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> I felt like that I should've got promoted after reporting those issues, especially since I found them within my frist two weeks

You won't ever get a promotion within two weeks, especially not over a single instance of good work. Do it a hundred more times, then think about a promotion.

I think you seriously need to re-evaluate your expectations about this stuff.

And perhaps work this thought into your head: "My job is to make my boss look good, not to impress his boss or higher."

"My job is to make my boss look good, not to impress his boss or higher."

This is really important. Not only will it make your time at a company much easier, it will increase your chances of promotion and it will make it easier to get future jobs as you will have one happy manager who is willing to vouch for how good you are.

> I received a rejection from state farm today stating that I'm not a good fit. Even though I meet the qualifcations.

Speaking as someone who has interviewed a few dozen candidates, this likely means you're rubbing people up the wrong way. Based solely on reading this comment alone:

> I felt like that I should've got promoted after reporting those issues, especially since I found them within my frist two weeks

If I interviewed someone who told me they left their previous job because they weren't progressing after raising issues immediately after being hired, that would be a hard no from me.

> If I interviewed someone who told me they left their previous job because they weren't progressing after raising issues immediately after being hired, that would be a hard no from me.

This.

OP's tales convey the idea of someone who holds himself at an uniquely high esteem that's not shared by anyone who contacted directly with him.

I mean,it's highly unusual that someone that barely can land an entry-level customer support role and still fails to keep it would be able to meet the bar of any of the FANGS, specially when they value personal traits.

To make matters worse, in the few jobs he managed to land he proceeds to act in ways that antagonize their leadership,both direct and skip-level, and also create problems for everyone around instead of solving them.

Managers want to hire people to solve their problems and help move things forward, not create more problems and act as a blocker.

"Overqualified" in concert with your employment record of very short stints means they're worried you won't be happy at the job and you'll leave for something else. Which, bluntly, they're right to be worried about.

Hiring a person has a pretty high fixed cost for the company (in time spent setting things up, doing their end of the paperwork, making time to show you the ropes, etc.), and it's only worthwhile if it's an investment - i.e., if the person being hired stays.

Your resume gives an employer absolutely no reason to believe that you'll stay. So you have to be extremely convincing about that when you talk to them - that means you have to be extremely convincing that you'll be happy working at a job even if it's not the right fit for you, even if they don't recognize you as much as you think you deserve, even if the internal email system maxes out at 1 GB.

(The person who's hiring you almost certainly also has an ambition to a higher role, has been slighted for recognition before, and has their own complaints about the IT setup! I've never heard anyone say "My company is over-promoting me and our internal email system is too good." So if you give them any reason to believe that those sorts of things are dealbreakers for you, and not things that you too will put up with, they'll expect you to leave. They're not going to convince themselves it's fine to hire you because that problem won't happen here.)

For instance, if they ask you why you left Amazon, you'd better not be saying "I found an important problem and I didn't get recognition for it." Tell them you had a personal emergency or something.

> For instance, if they ask you why you left Amazon, you'd better not be saying "I found an important problem and I didn't get recognition for it." Tell them you had a personal emergency or something.

Can I push on that a little? Lying is a Bad Move. There are, however, ways to finesse the conversation if it comes to that.

But there's literally no reason you can't just come out and say, "I wasn't getting benefits, and I need benefits." Honesty works there. It's fine to say, "I'm looking for a career with a brighter future than warehouse work, and I think I have the skills to work here because {insert experience}."

I'm not a frequently flyer on either side of the interviewing table, so I don't know for sure how this sort of advice sounds, but when I interview I expect honesty. If the process isn't candid, neither party is happy and there's a lot of wasted time and money on both sides.

I dunno, OP seems to have realized (according to other comments) that it was a bad move, and "I randomly decided to give up a job that in retrospect I could have put up with" does sort of seem like a personal emergency. :) To be clear I'm definitely not saying that you should make up a story "I had to take care of my grandma" or whatever.

I don't advocate lying (and as a personal quirk I'm very unlikely to tell an outright lie). But it's going to be very difficult to explain why you left all of those jobs in a way that doesn't scare an employer. If you can drive the conversation to roughly "it was a bad time in my life," that seems a) basically true b) personal enough that it'd be unprofessional for the interviewer to probe for details c) unlikely to make the interviewer fear that it will be an ongoing problem.

I guess the real advice here is, come up with an answer for this very foreseeable question, which you can say with a straight face and without getting yourself into more trouble.

> But it's going to be very difficult to explain why you left all of those jobs in a way that doesn't scare an employer.

If you work at a place for two months, don't put it on the resume?

If you have a gap in your employment, you need to be able to talk about that, but you don't have to talk about each stop.

In an interview, I'll ask about gaps. One ran something like, "I was laid off in {year} and took {weeks} to recover. It took me {months} to find a job at {company}. I took the role because of my financial situation, but I'm interested in you because I think our situations overlap better." That's not quite verbatim, but similar to what I had with someone we hired (I was part of the interview team, but I've never been a hiring manager). It didn't raise any red flags to me. His experience at his prior employer wasn't good, but he communicated effectively that he felt like we'd be a better fit, and we were.

Anecdotally, we had a candidate come in who was junior but pretty well educated. A thin resume in his situation would have been fine: we understood where he was coming from. I perceived a little insecurity from the two-page resume that could've been reduced to a few line items with a stronger emphasis on skills he brought to the table, and with a little probing on technical matters found that his purported experience was not what I would've expected from his background. Less in this case would've been more.

I don't know the OP from Adam, so I'd hesitate to offer much advice here; from the comments I'd think that there's a good reason to talk to a good counselor about the personal background and challenges and address the professional retooling after: but that's hard when you're down on your luck without money. Churches often offer this sort of service, but reading between the lines I'd guess that may not be an avenue for the OP.

Professionally I'd concentrate on starting over or looking to see if there are trade schools that would accommodate. One local to me is completely free and would provide a skillset for at least earning a living while trying to pursue other interests.

It sounds like OP's employment history consists entirely of 2-month-ish stints, and so leaving short stints off would mean having no professional experience on the resume.

Now, that might actually be the right answer in this case (your "starting over" suggestion, more or less).

"Finessing" the conversation and telling partial truth is also lying. No one ever got hired without some lying, whether they exaggerated some part or left out another.

E.g.

"Why did you leave Company X?"

"I hated it and was fired for low performance. But I'm much better now!" said no one ever.

Say "family emergency" and they'll always take you at your word and leave it at that. Just don't overdo it -- more than one of those might look a little fishy.

> "Finessing" the conversation and telling partial truth is also lying. No one ever got hired without some lying, whether they exaggerated some part or left out another.

I suppose that's an opinion, though I disagree.

There are certain things, for example, that an HR rep is not allowed to ask you by reason of law. I omit questions and don't volunteer information like that all the time; is that a lie? I also never, or rarely, volunteer my current salary; is that a lie?

It's always the case that different perspectives tell the same story in different ways, and part of what OP may need is a changed perspective.

If I were fired from a job for cause, it's likely that I'd need to have an explanation. Not all places will check references or confirm employment history, but were I a hiring manager I would. If that came up I'd want to chat with references and the candidate about the situation.

> But there's literally no reason you can't just come out and say, "I wasn't getting benefits, and I need benefits." Honesty works there.

The problem is that (a) you should have noticed the lack of benefits before you accepted the job, and (b) it doesn't make any sense to quit due to lack of benefits without another job lined up that does provide benefits.

Also, to be direct -- you appear to have little to no programming skill. You've never worked as a dev before, except perhaps at IBM, from which you transitioned to QA? You have no college degree in programming. And you're applying to the top echelon of software companies, that have the ability to have a shot at almost any candidate they want.

You need to be a fulltime dev somewhere, and without a degree (let alone from a great school) or experience, you're not aiming at a company likely to hire someone like you. Startups won't either; to be blunt, you're a giant project I would have to pour senior engineering time into to maybe get a competent junior dev on the far side. If you don't flake again.

My suggestion is either a coding bootcamp (I've hired out of appacademy.io), or finding a company big enough to have (super) junior engineers -- meaning a devteam probably 75+ -- and impressing someone enough to get a job there. Then you need to bust ass for the next two years, and show a hiring manager elsewhere that you're worth taking a shot on.

This person is correct in that:

You MUST show your programming skills.

How?

* Github. I spent 4 months programming a project in NodeJS, ReactJS, Postgres, (+ html/css of course) on Linux. I posted the code on Github for the world to see. Within 2 weeks I was hired to my first 100% programming job: $80k, on 1099 contract. Two months later, I was hired on salary at $105k by a different company. Once I had those on my resume, plus the github code, and the two next bullet points, recruiters began contacting me. Sure, no one paid me for those 4 months, and it was a grind, but now they certainly do pay me.

* A web portfolio. Web Dev is my bread and butter. How could I call myself a Web Dev without my own website?

* LinkedIn presence + LinkedIn Connections

To build skills:

* Udemy.com , Youtube, other video sites (google "sites like udemy" for more)

* IRC --> Google "nodejs community" and you'll find there's an IRC chatroom filled with hundreds of Node devs, many of whom are experts & work at major tech companies. There are also chatrooms on Discord and Slack, besides IRC. And they offer chatrooms in many languages & frameworks

* eBooks. Free ones.

This is certainly a possible route. To be honest, I'm not sure the poster has the ability to carry through a four month self-directed project like that; a bootcamp and/or working as a junior engineer provides far more structure and direction.

You bring up a great point.

I actually attended a bootcamp for 1 week, but thought it was over priced and didn't provide much instruction (25 students, 2 instructors, sometimes only 1 instructor. After a lecture on a topic, I'd spend 95% of the day just googling stuff. Also, the lessons were not structured in a pedagogical way in my experience there. That said, it was just after bootcamps became a thing-- I was one of the first cohorts at the one I attended).

So, I dropped out after the first week and was refunded remaining tuition. I went back to the workforce and learned dev part-time.

Bootcamps seem to be about 12 weeks (that's 3 months) plus about $12,000 or so. Whereas I took 4 months & paid zero. But that said, I already knew how to program when I started my project.

The project was more about showing strangers that I had the skills I claimed to have.

> I felt like that I should've got promoted after reporting those issues, especially since I found them within my frist two weeks.

Take this with a grain of salt, since obviously I don't actually know you or the details of this situation. However, flagging issues to your boss' boss is rarely the best way to leave a good impression. It mostly signals you have problems working within the structure of the company and you're a 'troublemaker'. Whether that's fair or not, is not too relevant. You might get away with these things if you already have a lot of credibility, but since this was in your first 2 weeks, that's unlikely to be the case.

Your post also gave off some vibes of feeling too good for the job assigned to you. Again, I don't actually know you, so I might be misreading it, but if you give that impression during interviews, you'll have a hard time getting hired. Do you have any friends you could ask to do mock interviews with you? They could give you feedback on not just the quality of your answers, but also the way you answer.

Edit: Oh thought of one more comment regarding expecting to get rewarded for calling out issues. Typically it's not the person calling out the problems that gets rewarded, but the person that fixes them. Just calling this out, since you might be under the impression that you are adding a lot of value, while your boss might not see it that way. Honestly, the best way to add value is to do the job assigned to you. If you want to stand out, do it better and faster than expected.

I would also add on that most ideas have already been thought of. It's pretty common that new people will come into an org and bring up their idea only to find all the experienced people rolling their eyes because the idea has been talked about dozens of times.

It's good to be observable but just because your idea hasn't been implemented before doesn't mean no one has thought about it. At big companies there is friction in place for any change.

As someone new I think the best way to bring up something you notice is to ask your manager or a peer something like "Hey, I noticed we're not doing X and it could be a problem. Is there a reason for that?" That will allow them to fill you in on the context and organizational history.

If you bring up an idea, especially if it's been discussed many times before, and start raving about how it should be implemented, your co-workers are going to lose a lot of respect for you because you haven't taken a chance to learn first.

And if you went up the chain with feedback/criticism, you'd want to have runs on the board with the company and also approach it very carefully with insane diplomacy/personality. It's not going to be like the movies where they say "You're an abrupt pain in the arse, but I admire that in a person. You're promoted!"

Yeah, that "expecting to get rewarded for calling out issues" is one of the things you can learn from homeschooling that needs to be unlearned later.

It comes down to you not having much power to fix anything as a child and parents who praise you for pointing out significant issues.

Anyways, it's not how society or workplaces work.

A promotion is not a reward. A promotion is an offer for a new job with higher expectations and more responsibility. If you struggle to meet the expectations of the current role, lack agreeableness, or are unlikely to be able to do the next role up there is no way that you'll get a promotion. Sometimes patience is key.

I'm currently mentoring a person who is transitioning into an engineering manager and this person has a noticeable stutter, but is an incredible candidate. If you don't like your southern drawl, change it. I'm from a place with a very strong accent but you'd never know it.

If you're getting a rejection to an application like "overqualified" or "not a good fit" it likely means your resume wasn't tailored to the position or there is something unbelievable about it.

"Not a good fit" is about social skills, it has nothing to do with qualifications.

And no one gets promoted in the first year.

> felt like that I should've got promoted after reporting those issues, especially since I found them within my frist two weeks.

Dude. What are you thinking? You get hired in a CS role and you're raising red flags about security issues and expecting more than a pat on the back?

I've been a supervisor. Trainer. CS agent. Let me tell you what I see: A guy comes in with tons of supposed experience but gets a CS job. All he does is talk about what an awesome dev he is and all the work he's done. Highly opinionated, and feels he's above the job but "Hey I gotta work so I'll do whatever I can for now." Nice. Not.

Two weeks in he sees a security issue. Does he bring it to me? No, he sends a detailed e-mail to the VP in charge of the anti-fraud system. Scratch "team player" off the list. And now he wants something more than a pat on the back? He went above and beyond in finding an issue but didn't follow the proper channels to report it and then expects a promotion to another department before he's even had his 90 day review? WTH?

I've managed folks who've pulled crap like this, and I was not impressed. You need to learn your place and get off your pedestal. If you're going to sit at the right hand of the king, by all means aim for it! But don't start off by showing off and telling the king all the reasons YOU should be his right hand man. Instead, work your way up patiently. If you're "all that", then he will choose you.

TL;DR: Humble yourself. Do the job your were hired for and do it well! Work your way up by proving you deserve it, not by insisting that you deserve it. Promotions are earned.

I think while this might be a hard read for OP, it might be the reality check they need.

>I felt like that I should've got promoted after reporting those issues, especially since I found them within my frist two weeks.

Dude, don't take this the wrong way but the workplace (and the world) do not operate the way you think they do. Your expectations are wildly out of line with reality. You need to adjust your expectations and learn some humility.

I am also confused about how you've never worked anywhere for more then two months but were also constantly maxing out your 1GB email quota in those two months? BTW, in the corporate world 1GB email quota is on the high end.

> I probably would've been promoted by now.

> I felt like that I should've got promoted after reporting those issues, especially since I found them within my frist two weeks.

> Even though I meet the qualifcations.

Your pattern of reasoning about your professional past seems to involve saying what you think "should have" happened as a result of your presupposition of deservedness, rather than considering how your approach might have effected the outcome negatively.

For example, finding a security bug in the first few weeks of a job is usually not a basis for promotion anywhere. Promotion is usually based on consistent dedication to improving something for the company or team over a long period of time.

This takes not only technical, but also emotional and interpersonal skills and awareness as others have mentioned, and the ability to balance your immediate personal desire for a promotion (which we all share) with the goals of the team or organization.

Basically, to progress in your career, you need both the grit to put your nose to the grindstone to stick through the tough part of any job, while also being open to others both in the technical and social sense, and developing a mindset of gratitude for all experiences, which is essential for learning.

Many of us have taken jobs we don't love, or that aren't at A-list employers, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for our personal growth. I spent a summer when in college literally filing the metal cases of networking equipment at a no-name network switch maker - effectively manual labor.

Sure, it wasn't a Google internship, but it sure taught me a lot about work, and I got to talk to some great network hardware and software engineers about their jobs. I work at Google today and sometimes when I have to do something that tests my need for instant gratification, I remember that experience and I'm grateful that I had it.