Ask HN: Getting out of a long employment rut? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Getting out of a long employment rut?

17 pointsbrailsafe8 comments

This is a bit more complicated than just an employment rut. I've been in web development for roughly 8 years, but have only acquired 2.5 to 3 years of professional development experience depending on how you count it. Have been a front end developer for a few years now.

I've been through 4 tech jobs, 1 of which I was let go from apparently for lack of necessity, dismissed from 2 for performance reasons, and the remaining 1 for irrelevant reasons. I took up employment outside the industry for a short period of time to pay the bills and that was okay. Post-dismissal from my last formal position, and for reasons that led me to start looking for new work before they got to me first, I was massively burnt out for a very long time.

At present I'm 25 and have been professionally out of the industry since May of 2016. I've been working on code for the last year or so and interviewing for most of that time, unsuccessfully. Furthermore, now that I have experience in industry and out, it's hard to feel compelled to not relegate tech to a hobby and go in a different direction.

After almost exclusive failure, by most definite measures—I consider my experience, ability to work with people, communication skills, and overcoming burnout to be successes as much as they are—, what direction should I go in?

Is anyone else in a similar position?

P.S I'm in Canada which has less of a job market and can't cross the border professionally. I've also moved back home to attend a semester of school while I look for new opportunities.

there is a benefit to owning your story and owning your narrative.

If you can concretely demonstrate that you’ve grown through your experiences, it may earn you the respect of prospective employers.

It is a big risk to be dismissive of critiques though. It is productive to engage with critiques and be able to explain and convince.

Being dismissed from two positions for perf is not a good look. What can you say has changed since then?

I appreciate the feedback. If I was asked about your second sentence, I'm pretty sure I could show that I've grown through my experience. At least in some sense.

I can't quite tell if you're asking me, or asking whether I'd be able to answer what's changed, but I'll answer your last point.

In the first position, I was pretty fresh with version control and SPA frameworks. I've learned to not be overly optimistic in the sense that I think I can work through recurring glaring problems in code that have no obvious source and no obvious solution. I was hired on a tight deadline project, using EmberJS and Git for the first time. This is when Ember was pretty new and with bad docs. I was coming from an Angular background which also had bad docs and a high learning curve. I'd regularly run into problems that weren't visible to me, undocumented, etc.. I also didn't know how to approach these problems from a human perspective. As in, how and who do I ask for advice? This slowed development a lot. I also learned later that the framework was designed with convention over configuration in mind, but those conventions weren't clear. With Git I messed up in a lot of ways while learning to use it on a team.

The last position has mostly been a learning experience about recognizing burnout early, when there are systemic problems within a company, how to pick golden handcuffs, the importance of culture fit, and the importance of using the best tools for the job. Personally, I was perhaps overly optimistic about my personal ability to finish code on time given the environment. Otherwise, I was working in an environment that in some ways I'd compare to water torture. I've learned to recognize earlier when I won't be able to succeed long term in a place, whether it's me or the place.

It sounds like you werent given the space and time to learn as a junior dev on a project that needed seniors. I'd recommend making some commits to open source to publically demo your skills which will prove youve learnt from early mistakes and show a commitment to learning new things.

Good suggestion and you're probably right. At least in terms of JavaScript programming expertise in 2014. Looking back, I did have the skills in other areas but was perhaps overconfident about my JS programming skill. Since then I've developed more humility.

My github is here https://github.com/LukeTully. Whenever I'm using something that isn't working like it should, I try to find a way to contribute. I could definitely be more proactive about looking for contributions to make.

Just going by how you talk about the tech stack you work on and a brief look at your Github, my opinion is that you should have the qualifications needed to land a job at the Software Engineer level.

Going off the tangents a little bit, I think as an industry we're going through a phrase where we're having a whole new influx of qualified candidates and we're being overly picky in hiring.

A bit of anecdotal points -- I went through a job search earlier this year after my startup went through a shutdown. I have 10 years of industry experience at this point and have done well in all of it, having moved up in a big company from SE to Architect in 6 years, and then as CTO of my startup. I had a surprisingly difficult time landing an offer during my job search. After I did, and started at a company, I quickly also began interviewing new candidates for the company as well. This time from the other side's perspective, I found us to be surprisingly critical when selecting candidates. We have a ton of candidates coming from programs like Hack Reactor and other similar ones, who all have good working knowledge of our stack (the most common one out there now -- Node, React), but we're being almost overly selective in choosing who to take in. Many of the candidates who we rejected, though junior level, actually did relatively well in their interviews to the level where, 7 years ago at my last big company, I would've hired them when I interviewed them there.

I have a completely unproven and unbacked up theory that programs like Hack Reactor and others are giving us a massive influx of new qualified candidates now, and every company is seeing it, and suddenly every employer has intentionally or unintentionally raised their expectations in hiring because the supply allowed them to be a lot more selective. This is a bit of a counter-point to the general consensus that there's always huge demand for tech talent and not enough supply.

That's kind of you to say. Your story probably touches on a reality that myself and likely many others aren't really thinking about or taking seriously enough. In my—albeit very limited—experience talking to codecamp graduates, my impression is that the specific skills are taught for the React+Node stack, adding to the talent pool, but then the knowledge doesn't go very deep. I don't know how well those programs prepare people for generalized problem solving on the web. Reminds me of when some of my friends only learned jQuery. Granted, I probably wouldn't expect that from a focussed program either. What skills did you end up selecting for and how have those hires turned out?

Hey.. I'm in a very similar position.

I'm 26, have been at 4 different tech jobs in 2 years, dismissed from 2 for not great reasons. I'm based in the Bay Area, and looking for a new job now. Its definitely hard to explain the work history to employers. I was actually considering moving to Canada as I was recently granted a permanent residence there, but I don't know about the job prospects.

If you want to talk, email me at mathemagicalmonkey at gmail

Your in the wrong environment if your not able to do what you want. Find a place in the world where you can thrive.

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