> I felt drastically out of place, but for years it was just too damn convenient to go with the flow.
That sums it up.
The Unemployable Programmer
31–40 of 464 posts
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#32"But they're not talking about people like me, they're talking about twenty-something Ivy League post docs with stellar CVs."
We're trying to recruit a devops with AWS experience. We really don't care about which uni you went to or didn't go to.
Probably no good for you as we're in Manchester, UK but I don't think we're that unique.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#33I am self taught with no degree and honestly, I get at least an interview with about 70% of the places I apply to. I don't put my education on resumes and nobody EVER asks. I am applying to mostly startups though..
I do think startups are the key. Startups generally don't have the money for silly hiring processes so they actually take the time to talk to people that apply for positions. That and the money they save on stupid HR process goes to my salary so that is great too.
I disagree, i've worked for a few fortune 500 companies. The fact that I don't have a degree has never stopped me from getting a programming job. On the other hand, i've definitely had the feeling like there was a glass ceiling.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#34I feel I can relate to this general life story. A lot. While I'm currently only vaguely looking for a job, I also share the same suspicions about general job options for freelancers - although I have to say that I have been extremely lucky in finding work so far. But I agree it sometimes looks like our work isn't very valuable. In this context I have to say though that the HN freelancer thread, while yielding uneven…
There is no over-supply of developers, there is a shortage of good developers (for various definitions of good).
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#35If he or she would put some contact info in that blog post they might be able to strip the 'un' from the title.
The new hiring meta-game: complaining about being unemployable to become employed!
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#36I feel I can relate to this general life story. A lot. While I'm currently only vaguely looking for a job, I also share the same suspicions about general job options for freelancers - although I have to say that I have been extremely lucky in finding work so far. But I agree it sometimes looks like our work isn't very valuable. In this context I have to say though that the HN freelancer thread, while yielding uneven…
There is no over-supply of developers, there is a shortage of good developers (for various definitions of good).
> there is a shortage of good developers (for various definitions of good).
But couldn't that simply be a result of an inadequate selection process, instigated by a flood of applicants, and then worsened by an inability to judge who will be good in what role? It seems very easy to dismiss anyone looking for work on the grounds that they must not be very good to begin with. All we know is not enough long-term suitable applicants make it to the end of the hiring pipeline.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#37I 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 to change it. Being unemployed, I luckily had a lot of free time. I made a study of the programming job ads in my target market and if I didn't know what a technology was, I looked it up. I tried to figure out which language was the most asked for, and decided it was PHP (at the time). Also in my studies and in the job ads I noticed that most of the work involved these new-fangled Content Management Systems and so decided I needed to learn one of those, and I chose Joomla. It was a choice I would later come to regret but it got me a job.
To learn these, for both PHP and Joomla I ordered a book from Amazon.com. I limited my search to books published in the last few years and ranked them by customer satisfaction and chose one near the top. And then I made myself go through reading these books and doing the exercises at the end of the chapters. This was very very boring but I made myself do it. Then I created a few Joomla websites for local small businesses for free.
And then, after 6 months of unemployment, I had made myself employable again. I saw a job ad that I was now now barely qualified for, applied, and was hired to maintain a legacy Joomla website. Was it a glam job? No, but it was somewhere to start. And the rest is history. I do think if I found myself unemployable again I could repeat the process and figure out what is being asked for these days and learn that.
I haven't done a study of it lately but I would guess almost any kind of expertise in a major JavaScript framework like Angular, Ember, or React/Flux might get you a remote job fairly easily, as there are very few experts in this and many companies seem to want it. Also most developers don't want to do front-end/JavaScript stuff like that so there is less competition. That's where I'd start looking anyway.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#38This should come with a huge YMMV.
The demand for programming skills varies across locations, skills and age. Certainly you can be an unemployed programmer but adjusting locations/skills can greatly improve circumstances. ODesk/Freelancer gives you very little control over demand and hence, you are just a commodity. I've yet to see anyone doing well out of it from a contractor side but plenty of people doing well who need cheap contractors fast.
Understand the market or someone who does will take advantage of you...
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#39Here's the dirty little secret about "employability" you hardly ever read about in places like HN: It's not about you. It's about your user and what they accomplish with the tools you build for them. It doesn't matter who you are, what you know, what education you have, where you've worked before, what turns you on, or what you think is cool. It only matters what you can do for others. It's really that fucking simple…
There seems to be some confusion amongst people who move from writing code for fun to writing code for money. Which is of course that they're not being paid to write code, but to solve problems. Writers and musicians usually don't get paid just to write or make music, they get paid to entertain. If you're confused about why you're being paid, you might start to think you're getting a raw deal.
Since I started writing software not because of any love for it, but to solve various problems I was having at the time, it's always sort of shocked me that some people manage to get so far into their careers without realizing what they're being paid for.
I quite enjoy it now, but rarely in the revel of pure creation. Usually it's from the satisfaction of a problem solved in a reasonable amount of time under well considered constraints.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#40Degrees only matter for "serious companies" and are used as a filter by often clueless HR employees without technical background. As long as you can prove practical experience, you should be fine.
Your network, on the other hand, becomes more important as you get older. Hiring an unknown person in his/her 40s or 50s has a much lower risk/reward ratio than hiring a random developer in his 20s who will a) do whatever you tell him without questioning anything b) work himself to death and c) work for almost no compensation.
Stay away from oDesk and online freelancing in general. Most of what's outsourced online is low skill, low risk and low reward work (landing pages, analytics integration, etc). Almost everyone can do it, so suddenly you're competing with everyone on the planet instead of just a couple of 100-1000 freelancers in your city. One of your biggest advantages over 2nd/3rd world freelancers is your location, language proficiency and cultural background. Use it to your advantage.
Also, hiring is really tricky. No one has really figured out how to do it right and so you have these hiring rituals with IQ tests, personality tests, weird screening procedures etc. In the end no one wins, because interviewees have gotten insanely good at playing the hiring game and employers have become overly careful just not to hire a random guy who will mess up their code base in 6 months and then leave for the next gig.
My personal advice to the OP: if there are tech/startup/... meetups in your region, go there. It's a good starting point and it's fun most of the time! You can get to know some interesting people and that might open some doors!
Best of luck, if you're reading this!