421–430 of 521 posts
LOTS of good advice here. My only addition would be to further specialize in something you don't hate working in. Becoming a subject-matter expert will afford you the opportunity to take time off or just work whenever you feel like working.
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"I was driving a startup venture that failed..." ought to do it.
yeah - you better have your background story on that straight though, my next question would be "tell me about that" and then "what happened"
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The concern is that someone was fired for cause or has a pattern of abandoning jobs. Taking time off to raise children isn’t a big deal at most companies (at any big company, you’re more likely to find more parents than non-parents in hiring manager positions). Even gaps for things like travel aren’t really an issue as long as the candidate explains it. You have to consider that hiring managers aren’t only seeing res…
just curious - if someone is "fired for cause" (don't feel that this term is universally accurate in its implications but thats another discussion), do you feel they should never get a job again? its some sort of Scarlett letter or brand on them?
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Wouldn't it be nice if pay was correlated with value to society? There are a lot of software engineers getting paid bank to make products that are worse for users and society but make their bosses fat stacks. The school janitor is providing more benefit to society.
As a software dev I agree, and I've worked on some products I'd deem as a net positive to society. But there is just so much shit software out there. As a German I wonder what the people where thinking programming VWs TDI system to activate emission controls only during testing, was it worth it? Polluting the environment and peoples lungs for a bit of money? It's not like dev jobs are a rarity in Germany. And yes I'm…
1. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. 2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. "I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team" --> is a desirable skill in and of itself. 3. Stop…
> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving. Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?
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In my country, it's illegal to fire a woman(or man) on maternity leave and company must give her(him) same place back, when they return. Maternity leave is usually taken till a kid is 3yrs old, so after 3yrs they must give you your old place back, by law.
These laws usually have loopholes, in the case of the job no longer existing. Which it is very easy to make a job no longer exist, especially in a 3 year time-span.
1. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. 2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. "I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team" --> is a desirable skill in and of itself. 3. Stop…
> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving. Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?
- Some people are going to be more apt at building things from scratch than you. This is true for everyone. There are millions of programmers out there, and a small number of them will knock it out of the park, but it can seem like one is inferior to them. Not inventing things from scratch isn't inferior. Given your work ethic, I'm guessing you don't have the time to actually work on anything interesting and solve problems in a novel way.
- Your 20s are meant to be wasted. Given your age, your brain has just finished maturing. Yes, there's some things you might feel like you've missed out on, but your 30s and beyond are full of possibilities.
- You are not a loser. You know who's a loser? Someone who's lost at a game. Compared to most of the humans on earth, you're doing fine. You feel like a loser because you are missing out on life experiences by working insane hours. Stop it.
- Stop working so hard. What the fuck are you doing working 70 to 90 hours a week? I try not to swear on HN, but I think it's appropriate here. Those hours are ludicrous, especially given how long you've been in the field. Don't work more than 40 hours a week. Try to work even less than that. Stop being on call. Stop working on weekends. If your boss complains, don't budge. If your boss does anything to guilt or coerce you, tell them to fuck off. It really is that simple.
- Your salary will increase if you get another job. At every job change I've had as a programmer, my wage has gone up by at least 30%, and once it went up 200%.
- Yes, you have been doing the opposite of "Work Smart, Not Hard." Start working less. If your boss calls you at 1AM, put your phone on Do Not Disturb and go back to sleep. Utilize your sick days and PTO. Take long lunch breaks.
- Leetcode and algos are a meme. Stop thinking that you are a loser because you're not able to solve them within the time alotted to you. Your job is to get shit done, not to impress dudebro coders with m4d l33t sk1llz. That shit is stupid.
- You're burned out. Take time off from your job. I don't care how long it takes, or if they let you go for taking off too much time. You need to go on some adventures, meet some new people, and actually enjoy your life.
- The only way to get good at networking is to just do it. There's things you can do to be more likable, but they won't work if you can't simply network. Go to meetups and conventions. Strike up conversations with people even if your opening line is ludicrous. The more that people simply know who you are, the more likely you'll get a better job through connections.
- Regardless if you stay at your current job, consider doing what you can to work as little as possible. In the tech field, it's really easy to overspend with the kind of money we are making (even on the low end). If you can downsize your life and even move somewhere with a lower cost of living, you can take easier jobs to make ends meet while you use your free time to actually live. By this point, you should have some time to actually live, especially now that you are approaching your 30s. Don't feel bad about wasting your teens and 20s. But I would absolutely say don't waste your 30s. Your 30s are essentially the point at which your body has finished developing. Make sure you have fun with the next few decades before your body starts to really slow down.
- Learn to care less about your profession. We all need that passion as an initial drive, but at this point you've essentially "done it." Life isn't about being a software developer. It means different things to different people, but I do think a life devoid of serenity and shared experiences isn't preferable. You need to be able to show up, get paid, and go home. Trust me, I've made the mistake of caring too much, and too many times. The truth is that unless you are the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, 99.9999% of the world doesn't give a shit how good a developer you are. Yet far more people in life will love you if you lead a simple and honest life, and are a good person. That's way more important than any mount of leetcode you can do.
- You are by no means the only one. Software development is ironically both a permissive industry and a high-pressure one. We create these "10x developer" and "rockstar developer" myths to psych ourselves into excelling. In general, it's fake. I've known some 10x developers, and while I respect them for their abilities, I don't actually envy them. They spend more of their life on work than I do, they don't get 10x my paycheck, and at the end of the day 99.9999% of the world doesn't know who they are or even care that they are 10x developers. Yet we all want to be them, more or less.
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> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving. Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?
> Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise? Let me start off saying I dont agree with this logical fallacy. So don't downvote me if you don't like that some employers think this way. I think many interviewers/managers worry that a gap in resume is actually you got fired and then spent months looking for a new role (possibly this one). Or that you started at a company and the…
It's the same reason so many arbitrary things go from "this is absolutely necessary" to "this would be nice" to "oh we can remove that please don't walk away!" depending on the state of the job market. Interviewers are surprisingly flexible when they are no longer the ones holding the reins.
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> On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I think that at least in tech it was only ever a thing in companies that didn't know better. I mean, I throughout my career I was fired multiple times and at least twice that resulted in a 3-month gap, only one of them being voluntarily that long. I now take them on purpose and collected a total of five over the course of 10+ years. I…
My last job search it came up a lot . I took about 8 months then started looking. Because I could at that time. Since it was the current thing I was doing it came up a decent amount. Took probably double the amount of time to get a job. I finally asked someone why they cared? They said it looks like others were passing me up for some reason and they did not want to pick someone up who everyone else was passing up. Hi…
This, although it seems not everyone got the memo, hence a recent conversation I had:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31528057
> Being in any way undesirable hurts you.
Does having gaps make you so though? I'd say not necessarily. I mean, isn't there a workforce shortage at the moment?
Personally, I don't care. I just checked a recent candidate of mine and he... didn't put months in the start/end dates of his projects. If there's a gap there, I wouldn't even know.