IMO your problem is not lack of degree (personally, this is the last thing I check on a resume). Nor your age (I am also 40ish and more productive than ever). Your problem is your debt.
How would an employer even know about that?
About his debt?
The Unemployable Programmer
401–410 of 464 posts
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, sometimes people aren't aware that HN is its own little echo chamber. I was talking to a recruiter recently for a managerial job and somehow got onto the topic of hiring. I asked him what's the hardest jobs for him to fill right now. He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers. Corporations have built their castles on these technologies, not FOSS/Mobile and need staff. Degrees were an i…
what does "complete nightmare socially" mean? :)
Well, my own quirk is I'm a later day starter... it's almost impossible for me to start consistently at or before 9am... outside of that, I tend to take more time to understand the problem and the desired solution than hacking away. Both of these have cause me a lot of issues in positions for companies that are more rigid in their desire for a homogenized work environment.
On the flip side, I share knowledge and work to leave code better when I'm done than when I start. Others will show up/leave on time, but won't share anything and will leave very obfuscated code in place.
Lets face it though... the personality traits that make one adept at somewhat technical and often mundane tasks have a pretty high correlation to some generally less than desirable personality traits. Programming is much more of a craft (or even art) than it is an engineering discipline in most places, but we have to interact with business roles where expectations and mindsets are vastly different.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#403Earlier 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…
Agreed, sometimes people aren't aware that HN is its own little echo chamber. I was talking to a recruiter recently for a managerial job and somehow got onto the topic of hiring. I asked him what's the hardest jobs for him to fill right now. He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers. Corporations have built their castles on these technologies, not FOSS/Mobile and need staff. Degrees were an i…
Oh my. I know somebody who needs that job. Probably the "Georgetown, KY" on his resume is the difficulty, but he's willing to move. He can do C#, Java, and C++. He even has a traditional 4-year computer science degree.
Pass along his email if you can: markcahalan@yahoo.com
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>And having a single development job at a big company for a decade isn't some kind of career-killing move... unless you turn it into one, by letting your skills stagnate and wither, which is on you. HN is going to hate me for saying this, but there's another problem besides your actual skillset. At least in the start-up bay area scene, working 10 years at a big company[1] absolute is a negative to a bunch of people…
Agreed. In fact, the description of the big company environment "barely any work to be done, it mostly involved sitting at a desk and writing some emails all day" is a stereotype often applied to the day to day life of boring large-company developers. In cases where this is true, a developer who has spent the past 10 years primarily writing emails and doing minimal coding is unlikely to be a strong developer candidat…
LOL, I once spent my first 3 weeks at a job sitting at a desk with no computer yet... started bringing in my personal laptop tethered to my phone (killed my data use after windows update right after the new billing cycle, that was a painful month). I was spending about 20 hours a week in planning meetings though... once I had a computer assigned, I was still blocked by others' tasks another 14-15 hours a week... so all told, I actually got about 4-6 hours of actual productive coding done on a typical week...
I jumped at the first job that even looked interesting to me... I couldn't handle that much mundane.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#405Earlier 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. 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…
It's not like you push anything important your first day. You spend two hours doing some simple bug fix that would usually take you 15 min and then spend the next six hours learning how the CI and deployment pipeline works, usually with someone holding your hand.
CI and deployment pipeline?!? What are you a spoiled millenials thinking... we build local, and copy the whole folder over RDP copy/paste onto the production server.
You may laugh, but I've seen that far more often than an actual CI/CD process in place...
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#406This 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…
no... this happens. I've got a buddy who is trying to find a job right now. My phone is ringing off the hook even after I've removed my number from the job boards, 'cause I have a pretty cushy gig right now, while he gets almost nothing. He's one of the smartest guys I know, and he's not crazy, no record or nothing, he's just kinda shy and comes off as... well, people tend to think he's shorter than he is. Which is f…
* (If anyone is looking for a smart C++ dude, preferably someone using QT, lemme know, I'll hook you up.) *
Uh, maybe. Is he OK with low-level stuff too? We do use Qt, but we might ask him to write a disassembler or a kernel driver.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developers should realise that when you come to an interview the interviewer isn't looking to dismiss you because you can't recite Knuth. For the vast majority of jobs they are desperate for you to be competent having just interviewed 5 incompetent people. I've worked as a programmer for 3 very good paying companies over 15 years and none of them could get enough good developers.
I must be incompetent because I'm having a hard time finding a position and I have over 15 years of development experience most of it in .net and have worked on everything from my own mobile application for small businesses and worked and learned a new platform for a $20 million enterprise project.
Where are you at, and where is your expected pay compared to others in your area? (ex: via glassdoor, etc) Also, there's a difference between getting passed the recruiters and H.R. types and actual interviews.
Also, what types of .Net development... how much front end (web specifically). Doing webforms with no JS for a decade and a half doesn't mean much. I'm not saying that's the case, only that it can make a difference in hiring.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#408This 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 story sounds like the person started as a programmer, started a small company, and then did more Business Development and running the company than programming. He mentioned having to fire people, so I wonder how many people he employed. So it sounds like he already made a career change (from software development to business executive) and is now trying to change back to software developer, after a decade out. Mo…
I kind of miss simple ... tags... I accept that is now typically used for icons... but is ... really better?
I was once a really big proponent of semantic markup, and avoiding tables for non-table data... but I don't know that flexgrid that much better, more flexible, but not really much better.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's baffling is people in denial blaming the victims. We admit it is our fault for thinking a Computer Science degree had any value. We weren't fooled, we were just dumb. But we still want to survive, that doesn't make us bad people just because we enjoy programming.
>... admit it is our fault for thinking a Computer Science degree had any value. CS degrees do have value. But their value is not constant, and depends heavily on the domain and requirements for a particular job. The real confusion is thinking that a CS degree is supposed to merely provide job skills training. While you get some of that as part of the deal, that's not actually the purpose of a degree -- and it never…
Because most line of business applications are crafted, run on insanely fast hardware and don't need pure CS/Math skills to create. Some jobs need CS/EE/Math degree knowledge to do well. Software is written by a wide variety of skill and knowledge levels to varying degrees of effectiveness... in the end all anyone cares about is does it work/look reasonably well.
Re: The Unemployable Programmer
#410This 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. I've had about 40-50% of places reject me due to a lack of degree. A couple even sent me hopeful…
Those places are silly. We'd hire you if you can do low-level stuff. (background check too, but I guess you'd pass based on other posts)