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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

#241

Post by jonahbenton »

nickbauman wrote: post #222
jonahbenton wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't agree, sorry. Hear the critique of the abstraction but there is a reason it exists, and to deny is to deny reality. "Personal brand" is just another way of saying "personality, but online." It is the nature of intelligence itself to distill and compress complex, messy stimulus/data/phenomena into shorthand. One must recognize that this is what people do when interacting with oneself, both f2f and online. This i…

If this is all about online expression, why borrow something from advertising with this horrid neologism, then? We can use regular english, like "persona". We don't need this, and I think it's harmful.

I hear you. "Brand" itself is a horrible term and the awful connotations of course go way beyond advertising.

But if whatever this term should be were a horse, it left the barn ridden by "personal brand" a long time ago.

I don't discount the success of terminological improvement movements- for pronouns, most notably- but a compelling story about disadvantage -> solution -> improvement to create an alternative remains to be told, at least from my perspective.

"Persona" is not the solution. It's creepy, imprecise, and unownable. It needs to be able to become a term of art.

"Profile" also unusable, is taken for dating.

"Avatar" I think is successful, but incomplete.

Part of the problem is that the "branding" platforms are themselves universally awful, both in being hard to use, and in failing to elevate their users. It is never more clear that one is working for the machine than when one is configuring one's "profile" in LinkedIn.

It definitely seems like there is room to create a successful professional platform, with a named product- like "Highlights"- and that term could take over for "personal brand."

If you have thoughts about it, please do it! We need it!

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

#242

Post by surajrmal »

5cott0 wrote: post #211
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I agree that many switch onto adjacent roles, most SWEs do not do it by late 20s.

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

#243

Post by watwut »

ramraj07 wrote: post #218
watwut wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 80 is probably the sustainable maximum for any normal human.

Not according to research. I know that academia features long hours. I never heard of academia as an example of efficiency through. Game industry is another hours high occupation (and the studies about crunch are from there).

Also, having kids after 40 is not exactly advisable for women. You are getting into risk category health vise.

People who work 80 hours a week and have children simply have spouse who does all childcare related work and career sacrifice (if they had career).

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

#244

Post by sails »

jonahbenton wrote: post #192
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…

Obligatory- this framing of Learn/Earn/Return is a good one, but this application of the model to age cohorts is fantastically unrealistic and outdated. Especially if you have/plan to have kids. Unless you are exceptionally, unpredictably right place/right time lucky- I cannot emphasize how exceptional and unpredictable this is, and how much it depends on right place/right time and not on any unique attributes you po…

Fair point, thank you for adding this. I grabbed the notion from memory, and I don't even know if the source mentions age cohorts.

I think it is fair in the context of the OP as a mid 20's developer, but agree wholeheartedly that it doesn't need to be applied with specific ages in mind, but rather more broadly across an adult life.

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

#245

Post by ativzzz »

cantankerously wrote: post #236
ativzzz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I generally agree and I think I understand OP's intent. However, if true that paints a fairly bleak picture. I'd like to find challenging work and make upper echelon salary, why not? Didn't go to MIT or similar and no FAANG experience. So my only hope is to create an open source project or blog and pray it explodes in popularity?

> I'd like to find challenging work and make upper echelon salary

This has always been the case for humanity, that typically people who do challenging, high salary work come from wealthier families with access to better resources, including better social signaling resources to enable them to stand out from the pack.

It's just part of the game; if you want to play at the top without being born into it, you have a long way to climb, and you are competing against everyone else in your position. You have to either meet the filtering criteria, or find a way to stand out from the crowd.

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

#246

Post by vmception »

dominotw wrote: post #237
vmception wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DP? and yes, I got good at the easy problems, which would be all that appears in some interviews. In other interviews I could tell or got feedback that I was close to the bar, which is about 30 minutes. Or if I had an opportunity to finish a harder question later after the interview, I could tell that writing a working solution would have still taken me MUCH longer.

> DP? Dynamic programming, for the problem I linked. Oh maybe I am having bad luck I got hit with another DP/Hard , https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder-ii/ at company called ' The Trade Desk' , which i believe is no where near Tier 1/2 tech companies. Exhaustive graph search ins't an acceptable solution.

what is an acceptable solution? what criteria does the acceptable solution solve such as computation time and space, or is that a factor at all?

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

#247

Post by mywittyname »

silveroriole wrote: post #104
t_1589165433 wrote: post #19

How on earth do people have these experiences? I have to submit multiple hundreds of applications to get one interview. Throwaway because it could turn into multiple thousands if that fact is linked to my identity.

Is America completely saturated with developers or something? If so how are their salaries still so high? In the UK I can safely say I’ve gotten an interview for every job I’ve applied for. I’m not an amazing programmer, it’s just that the general quality of applicants is very low (I’ve been on the recruiting side before). Yet I see this “I’ve sent hundreds of resumes” problem on HN frequently.

I'm not batting 1.000 for interviews/submission, but probably over 0.800. I'm also not a terribly great developer. I think this is more a measure of risk tolerance than developer skill.

I don't generally apply for highly competitive jobs, nor ones which I'm am not clearly qualified for. My strategy is normally to find jobs that are looking for candidates with a specific skillset and focus on that. Recently this has been AWS/Cloud development skills.

I think some people are not so reserved and conservative. They either want to break into a specific field for which they are currently under-qualified (like data science), or just apply for jobs that have a significant number of excellent candidates in the application pool.

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

#248

Post by jimbokun »

5cott0 wrote: post #211
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have any citations for that?

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

#249

Post by crispyambulance »

eru wrote: post #175
crispyambulance wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

> Doesn't mean we need to pay people for their hobbies.

Well, you don't have to pay anyone for their hobbies.

The salaries for full professors in the humanities (or even STEM fields) can be anywhere from pathetic to half-decent. But that's not why people pursue a career as a professor. These are smart folks, they realize that the chances are slim for staying indefinitely in academia. Many try and many fail. They often to move on to other fields, just like physics and mathematics graduates. It's OK.

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

#250

Post by mixmastamyk »

dominotw wrote: post #225
vmception wrote: post #219

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 lan…

I think market now has moved on to leetcode DP/hard in ~30 mins. I got this in my last phone screen at tier 2-3 shop https://leetcode.com/problems/split-array-largest-sum/

Just did that one, didn't find the actual coding hard at all. But, just understanding what it wanted took a lot of time which would make me nervous, which would make me look stupid under the gun.

I don't think I could do it confidently with someone looking over my shoulder, clock ticking, and $200k in sitting in a suitcase.

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