Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

I got a question about Canadian PR.

Do I need to have a Canadian job offer before I apply for PR?

Assuming that I don't have a job offer, and I end up getting a PR anyway, then do I just fly to Canada and hunt for jobs there? It scares me to just go to a country without a job offer in hand.

From what I understand, getting a PR becomes easier if I already have a job offer. And conversely, getting a job offer is easier if I'm a permanent resident. It's like a chicken and egg problem :)

Also, my mindset has been that, if I'm taking the trouble to move to a different country for a job, that job better be an excellent job. But I also understand that I can get into a less excellent job in the beginning, and then look for other awesome jobs.

(Also, I'm not implying that there's anything "less" about a less exciting job; all I meant is that I don't have to move to Canada (or anywhere else) if I'm just going to end up being a Laravel developer, which I currently am).

Lots of uncertainties.

Also, if one is toying with the idea of moving countries, what are some other places a person in my shoes should consider moving to?

I was 27, living in the Southern USA with a MS from a State University, feeling very similar to you. I decided to push through my comfortable malaise and got offers at early Amazon AWS & Facebook back in 2009. It changed my life trajectory completely. I worked a little bit harder but got exponentially better payoff and interesting problems. Recommendations:

1. Getting into a more prestigious company is likely your next step. You only need to stay there 2-4 years but, since colleges are more corrupt, it's really the modern grad degree that proves your worth. FAANG or a reputable startup is your best option (LinkedIn Top 50 or Breakout List). The crazy hours you hear about are more self-imposed than you think, not mandatory.

2. If FAANG isn't calling you back, this means that you likely weren't even close on the interviews (Medium to Strong - No Hire). The interview algorithms are a heavily game-ified system and these companies expect you to study and game them so hard that answering the questions are second nature. I used to resent this, then I realized that it's actually a really good way to filter a large group of people with less class bias. If anyone can pass but they have to create their own 2-4 month gradual study plan to ace it, who is competent enough to pull that off? Often, in a larger org, you are encouraged to ignore your instincts and game-ify on arbitrary metrics to achieve larger-multistage company goals anyways. Adjusting my mindset this way helped me get the fortitude I needed to be better here.

3. Coding Competitions are another good way to get noticed by companies. The existing algo interviews started as NP-complete puzzles and Coding competitions and many people came to Facebook from that route (https://github.com/robertdimarco/puzzles/tree/master/faceboo...). Kaggle is the new equivalent for ML. It's a great time to get into ML via a non-traditional route and will likely turn into the existing algo interview frustration as it matures.

What about PhD in Europe in engineering?

Thank you for your advise. I value it highly.

Me not being an American and not being physically present in the USA complicates things.

My understanding is that, because the US visa situation is the way it is (due to historical reasons), unless I'm an extraordinary candidate (I'm not) I'm not going to get a callback from any of their US offices. So these days I don't even bother applying to their US offices.

Anyway, as long as it's FAANG, it doesn't matter too much to me where it's located at.

Some of those FAANG and similar companies have offices in India, but AFAIK their focus in India isn't as much on engineering as compared to their US offices (I could be wrong here). And besides, it's pretty hard to get into their Indian offices anyway.

The few callbacks and interviews that I did get from FAANG and similar companies were actually from their UK/European offices (and I messed them up).

Still, I'm not going to give up yet and would keep trying.

Why just married -> kids? Why not use 27 until like 35 to go out and see the world, accomplish stuff, meet people and women.