A network engineer in search of greener pastures

In theory that information can only be collected for statistical purposes and should have no bearing on the hiring decision. Any well run org will not show that information to people reviewing resumes, the liability is just too great.

Somewhat of a cynical take, but a lot of programs called DevOps and SRE are actually the same old ops people armed with some scripts and better BI tooling.

It's rare to find definitional SWEs in these spaces and when you do you should cling to them. Even then, it's hard to resist the urge to revert back to ops because toil is somewhat addicting to companies.

For years, I've been hoping some startup will finally "fix" hiring.

When I was in college, we had CyberCoders, which was a job search engine.

Then we got Monster, which was a job search engine.

Then we got Indeed, which is...a job search engine.

I do think a good job search engine could solve many of these issues:

1. You should only have to enter your info once, except for certain job- or application-specific items.

2. Inaccurate listings should be removed. If you miscategorize your non-remote position as remote, you should be removed/penalized, same as an Etsy seller would be if they listed polyester sheets as linen.

3. Email delivery would be a non-issue.

But what it's always comes down for me is stuff like his "security clearance required; you can't get security clearance without a job" (change it to "experience" and it applies to most new grads), and the fact that the biggest things are intangibles.

The best way to get a job is to know someone who's worked with you in the past and can say "yeah, I like working with this person". You can't automatically filter for attitude, or communication skills, or productivity. Do you know python? Cool. Are you going to show ownership of your projects, though? Are people going to find you easy to work with? Will you meet deadlines? Can you make good time estimates and properly negotiate deadlines? (Similarly, how can an applicant vet the company culture around these and other intangibles?)

I don't know how a startup would fix these problems, but I hope someone figures it out and builds it soon. We should be able to dramatically improve hiring, both for companies and applicants/employees.

Honestly, I'd like to see the candidate's CV. This description seems off to me:

> I've got a lot of skills - video production, security, Linux, Mikrotiks, Ciscos, virtualization, cloud, domains, DNS, the list goes on and on.

Based on this gumbo of skills (why is there "video production?" And what does even "virtualization" and "cloud" mean in this context?), I would have 0 confidence in the candidate.

> My homelab is probably bigger than some businesses and it's taught me a lot. Even got an SD-WAN site to site VPN set up to my parent's house so they can watch movies off my home Plex server

This gives me a bit more confidence about the candidate, but setting up a VPN is not really a complex task. Is that all there is to the "big homelab?"

> With a fresh CCNA cert in hand, and a CompTIA Security+ to back it up, finding a network or security job should be no problem at all.

CCNA and CompTIA are junior-level certifications. Having a "Security+" cert means nothing if you have no experience in security to back it up.

I don't mean this negatively, but either OP is overestimating their abilities, or is vastly underselling them.

Writing a good CV is a skill... Learn it, or pay someone to do it for you.

People in software really don’t like hearing this, but we should be coordinating as a group for political protection. The reason is very simple. Even if you think you are a 10x engineer, you’ll be replaced in a heartbeat as soon as a fresh MBA finds out you can be replaced with 4 people willing to work for well below market. Maybe it’s shortsighted but guess what? Companies are shortsighted.

What does that mean? At a minimum, there should be much more strict enforcement of prevailing wage pay for immigrant labor.

The H1B should be used to hire experts which can’t be found in the US, not to chop the floor out of the market. There’s no reason Zoom should be able to hire an “AI Scientist” for 75k, but they can because no one is checking. And they did.

Political action means coordinating as a group to apply pressure. Politicians need you to vote for them, so we need to make it clear that our votes are contingent on their action.