Comment by ccajas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccajas | Hacker News Reader

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I have been laid off just before 2015 and I haven't found any stable work since then. I have been under-employed for a long while before the outbreak, and I don't even know what new change-ups in job hunting I should be doing now.

For a long time, many people have said that my years of experience make me valuable so that I should have gotten offers very quickly, but the reality hasn't shown that. Heck, even the founder of the startup company has told me, when I asked for his reference, that he was "very confused" that I haven't found any work for so long. And that was only a year in.

He unfortunately can't give me work anymore as he's tied up with his business. He did consider me for a follow-up freelance job before, but that was more due to a technicality that they needed a US developer for a particular job.

After being evaluated on mock interviews, turns out I'm in the peculiar situation where I am too underqualified for my years. But at least I have some experience working remote that should make me more appealing to employers.

I just can't call it impostor syndrome anymore if I consistently fail at getting full-time offers even when the economic climate was good.

My algorithm:

1) Decide which software engineering related role you want to work on (e.g. web frontends)

2) Enumerate the top skills that are relevant to that role by visiting job postings in companies you would like to work for. e.g.: React.

3) Enumerate the subset of those skills that you have. Those are your strenghts. Work in acquiring the skills you do not yet have. Those are your weaknesses (for now).

4) Visit Linkedin profiles for random employed people in such roles in various companies you would like to work for. Compare that to your own Linkedin profile.

5) In your profile, emphasize your strengths, deemphasize your weaknesses, while working on them in your spare time. And most importantly, list your skills using the skills feature. Recruiters use that to find people.

Personally I think you should leave out all mentions to "looking for a job" and such. That is a red flag. You do not want to tell recruiters that your skills are in low demand.

Also try to keep your job descriptions consistent and relevant to your target role. Rather than "role 1/role 2/role 3", just pick the most favorable/relevant description for role and stick with that.

It usually takes me 1 month to find a job.

This is great advice! In modern tech there is nonsuch thing as "my resume" only "the version of my resume i drafted to apply to a particular position". The fullstack developer is still wanted, engineering manager just want them to be fullstack in the exact stack their team is using.

“Under qualified for your years” is ageist bullshit. You’re either a capable L3,4,5,etc. Any coupling of those achievement brackets to age ranges (which cannot be completely detached from experience level) is discrimination.

It also depends on the level the GP is applying to. Is GP willing to take a L4 position although applied to be a L5? Of course usually that will come with comp expectations too.

> is ageist bullshit

True. As if they expect every 80 year olds to be nobel laureates. The thing is those with power to hire are hardly smart people, they just happen to have the power to hire, by chance.

Pretty sure it means "years of work" and not age.

That’s the plausible deniability part of it.

I'm not concluding that it's simply ageism, because this is feedback I'm getting from mock interviews, not real ones. Professionals tend to be more honest and open about how you interview if it's just for practice.

However the fact that you are using numbered levels instead of broader decscriptors like "junior" and "senior" means that we are thinking on different wavelengths. I guess you're talking Google-ese because it is harder to know what is "L3" without context.

I have obtained various kinds of feedback and working on some of my weaknesses, but "underqualified" and "repeating the same basic experience many times" are the most common themes.

Don't take this the wrong way (I'm trying to help, might fail but intentions are good) but it seems to me that the real reason you are having a hard time finding a "job" is because you have a history of leaving jobs after a short tenure.

I wrote "job" because working as a salaried employee is not the only way to make a living, or have a successful career. Consider that the freelance/contractor career you're currently having is 1) a career and 2) might be a better fit for you. Furthermore, some contractors I know make a lot more money than most of my salaried friends. The tradeoff being, of course, that you have no guarantees wrt to steadiness of your income (protip: salaried jobs come with no guarantees either, you could be out the next day, any day) and sometimes you have to chase down projects and deal with bad customers.

Sorry if something came out wrong, English isn't my first language.

> it seems to me that the real reason you are having a hard time finding a "job" is because you have a history of leaving jobs after a short tenure.

Brevity is to be expected in contract jobs. But I don't know if you are purposely trying to discourage me from finding salaried work which is my main goal.

I actually don't like freelancing at all, I prefer lower risk than freelance, and it is not paying me well anyways. No exact numbers but I made under 5 figures last year. Not really great for a US freelancer. I only do this to make some ends meet while I'm searching for a FT job.

You seem to have skipped the first part where I said I was just trying to help.

I wish you all the best in finding work as quickly as possible, sir.

I glanced over your LinkedIn profile, to me it looks like you need to add more 'modern' tech skills to your profile. It sucks, but the industry moves to new tech quickly and unless you are an enterprise Java developer, your skills get pretty much outdated in few years and you need to catch up at a fast pace.

I would learn (or highlight it if you already know) React.js and Node.js immediately, along with Postgres and MongoDB. That should get a good boost to the resume.

If you are going full stack, you would definitely need to put in AWS, especially micro services and serverless experience along with golang if possible. You can also learn Python if you want to try your hands on Machine learning as well, but I would recommend just focussing on React and Node.js as they are low hanging fruits and there are good enough openings for those two alone..

I have been in your shoes before and I know it could be overwhelming but you can do it.

https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

Can confirm this too.

Adding Salesforce, Docker, AWS, PostgreSQL, mySQL, MS SQL and stuff like that sometimes get scraped as keywords.

Sincere question:

Does anyone else think it's crazy that you need to know: React, node, Mongo, AWS, the Python machine learning stack, golang, a bunch of databases, microservice patterns, serverless infrastructure, Docker...to get a job in the tech industry?

Who are the people that actually know all this stuff?

It is crazy. I'm kind of one of those people.

Between my last two roles, familiarity and/or proficiency with the following technologies was required: React/Redux/JS/TS, Node/NPM, PostgreSQL, AWS (specifically Redis, ElasticSearch, Cloudwatch, CodePipeline, Lambda, S3, SQS, and RDS), Kotlin/Java/Spring/Maven/Gradle, C#/ASP.NET/MVC, Python, etc.

As well as testing frameworks / unit testing technologies like Selenium, JMeter, Postman/Chai, and Junit/Nunit/Pytest.

All of this hit me like a brick in the face over a 3 year period. I am NOT a master of any of them, but was definitely expected to be able to readily work with them. At times, it felt like I was supporting 5-6 different roles.

These were two startups with <100 people, so maybe that's why.

People <say> they know :-) Many hardly can write "Hello, World!".

I have "hobby" experience in React, Vue and Node if that counts. My resume contains a Github link plus one open source contribution on a React-based project. I just don't put them in my LinkedIn profile because it would be confusing to say "I know XYZ" in a professional profile but cannot list XYZ for something I did at work.

I think I've seen that roadmap diagram before and I notice that in every place I've worked/contracted at, their skills needs usually stop short after the "Version control" part. They don't do packages, modules and I am left in the dark about the deployment process. And I don't know if that lack of transparency of SDLC is done to me on purpose since for a long time I've been a contract dev hired to do some specific thing.

However, not everyone is privileged enough to go through the "standard techie" experience. Some of us never even heard about Leetcode until long after graduation, some of us only have experience in companies that don't believe in concepts like testing and good security.

Looks like the ideal places for me are somewhere that bridges the gap between the haves and the have-nots. A place that still has legacy work to be done but also is up to speed with newer things in other aspects. Does working at traditional F500 companies cut it?

You can put hobby experience in LinkedIn summary. Also you can make a real world project like for e.g. Covid019 tracker in React and can post it even as a professional experience.

It sounds like you've gotten enough positive feedback to know you're not an imposter. Sounds like it's your interview skills or first impression?

If I consistently fail interviews then it's reasonable for me to conclude that I really could be an imposter. But I have gotten interviews from many places small and big, including some FAANGs and Bay Area companies.

If it's just first impressions then I could be like a decent TV show but with a bad pilot. Seems like I might be an "acquired taste" kind of professional.

This is immensely forward but if you would like any help with your resume or interviewing I would be more than happy to help. I am no recruiting expert I believe I have some skill that may be useful. I've changed jobs every 18 months (by choice) for the past 6-7 years or so and I've interviewed with about 10x that many companies. No pressure, just wanting to help out.

Not sure if this will help you, but just putting it out there: Getting a job via a referral will boost your chances by quite a bit.

I am not sure what your core skills are, but in my case if I want to go work for a bank, via referral I get an immediate response (and even one other bank intercepts the referral).

Without a referral I don't even get a response.

I try to use referrals whenever I can. A few years ago got one which lead to two on-site interviews. Lately though people have been giving me the cold shoulder on LinkedIn or email, understandably they are tired of being pestered about jobs.

I don't socialize often to begin with but I always separate people into "family or friend" or "professional" buckets, never mixing the two.

The company I work for is looking for software engineers in the LA or Chicago areas, email me if you want more details :). Our product isn’t the most glamorous, but we take work/life balance really seriously.

I live in Chicago, and will email you soon.

I hate to say this but working for startups really warps everyone's sense of level and career progression. Startup management cares to retain talent and they often give out titles (Senior, Director, VP) like confetti. If you really want to know where you are, the old-school behemoths (e.g. IBM, Lockheed etc) tend to have better (and more rigid) levels.

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