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My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

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Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#171

Post by Retric »

bob33212 wrote: post #163
b3kart wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Well-established and widely reported”: is it actually? Yes, I’ve also seen the anecdotes on HN, but I am conscious of the survivorship bias, never mind HNs overall bias towards the US/Bay Area. You might never hear from developers in their 40s and 50s who have found a job easily and don’t bother participating in such discussions. Any statistics available on age and time in current role for SDEs, preferably spread ge…

It depends a lot on the company culture. You can find startups where they intentionally look for you people who are excited about joining their first startup. Generally they can pay these people less and give them equity. You can also find older established companies that prefer someone with 10+ years experience in their specific industry. There is also the issue of company hierarchy. After 10 years of experience do…

The CEO is rarely the oldest person in a large company. So some age inversion is going on.

A more reasonable comparison is how old the tooling is between industries. The rate of change in the web front end world is vastly faster than C, so having someone with 20 years of experience in each means very different things across industries.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#172

Post by texasbigdata »

georgeburdell wrote: post #109
nnoitra wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that you are overqualified? How was your PhD experience, do you think it has helped your career considering the opportunity cost?

Not over-qualified (see other posts). At this point in my career, a PhD has been a net financial loss even though I managed to graduate in four years. The jobs are more interesting though. I wouldn't recommend it, honestly.

Do you have more terminal career optionality though? It feels like a PhD should be at least relatively valuable as a promotion signal, or are you arguing the 4 years of lost work experience outweigh any positives (ignoring debt and foregone income).

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#173

Post by steev »

goatinaboat wrote: post #152
alextheparrot wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems a bit unfair, as I don’t ask the plumber likely because of trade skills being centrally licensed and regulated. Presumably if they are licensed to do the job someone else has already done the vetting - which makes sense especially for consumer-focused skills where the consumer might not be able to perform an adequate vetting. I understand the core idea of your comment, regarding the utility of whiteboard i…

Presumably if they are licensed to do the job someone else has already done the vetting That’s true but it’s also true that a candidate may have had previous jobs at a string of reputable companies, and yet that “vetting” is completely ignored and it’s back to square one. Not to mention that a degree from a reputable university also doesn’t count. Maybe it gets them past the HR screen but no interviewers seem to beli…

A degree from a reputable university doesn't count in _any_ profession (ok, that's hyperbolic - it certainly counts for something in run-of-the-mill office jobs). Even doctors, lawyers, actuaries, accountants, etc. have to prove they are capable to a central authority before they can work.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#174

Post by rikroots »

brmorris wrote: post #148
rikroots wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Realistically, most companies are never going to check your GitHub profile in the first place This is, in my personal experience, a sad truth. I've been seriously looking for work for the past 6 months (thank you, Covid-19, for your disruption) and I'm surprised by the number of times I've started a phone interview with questions like: "tell me about your skills" ... has the interviewer not looked at my CV with its…

To be fair, how the candidate responds to "tell me about your skills" during a verbal interview is often a lot more telling than the same information on the written CV.

I don't know about other candidates, but when I'm preparing for a phone interview I'll have spent time learning about the company and will have tailored the general questions I expect the interviewer to ask me to map closer to the job spec and the company ethos. It's nice when I mention skills I've used in various projects and the interviewer knows what those projects are because they've glanced through the links supplied in my CV/application.

As an interviewer, I'd hope the applicant has done similar work. If they haven't - or give me a stock response - I'd want to spend a couple of minutes probing their response with questions about how they used those skills in their portfolio work.

Asking about the skills they've developed while building their portfolio work as a first question generally (my personal view) helps break the ice, engage us both in the conversation and make for a happier rest-of-the-interview experience.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#175

Post by eru »

crispyambulance wrote: post #156
eru wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making lots of money is how society tells you what contributions it realy values. A big part of the rest is empty talk. It's easy to say that we value eg teachers or nurses or janitors. Doesn't make us pay them more.

> Making lots of money is how society tells you what contributions it realy values. No, not in the case of humanities (or almost any other field) in academia. The problem with his first career choice, philosophy, is that jobs are incredibly scarce. It's not that they pay too low and no one wants to work as an academic. There are simply far too many candidates for not enough slots.

> No, not in the case of humanities (or almost any other field) in academia.

Are you sure about that? Perhaps society doesn't value them much? (I know I don't. The humanities make for great and fulfilling hobbies, sure. Doesn't mean we need to pay people for their hobbies.)

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#176

Post by eru »

rubidium wrote: post #164
eru wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, far from it. There are much more successful economic systems around than the US one. America oddities like government mortgage guarantees, or federal deposit insurance, or licensing for interior designers are not necessary, and in fact not good for the economy. Neither are pervasive price controls. The US would do better, if they moved to a more market based economy.

FYI I’m not talking about the narrow spectrum of more socialist to more free market republic/democratic capitalism. There’s plenty of details to debate there of course. I mean general range of human experiments in how to structure society: monarchy, feudalism, religious state, empire, full socialism/communism, fascism, etc...

Oh, sure.

Giving federalism a serious try might be interesting. So that you actually have 50 different governments in the US to fuel experiments.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#177

Post by pydry »

Retric wrote: post #171
bob33212 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends a lot on the company culture. You can find startups where they intentionally look for you people who are excited about joining their first startup. Generally they can pay these people less and give them equity. You can also find older established companies that prefer someone with 10+ years experience in their specific industry. There is also the issue of company hierarchy. After 10 years of experience do…

The CEO is rarely the oldest person in a large company. So some age inversion is going on. A more reasonable comparison is how old the tooling is between industries. The rate of change in the web front end world is vastly faster than C, so having someone with 20 years of experience in each means very different things across industries.

I've noticed that while this is true, age discrimination against older job applicants in a company does correlate to the age of the CEO though.

It seems that everybody in management feels more "comfortable" hiring subordinates that are younger than themselves (perhaps because age/experience is a threat to their implied authority), so the younger the CEO is on average, the younger the other C level execs will be, etc. all the way down to the bottom ranks.

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#178

Post by PopeDotNinja »

nikanj wrote: post #122
ivalm wrote: post #99

I am curious what counts for “mid career”, he started coding ~6 years ago. Presumably he is in his 20s. Here him talking about leaving philosophy: https://www.philosophicalhacker.com/2014/04/22/why-im-glad-m... Edit: LinkedIn ~agrees with this estimate

Ageism in tech is well-established and widely reported. If you're too old for the game by the time you reach 40, your mid-career does indeed fall somewhere in your late 20s/early 30s.

If you keep your skills sharp, marketable, and maintain a good attitude, you can get a job at any age. I was a tech recruiter for 9 years, and I saw a lot of older candidates get rejected. The reasons they go rejected usually came down to trying to sell themselves on years of experience & coasting on work they had done many years ago.

Here are some examples:

- if I ask you to tell me a story about cool work you'd done, and the most recent story you can come up with is from 14 years ago, I'm going to ask you come up with a more recent example

- if you try to sell me on your 20 years of experience, I'm going to ask you what someone with 20 years of experience can do that someone with 5 years can't do

- if you've worked on an older technology for N years and want me to hire you for a modern web development job, trying to selling on how you can learn it is not going to convince me that you want to do it, so when I ask you to show me something you made in something that people actually use these days, I need to see more than a badge you earned on Codecademy

- When you try to apply for a development job, I expect you to be a developer now, so if you look like you've been a manager for 10 years, and I ask when the last time you wrote code was, last night is a better answer than last decade

- If you want a premium salary, you need premium skills

Re: My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

#180

Post by jasondigitized »

sails wrote: post #170
say_it_as_it_is wrote: post #147

It's alarming that there's an idea among a people -- possibly bay area -- that mid-career is six years of experience. You are your own worst enemy with that kind of belief. People reinvent themselves and their careers many times over a lifetime. It's hard to return to certain types of technical work but never impossible, especially for those who are sufficiently motivated. You will reach the limit of a pay scale, but…

I like the framing of a career into thirds of 15 years. 20-35: Find and build your skills/industries/networks and start to align that into a career. Don't be afraid to make mistakes to enhance learning. 35-50: Double down on the skills you have in the industry you know, build your personal brand, achieve your career goals. 50-65++: Give back to those earlier in their career, pay it forward, pass the torch etc. With t…

I’ve heard this referred to as Learn, Earn, and then Return.
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