.

Caveats: I’m not a startup guy yet I have started various businesses up.

Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#52

Post by itamarst »

Another alternative is negotiating a shorter workweek - you might be willing to stay longer at a job if you're working less than 40 hours a week.

I've done this, and it's pretty great. I interviewed someone who's been doing it for past 15 years: https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer...

Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#53

Post by somethingsimple »

EliRivers wrote: post #37
somethingsimple wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked at Microsoft and being now at another big tech company, that hasn't been my experience at all. Those companies seem to be trying to mimic startup culture internally, so they promote the "entrepreneurial employee" idea and try to organize groups internally as small startups. I wish I could do the 9-5 thing at those companies (given the great pay and benefits, adding a predictable and sane work schedule w…

You may last a couple years being the odd one out doing strictly 40h a week, but performance review is going to catch up with you at some point. That doesn't sound like a performance review. It sounds like a "are you staying late in the office" review. If the way to get ahead isn't to be good, but to just stay late, is it really worth it? All those extra hours of your life, sitting at a desk, wishing you could go hom…

It’s not about perception. I have to stay late because the work itself is insane. Crazy deadlines, dependency on other people/teams, that sort of thing.

Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#54

Post by jackallis »

firestri wrote: post #49
jackallis wrote: post #47

how did you go about self learning and employed?

Are you asking because you're curious/looking to do the same or because you think that it will help find answers?

i am curious and looking to do the same.

Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#55

Post by wprapido »

You should look into contracting or freelancing. Depending on where do you live and your skills, it might be local or remote. It's totally cool to work for a few months to a year for the same client and move on. Stay employable? It's not something you should strive for. Focus more on coupling a steady income with interesting projects.

Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#56

Post by Random_Person »

I work for my state. Sure, I don't get to go on "recharge" breaks, but I do get a month of vacation each year (plus a bunch of sick days) and I'm never required to put in more than 40hrs.

The downside is I'm paid about half of what I should be making.

Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#57

Post by bitshepherd »

throwaway713824 wrote: post #45
bitshepherd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not reflect my experience at the >10k employee level of company. I've had a more reasonable work week out of the 150 employee consulting firm than I have the 10k employee public software company. At the >=100k employee, multiple-decades-in-business, old guard type of company, I had the inverse of what you're relaying, as well. On-call was routinely referred to as the 'week of hell'. Fires tended to crop up…

You should name and shame, no one wants to work at place like this. Surely it's just individual teams and not the entire org though?

You'd be surprised. :)

Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#58

Post by justboxing »

digitalpacman wrote: post #12

Work contract. Find a business that expects 40 hour work weeks. Hunt for the work, don't use recruiters.

> Hunt for the work.

Easier said than done. This part seems to be the hardest, from reading comments of other freelancers and contractors in several forums, not just HN.

Any concrete tips, "hacks" that work, that you can share in this context? The fact that software engineers are generally bad at marketing and selling themselves ("Imposter syndrome" much?) makes this part of contracting, freelancing that much harder.

Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#59

Post by firestri »

jackallis wrote: post #54
firestri wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you asking because you're curious/looking to do the same or because you think that it will help find answers?

i am curious and looking to do the same.

Cool, so when I started out I took a mindless survival job. And on my evenings and weekends I learned using online courses and books. I also asked questions on forums/chats related to that technology and went to local meetups. It took me about a year until I knew enough to get my first junior role.

Good places to learn are things like the Rails tutorial on their website, the Ruby koans, or the Doug Crockford book about JS, frontendmasters.com. Treehouse was also helpful for learning the basics of CSS but I didn't love the cartoonish story around the lessons.

Above all, find a problem you have and think about how you could solve it with technology I would say, it will let you put into practice what you're learning and guide your direction by researching the things you're stuck on.

Re: Ask HN: I want to be a 40h/week intermediate developer.How do I stay employable?

#60

Post by arandr0x »

Work for the government. Work for a school or school system or for the local assembly of elected representatives if you really want the summers off.

There are plenty of clock punchers but typically they don't job hop. If you're not OK working for years, often more than 40 hours, at some company that will eventually become big enough to not be a startup, to accrue enough internal knowledge to have value even when you don't work, you are never going to get to the 40 hours a week long vacation stage. The alternative is the public sector. In academia, you don't get the summers off (research doesn't stop) but it does significantly slow down often for months at a time and you have some variability(based on funding schedule) about what you work on, so that's another option.

(Also, you're in Canada. You can get a seasonal non-tech job and code in the off season. People find "full time dev who quits every 9 months" weird but they'd find "full time contractor who is a rafting instructor/diver/park ranger/snowmobile tour guide and codes to fund their lifestyle, so don't schedule them in the summers/winters" mostly cool.)

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