It was that I have to go job hunting and how demoralizing and toil heavy that process is. Heck I'd likely go job hunting just out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be interesting at the least, but naw it's too much of a pain.
>Recruiters. Don’t discount or blow them off.
That's all they do for me ... I suspect there's a subset of people who are very attractive to recruiters and they actually do things for those people and I am not in that group. The advice surrounding recruiters is always so disconnected from my experience that it seems strange.
Don't get me wrong: I think this is an incredibly dumb practice. But there's a mythology that IQ testing is a super-effective tool for recruiting that has been suppressed by anti-discrimination law. That is not the case. Most companies don't use IQ tests, because they're not fit for purpose.
It definitely is true that IQ tests are used less in the US because of prior case law though.
Every place that tested leetcode in my interview (easy/mediums) never impressed me with their work culture. Usually it's a proxy test for obedience and/or accepting bureaucracy.
Also forget about career advancement. (Why would we promote you when we can replace you with another code puzzle solver?)
It's less about me being stubborn as it is those places are hiring based on the wrong skills, and those end up not being good places to work.
The two exceptions I have had were when a former coworker who is now the director of an f500 non tech company was going to create a strategic position for me. He needed someone he could trust.
The other time was when a CTO and the director of application development were both former coworkers from another company and it was just a matter of me saying yes.
The first job would have been more stress than I was willing to deal with and I don’t do large companies (I was suffering from PTSD from my time at AWS). The second didn’t have the budget to meet my compensation target.
Every network job I've gotten (two) has been a walk on interview, I'm fine with this as long as I don't have to do circus problems.
But you aren’t going to have a walk on non leetcode interview at one of the companies that pay a quarter million+ for a mid level developer based on a referral. I’m not saying you are a mid level developer just giving an example of comp.
The amount a returning intern I mentored when I was at BigTech had a return offer that was the same as I made two years prior at 60 person startup.
Now that I’m out of BigTech, I had to get a job as a “staff software architect” at a 3rd party consulting company to come close to what I was making in 2020 as mid level consultant at AWS and I’m making over $80K less than I would make as a senior doing the same thing at AWS or GCP.
I’m 50, an empty nester and I’m good with making that trade off. I would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever work at any large company again.
But if I were 30 in 2024 instead of in 2004, yeah I would grind leetCode to make a 300K+ a year.
And yeah I got into BigTech without a coding interview and could probably weasel my way into Google/GCP in the consulting department without one. But that needle would be hard to thread for the vast majority of prople
That’s why I always advise anyone in CS to practice for coding interviews
I think the BIGGEST misconception in our industry is that it is only FAANG that pays TOP dollar. No one teaches CS grads coming out of college the hardest truth of it all - you will get paid what you are worth to the company and your career should be geared towards figuring out how to make yourself more valuable to a company that company is to you - this is where REAL money is and this can be had in A LOT of places. there are maybe 10 people at FAANG that have this - 99.76% of people at FAANG are expendable. too many bodies - most of the people are no ones. on the flip side there are 1,000’s of companies that have been in business for decades - there, with proper planning (much better time spent than fucking leetcode), you can become more valuable to the company than company is to you and your salary will reflect that - even higher than highest of salaries at FAANG…
The 600 person company I work for now isn’t going to match what I could make at Google. On the other hand, Google would require me to be in an office and I would not have unlimited PTO.
Everyone is expendable. No matter where you work.
I don’t think you know the salary ranges at BigTech and how they compare to the rest of the market. Those thousands of companies aren’t going to pay FAANG salaries.
That grad I mentioned coming out of college is making $160K their first year and that was working in Professional Services not development. An SDE was starting out at $175K - $190K
I can tell you from personal and numerous other examples that this is false
I don’t think you know salary ranges at BigTech…
I may not (even though of course I do as this is public information at this point) but I was getting paid $900k at 15th year. And know people in similar-ish range - just coding…
true story, I was on a honeymoon when I got an emergency call at work - no one knew what was going on, jumped on and fixed it in 10 minutes - got a bonus enough to buy a new car…
every junior I encounter in my career nowadays I teach that they should NEVER consider themselves as an “employee” but as a “corporation” and working somewhere not as “employment” but as “partnership” - makes a huge difference through and through when you cement this in your brain
You think if you got hit by a bus tomorrow your employer would go out of business?
my current employer - no, I am winding down my career. my former employer obviously not since I am no longer there but they paid me 6 months extra to do nothing but train people when I was leaving and have also done “emergency” work for several years after.
companies should strive of course to not have 10(000)x irreplacable employees but in 1,000’s of places they are always there. and path to become one of such people is easier than slumming it at FAANG I guarantee you
I am giving actionable, repeatable advice, not once in a lifetime lottery tickets.
Do you have actionable repeatable advice that would allow that junior developer to make $175K straight out of school and over $300K 3-5 years in the workforce?
Those FAANG and adjacent companies are paying collectively 10s of thousands of developers that every year.
NOT at all what I am saying… what I am saying is that there is a path in this industry where you are not a slave to “FAANG” where no one knows your name. there are (tens of) thousands of companies where you can set your career such that you are more valuable to them than they are to you. and once you get that money is no object no more… and you get to stay decade (or two) in the same place vs doing the leetcode-change-jobs-like-socks dance.
actionable/repeatable advice: - find a company which is at least two decades in the business they are in - preferrably some niche thing but not required - make sure books look good (the barometer here is whether you would invest part of your 401k in the company) - less than 100 dev/qa combined preferrably
when you start look for patterns, specifically things that no one wants to do. there will always be that. if you hear “don’t touch this code” spend months studying it and understanding it (on your own time). make sure to understand FULLY every aspect of the business your company is doing, suck up all the domain knowledge… every production issue, no matter how big or small you will volunteer to help and go through all post-mortems… on this path things will become clearer and clearer what you need to get done as time passes.
soon enough it will be YOU that is a go-to person for everything, most important customers will know you by name and will call you on your cell instead of creating ServiceDesk ticket…
above all - never look at your career as an employee - you are a corporation and your relationship with your “employer” is partnership between two business entities. no one bats an eye if company X pays 7-figure yearly to company Y for its services… and yet compensation for an “employee” in those figures would be like “huh? no way.” and yet just how Jira might bring enough value to company X to justify 7-figure compensation, so can your services as well if you position yourself appropriately. no one will teach this in America as America needs obedient employees…
How many of those companies that know your name will pay you straight out of college $160K-$200K and up to $400K-$500k+ within 5-7 years?
If you want to be at a company where everyone knows your name, it’s going to be a small company.
the days of $160-200k out of college are slowly but surely coming to end (try to find some right now and see how many there are compared to say few years ago). Hard to compare but I started in 1999 at $117k which is “there” inflation-adjusted but overall I would say it is not easy starting in that range. $400k-$500k in 5-7 in definitely achievable, little bit of brain and little bit of luck.
Even if they do have to “settle” for enterprise dev, they still need to practice for DS&A to increase their “luck surface area” to get into those companies that pay top of range.
Glad to hear there are still some old dogs like us making good money. :)
> Fizzbuzz was designed to catch the complete bullshitters who literally could not code.
If you're not a well-known name, you can have your job-postings but you won't get any applications. Either you spend time on advertising and try to convince people that you're really real and actually really want to hire, or you just get yourself someone who introduces you to people who might be a good fit. That's a recruiter.
The one I didn’t meet in person was a specialized recruiter for my niche.
Two came from me reaching out to them and two were from internal recruiters
1) They use the correct email address, the one I used on my resume and to apply for jobs, and didn't dig out my personal one somewhere.
2) They don't say something stupid that reveals they didn't even look at my resume. ("I see you have C# experience", uh no I don't)
3) They include anything at all that's supposed to interest me, even if it actually doesn't.
The vast majority fail at step 1. I've only ever had one email from a recruiter that passed all these criteria.
> Heck I'd likely go job hunting just out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be interesting at the least
I definitely agree with you: Looking for a job (or "keeping your doors & windows open to new opportunities") while having a job is much, much easier -- mentally. In my industry, most connections with head hunters are made through LinkedIn. You can set a special flag in your profile that says "I'm looking for work", but this is only visible to professional head hunters (they pay a lot of money for an account with these special privileges). It works very well. Normally, the calls start with: "Them: Are you looking at the moment? Me: No, but I am open to new and exciting opportunities. Them: Oh, great. I have something for you." Do that enough, and eventually something very good lands on your doorstep.
That’s no exaggeration at all. I’m not always looking for a job. But everything I do I do with one eye toward how will this look when I get ready to interview? Am I working on tech that is demand? Am I working at the correct “scope, impact, and ambiguity” or am I just being a “ticket taker”?
Reality is that there are too many software developers chasing a small number of value-creating opportunities in a sea of useless or highly inefficient tech companies.
In the meantime, there aren't enough people to produce food, build houses, collect garbage, etc... So costs of essentials keeps going up. It's hard for software devs to transition to physical jobs so it's going to be a tough one.
Absolutely a large misallocation. And this is not just about the number of engineers. It is also about number of managers, 2 pizza teams, entire management chains merely doing promotion/PIP management, entire sets of VPs and execs with no market experience or engineering experience. Even a large number of PE investors and angel investors who just landed on money but actually don't have any skills beyond betting far and wide.
Highly paid roles have been paying people who are just doing administrative work. This is misallocation. And all of a sudden, this misallocation has come to bare.
Essentially broken window theory with humans.
Also, the centralization of media put this effect into hyperdrive. Successful, high exposure companies were drowning in money and so they could just throw 100 engineers at each tiny problem and it wouldn't materially affect their bottom line. They also didn't care much whether an employee was doing their job efficiently, so long as they met basic objectives... Which wasn't hard to do when you have so many people in the team and each person is responsible for a tiny piece.
Many people could be counter-productive in the long run, they were productive enough to meet their short-term OKRs and so they were left alone but their rushed work set the project up for long term pain... Often it's impossible to trace back issues to specific individuals... In software development, it's trivial to introduce massive technical debt while meeting or even blowing past short-term objectives. Someone who is literally killing the project might appear to be a top performer... They may be promoted before any problems become apparent... Kind of like a bad civil engineer who builds an amazing looking bridge and is celebrated for years until the bridge suddenly collapses because the foundations turned out to be poorly designed. By that point they've already been promoted several times, maybe already retired and they can claim that the collapse was caused by incorrect construction practices or bad maintenance work performed later. However, in software, it's much worse because you can't just point to a single incorrect formula or calculation. Failure is usually the result of many bad decisions.
A game of whac-a-mole can keep people REALLY busy too. You can measure that they're hitting more moles per minute and call that 'increased productivity', but whether or not hitting moles with a hammer is useful is a separate question.
Also, there are questions of short term gains vs long term gains. It's relatively easy to trade away long term gains to obtain short term gains. The incentive structure of our system is predicated on it.
The problem seems to be that ATSes struggle with the "modern" style of resume, much beloved of Word template authors, where you might have a left column with your contact details, github, and maybe some skills and then a borderless table on the right side with your positioning statement and job history.
I went from zero callbacks to 80% after I junked Word and rewrote my resume in a much more old fashioned, linear format. I used Overleaf (LaTeX) like it was 1999 and exported to PDF.
I've spoken with two technical recruiters who say they prefer reading templates instead of hand-crafted Resumes on top of them also parsing better in the ATS system ):
In my case, I had a simple layout with sections clearly delineated and very simple formatting (bulleted lists). Dates were spelled out eg September 2024 rather than 9/24. UTF-8 throughout. No difficult latex packages, just classic ones like enumitem and fancyhdr.
Frankly, plain text rendered to PDF is probably going to be the most easily parsed by their systems. If they let you add attachments separate from your resume, then stick your "beautified" resume there.
[0] For the curious: https://www.hropenstandards.org/
That's it. That's all you need to do.
The reason? My resume lists my name as follows, where I means the initial for my middle name:
Firstname I. (Nickname) Lastname
And yes, even professionally I do use my nickname and my last name, except for things which must match my government ID, such as offer letters and payroll/tax records, where of course I omit Nickname and use the legal Firstname as well as sometimes the middle initial or full middle name.
With this format, how does Personio parse my name? It thinks I’m called Firstname Nickname. No human would make this mistake, nor would a copy-paste into Notepad cause a human to do that.
And if it has any LLM intelligence at all, it should know that this is unlikely, because Nickname is actually a very common nickname for Firstname, so it should suspect a disperse and have a human double-check its conclusion. Alas.
I’ve also had other issues with these systems misparsing my employment history, since they don’t always properly parse jobs that span corporate acquisitions (changing title and employer at that point but being the same job) and are accurately reflected as such on the resume.
sounds like they did something like:
first_name, last_name = name.split(" ")
I call this easily avoidable because name is usually a separate field in the application or referral forms, so this is the bad auto-parsing overriding accurate manual input.
Some examples that come to mind from my experience are applicants with Chinese names that also use a western name professionally ("Yu-Chen Liew, but I go by Janet"), Spanish names that include patronymics ("Penelope Cruz Sanchez") and cultures that place the family name first ("Park Lee"). Maybe (f,l) = split(name, " ") works in some very homogeneous country like Iceland, but it sure doesnt work in the US.
By contrast, Spanish last names simply use two last names, with a child taking one last name from each parent. Traditionally this is the father's first last name followed by the mother's first last name, though efforts toward gender equality have made the law more flexible nowadays in both Spain and many other countries.
It doesn't violate Spanish naming conventions for given names to be reused in the next generation, and some families do that, but that isn't patronymic since it's not a "son/daughter of X" name, just a reused given name.
Please see the job history array.
they offer the option to parse your cv and see what "comes out on the other side"
I am not sure whether the idea of the parser is to be a starting point to then use the editor, or a test.
https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/jakes-resume/syzfjb...
I remember seeing a list of companies you could "apply" to with your resume that would then show the ATS-parsed version back to you. Every single person who used it got a reasonable result back, which is usually enough to put an end to all of the ATS myths out there.
The design always struck me as a clumsy attempt to take up space.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringResumes/wiki/index/#wiki...
(In short, they might not be as important as you think they are)
I don't think people realize how many of the ATS myths have been promulgated by people trying to sell services to job seekers. The ATS myth resonates with people for some reason, so desperate job seekers will often pay (unnecessarily) for various "ATS friendly" templates or ATS reviews.
“Oh no it’s 2 pages with only education on p2.”
Quickly comment out a bullet and print off a fresh 1 page pdf. I don’t use dumb words or phrases now to fit layout, at least far fewer. And git makes me less worried about deleting when it isn’t working.
One pattern i use, that i think makes things simpler, is to have a layout/contact template with definitions, then different context specific main latex files inputting from a sub directory of section blocks: experience, skills, education, etc.
I’d thought I was slick with word table layouts for sections, until a counselor told me the table structures persist in the supposedly flat pdf.
I wish there were an standard optional JSON attachment with a ridiculous small kb size limit to upload along with a human readable resume to help out the user data AST parser.
AFAIK one can embed arbitrary RDF into PDFs, and then one wouldn't need an extra field https://pdfa.org/wp-content/until2016_uploads/2011/08/pdfa_m...
Here's an example of a simple resumé [0].
You can see in the "Quick Start" section how the resumé template is used, which is very similar to how you described yours.
LaTex is a dark art and I just repeat basic incantations learned from the elder boards.
But, I cannot bring myself to write docs in a web browser and use web app storage. I have a personality disorder that requires me to use a local text editor for personal use cases.
Also I will buy a perpetual license for software. Like sublime text i just renewed a 3 year license to text+merge.
I get that subscription licensing is better for the dev business but I can’t do it.
I have done two different types of resumes; long and sort. When I was learning about resumes in high school and college, they said to just list your jobs and maybe some key skills. I have been told this is useless to recruiters. So I rewrote things to have a couple paragraphs about major projects at this jobs. I have been told this is too long and nobody has time to read it. So now I have both and you can pick the one you want.
I got laid off recently so this is fresh in my mind, but I got a job through my network instead which did not involve a resume or interviews. That's really how it should be. (I'm kind of just waiting for the founders from my last startup to start something new... they didn't survive the reorg either, which was a "sort by salary descending and only keep the last 3". The joys of having your software startup bought by an indecisive large company that doesn't do software ;)
Not sure about the 'should', but I think it is. Over the years I had the pleasure to work with quite a few good people, but there were also some buffoons (not counting those in marketing). I can only imagine, that the resume of the latter will look more appealing.
Especially for remote positions, there are hundreds of people applying for every open req and it’s hard to stand out
The year before last when I did do targeted outreach, it was because I both had relevant experience in a niche AWS service and I was a major contributor to an open source official “AWS Solution” while I was at AWS that was popular in that niche.
But that trick had a very small window.
So I guess the answer is do something that allows you to stand out from the crowd and then you can do prior outreach and tell them why they should hire you over someone else.
My biggest piece of advice is don’t be a “ticket taker”. Volunteer to lead larger initiatives.
Sure. But who’s going to do all those boring tickets? I know people need to work for themselves, but this just feels so wrong.
There may be edge cases where some obscure software can't parse a weird resume format, but in general if you put anything remotely resembling a common resume format (Company name, dates worked there, optional description and/or bullet points) it will be parsed properly.
I'm in a big Slack where people ask and give career help. Several hiring managers have offered to test people's resumes on their company's ATS over the years. Nobody has ever found a combination that actually failed the ATS except when it was an obvious problem (like someone who made their resume in Illustrator) or an obvious user error (exporting a resume as an image).
A few job sites, like WorkDay, have mangled my PDF resume every time I upload it. Like the OP, I've had to massage the layout and formatting to make it more compatible.
Almost all recruiters are "most recent resume in" type of folks or "curated long term list" type of folks - they'll either circle you for years trying to get you hired for something or they'll forget your name in 25 minutes.
It's possible that there is some selection bias here, where mediocre parsing systems give you the option to manually correct everything because they know they are mediocre. I remain skeptical.
I've never found good leads with cold approaches. Even when getting contacted and receiving an offer, it was always low salaries on that method. What worked best was going to related events, talking to people hosting the booths, talk to presenters of topics where I'm an expert and this way get warm introductions.
It turned out the ATS didn’t properly parse ligatures like “ffi”, “fi”, etc. It rendered them as a blank space, so “artificial” became “arti cial”. I turned over ligature rendering in my resume and started to get more callbacks.
Upon further inspection, I discovered that a lot of LLMs also have problems with ligatures and just ignore them when fed a pdf.
So, maybe those annoying job apps where you upload a resume and still have to fill everything in an HTML form aren’t the worst thing.
I used to reject 6mo contract offers but after being a laborer the 2.5X pay increase even for 6mo made sense. So I accepted one and now I'm here typing this on a 16" mac at a new job. I am now thinking about making better choices financially.
Have a GitHub, resume, luck
I wrote extensions to through LinkedIn's jobs and other boards but ultimately luck (some company person finds you). It's even harder for me no degree but I have 5yoe.
My job though was niche my robotics/hardware projects stuck out to the interviewer.
I worked labor for a year it sucked. But yeah I turned down a few 6mo roles thinking they were not secure but I was like f it I need change and will just pour my higher income into my debts.
> Keeping good connections with your coworkers and not burning bridges is one of the most important things I think you can do in your career.
Words to live by. I wish more folks internalized this phrase.
This is so true, one of my biggest corporate deals came from a guy I worked with a decade before, he was junior at the time.
Job searching is a shit process though. I applied for ~40-50 jobs, only got 1 offer. Small country too, so thats basically all the jobs I could find. But landed in a really good company, and have a bit of a break before I start.
So I've been using all my spare time to learn Graphics programming, C, and Audio Engineering.
I've made a little Wolfenstein3D-type raycasting engine [0] that I'm proud of, as I'm just a frontend coder for work.
[0] - https://github.com/con-dog/2.5D-raycasting-engine/blob/maste...
seems the old markers of dev competence are no longer there, some github projects, a degree were enough nowadays it's a lot harder even here in europe where the salaries are on the low end.
The first time was at a struggling startup. We all knew they were struggling and the company was very honest with us and kept us abreast of all the companies that our VC backers were pursuing. I was in some of the interviews with potential acquirers.
Our backers promised all of us that “we would get paid for every hour we worked”. Of course they couldn’t promise us we would not get laid off.
All of us stayed until the bitter end. That day we all got laid off after being acquired for scraps, we went to lunch together and hung out in the office just joking around until the end of the day.
We all had something in our back pocket anyway and from looking at LinkedIn, everyone found a job that was either as good or better within a month. This was 2011.
Our largest customer arranged for me to get contract with them to finish out a project, the acquiring company gave the customer access to all of their code and gave me permission to keep my work laptop and waived my non compete.
They gave everyone a month severance. I was treated fairly and have no ill will toward anyone there.
The second time it was Amazon in 2023:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
The third time it was a shit show of a company last year. But this is where I have problems with the author
> How do you succinctly summarize and highlight all you’ve done there?
I keep my resume and longer form career document up to date at least once per quarter. I list out the details of major accomplishments in STAR format while it’s still fresh. I have both a technical summary and a business oriented summary for non technical people.
It looks like he learned that lesson too.
> I was being selective and only applying for places I’d realistically want to work
He has a newborn baby. His first priority is to work for any company that will allow him to exchange labor for money to support his family. Even if you do have savings, no need to use it unnecessarily.
I got a 3.5 months severance from Amazon the year before last and my stretch goal was to get an offer before my paid out PTO of 9 days was over let alone dip into my severance.
Of course I reached out to my network first and targeted outreach to companies specializing in my niche (strategic cloud consulting emphasizing app dev). I also spammed my resume to any CRUD enterprise app dev job as a Plan B.
I could always keep interviewing while working. I was working remotely.
I did end up getting a Plan A job offer within 9 days of leaving AWS. But I knew three months in that it wasn’t going to be a long term job.
When the end did come, I was already in the early stages of interviewing for my current job and had an offer three weeks later. But again, I wasn’t going to let the perfect be the enemy of getting any job and I kept applying for Enterprise CRUD jobs until the offer was finalized.
I did work on a side project in 2023. But I got paid for it. A former CTO had some work he needed done.
Literally, your handle "scarface_74" says it all. When PIP comes through the door, you raise your automatic rifle and shout: "Say hello to my little friend!"
It’s a reference to my favorite obscure Batman villain.
I have a bookmarklet that opens a new gmail compose window, with the recipient being "[email protected]", and the subject being today's date. As I'm working throughout the day, I jot down what I'm working on.
I also used to review these every Friday, and type up a summary, and every few months - or as I'd remember to - update a "hype doc" that's basically like an internal resume that my manager can use to help argue for a raise for me, or whatever.
I also copy this data, without any stuff that might be considered company property, to someplace local I can access if I'm fired.
I’ve said it before, and I say it again. This isn’t true. When companies try to be helpful and give you well meaning feedback, you find out that their reasons for rejecting you are absolutely banal, and you’d have been better off not hearing anything.
Sometimes, HR doesnt know and the interview panel may not know.
I didn't last very long. Candidates would see the feedback as an invitation to prove me wrong or argue with my assessment. I got a few very angry e-mails from people who took their rejection very personally and made it clear that I was their enemy. One person (who was actually very unqualified) even went on a mini rampage across the internet, trying to "name and shame" my company and even my personally for the rejection. There were even threats of a discrimination lawsuit.
So I stopped. It's back to something like "We've decided to proceed with other candidates"
So I could imagine debating a point while being in the right.
I absolutely can. Every single time I've gotten detailed rejection note it turns out to to be over pedantry (or rather, the fact that you didn't follow the letter of the instructions perfectly, god forbid you show some creativity).
It's really hard to not send a point-by-point rebuttal of their nonsense, but it never leads to anything.
Some people are fantastic on the happy path but horrible on the sad path.
Instead I sent something akin to “we decided on another candidate”
So the candidate gets feedback along the lines of: "Thank you for participating in our interview process. Unfortunately, our panel decided you weren't the best fit for position X at this time, because ...reasons.... Under company policy, we won't accept further applications from you for one year from today, but we would encourage you to apply for a role with us in the future".
There is a chance they will reply back to HR arguing, but it is their job to be polite but firm that the decision is already made, and that they can apply again in one year (and not pass anything back to the hiring manager).
The key is to think long term and about the company as a whole - the candidate who gets helpful feedback and is treated fairly is more likely to apply again in the future (after the mandatory cooling off period), when they might have more skills and experience working somewhere else. There is a finite qualified labour pool no matter where you are based, and having the good will even of rejected candidates is a competitive advantage. The message should be "not now", rather than "not ever" (although of course, if they do go on some kind of rampage, they could turn the not now into not ever - that's a bridge burning move). If a tiny percentage go on a rampage, but the company protects the individuals from it, and has lots of counteracting positive sentiment from prospective and actual staff, then it's still a net positive.
yeah - I don't know why OP makes that sorta assumption. I'd expect angry replies with no benefits to the time wasted on my part.
They were looking for a network engineer who could program a little and you're a programmer who knows a little about networks or something like that.
I’ve been rejected three times once I started the interview process. I have also always gotten interviews from companies where external or internal recruiters reached out to me and I submitted my resume.
All three times I’ve gotten rejected was post mid 2023.
It was clear from one within 10 minutes that I wasn’t what they were looking for. I’m not sure why I didn’t get hired for the second one after going through the rounds even though I have my suspicions.
The third I got ghosted after the HR screen where the representative from the target company’s investor interviewed me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42622893
So by 2008, I was 34, starting over and applying for enterprise CRUD jobs where I was competing against people with a lot less experience and maturity. I was cheap labor. That held true in 2008 and 2012 and I was digging my way out of the “expert beginner” years.
It wasn’t until 2014 when I was actually starting to be recruited for strategic positions. In 2014, 2016 and 2018 I was an early strategic hire by a then new director/manager/CTO to lead major initiatives.
My interviews were two adults talking about strategy. By 2014, I was 40 years old.
2020, a remote position at AWS Professional Services fell into my lap. I was 46 then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
Now looking for a job in 2023 and 2024 targeting full time roles at cloud consulting companies, can you imagine how easy it is for a 50 year old who knows how to communicate decently, with 25+ years of development experience, 6 years of AWS experience including 3 at AWS to get a job at those companies?
Now when you take AWS away from me, I am just another enterprise Dev with above average communication and project management skills.
Two of my three rejections were at product companies even then the interviews were behavioral. It does concern me a little that I got rejected from product companies that were looking for “architects”.
My title right now is “staff software architect” at a consulting company.
I didn’t argue with 1 because I figured it was pointless and it sounded like the recruiter was having a rough day. I politely pointed out 2 as a courtesy and he said “huh, the other guy yelled at me about that”.
Although honestly, I left the process thinking “lol” instead of “I’m a dumbass” like I might have absent the feedback.
If this was SASR recruitment that'd be the pysch portion of the test, reject a candidate for a reason that makes no sense and watch their reaction ...
The assessment never stops, everything's a meta test, and they push until you quit the recruitment merry go round.
In the relatively normal world of software engineering .. that's a recruiter landed with a poor testing pachage and procedures.
This could mean two things. "You aren't knowledgeable about OOP" or "you couldn't show us that you are knowledgeable in OOP". If it isn't the former, maybe it's the latter? Maybe the real+underlying feedback is that you couldn't convey your breadth of knowledge in your interview?
From the interviewer's perspective - we get someone who is average, then another person who is average, then someone who has trouble with basic questions, then we get this person who may be as average as the first two, then we get someone who answers every question correctly, and has a deep knowledge of the domain if you drill down, then you get an average person again.
There's nothing really wrong with the person, they did as well as four other people. It's just that someone else came in who was a standard deviation above the majority of the people in the bell in the normally distributed Gaussian curve.
But especially after a take home assignment, feedback should be given 100% and face to face. It's almost embarrassing to spend X hours/days of your (spare) time only to be rejected with an email and usually some random reasons, without having the chance to explain why you built this toy project that way, how much time you spent and what would you do with more time or in production or even showcase some live coding on top of what you did.
But everything has become really inhumane, no-one cares. That's why AI is dominating and ruining the field.
If it's banal, I'd like to know. Otherwise you're still left wondering whether it's anything that hinders you in the longrun.
Could you clarify further? Front what I hear on the news, there are hundreds of thousands of open engineering/ai positions in the US and we cannot find workers to fill them. You mention ZIRP, so I'm assuming you're probably in the US.
Practically every news show in the past two weeks has noted the importance of having a concerted US policy to help fill these open positions. They also mention the existential risk to the US caused by the massive shortage of engineers.
How does this square with you saying " If you haven’t searched for a job since then it will surprise you how much more of an employers market it is now." Where is the disconnect?
I've been in the tech job market about 30 years, and this might be the second worst time for people in tech, the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s being the worst. My boss knows it too, he knows I can't leave and find another job that pays as well right now. A couple of years ago I was still getting about 20 recruiter contacts per week, and now I'm lucky if I get 1 per month.
If you haven't noticed how bad it is, I have to wonder why?
Agree on not all postings are real (we do some because we're mandated to do a proper search when filling positions with people we know)
I could throw my resume up in the air and find plenty of commodity Windows programming jobs.
It’s much worse now. I found a job quickly both last year and the year before. But that was only because I have a combination of skills and experience that puts me at the top of the pile of resumes in my niche.
The only thing that matters is the ratio of job seekers to open positions.
There are always a lot of open positions because there are a lot of companies. Even during recessions most companies will be opening to hiring the right candidates.
When there are more candidates than positions combined with a lot of layoffs, companies get more selective. Companies are hiring, but they're being more careful about who gets hired.
Fake job postings to give the appearance of growth for funded companies who are struggling to grow to meet investor expectations.
Posturing to distract from the actual practice of hiring less-expensive talent overseas while pretending to be on Team America.
Political spin to avoid losing face/clout during an election year.
In short: some form of lying (or at best, twisting) to avoid the shame of not being as successful as one might look on their <insert social media here> profile.
What I dislike most is the cheating from H1Bs though. My friend in an AZ university described how foreigners were known to cheat on their exams based the clique of the country they came from. Similarly, I met an H1Bs who sends his work to Indian cheaper workers even though it is supposed to be confidential. They also collude to get their family and friends into the U.S.
Bloomberg news covered it recently, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-...
Most software engineers lack credentials to get hired to build ai, unless you view conventional software engineering as ai.
The time to build out ai tracks in universities was back in the Obama administration. It’s ridiculous that all of a sudden the whip is being so harshly cracked for everyone to re-skill. I applied to CS grad programs for two straight cycles, with strong GRE scores and a solid CS undergrad degree, and not a single non-remote university program offered me admission, seemingly due to enrollment caps as bottlenecks.
I ended up joining a well-known online MS program, and I feel that it is teaching me so little for the effort I put in that I don’t think my ai skill has improved over what I had from outside of the program, but hey, if the system is broken, what can you do? I can learn nothing, remotely, and use that degree to get an ai job where I do genuinely valuable work, but I’m definitely not allowed to make those genuinely valuable work contributions in a remote role.
The opportunities available are extremely limited or they don’t make sense/aren’t very good. Just smile and play the game… or is it the game that’s playing with candidates?
A lot of really good people can be had in certain US states if you're willing to pay them a lot of money relative to their local market. I've gotten several applications from some pretty overqualified people simply because the pay for the associate position is higher than their local employers are offering for mid-level people. If you then turn that around, it suggests that some of these employers struggle to fill positions because they actually have to compete on the nation-wide market for people.
Like the article mentions, it's an employers market.
The thing I struggle is the question to why you want to work at a place. Either I'm short and to the point, or it ends up written like I used to when working for one of the Big Three.
And coincidentally, that is exactly the kind of stuff that ChatGPT generates.
I switched careers in my 30s to get into tech. It was big, difficult pivot. At the moment, I do not regret it and really like what I do.
But the job market is shockingly bad. I do not have an optimistic outlook, so I am looking to pivot again, likely a small business. All the extra cash I have after expenses, I put towards various side hustles. One big upside to being a SWE is that I can make whatever app I want and put it on the internet publicly.
I encourage others who want to work for themselves to reduce their core work hours if possible, and spend the new free time working on their projects.
Otherwise you will burn out
- many local small business owners are aging baby boomers, they will be exiting + retiring; that's opportunity to back-fill
- the culture among younger people (millennial and younger) seems to be more focused on employment over entrepreneurship; they seem to prefer the safety of stable employment over taking risk on their own (I have no data backing this, just anecdotal experience...but I think its bc of student loans)
- stable employment with a big company is not so stable anymore, most of human history leans entrepreneurial, big corps are recent phenomenon
I could keep going but I will stop there.
You think it was hard competing against 10 other similar apps? Try 1000 or 10,000 competitors.
Another problem is management attitudes towards hiring. They are switching their capricious attention and investment towards AI [1] and off shore to save costs [2, 3].
The combination of all this is making for an ugly combo of negativity. Tech used to be a lot more fun, even before the SV ZIRP hysteria.
[1] https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
[2] https://www.turing.com/blog/top-us-companies-choosing-offsho...
[3] I work at a large bank. Almost all our new roles are exclusively in India and the Philippines.
Starting a business seems like the only real answer. Struggling only makes sense when it's for your own company.
Recruiters are often and perform a valuable service. Agree that it can be invaluable to find one you want to work with.
I still get mad thinking about it.
Over 25 years experience in frontend web, searching since July, and the water is as ice cold as I’ve ever felt it. Low response rates, low interview rates, zero offers. Wondering if the backend grass is slightly greener at the moment or that’s just my perception from the other side of the fence.
You have to lean on your network.
Anyway, I've found that back in our field it's largely React roles which were affected. Angular jobs are fewer and typically lowballed, but not nearly as much as the rest.
As a hiring manager, I want:
- Your references are already vetted and testimonials left on a public profile,
private on invite for those who haven't left their job yet
- Actual qualifications, like job training and certifications. Even Scrum Training.
I want to know you were actually taught the right way at least once, by a
reputable source
- A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can
use arbitration to seek damages if you lied
- A standard set of tests administered by experts chosen at random.
- Your requirements to be hired
- The salary range, hire type (contract/full-time), benefits
- The location
- A description of the project you want worked on and skills required
- Your company's pitch deck or equivalent
- Glassdoor reviews
- My name, age, gender, picture, etc are hidden until the company has clicked a button
that certifies they are interested in me based on my qualifications. I get that we can't
stop hiring bias, but at least make it more obvious when they pass up why they have.
Your references are already vetted and testimonials left on a public profile,
No one is going to give you a negative reference on LinkedIn. That doesn’t provide any meaningful signal.
Actual qualifications, like job training and certifications. Even Scrum Training.
Certifications don’t prove competence. Anyone can memorize enough to pass a multiple choice test and there have been brain dumps for them for decades.
I went through the 6 certification .Net “Architect” path back in 2010 basically as a guided learning path with a goal at the end. I knew even back then they were worthless as far as competence and never put them on my resume.
More recently, at one point I had 9 of the then 12 AWS certs as late as 2021. I have 6 of the 9 current ones now and I’m working on the other 3 by the end of the year.
I got my first one without ever opening the console in 2018. They also served as a guided learning path so I would know what I didn’t know and I could talk the talk. But I don’t consider myself knowing a service until I’ve used them.
They are all very shallow marketing certs except I’ve heard good things about the Kubernetes certifications and that they require hands on problem solving.
I want to know you were actually taught the right way at least once, by a reputable source
How would you know that? I have a degree in CS. I graduated in 1996. Is the source I was taught COBOL and FORTRAN from “reputable” or “relevant”?
A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can use arbitration to seek damages if you lied
Arbitration is biased toward the client and the clients industry. The judges don’t get hired if they consistently make judgments that are against the industry that hires them.
A standard set of tests administered by experts chosen at random.
What I am looking for when hiring is specific to the company. But they have that already - leetCode style interviews that don’t give a signal to whether they are “smart and gets thing done”.
> testimonials left on a public profile
> Actual qualifications
> A written contract that what you say is your experience is true, and that I can use arbitration to seek damages if you lied.
Forget about tech for a moment: You can re-write it for hiring people in oil and gas field operations, and it seems just as absurd. Re-write it again for a hospital trying to hire nurses. Still absurd. I picked both of those industries because they are very much learn on the job. Yes, certs exist, but there are many people who work most of their career in those industries with few-to-no certs.
And for everybody who demands a certificate of some sort, there's somebody else who rejects anybody who _has_ that certificate ("You have an MCSE? Only idiots have MCSEs!")
You can do this similarly for greenhouse.io, ashbyhq.com, myworkdayjobs.com, breezy.hr, workable.com, dover.io, ats.rippling.com, icims.com and other popular ATS websites.
I am in Game Development so it is a much smaller community than the overall tech industry and you're more likely to know people in different companies as people slowly disperse after completing a project.
I think as you get older you kind of have to find jobs in this way, relying on your network and reputation, rather than doing a fresh cold application each time.
I’m going to refer them to the ATS.
Sorry to be this way.
Especially if you are early in your career and its becoming harder to land a stable job.
you need to learn how to market your skills, get clients and deliver.
No more excuses to sit in a job and do nothing. This is going to be critical to survive.
Eventually I think companies are going to be much smaller entities than they once were which means your have to really buid your own biz.
1. Sales = learn to knock on a 100 doors to get one sale.
2. Marketing = learn to communicate your value prop to specific companeis and hiring managers.
3. Delviery = learn to deliver products/projects end to end with all the management that goes in between.
If you know all 3 you'll never be in a position where you don't have income. It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now ... don't just do a 8 hour job and go home and watch tv.
Keep trying to sell your services to others ... at least 2-3 hours after work to other companies/startups/other industries. Its a big world - smeone needs your services - your survival depends on finding those people nad packaging your skilsl so that they buy.
Yeah, your kids are gonna love that quality 21:00-23:00 time...
It was only when I've built my first startup that many of those skills had to be learned and to be quite frank, I only wish to have started earlier rather than being throw into for making enough money.
Nowadays that schedule is accurate and I'm a family person with two young kids in the house. I just don't wake so early but that is mostly because I keep working on my personal projects until midnight~1 AM.
The good thing is that I'm no longer so attached with my employer company. Mismanagement, demotion or those issues don't affect me so personally because my professional value is no longer just defined by the company where I work. My work outside company hours is valued by many others, albeit not profit-driven it serves as a good backup whenever falling into unemployment situations.
My backup is an always up to date resume with an up to date skill set, and a longer career document, a years worth of expenses in a HYSA in addition to retirement savings, low fixed expenses, and a decent network.
I figure in a year someone , somewhere will give me a job or contract. While my wife hasn’t had to work since 2020 at 44 when I was 46, she has kept her CDL so if push comes to shove, she can get a job with the school system as a bus driver for the benefits while I build up an independent consulting clientele.
I found a job quickly both in 2023 and last year.
I agree, it is pretty rough, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone and don’t think anyone should follow it if they intend to live a full happy life.¹
¹ I know what you meant, I’m making a joke.
(I did it.)
What's the point of wasting time with a very poor analogy? It's actually like saying if 2200 calories is a normal day of food, 1925 calories is not like starvation.
Where is commute? Corporate jobs in IT are not 8 hours sharp and ciao, there is also lunch break to count in. Also 23-6 means 7 hours of sleep, too little for many. And so on.
He doesn't even have 8 hours there for the corporate job.
My children were four and eight when I started my business and it wasn't a problem at all. In fact I would say it made many things easier because I had a more flexible schedule.
This was a good advice 10-2 yrs ago, but going forward? We'll have to see, but my gut says this will become just as likely to succeed as becoming a successful influencer... By which I mean that a few will occasionally make it/succeed, but it'll only be such a low fraction of the people trying for it that it rounds to 0.0%. and the ones succeeding will generally have been able to leverage an opportunity that most trying the same never had.
(Not to discourage people from trying - without an attempt you won't even have the chance to grasp such an opportunity. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of an observer)
Stop talking yourself out of everything!
That 4 years number sounds like an ass pull. What’s your source? Everyone is different and some of those skills come naturally to some people, so I sincerely doubt that number is even close to universal.
Honestly, your whole suggestion seems straight out of one of those generic self-help scams that ignore the realities of life and always blame the user: “You gotta do the thing. If you’re not successful it’s because you didn’t want it enough, not because we’re dispelling the same dated advice to everyone”.
Note I don’t think that’s what you’re doing, you’re not selling anything. I’m just saying I question the helpfulness and quality of the advice.
Sell online.
Max Cost of experiment: $200 + hours put in.
You'll learn to sell.
None of my advice is expensive in time or money. But it requires effort and ability to learn from failure.
The learning from failure is the key part. Everything else is just qualia.
Same quality of advice.
Anyway, the real advice is not to always preemptively work a second job. It's use your high engineering salary for as long as you have it to save, save, save and invest, invest, invest. This is how you shield yourself.
This is ycombinator, you know the startup accelerator.
Also, the time one poster was spending “selling potatoes online” (literally not trying to be funny), he would be better off, spending that time doing interview prep and job hopping making more money.
You can take these numbers for YC investments and draw your own conclusion.
https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-life-and-death-of-y-co...
All that other time watching TV and commenting on YC can be used to learn to run a business.
Also the skills you'll learn by starting a very tiny biz - marketing, sales, resilience, communication, people-skills and delivery - will help you sell yourself at present and future job opportunities.
Also not everyone is in tech or wants to be in tech. /smh
this made me lol. you are being a dickhead so i will ignore that and defend myself in good faith.
i actually job hopped this year so i can make more money while spending less time selling my work to other people. it's going well for me, so good that i had enough free time to launch an ecommerce website selling sweet potatoes. this project was an experiment to see if there was a market for direct to consumer food and also a project to learn about shopify and google ads (for other business ideas which you frown upon so you might not see the value in this). it was also an attempt to work closer with farmers because farming and food is an interest of mine, and i'm from where they grow a lot of sweet potatoes.
so that time was spent learning and doing something interesting to me intellectually, which is never a waste of time. 20 hours of my free time (which, to remind you, i have extra free time to do this because of my overall career strategy where i earn a high hourly rate so i can work less hours each week) resulted in learning new skills. with 10 more hours of my time i've learned about food safety, organic regulations, shipping, managing physical inventory and cash, as well as learning about our food distribution system (which is totally fucked since there is a market for direct to consumer sweet potatoes). not to mention, the time spent has earned me over $100/hour.
can you please remind me, snarkily, again, why this was a waste of my time?
Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
In a slowed down market, both get difficult, the latter many times more than the first.
I only have to convince one place - Google Ads. Plus bring in the "eyeballs" with my free app, but I have accomplished that more than once.
> Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Just one company in my case (actually several, but 90+% of the money comes from Google)
> Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding. I have to be competitive enough to make a few thousand a month, and with my programming (and database design, and UX, and SRE etc.) skills, I have achieved that.
> And you need to make enough to pay for health care. In the US you do.
> the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is less than $50 USD.
https://medium.com/beyond-agile-leadership/the-difference-be....
>Success rate: According to Zippia, only 0.5% of mobile apps are successful, with 9,999 out of 10,000 apps failing. Fyresite estimates that 99.5% of consumer apps and 87% of business apps fail.
Now imagine what would happen if more people took that advice?
For context, a new grad working in a major city in the US not on the west coast - even an ordinary CRUD enterprise framework developer - can make $70k- $80K a year.
What exactly is a “few thousand a month”? That’s a good side hustle. But even that’s not enough to support yourself
please, with the original snark style from your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42632061, tell me more about how it is a waste of my time to find businesses to do business with my brand new business and instead just find a stable job?
America is great at making sure most people think this way…
I don’t have to worry about finding customers, I have unlimited paid PTO and I plan to take 30 days this year not including 10 paid holidays.
My wife and I travel a lot and we did the digital nomad thing for a year.
If the company decides they don’t want to employ me anymore, I find another job like I have done 10 times in my career including last year and the year before. Both times it took three weeks.
I don’t live in the Bay Area , I live in a nice condo with access to 5 pools, a private to the condo association fishing lake and two gyms, bars and restaurants all within walking distance in state tax free Florida.
If I were 22 in 2025 instead of being 22 in 1996, I would definitely do what I needed to do to exchange as much money as possible for my labor instead of toiling away at an enterprise dev job making $70K a year when instead I could be graduating college making $170K to $200k+.
I did do my bid in a FAANG working remotely between the ages of 46-49 and I saw first hand the doors it opens and the experience that college grads had that they couldn’t get anywhere else,
Hell, it open doors for me. There is no way I could have found jobs as quickly as I did both last year and the year before without it.
Also even at 46-49 I learned a lot that has helped me since I left.
On another note: after my youngest graduated, my wife and I sold everything we owned and after traveling for a year, we settled down in our vacation home (a unit in a condotel we own).
We rent it out when we decide to travel for an extended period of time. The “hotel” part of the condotel takes care of everything.
I have been working professionally for 28 years across 10 jobs. I assure you I’m not “short sighted”.
After three or four years in the industry, if they suck up everything they can and take advantage of every opportunity, they will be set.
The same is true to a much lesser extent on the enterprise dev. I tell people on that side just not to be a “ticket taker” and volunteer to have larger more impactful products - “don’t be the bullet. Be the gun”
Whose advice is going to lead to better outcomes? Doing drop shipping from Ali baba and selling sweet potatoes on line or mine?
While I haven’t had to pass a coding interview at BigTech, I have had to pass system design and behavioral interviews at one and I have conducted a couple at BigTech.
I’m telling them to work to demonstrate skills with working at increasing “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”.
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
I know first hand the leveling guidelines at one of the BigTech companies and 2nd hand about another. From working at one less than 2 years ago.
My latest project I’m leading is a Kubernetes + Generative AI project.
Do you really think I’m someone who doesn’t have a pulse on the modern tech landscape?
> My latest project I’m leading is a Kubernetes + Generative AI project.
we are no different. i'm leading a project to deploy an etl pipeline on azure kubernetes right now.
100% this.
this is how i see it from my point of view as a younger person observing the world around me and where i fit in
GODSPEED mate - you are on the right track
My generation for the most part never will work for a FAANG or get equivalent compensation because we aren’t going to grind leetcode and do what it takes.
I would never have gotten into one if it weren’t for the very thin needle I threaded and I definitely wasn’t going to sell my big house in the burbs to move to Seattle to be an SDE (what the recruiter originally suggested).
There are plenty of people who post here who are under 30 and will make more than I will ever make. I’m not bitter. Like I said at 50, I can afford to purposefully prioritize lifestyle over chasing money and eschew opportunities to make more.
My Generation didn’t have the chance of graduating from college and getting a job making an (inflation adjusted) almost quarter million working for BigTech or the equivalent company back then. Many in my generation came in during the dot com boom and it took years for us to recover and some never did (I didn’t suffer any ill effects from the crash).
From looking at LinkedIn, none of them are or have ever worked for a company paying as much as my former coworkers at BigTech are making 3-4 years out of college.
The generation graduating post 2010-2012 has way more opportunities to make a lot of money.
i graduated high school during the great financial crisis. i remember being near done with college at the university of mississippi when i visited birmingham, alabama and walked through the occupy encampments. i didn't make enough money to contribute to retirement savings til 2019 when i was in my late 20s. your generation has experienced unprecedented stock market gains over your peak earning years. i'm not hopeful that these gains will continue through my peak earning years therefore i prioritize finding creative ways to generate income before it's too late after being complacent with my fat ass tech paycheck sitting at my standup desk and drinking my kombucha with the wool over my eyes while the ai writes my code.
The top end of enterprise dev salaries for seniors is around that of entry level salaries at BigTech and adjacent companies.
That’s not meant to be an insult. I was on that side until I was 46 and now at 50 I’m back on the very top end of enterprise dev. But it’s still somewhere between entry level and mid level at BigTech and closer to entry level.
The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.
If you graduated in 2008, yes it was a shit show. But that means by 2012, BigTech comp and enterprise dev comp started really diverging. The stock market has been gangbusters since 2012. But it stagnated most of the 200x’s.
If you had jumped on the BigTech wave in 2012 you would have been set.
By that time, relocating wasn’t an option for me because I was 38, just gotten married and had two (step)kids.
> The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.
this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now. nonetheless, we are not talking about maximizing income here, we're talking about surviving in a changing world with a tougher job market for devs. let me remind you of the grandparent orginal comment that started this all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42631755 that person is right.
Yeah for an entry level developer getting in the industry right before Covid hit had to suck.
> this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now.
The entire market sucks now. But BigTech is still hiring as well as the enterprise dev side. You might as well shoot for the moon and settle if you must.
This discussion was about creating a business instead of working for someone else.
I bet you that you could make more money by spending your time doing interview prep and changing jobs than you could selling potatoes on the side.
btw spending time marketing yourself is much more effective than interview prep in my experience. i got every single one of my jobs because i know how to sell myself. all the jobs i've gotten did not include an algorithmic interview. i can only think of one algorithmic interview i've done in my career, and it was early in my career and helpful to learn my knowledge gaps as a mostly self-taught developer. i did not spend any time doing "interview prep" after that, but simply learned the CS fundamentals that i was bad at. that has helped me so far. not 1337 code or whatever the fuck.
but that doesn't matter. i work 4-6 hours a day selling my time at a high hourly rate. this gives me more free time to do all the things i want to do. i chill hard as fuck. walk 90 minutes a day, sell sweet potatoes on the internet, grow my food, write books, and work on my saas app.
i recommend doing this if you are like me. don't work a 9-5, unless you use it to help get you to this point.
But I am self aware enough to know that isn’t a repeatable process that most people can do anymore than “selling potatoes online”.
I don’t have to “market myself”. My job at AWS fell into my lap more or less then after leaving, with that on my resume and LinkedIn profile along with my other experience, people reach out to me. I don’t spend time trying to be a “thought leader” online.
actually selling sweet potatoes. if you would listen!
> I don’t spend time trying to be a “thought leader” online.
i have 139 followers on twitter. i don't tweet about tech. "marketing" is simply one html document on the public internet that clearly communicates to technical and non-technical people what you can do for them. not what skills you have.
if people realized - aimed at software engineers - that the same company you're applying for - someone went through the pain of creating the initial product, marketing it, selling it. I'm sure you can do the same - maybe not at the same level but at 80%.
unlike in zero-sum games - real life you can have multiple winners - 80% will get you there.
And then sell it.
Not rocket science but most people are their own biggest wall.
This is incredibly far from being the universal claim you say it is. 99% of software developers work for someone else, not at their own business, and most are perfectly happy.
By all means, building a business is great for many reasons, sometimes including financial reasons, and you should do it if you want to. But not wanting to is not an "excuse" and you shouldn't feel pressured to do so.
That experience taught me a valuable lesson: there are some industries you just don’t want to be involved with when the economy takes a downturn. Companies tighten their budgets, and the first cuts often come from areas like training and marketing. On the consumer side, people quickly drop non-essential luxuries like streaming services or food delivery.
If you work in industries that provide those kinds of services, they’re essentially “fair weather industries”—great during good times but highly vulnerable during tough ones.
Since then, I’ve made a point of only working in what I call “recession-proof” verticals. These include energy (avoiding risky sectors), insurance (because companies rarely skip paying premiums), and certain areas of banking (where money flows abundantly).
Another critical strategy is diversifying your skill set and building a strong internal network within your company. The more indispensable you become, the more secure your position. In more technical terms, this is akin to “obligate mutualistic symbiosis”—a relationship where both parties thrive because they rely on each other.