Ask HN: Taking a junior SWE job at around 7 years? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Taking a junior SWE job at around 7 years?

I'm a professional web developer of 7 years that, if taken at the superficial face value of how many years I've worked, is one that is expected to be mid-level or approaching senior-level.

The problem is, my career growth feels stunted.

All of this seems to be confirmed by interview feedback I've gathered recently from several companies. The gist of it is, I show knowledge in a couple of topics, but don't show a lot of depth in any of them. I've shown capability to perform my work as expected and told that I write clean code, but that I can't grasp the "big picture" ideas of software development better, or the minutiae of a given programming language.

So with this in mind, would it be possible to go back to a junior position?

I prefer to do so in a larger company, because I have never been actually mentored or have much guidance from a senior dev. In two places, I was the only programmer around.

The problem here is that at showing 7 years of experience, it sounds like a turn-off for many companies if I show that I'm only capable at a junior-level. Perhaps removing my oldest jobs might help. How would you approach this?

View on HN

You are almost certainly selling yourself short.

If you have 7 years of experience, you almost certainly have important, non-junior level skills of value.

But companies do not hire people based on how good of a developer they are, they hire you based on how good you are at interviewing. These are corrolated, but not equivalent skills.

What you need to do is get better at interviewing.

Interviewing is a skill that needs to be practiced.

That means you need to get better at programming silly algorithms on a whiteboard.

Fortunately, this is a skill that can be practiced. There are loads of resources out there that will teach you exactly the stuff you need to know to become good at interviewing.

+1 .. Plus a lot of interviewing skills are just common people skills that you can screw up without thinking about it. Just keep interviewing and pay attention and review things afterwards. Simple things can make a difference. I had a job that I really hated and tended to bad-talk the company in interviews. I went for months without an offer as it, not surprisingly, turns out that people don't respond well to this. Once I stopped doing it I had 2 offers within a few weeks.

Interviewing is a lot like bowling. If all you can do is avoid stupid mistakes, you are doing better than 80% of people.

Also, study before your interview. The company, the products, and the tech being used.

Refresh yourself on the skills they're asking for. Not as a way to fake it, but as a way to make sure those topics are fresh in your mind.

To add to this, study everything on your resume. I hate interviewing people who say they "know DSP" but can't tell me why one might use a filter before down-sampling.

Agreed.

Also most companies won't give you honest feedback on what you did wrong in the interview, especially w.r.t. soft skills.

Join an interview prep class or mock interview workshop and try to get someone else to identify what you're weak on. It could pay off majorly and help land your dream job.

Any recs for classes in the Bay area? I've heard of interview cake and was considering getting it. But it seems not as useful as a class.

I've been lucky enough to have collected feedback from at least a handful of companies. I've also interviewed with TripleByte. They didn't match me with a job but they are detailed on what I did wrong in the interview. They also said I sounded a bit nervous. I don't stutter or shake my voice so I'll have to figure out what are other signs of nervousness that I might be showing.

Most of the non-generic feedback I got on tech skills followed the same theme- I have breadth in knowledge, but not depth. I'm not as "T-shaped" as I thought I was.

Getting better at interviewing is cynical and not good advice.

The OP isn't looking for how to land a job, they are looking for how to actually become a better software engineer. People that are better at interviewing than they are at engineering are not doing anyone a favor.

It takes a lot of courage and insight for the OP to recognize their predicament and come to the solution of applying for a junior position.

I have over two decades professional experience across many organizations and I contend that is an absolute truth that one can spend years (even seven) with little to no mentoring and advance in skills less than an equally adept person who had one or two years on a team that really helped them grow. I've seen it happen and I've had it happen to me early on when I saw an engineer I used to mentor (but I had none myself at the time) leap frog me in capabilities when he went to another job that had even better mentors.

Getting better at interviewing is not going to help as much as getting a job at a company that gives them better support. If it takes a junior position to find that environment, so be it. But expect to advance extremely quickly, so set that expectation with the employer that they will support the promotions as they are earned.

You're on point, dav.

For me I think the best strategy to take in being more employable (and hence having an easier time advancing to a more ideal position) is to start building up desirable experience in the next job I take.

It's been a while since I have been gainfully employed (my ex-boss gives me freelance work at least) so right now in downtime I apply for jobs and set up interviews. I've been fortunate enough to get detailed feedback from a few places.

In particular with TripleByte. They've been very helpful in finding holes in my interviewing style, and knowledge base. Even though they couldn't find a targeted job match for me they run down in detail what I did wrong and what I could do to improve. And I do feel like it's hitting home.

I feel like I've "Peter Principal" myself to a junior role. Most of the companies I've been with are on the smallish side, with small tech departments. A marketing agency that outsources to India, shows little care on the craft, no basis on testing, integration, or automation.

Another one, a magazine company where I was the one man band when it comes to programming. Nobody else knew how to code. I had to deal with putting out fires working with a legacy code base and had to cowboy-code my way out of problems.

These experiences have made somewhat of a self-starter, but I need more structure. I need to know how to apply TDD principles, figure out the best way to solve an algorithm, or depending on the company, pair program with someone.

It's like competitive games. I can't get really good unless I can practice alongside someone that can consistently kick my ass. Eventually I may be able to kick theirs more consistently. Craft my own problem solving approach that I can call my own, use it as a selling point.

Granted, I'm only just about one decade into my career, so I'm not that late in the game.

The "one year of experience" phenomena is too real. I'd like to read some articles not just that show examples of it, but also teach effective methods to correct it. I don't find a lot on dealing with the latter.

I agree with the parent. I think you are selling yourself short. Who says every dev needs to be deep? A lot of us get to very senior positions by being very broad. I suck at interviewing but have always managed to find amazing jobs where people looked up to my breadth.

If you have 7 years of experience, you almost certainly have important, non-junior level skills of value.

If only that were true. There is a difference between having 7 years of experience and 1 year of experience 7 times. If he hasn't had a mentor and been in a bubble, it's possible that his skill set is not as high as it "should be" based on the number of years he's been working.

I found myself in a similar situation around 2008. I started programming in 1986 when I was 12 in AppleSoft Basic and assembly, went to college, got a degree in CS in 1996 and spent the first 12 years of my career being a solid C++ "programmer", who dabbled in other languages.

During those 12 years, I was also the only programmer at the company without a mentor. I could write clean code, bit twiddle with the best of them, but hadn't been exposed to sound engineering practices.

In 2008, at the age of 34, I humbled myself, got a job as what I would consider a junior "software engineer" (making about the same thing as I was already making) and spent the next 8 years, learning from others, studying, and job hopping my way between 4 jobs and becoming what I consider a pretty good architect.

Coincidentally, I'm age 34 right now. So at that point where you were at a crossroads you turned things around. Did you work at large companies to correct that? Do you think development team size make an impact on your career growth?

Being at a large company isn't what made the difference. Even though I didn't realize it at the time, I think it is more important to work at a company that sells software and sees software development as a profit center and not a cost center.

There are some requirements I would look for:

1. Do they have automated tests?

2. Do they enforce code reviews?

3. Do they use some type of continuos integration system?

4. Do they use source control - preferable Git?

5. For the server side, do they use a statically type language - Java, C#, or even NodeJS/TypeScript

6. Do they have organized training sessions like lunch and learns?

I'm at a point in my career now where I'm pretty confident in what I know and I'm the only architect at my company. I ask for advice a lot from some of my former more experienced coworkers on a private Slack channel that we still use.

To all those questions I can answer 'no' to all of them, besides no. 4 because I do use Git. Damn. Now if only I can get offers from companies that have the other qualities.

We are the same age and have about the same length of experience.

I totally get where you are coming from because I began to feel I wasn't learning anything new and just repeating the same processes. So I left after 3 1/2 years.

Since then every job I've had I try to work for people I can learn from and grow.

Having people who can mentor or just being around smart people and seeing how they work and implement processes can be really helpful.

Same thing happened to me and I'm the same age. Except it was this year and not 2008.

I found myself in this scenario pretty recently. I had about 5 years experience at a non-tech company with experience in a million things.

I had to move and was getting killed in interviews for sr. positions, until I wasn't. I found a company that saw my value and gave me a chance. I contracted for them for a few months then landed a 6-figure job doing stuff I'd never done before.

I would encourage you to hold your head up, build some stuff in your spare time, and find a company that values what you are. If you are capable with JS in any capacity, double-down on that since it seems a lot of people are being hired from that. Plus you can show projects that can impress people of all backgrounds.

I would also encourage you to reach out to any past associates or linkedin connections.

Another resource I recommend for people is Mike Hartl's book(1) on Ruby on Rails. Yes, it does teach you that language/framework specifically, but it also shows you how the web and server-side applications work. You will be able to speak about REST, DB Associations, OO concepts, TDD, and several other buzzwords that impress employers.

I don't know your work of course, but from the sounds of it you have a better shot than you think! Go get 'em.

[1]https://www.railstutorial.org/book

I'm on mobile so not much time to type, but I do have a few JS projects. Some of them novel. I made a software renderer in JS that rasterizes triangles and takes JS shaders, emulating a programmable pipeline.

I hope that I would at least stand out from most JS developers with stuff like this. I don't really have an interest in making a Twitter clone with a Bootstrap UI. I'm hoping someone takes a chance at my skills with my not so typical JS projects.

When hiring a junior developer (or anyone, really), the attraction is the gleaming future potential of a person. So, if you want to get hired, you'll need to be projecting an exciting upward trajectory no matter what. I think you'll find it unconvincing to say "yes, I've been at it for seven years, but look, I should be able to do your junior work at least, yes?"

So you want to frame it differently. For example, provided this is true, you could emphasize that you've been the most senior person in your company, but that your company offered limited growth opportunities. Now you're just champing at the bit to work with people from whom you can learn and grow, and you're overflowing with energy to do so. Demonstrate why it's true, perhaps with examples of things you've been poking at on your own. Or something. You need your story to be true, and the above might not be. But you do need to have _a_ communicable story.

Second that this is a good reason to leave a company. Ideally you'll have some certain growth opportunities in mind to learn at the new place.

I'd say go for a mid-level position. Most mid-level positions are really junior positions anyways given the way most companies define mid/senior positions. When interviewing look for feedback practices that can help you learn, like regular code reviews and peering. Every developer is constantly learning and some companies embrace that more than others, if you can find a company that takes it seriously then it shouldn't really matter if it is a junior position or not.

There's a difference between a software engineer and a web developer.

I'm assuming you build websites? Web developers don't typically deal with the sort of algorithmic problems that software engineers tend to deal with.

You're essentially switching to a new career path, which is not a deal-breaker.

Simply explain to companies that you are a senior level WEB developer, but a junior-level software engineer.

Honestly, being a web developer is dead nowadays anyway.

>>being a web developer is dead nowadays

What does that even mean?

being a web developer in the sense of making websites is something that is left to marketing teams and others. You likely will not be developing a website by writing raw HTML, PHP, etc. anymore.

Now web application development is very much alive, but that tends more to software development.

When I hear "web developer" I think of a person who produces web applications. "Web designer" is the term for someone who produces WordPress sites.

This highlights a very key problem that the OP may be having.

Less important than whether or not he is "junior", he needs to know what to call himself in order to correctly communicate the value proposition he's offering to the potential employer's HR department. The only way to know that is to figure out what people call what he wants to do in his market.

Maybe he's a "web developer", maybe he's a "software engineer", maybe he's something in between. But he should definitely A/B test terms to see whether his responses change and how.

The problem is "web developer" is a junior role now. Nobody hires web developers with 10 years of experience unless they know the underlying "software engineer" stuff to go along with it. The market is flooded with bootcamp devs that are now doing what was considered 'software engineer only' territory 10 years ago. Some designers are also getting wise and realizing that HTML/CSS and javascript aren't beyond their ability to learn.

I'm aware that job titles tend to be loosey-goosey in many programming jobs, aside from the largest of companies that have a big enough sample size.

For instance, my title for a web marketing agency was 'associate software engineer'. It was the typical job of setting up CMS sites, customizing plugins for them, or occasionally making a very static site from scratch.

I gradually got into doing more complex work like writing apps on MVC frameworks. But I think there may be indeed another career ladder I need to jump on if I want to actually do the "engineering" part correctly.

Perhaps they're no longer web scale?

> Web developers don't typically deal with the sort of algorithmic problems that software engineers tend to deal with.

Software Engineers rarely deal with the sort of algorithmic problems you're thinking of. Engineering isn't about the basic fundamentals of CS. It's about thinking in systems. A person developing an individual component of a system may deal with algorithmic problems, but unless they're also contributing to the architecture and design of the system as a whole they aren't doing engineering, either.

For a while I was building only websites, but eventually took on web app projects that leveraged MVC frameworks and had to build upon in-house REST APIs that to integrate with the products.

No algorithmic problems, though, you're right about that. The closest thing I can think of relating to time complexity for web dev are when N+1 queries are used unnecessarily. I fix those, and change them into single queries.

For what it's worth, though, Amazon did reach out to me and I did two rounds of interviews with them. I bombed the tech on the second one.

Senior level web? Heh, even in web don't even think I'm that far. I have zero professional experience with anything but PHP which is going out of demand in newer positions.

On the JavaScript side I have done two React projects, all the companies I worked for had old-school JS though. Bunch of vanilla JS with jQUery strewn in, hundreds of files, no usage of Node nor modules.

Have you actually received offers at the junior/mid level? Or are you just thinking of applying?

I wouldn't worry about "years" too much. It's very very easy to work a number of years and still be a "junior" skill level. I see it all the time. It's not even a criticism of the person at all; if your job is "perform minor fixes/improvements to this web app" and you do that for 5 years, for example, you're not likely to have technical skills beyond the junior level even though you've worked for many years. This is not a problem. It just means that if you want to move your career forward you will need to find a position in a more tech-oriented, forward-moving, mentorship-based organization.

A senior developer at a non-tech organization can easily translate into a junior or mid level developer at a major tech or tech startup.

The magic of it all. You are selling yourself short. You know and are capable of way more then you give yourself credit for. There are three camps, those you think they are everything, those who doubt themselves and those who have no clue of their value. The trick is finding the value spot for yourself. Likely you are in the middle, which is perfect, but if you don't learn how to sell yourself you will suck donkey dick (e.g. be at the bottom end).

Your job when applying for any position is to learn to sell your skill set and show what you can do for others. Learn to celebrate your success and tell other people what you can do, that is how you will make it to the next level. Sorry, it isn't all about perfect skill, it is about selling what skill you have.

Do a side project, sell yourself on it, unless it works out and you can profit from the side project itself.

I thought most companies don't care about side projects.

Really? I get asked if I got some side project in most of the interviews... besides it is a good way of improving the skills he says is lacking

Where do you live and what type of jobs do you apply to?

Uruguay(South America)... mostly semi-senior android and fullstack web developer

It matters if it is related to the job, usually it doesn't matter, to at least the python shop i was getting interviewed didn't seem to care my 5 years worth of projects in PHP and C#.

Side projects and volunteer work helped me earn my current position. ~mid-level programmer at a large digital media corporation.

My side projects are what swayed them. That and knowing some specifics to media of course. It wasn't solely the side projects, but they helped display a breadth of skill that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to with only work that I was paid by somebody else to do.

Two instances where side projects caught an employers interest just fell through with an offer in the last minute. In both cases, they over-estimated their need and funds to hire a new employee. So I'm just chalking that up to bad timing. Hoping to get the attention of larger, more financially stable companies with my projects.

There are so many variables, it really is hard to know how to hit the right points with anybody. I'm sure there's ultimately some sort of data correlation that could be produced about what, on average, attracts certain types of employers. I don't think it translates well to individuals, though -- there's too much to know in the larger job market. Unless you have a laser-focused intent on one position in one company in one industry, it's pretty much a scattershot.

In the media company I now work for, my manager is pseudo-technical. He had an engineer sit in on the interview for any technicals. Outside of the side projects, one of the major points I scored with them was that I knew anything at all about Adobe DPS -- and I hardly knew a thing. Vague private interest in how modern publishing was being handled translated into a position in a company that does it. Downloading an outdated demo at one point to play around for an hour or so translated into talking points. The engineer relied more on general technical knowledge for his approval, and seemed to avoid the typical "programmer interview" questions.

So! I guess my point is that people shouldn't rule out play as valid experience! Isn't that how most of us started on this kind of work to begin with?

Do things, build things, break things (and then fix them)!

When I interview people, I care about tangible evidence to back up what they're saying. That doesn't have to be side projects, but it can be, especially for people who have boring day jobs. (Conversely, if you actually did communicable stuff in your real job, I'm not going to care about a lack of side projects.)

One challenge I face with applicants is that they actually have 1 year of experience 7 times and not 7 years of experience. You should consider if that's what they are seeing.

Some people are doing the exact same thing they were doing years ago and have no depth. Your challenge will be to paint a different picture. Which is easily possible. It sounds like you are interviewing but maybe not doing well face to face. Maybe you just need more prep and its not a deep issue?

What does that really mean, "1 year of experience 7 times"? The candidate has the memory of a goldfish and literally relearns their skills every year? I think you're undervaluing experience in general.

It means they haven't really grown through their 7 years to do more advanced things and work on more complex projects.

Adding features to the average business CRUD app on a LAMP stack for seven years straight is a lot different than applying your skills and energy to things like distributed systems, bigger scale projects, learning better abstractions and design patterns, etc.

Actually, as I've seen it used, it usually is an alternate way of saying "that person is a job-hopper." The actual work on the resume is less relevant to a person using this phrase, usually, in my experience, than that they have had "sticking power" to stay with a given project through multiple phases (development, maintenance, etc.).

For me it actually means the same thing over and over. Had a guy with "15 years" of experience interview one time. He analyzed scientific data, sounded good. When we got into it he'd literally been writing/managing a parser in perl for a data sent with only minor changes. He did this for 15 years. Terrific waste of time. That guy was what I meant. He'd solved a specific set of problems over and over and never grown beyond that.

At big companies, it's easy for a junior developer to get stuck maintaining the same feature and not learning about different domains or tools.

It's a way to easily dismiss 7 years of working experience.

Generally it means that the person being discussed hasn't spent those years acquiring skills that are specifically useful to the interviewer. So the years spent acquiring different skills don't count.

The intent is probably to say that the interviewee has spent 7 continuous years doing a job that can be done as easily by a person with one year of experience as someone with more, and therefore does not provide the necessary challenges to stimulate development in the employee. But again, it is still summarily dismissing actual experience just because it didn't happen in the right place, and is a variant of "not invented here" syndrome.

The people who say things like that should likely not be discussing "years of experience" at all, as their focus seems to be on breadth and depth of skillsets. The "seven years of experience" guy likely knows how to do X, Y, and Z, while the "one year of experience 7 times" guy likely only knows how to do X. In that case, talk about X, Y, and Z, instead of T.

It's definitely an issue of selling oneself. You either get stuck with an interviewer if your resume is not great or if you don't sell what you can do.

There are people that either via the jobs they choose or the long tenure at a company haven't built a strong case that they can tackle anything other then a small domain of problems.

I had an interview once who had 15 years of managing scientific data (he wrote a parser then changed it when the data set had format changes a few times a year) that parser and platform remained unchanged for 15 years and he had no other duty.

Another interviewee had only built WordPress sites for 4 years. He had no other projects (hobby or professional) to illustrate he could do more.

I see your point regarding a skill set that is maybe just not useful to the interviewer, certainly in 7 years there should be more. People can and do spend time working on very narrow problems though.

That parser guy had 15 years of experience with that one single parser. If he spent 15 years doing 15 different things a year at a time--one year of experience 15 times--he would have had a broader, but shallower skill set. That wouldn't be more valuable in general, but it would be more likely to include skills that any particular interviewer values. But then he would still be dismissed as having "one year of experience, 15 times" from a guy who maybe wants someone with 15 years of experience specifically in writing parsers.

Time is a limited resource, and it belongs to the individual. You can't reasonably expect that someone will spend it making themselves more valuable to you when you aren't paying them, or even holding out a reasonable prospect of paying them in the future. By happy coincidence, there are plenty of people out there that will make themselves more valuable to 10000 interviewers just like you, by acquiring skills that seem to be popular or becoming popular, but there are many more that won't live their lives for other people on the off chance that it might be rewarded someday.

You can't really measure skills by how long someone has done something. Some people can learn a new skill and be better at it after two weeks than someone who has done it for ten years. And there are also people who can practice a skill for ten years and be 100000 times better at it than the guy who just learned it two weeks ago. To make those judgments, you have to be able to measure aptitude, rather than just read timespans off a resume.

And right there, with the WordPress guy, you're implying that he wasted 4 years of his time because he didn't spend any of it preemptively learning any of the things you find valuable. Why should he? He hadn't even met you yet. How long had your job posting been open, declaiming that your company would need someone with M years of experience in skill X when it starts hiring for that in N years? (Yes, I know that's not how it works.) Did you even try to gauge how skilled he was able to become at WordPress site development after four years? Did you wonder why it took him 4 long years of doing just that before wanting to move on to something else? Or did you preemptively strike him off your list for having no prior "years of experience" in skill X?

My point is that I would very much prefer it if the industry hired for general aptitude rather than specific skills. If that doesn't happen, I would still prefer it if interviewing companies used a different metric for measuring the skills they find valuable than the total time spent practicing them. The glib comparison between "N years of experience" and "1 year of experience, N times" just presses all of my rage buttons at once. It almost perfectly highlights the gross disrespect that potential employers have towards job-seekers whom they perceive as unfit to serve them. It is part of the arrogance that prevents companies from critically examining their own hiring processes.

>One challenge I face with applicants is that they actually have 1 year of experience 7 times and not 7 years of experience. You should consider if that's what they are seeing.

I think this is very real. So how do you correct this problem and sell the perception that you are able to do well?

Interview prep, like Pramp? I did get some feedback from TripleByte at least.

Without knowing you - it's hard to say.

Ultimately having confidence and being able to demonstrate how your history makes you a good fit is going to combat that perception.

When you tell people about your work history - does it sound mostly like the same kind of problems/tasks? How can you show you did more than that?

Any outside projects you have that show diversity in experience?

Regarding your statement about Pramp - are you failing on the coding part of interviews? Not to get into the validity of white board exercises as a method for filtering candidates - I personally don't think putting people on the spot is a skill set that you actually need to do the work.

Is it possible you are stuck in a rut due to troublesome interviews? As I said above lack of confidence to sell yourself can be sabotaging you.

What a crazy idea. I mean, if you want to be paid less, go for it. Mid and senior engineers aren't walking tomes of CS knowledge. And junior engineers aren't the only ones learning. I've mentored quite a few senior engineers. As others have said here, you're probably bad at selling yourself in an interview.

Hit me up on [twitter](https://www.twitter.com/davidsilvasmith) or [email](mailto:david@splt.io) I'm curious to learn more about what you are looking for.

Sounds good. Email sent.

Web is the most evolving technology. Unlike a java or c developer, web developer should refresh himself everyday. Doesn't matter if one is 1 or 10 year developer. With a 5 year experience, I must confess I feel like I know a few. Here is a good article[1] by David Walsh describing this feeling. At an interview, I can say I wrote apps with Vue, Angular 1.x and React but if they ask a question like "how to add a new cookie with specific domain using JS", I can't code without googling.

[1] https://davidwalsh.name/impostor-syndrome

Mentorship is important, but you can get mentorship without taking a junior position.

I have a very similar history in terms of starting my career as the only developer in my first few jobs. When I finally joined a few (small!) teams in a row that a) included other seniors; b) used mature processes; and c) included code review on every pull request, I caught up very quickly.

A capable manager or VPE/CTO who's committed to helping their reports grow is also invaluable to a senior developer.

And yes, it sounds like you may need to work on your interview technique.

It sounds like you haven't really been pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, and instead have plateau'd in terms of growth.

Pick something that you find interesting, and go really deep in it (read books on the topic, develop OSS oriented around it). For a mid or senior level engineer, companies want someone with a broad enough set of skills that they can tackle most problems given to them, but also has a deep knowledge of one or more areas (which adds to the collective group of talents among the engineering team).

My company Mattermark is hiring, and I'd be happy to talk to about the full stack position we have. We have several more senior engineers on staff that are great mentors. We also work with a range of technologies that give you a chance to sample broadly but also go deeply in 1-2 areas. This includes everything from crawling/scraping to website to REST/Graph QL API to 3rd party integrations.

Hit me up through kevin@mattermark.com

Thanks, I'll be in touch with you soon.

I am going to get downvoted like hell for this, but if you feel like what they are saying is true, then sure.

Yeah. I'd chop a couple of the oldest jobs off my resume and look for companies with a culture of mentorship and training.

A fresh start will be great for landing easy (underpaid) jobs, i had a friend that used that strategy and when the team realized that he wasn't a JR they quickly promote him to bigger projects and way better pay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com