Ask HN: How can I effectively restart my dev career?

You said that you were laid off in 2022. How recently did you restart your job search?

FWIW I'm a software engineer with 25+ yrs of SaaS dev experience (since 1998) & 10+ years of .NET dev experience. It took me four months of job searching to find my current position, which I started a few weeks ago. I was employed during the first two months, when I first suspected I was going to be laid off, & was collecting unemployment during the last two months. I applied to 175-200 jobs, got callbacks from ~40, interviewed with ~10, and received one offer, which I accepted.

I started off by grinding LeetCode easy & medium questions, but I stopped after 3 weeks because those types of questions have literally no bearing on the type of work I do daily (e.g. building/supporting APIs, datastore CRUD operations, performance debugging). If a company thinks that they're going to find solid candidates by requiring candidates to solve N Queens under time pressure, then they're not somewhere I want to work anyway, as that's probably just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problems they have.

Basically, it's a numbers game. On the one hand, you should be applying to a lot of jobs, to maximize your odds of getting selected to start the interview process. On the other hand, you don't want to waste your time with companies that are going to waste your time. For me, that meant ignoring job descriptions that wouldn't provide their salary range upfront, before talking to a hiring manager or taking any tech tests; bailing out on any job interviews that use LeetCode/HackerRank in the technical interview stage; bailing out on any job that didn't support an acceptable remote-work arrangement (in my case, I was only looking for 100% WFH). Also, the lead time for most of the jobs I applied to was 3-6 weeks. It's a slog, but playing the stupid LeetCode game is likely to only waste your time, if you're like me & don't live/breathe algorithms like I'm taking CompSci 101 in college again.

Also, as other folks have said here, you should be doing everything you can to see if folks in your social network know of any roles for which you might be a good fit. I've landed several jobs that way -- it helps if you can get your resume seen by a hiring manager without having to deal with all of the BS that's typically involved in modern automated resume screening.

> Does someone with my experience really have to grind leetcode and memorize algorithms to prove his capability?

If you're going into a coding job, expect that people will test your ability to do code (relevant to the job, or leetcode/algos if a generalized thing).

Also self taught, and also laid off - I had to take short term disability initially and then took a layoff for severance, and now I'm on my 401k to survive. My situation is that I've had to deal with a lot of skill regression and memory loss, so its been a really difficult grind to get back to where I was.

Honest advice - if you want a code job, and CAN do it, just grind the leetcode - 10 hours a week for like 6 weeks should be sufficient to cover most cases. You can get in at even really big companies if you're good at it.

Advice for applying places in 2024 with a multi-yeargap (from someone who's seen what doesn't work, not someone who's made it work):

* Tailor EVERY resume, probably way more than you're doing right now. Fitting directly into the job description matters way more than general skill and will get you through to the next interview level.

* Quality over quantity

* Then quantity, you'll probably have to apply 200 places with the above to get 5-10 interviews. It sucks. 2 flags generally means you're out - no college is usually fine, but gap + no college means only some folks who are looking for diamonds in the rough will look at you.

Bonus things I've been told that help:

* Make up a consultancy, remove the gap. Talk about stuff you've built

* Built a folio website, github, or some other things to show that you're sharp and can build things right now. Doesn't have to be relevent, just recent.

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How many times would you estimate you stopped the process after actually talking to a recruiter/hiring manager but found out out they wanted to ask you algorithm questions?

It doesn't matter if you think that leetcode doesn't make a difference, if the company asks for it, you need to be ready to jump in and do it. In case you never studied this before, you need to start from zero and read books about it, there's plenty of $30 dollars courses that will teach you everything you need to know -- as long as you put the effort into it.

Furthermore, Leetcode easy/medium aren't about memorization, most of them they are about knowing algorithms, complexity and stuff that you'd have in an university CS course. If you've read Cormen et al's "Introduction to Algorithms", have done most of exercises and got it down, you'll likely already do well enough if you just practice some to write common algorithms quickly that are frequently used as a part of a solution, like BFS, DFS, stacks etc.

There are some medium exercises that are about either some maths or binary arithmetic, those you can even leave it out as it isn't very common to be asked, but it's worth to study them once you are very confident with the basics.

I know it's a pain to review it, but if they ask it, you need to be ready to prepare yourself, honestly I wouldn't like to work with somebody that in any small challenge that they have, they'd be coming up with excuses to it and that's a filter that they are using successfully against you so far.

"What have you done lately?" - I've been preparing myself to become a developer again, here's a list of things I've done meanwhile: (big list)

That's what they want: play the game or keep having the same results that you had before.

As you are looking for a job since 2022 you should have been preparing since then, but it's never too late, start to prepare now, go to programming meetups and even pretend to be working in a company of a friend or colleague you met there.

There are so many things you can do to fill that gap, you can also just lie, but that isn't something many can do.