The Unemployable Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#351

Post by nordic_nomad » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

balozi wrote: post #341

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 job cycle is a lot shorter now than it used to be, and the landscape changes a lot faster. I'm in my 30's now, but have had to completely reinvent myself 3 times already (twice within tech) and expect it to happen more.

Ageism works against the young as well as the old. Most of these 20 something people I'd suspect, if they haven't been developers since they were 9, have run into it. The advice is still sound.

An employable skillset is now a moving target. You can't depend on job websites to get the job done. Your number one job is to be your own salesperson. Find someone who is where you want to be and find out how they got there, you're probably not that far off from being able to replicate their methods if you're already in the field.

Being hopeless and depressed about the issue doesn't solve anything, and if you're over 40 you have plenty of advantages. Become a consultant and sell yourself to companies who won't even give a 20 year old the time of day. They may not want to hire your outright, but they can definitely see they need your expertise.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#352

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

"People at the office were nice. They had very modest and orderly lives, but they didn't have any interest in science, creative tinkering, or anything fanciful really, so very unlike the people I had worked with before."

I really hate this characterization. Are there people at the office like this? Of course. But there are also plenty of offices that have people like this. They just have their own interests outside of the office job that they like to spend their time on.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#353

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:21 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #136

mkozlows wrote: post #82

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. And having a single development job at a big company for a decade isn't some kind of career-killing…

> 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. What is baffling is this Valley-centric, web and mobile development-centric line being repeated c…

Employers are generally picker in companies who's primary service/product isn't software. But they're still among the loudest to complain when they can't find anyone to come work for them for peanuts.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#354

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:23 PM UTC

nordic_nomad wrote: post #194

vonmoltke wrote: post #136

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. What is baffling is this Valley-centric, web and mobile development-centric line being repeated c…

So I'm self taught, no degree, and I get job offers and headhunters out of the blue from all over the central US. Denver, Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines, Chicago, and small cities I've never heard of. The best thing I ever did was look at my friends early on who were getting found on linked in and organized my linkedin profile to look as similar as theirs as I could truthfully. The next best thing was taking 6 months…

"Started a tech company in grad school"

How could you do that if you don't have a degree? Very few grad schools will admit someone without an undergrad degree.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#355

Post by Tyguy7 » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:27 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #278

mkozlows wrote: post #82

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. And having a single development job at a big company for a decade isn't some kind of career-killing…

I think this overlooks the difference between qualified and credentialed. In the valley, there are plenty of experienced and uncredentialed people working great jobs. There are relatively few unqualified people doing the same, except when hiring squeezes exceedingly tight. Outside the valley, defending the decision to hire someone without credentials is virtually impossible. There may be plenty of interest, but someo…

I'm not sure if I could agree with the "Outside the valley" comment. I live nowhere near the Valley, and myself and plenty of my co-workers are not credentialed. As a matter of fact, my current workplace is pretty much in a rural area. My last 3 jobs have had a pretty equal number of credentialed and uncredentialed employees. These companies all pay very well, and are well-known.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#356

Post by brightball » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:31 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #339

brightball wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you lose 5 people to the same place that's usually from insider recruiting. A lot of companies use No Raid clauses in both employee and client contracts specifically to prevent that type of thing. If you want to go work somewhere else, that is totally up to you but I'm more than allowed to have a policy stating that you're not allowed to recruit away my entire staff because that destabilizes the entire business,…

I still don't understand why that policy's fair. I recently left one company and joined another, and am trying to convince all my former coworkers to apply here as well because I genuinely think it's a way better place to work. If you can't compete on the labor market fairly, you deserve to lose employees. Policies like the one you describe are just a market inefficiency that doesn't have a real justification for exi…

If a company employs 20 people and 5 of them are programmers without which the company can't function, one leaves and recruits away the other 4 to go work at the same place that means the remaining 15 people are out of work.

Business owners have a lot of people's livelihoods at stake. It's about a lot more than just how much more another company is willing to offer you. That might not matter to you, but that's also why you get to see the policy before agreeing to work at the company.

If coming to work at my office and having the flexibility to recruit away all my staff is important to you...then you don't really have to sign the contract. If you do sign the contract then you're agreeing to the terms. It's not rocket science. Fair policy is that you get to decide whether or not to abide by it before I start paying you. You have the right to decide that policy isn't okay with you and not take the job. Nobody forced you to sign the contract and take the job. If it's a market problem, then I will eventually lose all of those employees because they will have plenty of other choices if they aren't happy working there anymore.

Or to spin this around into the language that you used, policies like the one I describe exist because a lot of people only have their own self-interest in mind and part of my job is to have the interests of all of my employees in mind.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#357

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:31 PM UTC

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.

If you hate it, why are you using Angular?

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#358

Post by alkonaut » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:32 PM UTC

bengale wrote: post #236

matwood wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed people like this though not as extreme. Basically person gets a job. They learn the job in about 3-6 months and now repeat the same job for years without ever learning anything else. So on paper it shows 5-10 years experience, but in reality they still have about 3-6 months experience. Part of the blame lies on the company for not giving the employee a growth path, but the largest part lies on the em…

It's been a big problem when I've been recruiting for developers. 10 years experience or 10 of the same year, normally it's the latter. Personally if I feel I'm no longer learning then I raise it with my manager. If after a few months nothing has changed then I start interviewing.

I thought it was nearly impossible to do software development and not learn continuously? Can't imagine what a dev workday looks like when you aren't learning. You rarely ever do the same thing twice, and even if you do you learn from past mistakes and become more efficient.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#359

Post by alkonaut » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:37 PM UTC

pandaman wrote: post #195

alkonaut wrote: post #19

I think being around 40 with a decade of dev experience should be pretty attractive, at least if the programming experience is somewhat modern. 10 years OO-programming should be translatable to any OO language with ease, regardless of what you actually used before, for example. There are "unemployable" developers out there, but they are 10-20 years older and have 15 years of niche in-house platforms in some huge ente…

Having experience /is/ attractive. Not having it, though, is opposite of attractive, especially at 40 and without a degree. Reading the article, I don't think "Now, life at a traditional office was not that bad: barely any work to be done, it mostly involved sitting at a desk and writing some emails all day. " means he had a developer job.

That might be the case. That's pretty much a definition of software development: 1) there is always a lot to do, in any code base 2) doing that for years, even if it's just improving the same code base, will give new challenges and experience.

If you don't have work to do and you aren't learning and progressing then you aren't doing software development, at least not properly.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#360

Post by ziegmeister » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 6:40 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #294

bengale wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a double edged sword I guess. I chose my school and degree based around staying close to home to help with my disabled brother. It turned out to be a poor decision, academically that is, as the course combined software engineering students with business I.T and we weren't covering anything I didn't already know. I got a summer placement writing code and realised I was learning much more during that time, so wh…

It's not about the hiring team looking for anything specific that a degree could give you, it's that they've bought into the old idea that the piece of paper is a hard wall that separates them from the homeless guy outside. The corollary of "I'm superior and secure in my position because of this degree" is "someone without a degree is inferior". Fear and self-doubt are the only reasons that anyone requires unrelated…

No, it shows that that individual is capable of sticking something difficult out through the long term. Are there people without there with that quality that don't have degrees? Certainly, but you don't know whether someone without a degree possesses that quality or not (and yes, false positives are a thing, there's always a risk).

Admittedly the value of a degree has likely been diluted in recent years given that college standards seem to be getting more relaxed, but that doesn't mean that it's not still a somewhat useful signal, especially when you have to filter hundreds (if not thousands) of resumes for a single position.

Just like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, no one got fired for hiring the candidate with a degree. Believe it or not, there may be more reasons behind this than 'self doubt' and 'insecurities'.