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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

#211

Post by 5cott0 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #191
sails wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think in "our" line of work you tend to see at most 30-some year olds actually talk about the job; I don't know what happens to people in the tech industry beyond that, they seem to have a lot less "presence". Mind you, maybe there's just less of them because access to education and work in tech has improved so much over time?

I think most people in SWE jobs by the time they hit their late 20s move to engineering management, product management, or burn out.

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

#212

Post by TrackerFF »

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 honestly think that 30 is going to be the new 20 for A LOT of people are going to start their careers after that, as people will need either re-education, or career changes due to changes in their previous industries. I know it's just anecdotal, but I know a ton of people in their mid / late 20's that are going into college now, because their old jobs either don't exist, or became downsized by automation.

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

#213

Post by ativzzz »

cantankerously wrote: post #193
cletus wrote: post #66

So I'd say anyone looking for engineering work should aim to have at least one (and just one is fine) of the following: 1. A good (and well-known) school. MIT, Stanford, CMU, UW, Waterloo, you get the picture. 2. A good (and well-known) employer. FAANGs in particular. Ideally as an FTE but internships are good signals here too. 3. To be known for something you've done. Well-used open source project, well-known blog,…

"Simply go to MIT and work at Google" I say this in jest, but that isn't the most replicable path. For someone who didn't go to MIT and is mid-career, should one just throw in the towel and give up on the industry?

The OP should have prefaced his post with "If you want to make top 1-5% of engineering salaries". The vast majority of engineering jobs are done at boring non-tech companies by average programmers who have average educations and experiences. And of course, average salaries.

Generally programmers working at those companies don't know about or don't care about HN.

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

#214

Post by eel »

non-entity wrote: post #53
eel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may offer a suggestion, what works for me is that at the start of a job search, I first make a very large resume, with several excess bullet points and detailed lists of technologies. I am the only one that sees this version of my resume. Then, for every job I apply for, I cut out all of the uninteresting bullet points and reduce irrelevant terms for that job description until my resume is about a page long. For…

> For instance, if I'm applying for a Node.js role, I minimize my past Java and .NET experience (I may mention each just once to show a little bit of breadth) so that my JavaScript experience shows through more. What if you dont have any JS experience, but have say several years working on .NET and Java. Removing that experience makes it looks like you're an entry level candidate, when in reality theres actually a de…

I agree with you that a lot of skill is transferable between technologies, but I suspect that some recruiters or hiring managers either don't realize that or they typecast you into a specific role. Resumes are a form of writing where being concise is better than being complete.

Also, I should have been more clear. I don't erase everything about a past experience if it's a different technology. Here are a couple hypothetical examples to help clarify. In this first version of a resume snippet, the applicant should be applying for a Java position since it's filled with terms that make sense to the Java community:

> Software Enginer at XXX Company

> * I led the design and implementation of XXX Company's internal payment processing service which processes $YYY million USD in annual revenue. The project used Java, Spring, Hibernate, and MySQL.

> * Introduced testing (JUnit and Mockito) into the engineering culture by leading brown bag talks. Increased unit test coverage on critical company projects from 0% to 73% over 2 years.

> * Used JNI to integrate critical path code with XXX Company's proprietary hardware driver, increasing average performance by 8x.

Here is a snippet representing the same experience, but catered toward a Node.js position. References to enterprise Java are removed, and the last bullet is replaced with a more relevant bullet:

> Software Enginer at XXX Company

> * I led the design and implementation of XXX Company's internal payment processing service which processes $YYY million USD in annual revenue.

> * Introduced testing into the engineering culture by leading brown bag talks. Increased unit test coverage on critical company projects from 0% to 73% over 2 years.

> * During XXX Company's annual hackathon, I implemented and presented a functional prototype service to present payment information in real-time using WebSockets.

Now these changes alone are likely not sufficient to get a call back from the Node.js job position, but it changes the automatic typecast from "experienced Java developer" to "experienced developer" Hopefully this candidate has some other past experience in Node.js/web development/JavaScript to flush out the story.

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

#215

Post by SeanDav »

bregma wrote: post #187
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…

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 resu…

> "... the way you look up or look down when you're trying to recall how you solved a particular problem"

Are you talking about NLP here?

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

#216

Post by scarface74 »

rikroots wrote: post #174
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.

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 sup…

As an interviewer, I'd hope the applicant has done similar work

Especially in this market, unless you are, you’re not a special snowflake. You need them a lot more than they need you. Why would you expect them to put in any level of work pre interview?

My last two jobs where I was coming in because they needed my set of skills and I had three offers on the table and probably would have had at least one more of I had waited, yeah the company I worked for spent as much time selling me as I did them. They made sure that they moved fast and made an offer (less than two weeks from application to offer).

But, I’ve applied for my first role at a $BigTech. I started the process near the end of April. I had my first technical interview last week and the next rounds are probably not for two weeks. Who knows how long it will take them to make a decision. I would never have accepted that turn around at smaller companies. But $BigTech doesn’t need me to rescue a failing project or process like my last two companies.

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

#217

Post by alextheparrot »

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…

Your first paragraph is all too true from personal experience. Last week I was phone interviewing a candidate who, by resume and our first 5 minutes of conversation, I knew would pass the standard coding problem we had prepared.

Felt like a waste to “vet” then, as the signal that they were a good candidate was already there.

On the other hand, getting a CS degree showed the need for additional vetting, in my experience. I saw many students who hadn’t really learned to code, and only a handful of students learned to write industry-level code.

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

#218

Post by ramraj07 »

watwut wrote: post #112
ramraj07 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generalizations galore on both sides? There are probably as many 40hr Devs that just want to phone it in as there are effective ones. It's possible youve learned to weed out the former but they do exist. Similarly I'm probably one of those Workaholics, but I make an active effort not to waste time. However I do work with good effective 40hr devs and I try to make sure that we are all on the same velocity. The remaini…

90 hour a week means that the person is either not sleeping enough. Sleep deprivation means you cant be performant fully. Or the person did not had a single free day in weeks while working 12 hours a day. There are the people who do stupid decision just out of being tired. Just about the only way I have seen people work this much and not be overly tired drag was when significant bulk of time was spent socializing and…

Not sure where these numbers come from. I come from acadrmia. The expectation (and for the most part, reality) for someone in track to become a successful tenured professor is to maintain 80 hr weeks for a couple of decades if not longer. My professors maintain this still, it's how they live now. They have kids, but they had them when they're in their 40s after getting tenure. And they are not working below optimal intellectual abilities.

You would be surprised at what your mind can do if you want it to. I made the jump to tech from academia because while I was ready to do that insane work ethic I wasn't convinced that academia as it is today was worth it.

Turns out I can't just switch off this style of working though, and hence I end up working harder than I should. I'm not wasting my time though.

What I have observed though is when engineers who are in their twenties just Naturally go into an insane work ethic without mentoring on focus and time management typically waste their time. But it is possible to be 2-3x more efficient by increasing the hours you put in as long as you are smart about it. Many of the smartest people in the world do. Of course this should be a personal choice. 90 hours is a bit much though. 80 is probably the sustainable maximum for any normal human.

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

#219

Post by vmception »

I gave up on my midcareer job hunt once COVID19 hit because it was obvious that it would be a crowded pack, and salaries would go down, and desparate visa holders would be waaaay better at leetcode than me.

I think I also did 16 companies or so but being exposed to them took longer than before.

In the past I've also gone through 16 companies in one month through one recruiter before, fielded one or two offers and landed a job.

I think this took 6 months. 3 months of trying for the wrong higher position, and then the final 3 months getting serious about leetcode.

Regarding the article, I would say there isn't much to say about coding challenges, except be ready for them at all interviews now. The article mentions that it is a good test if the company can afford false negatives, which doesn't explain ANY of the startups. The signaling at all the companies is arbitrary but especially startups.

I'm just taking a cooldown period so that all the recruiters stop passing my old/current resume around (there are also SO MANY new non-tech opportunities during COVID19 war), with regard to tech I'm going to redo all my resumes to show less experience instead of trying to hit top of market in startup salaries and big tech comp packages. I get callbacks pretty instantly, which was reassuring but something about me wasn't hitting like it used to, even after I was solving the leetcode easy problems in 5 minutes.

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

#220

Post by scarface74 »

Tomis02 wrote: post #119
nnq wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hardware engineer Software's different because you can hire-fast & fire-fast. Unless you have broken processes and incompetent people surrounding the new hire, you can easily determine if they're good enough. Hack, it's even worth it to hire 2 devs for everyone you need and fire the worst performing one in a few months (flip a coin if they're pretty equal and can't afford them both). Easier to get fired, easier to…

> it's even worth it to hire 2 devs for everyone you need and fire the worst performing one in a few months (flip a coin if they're pretty equal and can't afford them both). You're a bit of a piece of shit, aren't you? Playing with people's lives like you're a god.

And no one says that about Netflix:

https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

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