Reading this thread, I get the sense that most comments are from twenty-something guys. There is no way they would understand what the 40-something rusty programmer is talking about. It's call the invincibility of naive youth. You will be him in a few years.
The Unemployable Programmer
341–350 of 464 posts
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#342Hmm... I'm a 35 year old programmer and I work in Defense/Aerospace. If you think finding a good developer is hard, try finding a good developer who also holds a security clearance. If you're any good at all, you will always be employed and well compensated. The work can be dull, with Vogon-esque processes and procedures, but I have side projects to keep me sane :) Every couple of years (ok, at least every year) I'll…
> If you think finding a good developer is hard, try finding a good developer who also holds a security clearance. Maybe it's harder to find in the States. I had a Canadian clearance for ten years (it wasn't a low level one either), and could never get a job, even with experience in whatever stack they were utilizing. The reason? Couldn't speak french. Even thought the coding language is all either English or math, a…
If it were the difference between getting the job I wanted and not, I would learn French.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think it's the fear of pushing to production on day one, but that a day one employee would not yet be able to produce anything worthwhile enough to push. A very well tested codebase with resilient systems and tooling takes time to learn, it will take time for a person to become productive within it - and that time is a lot longer than the 4 or so hours you get on your first day after the legal paperwork is do…
At my current job, we aim for a new employee to push to prod on day one not because we want the employee to begin churning out valuable work immediately, but because we want them to quickly become familiar and comfortable with the development, QA, & deployment workflows and tools.
The ticket that gets deployed is often as simple as a typo fix or a small CSS tweak, just to illustrate the whole process. The risk of deploying to prod isn't zero, but since we deploy many times a week already, the risk of deploying a typo fix is pretty low to us.
It also serves as a test for the existing employees: ideally those workflows are smooth enough that it all Just Works on a freshly-set-up environment and account, and we are comfortable enough with our rollback strategy that (after reviewing and testing) we are not afraid of merging in and deploying our new employees' code.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#344Coffee and techno, dude. Coffee and techno.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#345I got a degree but am still unemployable because I didn't have a job when I graduated and apparently nobody hires unemployed people. It's like there's just some tiny step I need to get over. Recently a recruiters said all I needed was a little Java experience and I could be making a lot of money. But I have plenty of Java experience, why can't I find a job anywhere? The worst thing about all of this is how harsh and…
Make your own job man, if you did any freelance work then you were self employed. If you find yourself unemployed, hack on something in between interviews and call it a startup that didn't work out.
Never, never, never admit to any hiring person that you weren't in charge of your career path at all times. That's one of the few distinctions they can make with technical people about whether or not they're qualified or not. Don't make it easy for them.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#34620 somethings aren't comfortable hiring 40 somethings. That's the bulk of it, and if you think this isn't true you're lying to yourself.
This. I've been on teams that have straight up turned people down because of age (sorry, "culture fit").
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#347I want to start dating. I put my profile up to dating sites. I spend much of my days sending messages to women's profiles. I take their personality tests, but I never get messages (or replies to mine) even though I'm sure I get matches. I even started looking at niche sites such as "nerd dating..." Dude, just get out and actually talk to women. I'm not going to say how to get gigs, jobs, etc because I'm out of my lea…
> Dude, just get out and actually talk to women. That's a lot easier said than done. The parallel with employment is actually not bad: one doesn't find a job by approaching random offices asking for work any more than one finds a wife by asking random if they would like to get hitched (yes, some small number of people succeed with both approaches); one often finds a job by being introduced to the right opportunity by…
There are varying degrees of this though. Singles have things like speed dating and singles only volleyball leagues. We have meetups and conferences. I have found all of my jobs through networking. My first 2 were directly from meetups. The 3rd came from a former classmate. My current role came from a coworker from my 2nd job. Most of my other interviews have come from meetups too. It is a lot easier to do this when you know there's some common ground.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#348Earlier 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.
I'm in Dallas as well, and I can back you up. I was unemployed for two years from 2010 to 2012 after getting laid off because all my experience was specialized experience that didn't transfer to other companies well, and being unemployed so long took a huge toll on my mental health.
I've found employment since (and even changed jobs over the new year), so it's definitely something one can recover from, and for all I know the job market might have changed since then so things are better now.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#349This 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. And having a single development job at a big company for a decade isn't some kind of career-killing…
I completely agree. I am self taught, started learning code about 6 years ago, and I get recruiters contacting me and job offers constantly. It's gets annoying actually. A guy without a degree getting calls about 6 figure jobs on a regular basis sure sounds like he'd be in a different industry than the guy who wrote this article. When I hear developers with degrees complaining about how hard it is to find work these…
Job markets for developers vary widely across the world?
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have done a lot of interviews where I was told that I was the single strongest candidate on the tech screen. I would be told, in the interview, that I correctly answered questions that no other previous candidate could, often prefaced with "I don't know exactly, but if I had to guess..." And then I never hear from them again. I am not making this up. And this has happened on multiple occasions. I get strong positiv…
That's rather unfortunate. I will never say that to someone and not offer them the job, unless they have a personality problem.
In my case, the personality problem might be the ever-increasing paranoia that I'm being rejected on the basis of some outlawed or unethical criterion, and subsequently ignored upon orders from the corporate legal or PR department.
It's one of several plausible hypotheses I have for the observed behavior. Very few are compatible with a healthy future employer-employee relationship.
This is one reason why I hate the brainteaser questions. I was told for one such question that I was the only candidate to give the correct answer. Then the interviewer suggested that I must have encountered it previously, even after seeing me "showing my work" on a whiteboard. Can't win; if you didn't lose, you must have cheated. That company blackholed me after I flew in from another city to spend a day-long interview with them. They didn't even reimburse me for my personal travel expenses.
It was Spatial, owned by Dassault, near Denver, in case anyone cares. That was, in fact, the second Denver-based company to do exactly the same thing to me. The first flew me in, interviewed almost all day, then cut off all contact, didn't pay travel expenses, and even tried to stick me with the cost of the hotel stay by canceling their payment. That was Tyler Tech, Eagle Division.
Neither are unique in cutting off all contact, but they certainly are remarkable in waiting until after an in-person interview by a non-local candidate to do so.