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The Unemployable Programmer

unemployable.pen.io

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Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#251

Post by woah »

vonmoltke wrote: post #193
DaveWalk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it goes deeper than this: there's a greater emphasis today on the candidate being productive from day one. I don't know what is causing it (too much exposure to efficient software?), but in many industries hiring managers would rather keep looking for an absolute perfect candidate while leaving behind several that have the skills but need the training. I have heard the stories about managers spending 100 extr…

> I'd say it goes deeper than this: there's a greater emphasis today on the candidate being productive from day one. Which drives me crazy. Nobody can be truly productive on day one. You have processes to learn, even if it is just an informal "way we do things". You have existing code to become familiar with. You have team dynamics to work into. It takes time. Personally, I cringe whenever I read a job advert mention…

I think that you don't get it about pushing to production on day one. These companies do that to because they have resilient systems, tests, and tooling, and they push to production all the time. Pushing to production on day one is a way to introduce new hires to the continuous deployment methodology. If you're afraid of pushing to production, there's a problem.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#252

Post by HillRat »

vonmoltke wrote: post #168
mkozlows wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have friends who are devs and hiring managers (several of whom have no degrees, even) in many cities -- Detroit, Columbus, Portland, Chicago, SF -- and the same thing is true in all those places. If you live in a small town, I can believe that the opportunities are limited, but in basically any metro area of any size, it's a developers' market.

Well, I live in Dallas. I have been fishing in Dallas and Austin over the past several months and can't get any interviews. I would like to know where all these "desperate" companies are and what domains they are in.

What's your skill set and background? I hired a dev team a few months ago in Dallas and it was incredibly difficult to find qualified candidates, of whom only a few made it through the tech interviews (and I'm not that tough an interviewer) -- twenty resumes (from a very good headhunter who culled out marginal candidates) meant a dozen interviews meant one hire. I'm not in the hiring market right now (and may not even be in an industry you're interested in), but if you want to shoot a resume to careerbasetx at gmail (it's a throwaway account) I'd be more than happy to take a look at it, for whatever that might be worth.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#253

Post by fweespeech »

octo_t wrote: post #129
fweespeech wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for salaries well above the national average because companies need SOMEONE to do the job. And virtually nowhere cares about degrees, especially for experienced devs. I've had about 40-50% of places reject me due to a lack of degree. A couple even sent me hopeful…

40%-50% rejection is really amazing, I don't think you quite realise how tough the job market is right now. I have a friend with chemistry PhD who has - with no exaggeration here - applied for at least 300 jobs with varying levels of success.

Its 40-50% just due to degree, based on my estimation. I've got another pile of rejections for different reasons.

About 80% reject me before phone interviews, etc.

Literally the only pre-interview cited rejection reason was a lack of degree.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#254

Post by hardwaresofton »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #95
fringedgentian wrote: post #37

I once found myself unemployable as well, maybe what I did can help someone. This was quite a few years ago when the ColdFusion job I had just ended and the job I had before that was in Visual FoxPro (and a few other even less known technologies). Talk about unemployable. Also I am not in a major city, so I was getting pretty much no responses to my resume. After a few months I realized I was unemployable and set out…

I chose to write a hugely boring open source product that no one in their right mind would bother with. Old tech, competing with a ton of other similar projects. I focused on the documentation, make it as simple as 'cut and paste this code to get it working' every time someone had a question, bam - a cut and paste example. Did some serious SEO and soon was racking up a couple of thousand hits a week. This soon hits t…

If you're getting millions of hits per week, you might want to consider doing something to monetize the open source project...

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#255

Post by nilkn »

vonmoltke wrote: post #168
mkozlows wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have friends who are devs and hiring managers (several of whom have no degrees, even) in many cities -- Detroit, Columbus, Portland, Chicago, SF -- and the same thing is true in all those places. If you live in a small town, I can believe that the opportunities are limited, but in basically any metro area of any size, it's a developers' market.

Well, I live in Dallas. I have been fishing in Dallas and Austin over the past several months and can't get any interviews. I would like to know where all these "desperate" companies are and what domains they are in.

Are you open to Houston? I can provide suggestions on where to apply there.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#256

Post by [deleted] »

eropple wrote: post #219
manyxcxi wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Seattle and am getting lots of contact from recruiters in DFW and Austin, and not just the usual LinkedIn spam BS. My background is heavy on DevOps and I've got about a 50/50 split on .NET and Java.

I can corroborate this, though more from the LinkedIn side of things. Out of every twenty LinkedIn messages I get, probably six are SF, four are Boston (I'm local), two each are NYC and DC, and two or three are between DFW and Austin. (The last couple are usually Idaho or Nebraska or one of the other corporate-fief states.)

[deleted]

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#257

Post by HillRat »

proksoup wrote: post #230
eropple wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can corroborate this, though more from the LinkedIn side of things. Out of every twenty LinkedIn messages I get, probably six are SF, four are Boston (I'm local), two each are NYC and DC, and two or three are between DFW and Austin. (The last couple are usually Idaho or Nebraska or one of the other corporate-fief states.)

What are the corporate-fief states? What does that mean, or what is that in reference to?

Roach-motel markets: you can get in, but you can't get out. More technically, monopsonistic or oligopsolistic factor markets, where the number of employers is small and thus control hiring in the local market. (Though I would expect Nebraska to be fairly competitive in hiring, given its surprisingly large number of finance and insurance companies.)

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#258

Post by relic »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #229
vonmoltke wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearance requests must be accompanied by a justification, which basically means "needed to work on Project XYZ". You cannot get a clearance unless you actually need it to do work, and should not be cleared any higher than is necessary[1]. This leads to the chicken-and-egg situation with cleared positions: you need a clearance to work on these programs, but you can't get a clearance for the first time until asked to…

What's the rationale for that? Clearance is surely a lot of work to obtain, but that's what the cost of the investigation should offset. I would think even with clearance you can't actually get information you don't need to know, such as information on a project you're not working on.

The rationale is to minimize the number of clearances. Even though you can't get information without a need-to-know, the government still likes to limit the number of clearances.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#259

Post by mkozlows »

vonmoltke wrote: post #221
nordic_nomad wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the quick answer is JavaScript is needed everywhere. I'd bone up on that, and learn angular inside and out as well as a couple of other JavaScript frameworks for good measure. That's what gets me hired as a C# developer in php, ruby, and java shops where I can then gradually show them I know UX, devops, and other little valuable things. The trick is that the hot thing in short supply will change this time next y…

Hence the reason I said "web and mobile development-centric" in the post that started this sub-thread. I'm actually writing a UI in Angular right now or a Java-based system I wrote. I hate it. It is a pain I'm going through because I need a UI for this prototype, but there is no way I would want to do this full-time.

Let me put it like this: If you're an unemployed developer writing sob-story posts about how it's impossible to find a job, I'm going to assume that you're not wedded to a particular tech stack and are willing to work on the technologies that are in-demand.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#260

Post by kragen »

kagamine wrote: post #16
informatimago wrote: post #3

What about an on-line cursus, like, at Stanford, studying and getting the diploma. Of course, it may not be considered equivalent to the diploma obtained at Stanford in the Silicon Valley, but it would change you to a diplomed programmer, and you might get more doors open? http://online.stanford.edu/ There are others MOOC: http://coursera.org/ http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

OP's age might (will) still work against him even with a diploma. There is still a perception in IT that anything to do with technology is for the young and hip (even though the Internet is 20 years old and digital gaming even older, but ho hum). It's ridiculous and annoying and there are too many young people willing to be taken advantage of in return for grok-only-knows-what they think they are getting.

The internet is 46 years old. I've personally been using it for almost 23 years.
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