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Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

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Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#211

Post by phpisthebest »

jimmaswell wrote: post #124
blagie wrote: post #74

My advice: Have one or more side projects going all the time. If you get laid off, immediately start doing a startup, open-source project, or volunteering full time. A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume. A year of launching an unsuccessful venture? Running coding classes for the underserved? Focusing full-time on contributing to pytorch? That's a lot better, both at the time and in ret…

This is a live-to-work attitude. Have some other hobbies and goals, and a year of unemployment will be neither lonely nor depressing. Personally I've gone farther in the work-to-live direction, with an easygoing, "boring" (still fulfilling enough to see some javascript doodad come to life, but not world changing) WFH job I perform well in that supports my homesteading and other hobbies.

Or its "if you enjoy what you do you will never work" attidude

I have met soo many sysadmins and devs that absolutely hate computers, hate programming, hate everything about IT. They were in some career fair at some point in high school and simply picked that because it had high pay with out the 6 or 8 years being a Doctor or lawyer took, and it seemed easier than Electrical Engineering or something.

Me, I have always loved programming and computers. They are both my work and my hobby

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#212

Post by bigpeopleareold »

I wanted to get back into more hands-on work on something. Being laid off (well, not like a usual one, but I do not want to talk about that here) was not part of that plan, of course, but I still wanted to move on anyway. It opened me to accept dealing with the interview process more, which I always found unpleasant and tedious in the past. With that, compounded with not having to go through that for 8 years, sort of stuck with me. I started interviewing before being laid off.

After getting through a few of them already, I feel a little more comfortable of the process itself, even if it meant I ended up with rejections. At least with a little boost of confidence around it (that and seeing my financial runway), at least now pushing myself on this has changed my attitude.

For what it is worth though, my own interest is to work with something that I can improve on what I improve on. Except for a couple of industries, I'd do anything almost, hopefully with an emphasis on Java, as I think the space is a bit more exciting than the many years before now (or that I stopped caring over trends and just want to write programs :))

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#213

Post by Tao3300 »

I've been in that loneliness before, and don't want anyone to have to suffer it.

One thing we can do to help is have each other's backs by providing references. I've made it clear to colleagues who get laid off that I don't care what the corporate policy says: I'll give you a reference. It's a moral duty.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#214

Post by willio58 »

librish wrote: post #33
sillysaurusx wrote: post #19

> Don’t discount the physical aspect of loneliness either. If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve. Then, one day, poof—it’s gone. Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes. > Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for wh…

> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes. People spend 8 hours + lunch and commuting every weekday on their job. It's almost 50% of the time you spend conscious during a week. Most people want more out of that than just a chore that needs to be done.

I think there's a benefit for some people in letting go a bit. Even if you love your job, you need to understand that the system we work in is purpose-built to exploit workers. It's great to be focused on your work when you're working, but once you're done for the day you should unplug as much as you can. Taking PTO? Don't check slack or emails.

I love what I do, but I've found that even still if I let that fact convince me to work more than what is required of me I will eventually feel burnt out and eventually depressed. Maybe this isn't the case for everyone, but it's life outside of work that brings true meaning and purpose to my life. Time with friends and loved ones, going outside into nature and having new experiences, these are all things that make me actually happy. Loving my work just means I'm not sad when I'm at work.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#215

Post by periram »

Would anyone here find it useful if I offered to teach algorithms and data structures, specifically catered towards leetcode kind of problems.

The approach would be (writing it from memory, will revise it if there is any feedback):

First master the basic data structures and be able to manipulate them rather quickly. We will write many small programs to ensure that a one can perform most of the common operations on a given data structure straight from memory.

Then we will write transformations, i.e. being able to convert one data structure into another.

Next up with be problems that requires a combination of data structures.

We will spend a good about of time in graph problems, the usual data structures used to store / manipulate them and understand some of the basic graph algorithms ( MST, Traversal, Shortest Path, etc.)

We will briefly spend some time on sliding window problems.

Dynamic programming, Greedy and divide and conquer techniques are rather simple, but we need to distill it down to a science so that we can code them eyes closed :-)

Order complexity, how to think about it by looking at an intermediate step and calculating how many operations are needed to get to next step. We will dig a little into the mathematical aspect of it.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#216

Post by jt2190 »

ejb999 wrote: post #67
jt2190 wrote: post #25

> Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off. I don’t understand this assertion, unless “laid off” now means “fired with cause”. People are laid off all the time, for no reason other than the company wants to reduce their labor costs. Perhaps the author is assuming that the company is also making a judgement about their skills, e.g. that they’re s…

yes and no - unless companies laid off everybody, or an entire division/location for example, they already made some sort of decision on who would stay and who would go - if you find yourself in the 'let go' category, than someone likely made a judgement about you already and found you less desirable than the 'keep' category - thats just the unfortunate reality.

> ... than someone likely made a judgement...

Of course someone made a judgement, you just don't know what criteria they used, so it could be anything from "didn't like his face" all the way to "had the highest salary".

Furthermore, how does it help in any way to assume that the reason for the layoff was because of a personal shortcoming? And why should we assume in advance and without evidence that a potential employer won't consider us because of this?

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#217

Post by trinsic2 »

Good article. Well written and to the point. It's sad how bad the employer / employee world is today.

I have been providing computers services independently since 2007, but had a cerebral hemorrhage in 2017. Which I wrote short book about(It needs some work still)[1]. My NDE came without the typical experiences that you read about, but something within me had changed, I had a really hard time being dishonest and hiding parts of myself from the world (this is how I see it, others might see it differently). During my recovery, I didn't know if I could return to providing services independently, and had some interviews after being out of the work world for about 15 years, and man, had it changed.

My brutal honesty about myself and the world didn't go over to well in those interviews. But it made me realize how messed up parts of the world are, and how the employer/employee relationship is really slavery to forces outside myself. A good book on this is "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"[2].

Obviously, its not so easy to extract oneself from this relationship, I had something to fall back on as I redoubled my efforts to continue my services independently. Obviously, not all employer/employee relationships are slavery, but the corporate world and the politics behind it feels like slavery to me.

It feels like we are gradually moving away from centralized systems like these as more and more people realize whats important. COVID seemed like a big wake up call for many.

It's important, now more than ever, that people find what's important to them and start taking small steps in that direction as it seems like concentrated industries that are too big to fail are starting to collapse.

[1]:https://www.scottrlarson.com/books/book-most-improved/

[2]:https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity-...

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#218

Post by anon50118810 »

FpUser wrote: post #107
ThePadawan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in similar shoes to the author here, and am glad to hear you show some understanding for this. I interviewed with a quite promising company beginning of December, only to immediately get the written feedback (after the first call) of "Well I know a lot of SWE in this town and none of them are struggling to find a job - so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, w…

>"so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, we've already signed a contract with someone else in the 5 days since we last spoke." I think letting them know you are currently unemployed is a mistake. Frankly your current state of affairs is not their business. You can always tell them that you are ok but looking for a better job. Very simple and understandable. Yes i…

There's really no way to hide you're currently unemployed, or at least not employed in the tech field, unless you make up an entire fantasy world. Not only will you have to put the lie into your resume, and maybe provide fake references, but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#219

Post by ThePadawan »

jt2190 wrote: post #42
ThePadawan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in similar shoes to the author here, and am glad to hear you show some understanding for this. I interviewed with a quite promising company beginning of December, only to immediately get the written feedback (after the first call) of "Well I know a lot of SWE in this town and none of them are struggling to find a job - so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, w…

> I had mentioned how frustrating it was to simply get "no" as negative hiring feedback and asked them to elaborate if at all possible Don’t do this! You’re inviting feedback from someone who is basically a complete stranger, who has an undisclosed set of “standards” they’re judging you against, and who might not actually be very good at assessing talent. The odds of getting a “false signal” are high.

I've honestly made enough of a positive experience to recommend doing it.

Sometimes people just genuinely tell you things like "there wasn't enough detail about X on your CV, but we took a chance and called you anyway" - that tells me that I can improve my chances for a callback in the future by adding more detail (if I get that same feedback 2-3 times).

You're right though in that a looooooooot of hiring people also have no clue what they want to see.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#220

Post by ctvo »

okaram wrote: post #204
ctvo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime I read these comments I feel like I work in another industry. Who cares about the gaps in your resume? Truly, have recruiters commented in anything but passing? Your interviewers? I've hired candidates with large gaps in their resume and their reasoning for the most part was I wanted time off or I went traveling or N other things that have nothing to do with work. We. Did. Not. Care. Pass the interview. Thi…

It's not so much the (closed) gaps, but the time since last job. The first job after you take a year off will be harder to get. After that, most people won't care.

I don't think it matters as much as people here seem to think.

You're the current CTO of a unicorn looking for a more technical role with stability so you apply to be a staff+ engineer at Google. Now the opposite: you've taken a year off to take care of an elderly parent. In both cases, your resume is one of the lowest signals we have. You're going to need to pass that interview.

HR folks aren't even looking this closely as long as you have a resume with the right prior experiences. And almost none of these resume concerns matter with a referral.

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