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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

#181

Post by bradleyjg »

virgilp wrote: post #157
bradleyjg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A baseball player might well do something after the majors—coaching, announcing, hawking life insurance—but it’s still reasonable to talk about a “mid-career shortstop” six years in.

In baseball the average retirement age is 32, maybe slightly more recently - so yeah, 26-27 is "mid-career". For your analogy to work, there would have to be no programmers that are 60years old, and very few that are above 40.

What percentage of people whose job duties are entirely or almost entirely programming would you say are: 60?

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

#182

Post by onion2k »

Thorentis wrote: post #25

Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage? I can understand using that to give you an advantage for entry-level roles, but by "mid-career" shouldn't your experience and achievements in past roles speak for itself? Or do companies still want to see engineers spending their spare time doing unpaid coding? By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like t…

Tangentially related point - I've had several recruiters contact me through my Github profile (I have my location on there). While I don't know if really it makes a difference having a link to it on your resume, it can be a source of opportunities.

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

#183

Post by heavenlyblue »

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.

It’s more telling you about how many interviews that candidate had done just before they picked up the call with you.

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

#184

Post by heavenlyblue »

goatinaboat wrote: post #139
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…

has the interviewer not looked at my CV with its link to GitHub and various live projects I've done? No one ever looks at anyone’s Github, that’s the dirty little secret of hiring. A decade ago having a Github account was a weak-to-medium strength signal. Nowadays pretty much everyone has one and most are filled with junk (I’m sure yours isn’t but no one has the time to pore over it). You would be much better off say…

Out of the 20 interviews I had only one person mentioned seeing my GitHub profile, but I’ve got a feeling they did so because they were naive enough to still care about the humane side of the process. It was a very pleasant interview by the way.

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

#185

Post by virgilp »

bradleyjg wrote: post #181
virgilp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In baseball the average retirement age is 32, maybe slightly more recently - so yeah, 26-27 is "mid-career". For your analogy to work, there would have to be no programmers that are 60years old, and very few that are above 40.

What percentage of people whose job duties are entirely or almost entirely programming would you say are: 60?

Don't know - and I suspect it's heavily dependent on location.

Also, if I may add, it's heavily influenced by "production" of programmers (it's really not that old of a job, 40 years ago not that many programmers were graduating from university, compared with 10years ago). Also in the case of my country it's heavily influenced by emigration (basically everybody older than me who could emigrate, did; I'm one of the first generations where it made _some_ sense to stay in the country if you were a programmer).

I definitely agree that programmers tend to skew young. But both in my current & previous companies I've worked with plenty "old" programmers - 32 is definitely not retirement age, as it is in baseball. But yes, I also admitted that many tend to move to management, too.

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

#186

Post by NeutronStar »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #183
brmorris wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s more telling you about how many interviews that candidate had done just before they picked up the call with you.

Interviewers believing that people with no prepared answers are not competent? Ha! Tell me about it.

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

#187

Post by bregma »

rikroots wrote: post #132
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your resume is a "yes" at first read, your GitHub projects won't matter. Likewise, if your resume experience is a "no", they're not going to visit GitHub to change their minds. Where it starts to matter is if your resume is a "maybe" on first read. If they're not quite sure if your experience is what they're looking for, they might make an effort to probe around your GitHub profile for extra information. Having ev…

> 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…

I've done more than a handful of interviews as an engineering manager trying to fill team positions. I can tell you the question is not looking to find out what you've done so much as to find out who you are.

When I'm trying to fill a req I will usually get hundreds or thousands of applications, which get winnowed down to a dozen or so by the HR department, or system, or something. All of those applications have resumes that looks reasonable, so I have to whittle the stack down further to 3 or 4 prime candidates. Usually, on paper, any one of those applications look like they could perform the tasks assigned.

What I need to find out in the interview is if the applicant would fit the team, not if they could perform the task. The way you answer, they way you interact, the way you look up or look down when you're trying to recall how you solved a particular problem (phone interviews are crap, we've had good video conferencing for a decade or more), these are things I base my judgement on. These are mostly intangibles and if you've gotten as far as an interview with the hiring manager but fail to get an offer, don't assume you're not good enough. The manager might know the team are a nursery of primadonna asshats that manage to produce above average but some normie not as far up the spectrum would just quit in a week if they were thrown into that pen. It's happened.

Believe me, if you put a github account on your CV I've checked it. Also, if you haven't added one, you CV goes to the bottom of the pile. Now, tell me about what you've done.

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

#188

Post by hoorayimhelping »

bitL wrote: post #75
ddlutz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a system design interview for my L4 interview @ Google, it seems pretty typical to.

Some time ago a senior recruiter at Google suggested to me that they would have waived some interviews if I had a famous open-source project on my resume.

Makes me think of this: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

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

#189

Post by mikekchar »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #57
Thorentis wrote: post #25

Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage? I can understand using that to give you an advantage for entry-level roles, but by "mid-career" shouldn't your experience and achievements in past roles speak for itself? Or do companies still want to see engineers spending their spare time doing unpaid coding? By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like t…

If your resume is a "yes" at first read, your GitHub projects won't matter. Likewise, if your resume experience is a "no", they're not going to visit GitHub to change their minds. Where it starts to matter is if your resume is a "maybe" on first read. If they're not quite sure if your experience is what they're looking for, they might make an effort to probe around your GitHub profile for extra information. Having ev…

I have always looked a projects, portfolios, etc. No exceptions. If it's on the cover letter or CV, it's the first thing I go to -- even before I've properly read the other things. Not many people have interesting projects or have spent the time to curate a good portfolio. When they do, I tend to want to interview them regardless of their CV. I realise that I am in the minority (and I think that's crazy, but whatever).

If you have some good content, then make sure you don't waste it. Some hints here:

- If you have a main project that you have contributed to, make sure to point it out. Don't make me search for it amongst a hundred abandoned projects.

-If you are not the only (or even the main) contributor on a project at this point, make sure to point out what you did work on so I can find it.

- If you have some small experiments that you are proud of, point them out to me and tell me why you are proud of it. Personally, I love things like this. For less experienced people, if it's "I did a tutorial and modified it a bit.", tell me that. But you really have to explain why that's important to you. How did it change your outlook on things?

- If you have blog posts, show me, but point out one or two that you think are relevant for the position you are applying for. I'm impressed by a hundred blog posts, but I'm not going to read them all. I will read (um... skim... sorry) one or two, though.

- The more engaging the presentation of your projects, the more likely I am to spend time looking through it. The more time I spend looking through your projects, the more likely you are to get an interview (with cushy questions about your projects!) I'm stupid. I don't understand sunk cost fallacy :-) If you intrigue me and I spend time on you, I will secretly be hoping that you pass the interview.

Disclaimer: I'm a contractor now. I haven't done any serious interviewing for about 5 years.

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

#190

Post by jki275 »

r0b05 wrote: post #133
nikanj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. One needs to have an exit strategy for after 40s. In this case, early 30s would be mid career.

Nope.

44, write code every day and don't intend to stop any time soon.

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