311–316 of 316 posts
You shouldn't be able to call yourself an engineer unless you have a BEng, personally. Some places actually have laws against calling yourself an engineer without one.
I have a b.sc and a m.sc in mechanical engineering. Can I not call myself an engineer now anymore?
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- Don't apply to 50+ companies at one go thinking only a % of them will call you. Choose ~5 companies, do a lot of homework about their business & write to key people at these places telling in ONE paragraph what you can do for their business. If it fails, choose next ~5 and so on. This is one of the best advices for people starting their careers. This comment should be at the top of this thread! EDIT: Formatting
No, no, no, arghh no! No matter how much you research, study, network, and prep for any one special particular company, if you are the one to reach out you’re going to get ghosted a certain percentage of the time. If that percentage is around 90-95%, which is what it is in my experience being in the industry for 20 years, then focusing on 5 companies may mean zero callbacks. You need to cast a wide net, especially as…
I think it’s good advice. Although the points you make are generally true too.
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Because someone is smarter or better at the job in general that the lower quality specialists they can find. It's very hard to find a good generalist. If you can be a good generalist, you're exponentially more valuable than a generic specialist. I have done mostly backend work in Python, but in my current role I've worked in the frontend with Angular, I've debugged critical issues on our iOS app, I've fixed our AWS i…
I would say just the opposite. When it comes to the entire “web developer” tech stack, sure I can put together a website good enough for internal use, but I’m not very good at the front end. I consider myself to be very good at C#, okay at backend JS development and passable at Python. I have enough experience from doing a lot of ETL in a previous life to know how to automize queries and schemas for speed and to not…
As a sweeping statement, I'm better at solving "a problem" than a specialist. If you define the problem area tightly, they may be the right person for the job, but if the role you're hiring for has uncertainty and flexibility, the front end specialist probably isn't the right person to figure out why your database is slow, your load balancer isn't working, your build and deploy process is stuck, etc.
There are definitely roles that are much more fit to one or the other, but the generalist can handle a lot of things pretty well. All of that being said, we can probably agree that the best setting is having both.
Of course general problem solving ability is still valuable but it is more difficult to assess than a candidate´s experience in some tech stack.
So, for the general programming market the tech stack is the defining factor. The only way you can navigate between jobs with different tech stacks is by having an insider that guarantees the hiring manager that you have what it takes to learn the new tech stack without trouble, or by finding some company which is desperate enough to take the risk.
You can label yourself what you want.
> Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs. In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t be…
I'm not in the usual hiring circuit but went to one or two interviews for having a feel for that world. I always had the attitude of being the guy who will learn whatever is needed to successfully finish the task at hand, and I have work to show for it. It's amazing how's that was worth nothing for people that interviewed me, compared with how many years of react experience I had.
"Sure, but can you do python"
Well, I definitely can learn it. But can I do it right their, right now? I never really worked in python, so no.
And so... no.
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There are lots of opportunities to make that same type of comp at non FAANG companies. They're just not so clumped together, and don't have a cult-like following pumping them up in every thread.
Much harder to make 300k+ at a non faang/unicorn corporation