I have 4 years of experience doing microservices using spring boot, Kafka etc at a large financial institution. However I'm running into trouble when I try to apply for jobs. Everyone wants experience with containerization and public cloud. I basically never got a chance to do this at my job since everything is hosted on-premises using VMware's Cloud Foundry. I have been working on learning all this stuff but I just keep getting rejected because I don't fit this checkbox professionally and it feels like I wasted 4 years. Where do I go from here?
Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
#2The microservices knowledge is the interesting stuff and transfers to the more complex hard to maintain things people build elsewhere. The infra stuff is generally toil you can figure out if you must. Keep at it or look for places using better infrastructure abstractions. (ok ok, I worked on CF so biased but feel your pain)
I think long term the java spring stuff will shoe horn you more than CF stuff but there’s plenty of work there.
Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
#3Of course you're not doomed! Don't worry. You could always do a side project that uses containerization and cloud hosting.
My first dev job was over 15 years in bare-metal hosting (RHEL) and this was one of my biggest weaknesses too. I didn't get penalized too badly for it in the end. I even got an interview with a company that specialized in some kind of Kubernetes based product. I didn't get an offer from them but I did get an offer soon after that from a 100% AWS-hosted product company. It probably helped that I had so many years of development experience and had learned the basics of docker and containerization tech generally, so I understood what it can do for you and I was able to talk about that stuff intelligently. I had run into all the usual pitfalls in bare metal devops over the years so I was looking forward to moving to docker/cloud based stuff.
Over a year later I'm still a bit more rusty than most of my coworkers on AWS stuff. But you can pick it up. If you teach yourself how to use containerization (e.g. docker) and get a feel for what the advantages are, what problems it solves, to the point where you can talk convincingly about how you're exited to get a chance to use it, I think you'll come across ok.
Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
#41) Just learn it on your own and embellish your experience. Your new employer is not going to contact your previous employer and ask for details about their containers.
2) Many jobs use containers, but if you get out of the high-tech bubble, you'll find plenty of lower tech companies that haven't even started looking at containers. You'll be just fine with the right company.
Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
#5You're running into a classic problem.
Employers AND job seekers being overly focused some kind of perfect skills-to-role match. When the reality is, the best employees want to be challenged by new experiences. And employers say their best employees can grow outside of their comfort zone and evolve with their role.
The best you can do in these situations is project enthusiasm to learn & grow. How do you do this? One way is to explicitly share all the ways you've done this in the past. You emphasize how much you enjoy the process of diving in and learning about / mastering new technologies. You say it with joy.
Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
#6This is one of those areas where everyone lists it as required for the job but in practice you very very rarely use it beyond the basics. Pretty much everyone has an infra person and in most places it's all automated off of the git commits. You'll very rarely touch the cloud and when you do it will be for trivial stuff like updating secrets.
Add whatever cloud/container tech they're looking for into the skills part of your resume when applying. Take a day or two and do a crash course on Docker/Kubernetes. That will be enough to pass the interview. In fact, I think I've been asked 0 cloud/container questions during interviews. Tech companies don't really ask specific technical questions beyond Leetcode/System Design. Kind of odd but that's the way it is.
Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
#7You're running into a classic problem. Employers AND job seekers being overly focused some kind of perfect skills-to-role match. When the reality is, the best employees want to be challenged by new experiences. And employers say their best employees can grow outside of their comfort zone and evolve with their role. The best you can do in these situations is project enthusiasm to learn & grow. How do you do this? One…
> The best you can do in these situations is project enthusiasm to learn & grow. How do you do this? One way is to explicitly share all the ways you've done this in the past.
This feels like circular reasoning. How do you "explicitly share all the ways you've done this" with just a resume or on a job application? Side projects? It would be helpful if you could give some concrete examples.
Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
#8Not doomed. Where are you based?
Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
#9Not doomed. Where are you based?
East Coast USA
Re: Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?
#10Try to learn on your own about the topic and then obtain an entry level industry certification about it. They are easy and cheap, you should consider them as an investment.
The hiring company will not check that kind of details with your previous ones.