spearingthehead's comments

I have applied to consulting firms, although just sparingly in the past. Didn't put a hard focus on them.

Several months ago, I sent cold applications to two software developer positions at Deloitte, and one at Infosys. They were all rejected as saying I did not meet qualifications for these positions or simply were "not moving forward".

I need to find a recruiter that is really hands-on with their candidates as you say though it takes effort. Most recruiters I've met just want to fill the role regardless of who it is because why would they spend time trying to improve someone's pitch when better candidates come along that already did the hard work for them.

But what I would be more interested is a talent agent model where agents represent you, the worker, unlike the recruiting model where they represent the companies hiring. However, they seem to be practically nonexistent in the field of software development.

I am seeking an individual contributor role and did not enter this career to get better at sales pitches. IC is the safer route, after all.

Let me worry about sales skills when I decide to take on the riskier path of entrepreneur or leadership roles.

For me it sort of fell on my lap as I wasn't really going out of my way to find a remote job. I was just in need of more work. It was 2013 and was still using Craigslist for job hunting, mind you. I was looking for a better opportunity as I was "benched" a lot with an agency that didn't provide constant weekly work.

The key was probably that they were a small startup with some degree of desperation because they were ghosted by a previous developer and needed a replacement quick. I also had fit the tech skills they needed (experience in a particular PHP framework, CodeIgniter). The founder was pretty flexible and forward thinking, as, probably from being a former developer himself, let all his developers work remote. The pay wasn't that good but the work was comfortable and got me familiar with web app development in a company that actually uses their tech product to make money for them.

Presumably a Masters (but not PhD) might be suitable as a "booster" for an ailing career, on top of being a career-changer. But I also see OP doesn't seem to doing terrible on their own. I only suggest it as a way to pull yourself out of a dump and have nowhere else to turn for help.

How do you find discipline without structured education? Especially when you lack anyone else to keep you accountable for your work?

Like the author of this article, I have a bad sleep schedule. It's something that came about from over 2 years of unemployment (and still job searching).

I kept a log of my job applications from last year. Going over them recently, I noticed that the timestamps gradually creeped up from afternoon to late evening as the year ended. I had a set "application window" of an hour but that window gradually shifted more and more into the night. I now go to bed very late around 4am and usually wake up at 1pm.

For some reason I find it hard to give the morning a "greater purpose" when you don't have a 9-5. There's not much in outdoor hobbies that I want to do (or afford to do) and I clean sporadically, no set schedule. I feel much less worse being awake and inside in the late night hours than to be up in the morning hours with nothing productive, so I just sleep through those morning hours. My peak energy has shifted more towards the late night.

Looking to see if I perhaps need an accountability partner. I am single and don't talk to close friends as much and even if I did they wouldn't be available most of the day because of their work schedules.

  Location: Chicago
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes (conditional)
  Technologies: JavaScript, Node, PHP, MVC frameworks, Ruby, .NET, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Git, Docker (basic), Apache
  Résumé/CV: on request
  Email: [email protected]

College graduate with no formal CS education. I've been freelancing for roughly 10 years, working as an independent contractor for boutique digital agencies, early startups and other small businesses. Even some game dev for indie game studios.

I want to transition from a freelance dev/webmaster type of role, to a better-paid and more formal SWE career. Collaborating with and learning from a team of engineers, to build and deploy products at larger scales.

On the tech side of things, I've been very much been a "code only" person. Usually working independently (sometimes alone, sometimes in a small group of developers) with feature work and closing tickets with little regard to formal processes. Hopefully this can be counteracted with my soft skills client-facing experience from agencies and freelance work, having spoken directly with clients to better understand their problems in high-level discussions to meet their goals. I am open to learning from more experienced engineers to obtain more marketable skills in automation, testing, and cloud services. And understanding the team dynamics of a larger company.

Not interested in contract work or high-risk ventures.

I will never learn anything for free or paying money for it again because it has become ineffective from my own experience. Now, I require a binding guarantee that something has to pay off.

Web design agencies and software body shops like WITCH are also tech companies.

They may not 100% own their own software work, foster a poor software development culture and probably build on spaghetti inherited from some offshore firm they paid no more than a few grand for. And I know many software developers that would advise against joining these companies. But still, these companies would not exist without computing or the internet. Therefore, they are tech companies.

It's especially worse when they are required by TOS to not engage in communication with bidders/clients outside the platform.

This would be like, for example, if you set up a job interview from a listing at Indeed, and then Indeed demands that you do not use regular email to stay in contact with the employer, you must use their own messaging system. And you can't even voice chat elsewhere unless it's a link that is provided by Indeed so they can be aware of it.

Just the walled garden aspect of freelancer websites is what turns me off.

It does happen a lot in physical collectible markets. It is what happened with WATA Games and the lawsuit against their employees for market manipulation through auctions. Or the Nike scandal with a VP's son using her CC and employee discount buying massive amounts of hyped sneakers and reselling them, which just made everyone more aware.

I tend to look at bi-modal as two bell curves that are close at a few parts, but not quite merging together, and tri-modal as three curves.

Wouldn't it be more sensible to treat each curve as one sub-category of the industry? It would at least make things more intuitive. My salaries tend to be in the bottom-most curve (55k was my top yearly income) and any changes in salaries in the top curve would probably have little to no effect on prospects at the bottom.

Hmm... A little over a year ago I enrolled in an interview prep program that was open to all levels of experience. I don't have as many as 17 years, but around 8 years which is still past junior/entry at this point.

Part of the program's requirement was that you apply to 25 jobs per week. In order to maintain that number, I had to send some of my resumes cold, usually via LinkedIn job listings.

I didn't get a good response rate but I just did it to meet that 25 per week quota. And if anyone's curious, no, I do not have a job yet after enrolling in that program.

  Location: Chicago
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes (conditional)
  Technologies: JavaScript, Node, PHP, MVC frameworks, Ruby, .NET, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Git, Docker (basic), Apache
  Résumé/CV: on request
  Email: [email protected]

I've been in the freelance world for roughly 10 years, working as an independent contractor for boutique web agencies, early startups and other small businesses. Even game dev for indie game studios. College graduate with no formal CS training or education.

I want to go from a freelance dev/webmaster type of role, to a better-paid and more formal SWE career. Collaborating with and learning from a team of engineers, to build and deploy products at larger scales.

As a freelancer, I have adequate client-facing experience, communicating directly with clients for to better understand their problems, and discussing RFPs to meet goals. On the tech side of things, I've been very much been a "code only" person. Usually working independently (sometimes alone, sometimes in a small group of developers) with feature work and closing tickets with little regard to CD/CI. I will need on-boarding to learn modern, systematic approaches to software engineering using methods involving automation, testing, and cloud services. And understanding the team dynamics of a larger company.

Not interested in contract work or high-risk ventures.

Does this exempt Amazon as well? I heard from an ex Amazon employee saying that 50-60 hour work-weeks is the norm there, and they work you to the bone, but he also didn't specify if that was for his particular team/department only.

I'm guessing this is one of the exaggerated downsides, possibly coming from a skewed perspective of what is "normal" for a SWE if you spent your entire career in FAANG.

In any case, I'm still sure that working as a Amazon SWE would be light years farther ahead than working in a bottom of the barrel chop shop that pays less than half of market salary.

In other words, worst of the FAANG should still beat the best of the bottom-tier companies, especially if you're taking home much more money in the end.

However, if you can't get far, there should be some way outside of work to build up your broad skills. "A" you can build up on free time, but it's also mostly isolating. "C" is harder to come by outside of work especially as an introvert. I think we have enough bootcamps and such for A. Workshops for how to be influential in professional settings would be beneficial, because reading books about the subject is still no substitute for face-to-face office interactions.

Whether or not 10 applications is inadequate, I found it to be very subjective and dependent on their resume and performance factors. For me, just like you conclude, 10 is indeed very little, because I've submitted nearly one thousand applications last year alone.

But I know that others have gotten an offer (or even several) after sending only a dozen or so, and so to them 10 applications might be "just enough". Some have even gotten new jobs multiple times without cold applying, where referrals are their way in and cold applying became history to them.

It is a strange problem indeed. I'm in a similar job seeking position as OP having difficulty convincing some companies that my lack of certain concrete knowledge should be a non-issue, when you consider the true spirit of what a software engineer is not what you know, but how you come to know things and your ability to adapt to them.

As a SWE, I've been told many times that the ability to pick up new techs and languages should be your bread and butter, and I believe this strongly. If you understand the basics of network requests and REST patterns then most web frameworks are the same. Frameworks are just abstractions on top of the basics. In the real world of job searching, nobody seems to care. They prefer specific names for keywords.

I've also been playing the numbers name for far too long that seems like I'm falling into a sunk cost fallacy. Unemployed since late 2019 and sent out nearly 2000 cold applications. Given a set of inputs defining job experience, what is someone's probability of getting an offer within the next week after 20 applications? After 100? Or after 500?

I tend to hate solving problems that give no visible signs of progress towards seeing the end, but at least when I do these kinds of problems at work, I'm getting paid for it. Right now I am trying to solve such a problem but without compensation, without much motivation.

Getting a job offer right now is biggest challenge that I've encountered in my life. I have not been as confused or clueless, nothing I've done for my career ever came close to stumping me. And it also should NOT have to be the biggest challenge in my life. Better candidates should be things like, how to organize and manage a team for a very large work project, or how to plan your savings strategy for an early retirement. Finding a job should be among the most basic challenges, not super complicated.

  Location: Chicago
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes (conditional)
  Technologies: JavaScript, Node, PHP, MVC frameworks, Ruby, .NET, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Git, Docker (basic), Apache
  Résumé/CV: on request
  Email: [email protected]

I've been in the freelance world for roughly 10 years, working as an independent contractor for boutique web agencies, early startups and other small businesses. Even game dev for indie game studios. College graduate with no formal CS training or education.

I want to go from a freelance dev/webmaster type of role, to a better-paid and more formal SWE career. Collaborating with and learning from a team of engineers, to build and deploy products at larger scales.

As a freelancer, I have adequate client-facing experience, communicating directly with clients for to better understand their problems, and discussing RFPs to meet goals. On the tech side of things, I've been very much been a "code only" person. Usually working independently (sometimes alone, sometimes in a small group of developers) with feature work and closing tickets with little regard to CD/CI. I will need on-boarding to learn modern, systematic approaches to software engineering using methods involving automation, testing, and cloud services. And understanding the team dynamics of a larger company.

Not interested in contract work or small startups. Remote work would not be a problem, having been accustomed to remote-only workflows since 2013.

Also, the landscape changed a lot since the time you started pivoting at 2008. That's just one year after the time I started my career, competition was less fierce.

Now I'm curious it it's become more difficult in the present day for an expert beginner to rebound, when there's far more beginner competition and boot camps are springing up everywhere today.

On the other hand, there are also a lot more learning resources online since the late 2000s. Still trying to weigh both things in my head and estimating whether a 2022 expert beginner would be at a net advantage today compared to 14 years ago.