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Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

joshuahu.io

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Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#201

Post by wool_gather »

Cursuviam wrote: post #46

I've been treating my sabbatical time post graduation as basically summer vacation and honestly, it's been pretty nice. For the past 4 years, I've been researching, in school, or working an internship, so I haven't had a period of time to just be carefree for quite sometime. I'm very happy right now, but mostly that's because I have a roommate who's unemployed right now, so most of the time I'm not alone in the house…

If there's a hackerspace near you, it might work better than a coffeeshop as a place to get out of the house and focus on work. Having other geeks around helps me. (As long as they're not working on loud projects that day!)

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#202

Post by tomp »

CydeWeys wrote: post #97
09bjb wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of mindset that discourages people from taking healthy risks. There are any number of legitimate ways to explain a gap, such as, "No, I was not actually playing video games and surfing reddit the entire time! I actually wanted to invest more time in ____. Can I share with you what I learned?" Disclaimer: my CV has often been a horrendous mess of 3-6 month "gaps" (during which time I learned many of m…

You can easily eliminate every gap up to 12 months and some gaps up to 23 months simply by omitting months on your resume. Quit job A in January and joined job B in December of the next year? 2011-2013 at Job A, 2014-Present at Job B! Solved!

Alternatively, just write that you were a consultant / freelancer, and actually work as one for like a month of a year (even for free for a non-profit if necessary).

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#203

Post by dorchadas »

biscottigelato wrote: post #160
bradneuberg wrote: post #83

I've been in the industry nearly 20 years and I always take breaks between jobs. I've worked for startups, Google, Dropbox, non-profits, etc. Between jobs I've pursued personal growth, traveled extensively, re-tooled my CS skill sets in new directions, gotten healthy, done extensive open source work, and more. I highly recommend it to others in the industry if you have the ability to do so; it's only helped my person…

Any tips for companies to take your open sourced work as experience? I've mostly just been thrown the book at doing algorithm puzzles and such... Got rejected for not 'technically competent' despite polished complex app on both the App Store and on Github. It's insulting to the point I want to start cancelling processes with all Unicorns...

Same. I had a website that I was fairly proud of that involved DjangoREST and Angular and such, and was basically told "Anyone can do that" when I applied for a junior job. It was horribly demotivating, and I don't know if I've seriously applied for a coding job since, which is sad as I'd love to shift into programming and still do it on my own.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#204

Post by Latteland »

yoz-y wrote: post #154
nwellinghoff wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck is a "creative"?

An encompassing term for artists, designers, illustrators and other profession where your job is mainly to get original ideas and implement them.

So does that mean using engineering and math as the basis of building bespoke software is not creative in that sense? Just curious, not criticism - because I always thought of designing the architecture of a large software system, making it work within constraints, codes, making it easy to work on, fit withing design constraints, a beautiful UI, even a new programming language as creative.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#205

Post by Hydraulix989 »

stephengillie wrote: post #71
txcwpalpha wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why did you work so hard when you hated the job and coworkers so much? I think you might have good intentions with this question, but it seem a bit silly. You could ask the same question to anyone about any job. Why do you think the millions of investment bankers or consultants or lawyers or medical residents work long hours? Why do people work long hours in shitty retail or food service jobs? Why do people work in…

> Why do you think the millions of investment bankers or consultants or lawyers or medical residents work long hours? I thought lawyers worked reasonable hours. The medical industry is it's own special situation. Those investment bankers must be bad at math - for overtime-exempt employees, each extra hour worked past 40 reduces your hourly pay rate by 2.5%. Retail, fast food, office, IT, software development - all jo…

> Those investment bankers must be bad at math - for overtime-exempt employees, each extra hour worked past 40 reduces your hourly pay rate by 2.5%.

It's not about the OT pay working at an IB; it's about the bonus -- which is often a multiplier of your base salary.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#206

Post by omg_ketchup »

lovelearning wrote: post #72

A "gap" seems to be almost like a crime no tech worker should dare do. I have seen otherwise rational coworkers reject resumes only for having a "gap". Most want to relax, but the same people also punish those who do just that. I thought it was a quirk of the society I live in, but from comments here, it looks like it's the norm in all countries.

You were pursuing a passion project. You were getting to a point in your life where it might not be feasible to pursue it, and you'd regret it if you didn't, so you know what? You went for it. Anybody who doesn't respect that, you probably don't want to work for anyway.

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#207

Post by biscottigelato »

coaxial wrote: post #186
biscottigelato wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips for companies to take your open sourced work as experience? I've mostly just been thrown the book at doing algorithm puzzles and such... Got rejected for not 'technically competent' despite polished complex app on both the App Store and on Github. It's insulting to the point I want to start cancelling processes with all Unicorns...

> Got rejected for not 'technically competent' despite polished complex app on both the App Store and on Github. It's insulting to the point I want to start cancelling processes with all Unicorns... Because "how do we know you didn't copy paste it from a tutorial and claim it as yours?" It is insulting, and frankly discouraging. As if the only one true way to tell whether you know your stuff or not is to check if you…

Like a few hundred thousand lines of code copied from tutorials into a unique working product. Open sourced with a year worth of commit history.

I'd hire that guy, but maybe that's why I'm looking for employment and not the employer? LOL

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#208

Post by biscottigelato »

i_made_a_booboo wrote: post #179
biscottigelato wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shipped 2 projects that I feel are highly polished. Been almost 3 months in the job market cuz i have since ran low on funds. Being in Vancouver it's just extra tough. The Unicorns doesn't care one bit of your side projects. The smaller guys just doesn't have the resource to relocate. Let alone getting in the same room with them for interviews (aka. fly you over). So far very disillusioned. Seems like if the projec…

For me it's about creating a personal connection and telling a good story. I dunno I just have a belief in my ability to do that from past experience. This is new territory for me though, so we'll see. I'm not in the US on, so I don't play the whole unicorn game. I imagine that's a whole different ball game.

Unfortunately more and more companies are going the 'we don't care about your resume, we just want you to do algorithm puzzles'. way. Triplebyte, as listed on the Hackernews job board, is especially proud that they don't look at your resume and measure you only on the few things they deem important. Basically you can be good at a hundred things. But they measure you on ten things and don't care about any of the others, relevant or not. So if you so happen only have 6 things out of the 10, you are out, even if you have clearly demonstrated that you are capable of 100 things, and learning those 100 things in short order.

I would say I learned more in the 2 years than I did 10 years as a Firmware Engineer. But if I stayed my course just lurking in my old job I'd have been a Firmware lead. I can't even get an intermediate development job now...

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#209

Post by biscottigelato »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #187
biscottigelato wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips for companies to take your open sourced work as experience? I've mostly just been thrown the book at doing algorithm puzzles and such... Got rejected for not 'technically competent' despite polished complex app on both the App Store and on Github. It's insulting to the point I want to start cancelling processes with all Unicorns...

> Got rejected for not 'technically competent' That sounds a bit harsh. Unless you're going for a role that requires some kind of explicit/specific knowledge - and you're clearly not able to demonstrate any skill in that area - I wouldn't put too much stock in the interview processes of Unicorns actually being indicative of your true skill. I've been told, during an interview, that I was clearly incompetent and the i…

I demo'ed my work up front. And then did their algorithm puzzles. I don't think I aced them all. I have an answer to them all and demonstrate that I can tackle these kinda problems.

But it seems they want people that have studied for months and probably have seen the problem before, so they can go thru all the possible optimizations and come up with the best answer in 45 minutes. Basically they are hiring an 'Interview Cracking Engineer'. Not a developer...

I thought it used to be that they look at your resume and they ask you questions to confirm that your resume is real. And that's that. Now it's basically just an exam, period...

Re: Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career

#210

Post by Drdrdrq »

Aeolun wrote: post #74
nubbins wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure who your friends are but where I am half the young people are creatives or otherwise not traditionally full time employed and my experience has been people are far more likely to avoid you for being a boring banker/lawyer/accountant in a suit (which I used to be) than unemployed with a good story about what you are doing, which could spark a decent conversation.

I don’t know. I’ve had to actively hide my unemployment as well to get people to take me seriously. Even switching to ‘I am a freelancer’ makes you so much more desirable as a conversation partner...

That's actually a great way out of this situation. Recruiters know that there are many gems among freelancers, so working on side projects or on short paid projects should put GP in a whole different category.
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