ccdev

Looks interesting, but is there a paywall-free mirror of this article?

How do you make that business mindset intuitive for people that are used to being technical workers?

I actually would not want to limit myself to one industry. Working at a digital agency has its short comings but one thing I enjoyed is the variety of clients we get.

For example, I have a mixed skill set of web development and graphics programming. That's allowed me to interview at companies from a variety of business problems that leverage the graphics skill set, such as CAD/CAM, indie video games, or space mission simulation.

I want to say "I solve these problems" without limiting myself to one industry but relying on my tech skill as the niche. Is that just as good?

Leetcode problems rarely come into play outside of tech hubs or quant firms. I live in Chicago and rarely encounter such problems in job interviews. And just Leetcode easies at that. They do ask you do take-home assignments, though.

It is harder to walk away from a subpar offer when you have no other job to fall back on.

The only reason I accepted is because the alternative is having no work. It's harder to bargain for a fair wage when you're unemployed.

When we were discussing rates, I proposed $60/hr which is perfectly passable in the city I'm in for a contractor with my experience, but they couldn't do higher than $35. I am seeking something new but I need a plan to live comfortably in the interim.

It's unfortunate that Ruby doesn't get the push towards more applications like Python does. Especially for scientific computing and machine learning.

That's an interesting idea for a resume layout, although the columns will probably look very unbalanced with my set of jobs. I've only had two FT developer jobs, both of which are too old or too short to have made any meaningful impact or progress.

Whats going wrong in the interviews? Do you ever get feedback from the companies that reject you? Are there questions they ask you that you stumble on?

Several problems were spotted through mock interviews I took, as well as real ones that gave feedback. With the mock interview, I dragged on too much explaining my past experience because of all the disparate jobs. With Triplebyte, I was told that I show breadth in talking about different topics but not much depth in any of them. And very little knowledge on large system design (which I want to get a beginner job at).

It sounds like you have been working on fairly run-of-mill CRUD based applications that don't require that much thought. Can you be more picky about what jobs you take?

That is true, about 90% of the work I've done is CRUD web dev. The most in-depth project I worked on is for an indie game written on a C# .NET framework. This was a one-off opportunity that I got browsing job requests on Reddit, and I was given the offer based on some personal projects I had. But it didn't lead to more substantial game dev jobs. I suck at getting the ball rolling.

I have to just fall back on applying blindly as my networking game isn't very strong. Whenever a contract ends, I come off as too transactional when I speak to people about seeking work and that turns people off.

Even though Ruby on Rails has started to be past its peak popularity I like using it, and also want to use React and Vue more. I'm definitely not going back to CMS work. A colleague once forwarded me a Magento job because he became an expert in it, but had no interest in going back to that.

Web development jobs. Ranging from CMS-based websites using WordPress and Magento, and built in frameworks in stacks, LAMP-based to Ruby on Rails to using React.

These jobs all are underpaid, 1099 jobs. Made anywhere from $15/hr to $35/hr in a medium COL American city. I need work that is more stable and doesn't have me hopping around, and not having to live paycheck to paycheck.

All of these jobs are for small business clients, with usually me as the only developer. It sometimes feels more like consulting work, but I want more experience working in a dev team. I don't know how to pass interviews for FT jobs working in larger groups.

Spending more than 2 years at Eng I or Eng II is considered a cause for serious concern.

Is this just for within Google or also from Google's perspective of hires from elsewhere? Because I have to admit I have not been past mid-level (which I guess is the Eng II equivalent) for over five years.

I have 10 years experience in my career and never held a senior position, officially. Do I miss out a lot in seniority by just being a permatemp and contractor for small shops?

Agreed. This has been an eye opener for me as someone who has worked mainly in smaller companies whose job levels didn't go beyond junior, mid-level, senior/lead in my profession. Granted, the concept of target schools still adds some bias to candidate hiring, but it's better than in many non-technical careers.

I am not sure how Leetcode would help out here in specific, for someone who already has years of proven programming experience with other companies. Any company who holds any water in what they do would substitute rote knowledge of algorithms with real world programming skills.

Usually I have considered internal recruiters from larger companies to be more serious than the typical messages from third party agencies who don't even disclose the name of the company you represent. I didn't know they do the same "spray-and-pray" tactics, but if that is true, that is rather disappointing to know, that they have gotten as flaky as agency recruiters.

What's interesting to me, though is that I've had far better experiences with Amazon's recruiting staff. They were very responsive, usually replying to my questions in the same day, and have gotten in the running for interviews twice with them. I have been as far as being selected for the on-site interview round, but made the mistake of saying I am not yet prepared to travel there at the time.

MSFT did not set me up with a programming test, just something to fill out. The pre-screening document was a questionnaire asking various background-related things like, what is your expected salary, have you worked for mS before, what project or accomplishment are you most proud of, etc. I guess they just didn't like my answers, and am more likely to be considered by Amazon than MS. In any case, I become a "cold" candidate very quickly in the MS recruiting radar.

It seems little odd that at 35 you're still in the $25/hr range.

Don't underestimate the negative effects of having no job lined up when you're let go from your current one. You can't realistically negotiate for an ideal salary when you're currently making zero. Taking a less-than-optimal job offer is still better than being homeless, though.

For reference, my first web development job paid $12/hr (part-time) in 2007, in the Chicago area. I found this job by cold-emailing job listings on Craigslist.

I'm definitely choosing path 1, which is to become a senior dev. I prefer technical-focused jobs. Learn from mentor programmers, get into teams and learn formal development practices, and then help out programmers less experienced than myself. I've never held a senior title, never led a group, nor even been involved with the process of hiring other programmers.

I currently live in Chicago which is pretty good for COL/salary ratio, for the average programmer. Caveat: I am not average. I consistently get offers from very low paying jobs- as in "$25/hr on a contract" low. This comes from the tendency to being let go from jobs without having another one lined up, so I never could afford to wait much longer for a better offer to use as leverage. Also, I don't qualify for unemployment insurance.

That has put me in the bottom 15-20% of local jobs by total compensation. If I were to restart as a junior programmer at one of the better companies, I'd actually be getting paid somewhat more than at my last job (and with insurance benefits for once).

To be honest, I would rather take more algorithm-focused interview tests than be filtered through the HR perception that I don't qualify for Programming Language Y because I only have experience with Similar Language X. At least most of the companies that do algorithm-based tests are more agnostic about the languages you have used in the past.

Pair it up with the fact that I never look for jobs until I am let go from a job, and I have a double whammy for "hard sell". Something I didn't know that is a bad idea to do until much later in my career. But hey, it's not like we all know about all the things you should and should not do about careers. I just assumed that the only drawback of not having a job is that you have no income stream coming in.

I am able to get through interview rounds with Amazon, and also have gotten the attention of a few interesting companies from my Github projects. But somehow I do not get a good perception with local companies on my resume. Others have helped me out on fixing my resume and they've told me, it's too aimless. It does not have a clear sense of growth and direction, so I am trying out a new resume hoping that my job-searching experience will improve.

I'm mostly talking about people that, for one reason or another, appear to wander around with no clear career progression or direction, so it looks like they are "junior" in experience despite being "senior" in total years worked.

And I think that re-doing careers by switching professions (as you say, chemist -> QA) is different than re-doing career in the same profession. Something like the former is different because it's easier for companies to treat you as a clean slate if you switch to something that has little overlap with your former profession. But I want that clean slate treatement just re-attempting my profession.

For instance, maybe I want to re-do my entry level years because I never got into Computer Science, and would like to get an internship at a leading tech company, because that is a better start than my reality, which was just graduate with no internships, no support group of professionals, nor recommendations for good companies. It was just me going solo and blindly applying to local jobs at Craiglist for low-budget clients.

So yeah, I'm not talking about career switching into another profession, but more like hitting the reset button on one, to do it better the second time around.

I am trying to specialize more in graphics, though I still have to figure out how large is my skills gap between "doing solo graphics projects" and "full-time graphics programmer", especially in math. After getting advice on my resume on how to hide the slow career growth, I've been told to spin it to show I am interested in this niche and show direction towards that.

If you had been able to read my un-revised resume, it would probably read like a story that feels the same in the beginning as it is in the end, with no clear conclusion. So I am working on a new version with a different spin.

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Keep them coming! I didn't expect this topic to get this popular.

The reason I asked this question is that I am facing a career slump as a software engineer, and finding out that the software industry is brutal if you don't know how to carve a path for your own career.

And when I mean career slump, I really mean it. I'm living with my mom at age 35 which is quite the opposite of what someone expects of a software engineer at this age. Most people I know are buying/have bought houses and starting families. And I'm not at a point of self-sustainability yet. I can barely keep up with the insurance payments of my own car, and just keep the vision of having my own place to live in (once more, as I lived alone before things got tough) close to my mind. No longer be dependent of my family, get some privacy, some autonomy and instead of living every day switching between errand boy and going to a coffee shop for the free internet, to apply to jobs, or simply taking a break from my parents.

So that's pretty much me right now. I have 10 professional years of a "whole lot of nothing", no big signs of progression, maturity, or taking on more responsibilities. I didn't major in Computer Science, but I still expected my first programming job to be like, getting a mentor, working alongside a group of (in-house!) programmers, being able to ask them many questions and learn all about formal development practices.

Well, I got none of that in the places that I worked at. So seeing your stories gives me a good idea and hope that I can just move on from the past and have better companies approach me with hope and optimism, like I'm a bona-fide junior eager to learn.

Very difficult to move with only a few hundred dollars in the bank. Also it's generally not recommended to move to a place where you know very few people or no people, without first having a job lined up.

Also, I'd like to know if it's possible to change your behavior while still feeling like "yourself". And not feeling fake. I do not like the statement of "faking it till you make it". It makes it sound like you're betraying yourself, and therefore betraying other people because you are not yourself anymore.

If it helps expedite the process of getting an offer, I would go for it. I will not consider it if coaching starts to feel more like a detour than a straight line to getting a job, especially when I am "overdue" for a new job. However, there's also the issue of cost. I only have a few hundred dollars on my account, and life coaching seems too costly to sink into if I go on more meetings.

Job interviews have a great variety. It could be that the variety of job interviews, at least locally, does not easily extend to fit people with my personality type. But I do not consider myself to be one-of-a-kind. I know there are many more like me. I want to find that niche that people like me fit into.

When you submit your resume to a large tech company on their job site the chances of it getting to a hiring manager are exceptionally slim. If you actually know the hiring manager - or know somebody who knows the hiring manager - your chances are exponentially higher.

This is just from hearsay and personal anecdotes, but many people have experienced that getting attention from big tech companies comes a lot easier as a new grad than as as a more experienced developer a couple years since getting their degree.

College makes it pretty easy to build up a connection to larger companies. If you intern at X, then X is much more likely to give you a job offer. My view is that college is just a means to an end. I agree that just getting a degree doesn't prove much. But what you do in your journey to graduation- that really matters.

Good universities provide many doorways to networking than you don't get as easily afterwards. And it's not just of the professional kind either. How many people have stated how much harder it is to make new friends after college?

Opportunity cost of time is a big one. I personally think it's very dumb that 99% of the time, you must be currently enrolled in college in order to get an internship. On the other hand, I feel like some people do need it despite their experience. There is no age limit to enroll in college, and there is always a ton of stuff that you do not know. There are lots of older people that are dragging their feet, who still need personal mentoring or job training.

Things that you need to master at many job interviews are most fresh in the minds of a recent graduate. Now this is just from reading anecdotes, but people have received more responses from big tech co's as a new graduate than they have after being in several years in the field.

Great post. This is a good breakdown of different niches that I can at least follow as templates for finding related work.

I occasionally run into developers at meetup events who are involved in graphics or data viz and discuss our work. This is how I more commonly get attention from my 3D work, moreso than cold-applying to jobs online.

One of them I met first from seeing his demo work on YouTube and he was equally impressed with mine. He worked in medical imaging technology in his last job and referred me to it, but the company had a change of hiring plans last minute.

For now I say I'm more interested in media agency work. I was brought in for an interview at a small agency that does a mix of animation, VR, motion graphics and web development. They liked my portfolio. But budget issues arose and the hiring was put on hold indefinitely.

So it's just a streak of bad luck I guess. Clearly some people are interested in my work and I just need to find my good luck streak.

That's a good reminder to distinguish AR from VR in that Computer Vision is greatly involved in the former.

Are you looking for books that teaches advanced graphics?

That would be helpful (I have a few already on a wish list), but I'm more interested in resources for job openings or companies that are involved heavily in VR.

I already have working 3D math knowledge, having used matrices and linear algebra in my last job, integrated with procedural generated geometry, as well as implement some lighting functions in pixel shaders.

So for now I want to focus on the jobs I can step into.

If I were to take online courses, Computer Vision will probably be the subject I would most benefit from.

I should have started looking for jobs when my hours were cut from full time to part time at a startup I was at. I guess I was expecting a rebound to happen.

A few months later, I messaged the founder asking if he had an ETA for when the work hours would go back to normal. I got laid off after that.

I am weak in closing the deal with job interviews, mainly. However I don't know what is the average ratio of offers to interviews for developers applying to mid-level jobs.

So I guess you're saying I should be studying people skills, I guess? I often hear that I need to get mock interviews but there are few official sources for it. Also it's not very instructive to tell someone to just find any friend. Most people do not have experience interviewing programmers, so they wouldn't be good for mock interviews. And mock interviewing with friends would introduce too much of a positive bias you won't have from strangers.

As someone who had some amateur experience with C++ roughly 10 years ago I felt it was sort of deja vu with JavaScript. Transpilers, aggressive optimization, automation scripts it's nothing that was too unfamiliar with me.

Webpack is roughly a library linker. Babel is like GCC Make. Gruntfile ~= makefile. I think it's coming of age but the JS ecosystem is still undergoing growing pains, plus it can be overwhelming to newbies. People are paralyzed by too much choice. Having IDEs like Webstorm would be good at least taming or organizing workflow better.

Seems like it's a decent way to verify spurious claims that are not well confirmed in a spoken portion of the job interview. It feels like a FizzBuzz version of environment knowledge and tools skills.

The kind of coding tests I don't like are the ones that seem too onerous and involved for the given role. I have recently phone interviewed with a company, which they don't make their own software as a revenue source but build software for other clients. I talked over the phone with one of the lead programmers, discussed my skills, situations related to my work experience, etc.

Afterwards, he issued me a coding exercise with a VERY DETAILED .pdf document that felt uncomfortably close to a request for proposal and summaries of requirements. I hesitated and replied back about this. They assured me that this is not unpaid work and that everyone has to take this same test, in the language of their choosing. The test was intended to produce code for a MVC web app that they can evaluate. So I guess they really wanted sample code, despite having already produced other samples from Github, and discussed my real-world MVC work projects from my perspective as a mid-level developer (including one where I had architectural control).

I think the most disappointing thing, though, is that this long test is mandatory for everyone that they interview. So, the responses and decisions you make in the phone interview portion don't seem to have any real impact on the next step in the process. Someone could have a highly popular library on Github and they could still say, okay you gotta take this test. Non-trivial tests should be tailor made to a person's own experience.