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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

#411

Post by sweezyjeezy »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #381
tnel77 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bit to go before I’m a software engineer over fifty, but I have a lot of anxiety about it primarily from an ageism standpoint. I don’t really want to go into management because I love coding and solving problems, but I fear that one day I’ll will struggle to find work due to my age. What has your experience been with this issue?

I myself lead a software development team. I am 31 and the last two people I hired were almost 50 and they are very good devs. In my opinion age alone isnt a reason not to hire someone. What is the "common reason" older people are not considered to be hired? I guess because people think they cant adapt or are stuck in some ways in theire thinking. If your future you can show that this is not the case, I guess you are…

Some IC roles do fit more younger candidates than older. E.g. in a startup - often better they not have outside commitments like a family, or need for a healthy work-life balance. Sometimes "work smarter not harder" falls apart and they need to work like a maniac. On balance I've found older colleagues less willing to do that. That isn't meant as a criticism, just an observation about role-fit, those people usually didn't last long.

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

#412

Post by scarface74 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #383
scarface74 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean not being “offered” a position I didn’t want? I have never had any desire to be a software developer at a large company. I like being able to: - be on pre-sales calls with customers - writing the proposals/statements of work - deal with the decision makers from the customers side - architect the entire solution from the development side and the infrastructure/“dev ops side” - do the actual work - lead the us…

I don't care that you have software engineering experience, you are answering to a thread talking about leetcode interviews by saying you didn't have to leetcode because you took a non-software engineering job. Good for you, but nobody cares.

I didn’t do leetCode in:

2008: when the director of software was looking for someone with a weird combination of VB6, C#, and low level C and C++

2014: when the new director of software engineering was looking for someone to be on a “tiger team” to go after a new vertical

2016: when the new director of IT was looking for someone who could lead the effort to move from PowerBuilder to C# and JS and to lead the integration efforts as they were acquiring companies

2018: when the new CTO was looking for a developer to lead the effort to make their development and CI/CD processes cloud native

2020: current job.

From 2008-2020 it was mostly developing in C# and JavaScript with a little C++ early on.

In 2018 I started getting into Python.

It’s amazing what you kind of crap you can avoid when you have 12 years of professional experience (in 2008) and a good network.

Yes my career before 2008 was unremarkable and there is a pattern that I gravitated toward positions where I was one of the first technical hires by a new manager.

Each of the jobs I mentioned between 2008-2018 were a recruiter reaching out to me that I knew from network where the director/CxO was looking for someone to help them with some type of strategic initiative. All of them were more interested in my ability to technically lead strategic initiatives than whether I could reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard.

When you can talk to a technical director about how you optimized 65C02 code as a hobby in the 80s and how you wrote inline x86 assembly to speed up a batch processing system, they don’t wonder can you maintain a compiler for Windows CE devices.

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

#413

Post by harshalizee »

harshalizee wrote: post #171
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 terrible, possibly toxic advice. Software devs are people too. They burn out, take time off to travel, reflect, take care of family, or just down on their luck being unemployed. The only advice I'd consider paramount is to take stock of themselves financially and mentally, to assure themselves that they can take on the chaos and uncertainty that follows. Honestly, if someone showed up with a gap in their resu…

Edit/Addendum : Uff this blew up. If I came on too strong, that wasn’t my intention and I’m sorry.

I was primarily replying to this particular line from OP : > If you get laid off, immediately start doing a startup, open-source project, or volunteering full time.

The ‘immediately’ didn’t really jive with me. A job loss can be very traumatic to an individual, and I still believe in taking time to recuperate from it rather than diving head long into yet another thing.

I’ve interviewed quite a lot for my employers, big and small, including two of FAANMG companies for about 7 years now. From my perspective, I’m interviewing a candidate to see if they’re a competent engineer and a pleasant team member. I have absolutely no issues with passion projects / open-source and startups, just not if it’s aim is to be a resume filler.

>Focusing full-time on contributing to pytorch?

Yes! That is amazing and I already know that they’re a far more adept engineer than I am. But, if we were to dive in and I find out it was mostly fixing typos and nits in the codebase to show GitHub greens, then someone else who did something else entirely during their time off would come off better.

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

#414

Post by snapetom »

ketzo wrote: post #404
kelnos wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had no stigma whatsoever attached to the fact that I had been laid off. This point in the article was weird to me, that you should creatively avoid saying that you were laid off. Sure, some layoffs are just an excuse to get rid of people who the company believe are low performers, so if you were laid off from a prominent company where recruiters know why the layoff happened, this could be a problem for you when l…

Yes, when lots of companies are cutting back to their most essential employees, it helps provide a little cover. But, y'know, regardless of the environment, what does it say about your abilities that your employer didn't consider you essential? This is a very pessimistic way to view things that I don't fully believe, and of course any reasonable person knows that being part of a layoff is very rarely just the employe…

> But, y'know, regardless of the environment, what does it say about your abilities that your employer didn't consider you essential?

In the case of a startup, there's often not much you can do to be seen as valued if you're not a founding engineer.

I've been a part of 3 layoffs. 15%, 90%, and 75% reductions, all at small or medium-sized startups. At a startup, they're going to keep founding and early engineers first. There's a selection bias, but those engineers aren't probably "dead weight" if they were there since the early days. Plus, there's a cliqueness to startups that will favor them.

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

#415

Post by inkcapmushroom »

fatnoah wrote: post #352
anticristi wrote: post #336

I would love to read a European, perhaps Swedish version of this article. 12+ months of unemployment insurance is standard here. I guess it doesn't take the loneliness away, but might make unemployment less traumatic.

Looking at the internet, it looks like Sweden supports 300 days of unemployment benefits that max out at 1200 SEK/day (about $115 US). In the US, one can receive up to 210 days of unemployment with a max benefit of $145/week. So yes, there is unemployment insurance in the US, and it pays almost 30% more than in Sweden. There is a HUGE gotcha, though, and that's the cost of health insurance. Unless the former employer…

I think you just compared a daily rate to a weekly rate, if I'm reading correctly? Which would make the US rates very small in comparison, especially combined with health insurance as you describe.

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

#417

Post by oorza »

jareklupinski wrote: post #348
mattm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've heard "transparency" so much lately that it now gets confused with honesty. They're not the same. If a company asks where else you are interviewing an honest but not transparent answer would be something like "I'm exploring other opportunities at various places but don't feel comfortable providing more details." If you were to ask a company who else they are interviewing for the same role, you would expect the…

during one of the first interviews I ever had, the interviewer took me to a private room where I could do the coding part on my own on the desk was the laptop they wanted me to use, some pens and paper, and a stack of resumes from other people the interviewer made no mention of the stack as they were leaving or when they came back, and when I asked about it at the end of the interview, they chuckled and changed the s…

Pretty sure the test here is to see what you do when you discover them. I'd give them more benefit of doubt and guess that they wanted you to report it immediately, and letting any mention of it wait until the end of the interview was the wrong answer. If you're the sort of person that believes in these sort of tricks (I don't), you'd probably jump to the conclusion that the person ignoring the pile of resumes was okay watching the place burn down around him as long as it wasn't his job to fix it. That's a huge leap of logic to make, except in the whacky world of job interview shenanigans, where it's basically par for the course.

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

#418

Post by [deleted] »

w10-1 wrote: post #325
zer00eyz wrote: post #315

I survived the dot com crash (yes I'm old). I have hired (interviewing team member, or hiring manager) hundreds of engineers. If you are hearing "let me know if I can help" (number 5) you might be doing something wrong. You should be hearing some version of " I will talk to my boss" or "I will call for you" or "XXX person I know is looking". I have a list of about 30 people who if they call me I'm going to go out of…

"We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done" I really appreciate the sentiment. In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence. "You need to make some changes" is not particularly helpful when you're outside the fold. What's typically unstated is something about loyalty, esp. not disclos…

[deleted]

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

#419

Post by oorza »

jasmer wrote: post #375
jacquesm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company asks you about stuff that isn't any of their business you have my permission (not that you need it) to lie your ass off if you think it will help you. The power asymmetry is such that unless the counterparty is extremely careful about abusing that power that you will end up being cornered and taken advantage of. If you present yourself as more desirable than you are based on your current situation and it…

Gosh, no - strongly recommending not doing this. (The lying part) Lying is one of the worst things you can do, it usually speaks to an issue with integrity, a concern that comes before almost all of them even intelligence, education, aptitude, skills. Learn the skill of polite deferral, of saying things without saying them, diverting or embellishing a bit - and then only if it's an issue not relevant to the job. If s…

> And of course, if it's truly a bad situation just say that politely and assume you won't be working there

Or "this situation sucks, that's why I'm excited. I want to lead the charge out of the darkness and into the light" or some such self-aggrandizing metaphor. Assuming, of course, you are willing to take a job whose primary function is fixing a broken team.

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

#420

Post by spacemadness »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #381
tnel77 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bit to go before I’m a software engineer over fifty, but I have a lot of anxiety about it primarily from an ageism standpoint. I don’t really want to go into management because I love coding and solving problems, but I fear that one day I’ll will struggle to find work due to my age. What has your experience been with this issue?

I myself lead a software development team. I am 31 and the last two people I hired were almost 50 and they are very good devs. In my opinion age alone isnt a reason not to hire someone. What is the "common reason" older people are not considered to be hired? I guess because people think they cant adapt or are stuck in some ways in theire thinking. If your future you can show that this is not the case, I guess you are…

It depends on what part of the industry we’re talking about. One aspect of this is startup culture and needing to “fit in.” Or in other words “culture fit.” You see it on HN all the time where people mention many of their friends are coworkers. Sometimes that means not hiring the person who has a life outside work, isn’t going through the same issues everyone does in their 20s, and is perceived to not fit in. In some cases, I think it is simply the threat of possibly having a life outside of work and not signing up to overwork yourself by default.

Another is pricing yourself out of the industry. And another is the mistaken idea that all an older dev knows is older out of date technology. The usual stuff.

I’ve found that firmware and regulated industries in general do not have as rampant of an ageism issue.

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