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Comment by the_only_law | Hacker News Reader

I hate that the market is so great right now because I really can’t take advantage of it.

I would love to start the process, to try and get a salary increase anywhere from 30%-100% but unfortunately I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise. Don’t qualify for the jobs I see I think I’d enjoy, and don’t even qualify for the jobs that meet my salary preferences that I’d otherwise dislike. I also would have to be looking at immediately remote roles which just makes things harder. I also am about 90% I could not perform on interviews at most places. Digging myself out of the aforementioned stagnation and prepping for interviews is likely to take years at this point and who knows what the market will look like at that point.

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> I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise

I felt the same way over the past few years and decided to switch to a Technical Product Owner role at the beginning of this year. I used to be your typical HN user who was extremely passionate about programming, learning new frameworks, functional programming, etc, but at some point over my 10 year career I kinda stopped caring about tech entirely. Switching to a product owner role was great for me. I still get to leverage my technical knowledge without having to worry about the actual implementation too much. I also get to develop my soft skills like planning, communication, and conflict resolution, which is frankly a lot more interesting and satisfying than programming ever was.

Could you talk more about how you made this pivot? Was the transition to product owner a step down initially?

It was a lateral move within the same company, so my compensation is identical to what it was before. Honestly I credit my manager and the company in general for allowing me to make the move. My manager was extremely supportive when I expressed interest in product management and was quick to throw my name into the hat when an internal job opening popped up. I think it helps that I work for an extremely large company. I doubt I would have been able to make the switch if I was still working at a startup.

Why are you saying crazy self-fulfilling prophesies? Do you hate money?

Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills! You can learn can't you? Life means learning new stuff all the time. Learning never takes a time out.

The military was a bastion of learned lessons for me. One key takeaway: You are your own best advocate. Everything in an interview or negotiation related to you springs from that viewpoint. That's one of the most basic you will repeat infinitely. Use it boldly, not arrogantly.

> Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills! You can learn can't you?

It’s just about time really. I could skill up but what’s the market going to look like by the point I’m ready.

Apply. I had the same feeling and got a near 100% hit rate on my resume. Even for things is didn't really think I was qualified for.

To the point where I went back and had to rethink applying only to companies I really want to work for.

Get the job and then learn the skill. The value proposition you present is that you can learn stuff.

This is not a flippant reply! I’m totally serious.

Can I ask for a reality check, then?

I've broadly tech-savvy, and I can do some programming. I taught myself Lua for the sake of making game addons, I've dabbled in Java and Javascript (and tiny bits elsewhere). Most of my projects of note, outside of gaming, are simply little utility scripts for my own curiosities, nothing shared. My career thus far has been a decade of retail, but at least I'm currently in an entry-level management position.

Is there a core there worth trying to sell for a tech job?

I think everyone with aptitude or interest in programming should take a shot at a career in the field. Even outside of this current talent crunch, it's an industry with a lot of opportunity.

Getting your foot in the door is the hardest part (like many other industries). I don't have a lot of recent experience, but a boot camp or something similar might be needed to get past the first line of hr screening.

But doing some leetcode and sending out some applications is a pretty low investment way to start!

Definitely worth trying.

I used a software support role to get a foot in the door of the tech industry without any college degree, then used that was a way to learn whatever I could/display that I know how to code to get into a SWE role. I think the biggest learning curve I faced was learning "enterprise" software development in terms of design patterns, testing, etc. but it's all learnable once you unearth some of the unknown unknowns.

I'd also avoid using wording like "dabbled" because I've found that people are off-put by that and it comes across as selling yourself short, especially without a formal CS background.

Go for it.

> Most of my projects of note, outside of gaming, are simply little utility scripts for my own curiosities, nothing shared.

Put this stuff up on GitHub or similar.

I was recently involved in recruiting a junior dev at my company, and I was baffled by how lackluster people's portfolios were. Many people didn't have one. Those that did, had one or two school projects, or had a bunch of empty 0-commit forks.

Even one single passion project will make you stand out from the rest.

Ya but companies genuinely don't care about that. We'd all like them to, but when the first step of an interview process is an automatically generated global talent test, administered by an hr person, there's no room for this sales pitch really. "Lets hire this guy who tells us he can learn, or let's hire this new grad who's been grinding leetcode for 2 years straight and happens to test well on the tech we bet our whole codebase on".

> this guy who tells us he can learn

I'm assuming you have actually learned something and can show the results. Don't just declare yourself a learner, unless your real skill is amazing charisma.

Graduating and acing leetcode is evidence of ability to learn something. What's yours?

The article you are commenting on literally talks about how lots of companies are skipping the skills tests right now.

The article could say anything, anecdotally I see an increase in this.

Better, for you?

You didn’t qualify for the first job you got. The only difference now is you have more experience and less hubris. What I do is cut my teeth in a few bad interviews, polish off the rough edges, and then I do fine. It’s all about attitude and confidence.

> I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise

I'm sorry, but what does this even mean?

Nothing has changed in a significant way since 1996, other than ops per second and memory bandwidth. If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works, you're better than 99% of the total trash new-school Node.js/Django/Rails/React developers who think JSX is some sort of "innovation".

Having "stagnated" is definitely a hiring plus. It means you're less likely to slow down my systems with eight quadrillion layers of dynamic dispatch and abstraction, and you're not going to agitate for infecting my systems with Kubernetes specifically because I now need to orchestrate ten times more production machines to run the ensuing inefficient bloatware.

I can't imagine anyone being more highly sought after than a "stagnating" programmer.

Do you have any recommendations on how best to sell yourself from such a position? I have a significant C99-era/close-to-the-assembly fundamentals background, but I see a lot of “if you haven't already AWS'd all the AWS at your last company in production at scale, then there's someone behind you who has”, and that kind of thing has both been a notable lacuna in my experience and something that's notably less fixable independently than e.g. “plow through a React tutorial to familiarize yourself with the basics”. In particular, it seems like in the heavily external-service-integrating style of development, a lot of experience comes in along the lines of “remembering the pitfalls you ran into with particular vendors under particular loads” and the fundamentals don't get you as far. But I hear a lot of conflicting things about this.

I'm someone who's (supposedly) quite good underneath but has stagnated a lot over the last few years (and on and off before that, sadly) as other issues drained away my ability to work. I'm gradually stabilizing things and trying to find the best way to maneuver, and I'm pretty worried that everything's going to pass me by because my experience isn't of the right kind and I'm not legible enough. The people who are getting the jobs with all the traits I want are the ones who got a Real (that is, close to culturally archetypical) Job in 2018 and did their time in the salt mines with the three verifiable contiguous recent years of experience.

If what you say is true, then it's possible what I mostly have is a marketing problem, and it may be that e.g. some of the “actual demonstration of ability” is more readily solvable with “pull some stuff out into public repositories and freshen it up” than I've been imagining.

Write a script that deploys something to a fresh ec2 instance.. then you can say you used aws for your side project.

Aws is like 800 services, but under it all is ec2 and s3 -- just get familiar with those and the rest are conveniences.

This is not an unreasonable point, but I will note that I was partly using “AWS” metonymically to refer to a whole cluster of technology decisions surrounding the current wave of “cloud” everything, and I was also partially referring to the purer “have you been part of a full-scale service deployment with real users” aspect—there's a bigger difference between “operating a service when there's hundreds of thousands of requests from real people hitting you and they really count” and “operating a service for a random who-cares project” than there is between, say, “having a precise understanding of how Ruby behaves in a business-critical backend” and “having a precise understanding of how Ruby behaves on your laptop”. Lacking experience or even just lacking legibility of experience on the former seems to close a lot of doors, and that means you run into the “need experience to get experience” cyclic dependency on a critical subset of what's needed, regardless of how good your other skills are.

I recently had a job for exactly a week before the company decided I wasn't working out. One of the things they had me doing was logging in to Azure and trying to debug something - even though Azure never came up during the interview process, only AWS. It seems they didn't recognize there was any difference between them.

Hey, by stagnating I mean I’ve barely written code in over a year, and haven’t done any significant greenfield work my whole career. The work I have done has been mostly in legacy or obsolete technologies, and by that I mean mostly old version of stuff that’s still out there.

So by stagnating I don’t only mean not up on all the new hype tech, but also the caricature of a “code monkey”. Certainly on paper at least.

> you're not going to agitate for infecting my systems with Kubernetes specifically because I now need to orchestrate ten times more production machines to run the ensuing inefficient bloatware.

Sadly this seems to be the sort of thing that most employers want.

  I’ve barely written code in over a year, and haven’t done any significant greenfield work my whole career. The work I have done has been mostly in legacy or obsolete technologies, and by that I mean mostly old version of stuff that’s still out there.

There are heaps of legacy code out there needing to be maintained, and it seems like all the cool kids just want to do green field dev because fixing somebody else's insane code isn't "fun". You're likely more qualified than you think, you just need to market your strengths.

Get on with a contracting firm. They will place you on a dev project and have you coding in no time.

A lot of companies are not allowed to interview the contractors (since they are not employees) and the contract firms can swap anyone into a spot after they get the contract signed. (Granted there is a lot of wink and nod stuff that goes on)

Horrid pay, not allowed to say you worked for (GE, Microsoft, whoever...) and crap benefits but you get real world experience and may even get lucky. You can say..."while at Microsoft I..."

Nobody writes tools that only work on brownfield code, and there are plenty of tools that only work if you start a new project using their tools.

Green field code is easy-mode, not hard mode. Nothing is in your way, nobody expects anything from you (yet) because they have no basis of comparison. The real reason people want to do rewrites is that they want that greenfield experience without having to quit. It almost never works.

Start a new project on the side, using the skills you’d like to develop.

How do you balance this on the resume. I got plenty of cool project ideas, but outside of entry level, it just seems odd to list them on the resume (which I presume is the only way they’ll be seen by anyone giving the consensus on LinkedIn and personal sites). o feel it’d just look weird when you have projects and skills that seemingly have no relevance to your work experience especially when applying to roles that are mid level or senior.

It seems that a lot of things are just no possible to learn on the side as well. For example, doing anything at a large scale. That could be HPC stuff or just designing and building systems that need to handle high throughput without slowing or failing. I can’t afford to have the sort of projects that would allow me to learn those things.

The exception I can imagine is working on high visibility OSS projects and is a huge time sink and might as well be a second job.

Too negative an outlook, imho. You do the research and add the keywords, maybe project to your resume. If grilled you say I have some experience but am not an expert.

Also, you’d be surprised how much you can get done on a modern PC with vms or containers, it isn’t the nineties or aughts any longer. We used to run a full vfx company on what amounts to a single souped $10k PC today.

Or, rent a heavy-duty cloud vm for $100 a month, small investment but clock ticking will get you motivated.

While there’s truth to this, I’m gonna guess it’s a minority viewpoint.

>If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works

bonus points if you created a vuln or two :)

Well, the thing is, the people you described are the ones doing the technical interview. They hire people similar to them.

Meh, honestly just shoot for it. The worst they can say is no, and a lot of job reqs are just long wishlists anyways.

Hell, pick a dumb company you'll never want to work for, like Uber, if you want real-world practice. Then you at least know what real-world failure looks like.

I'm back in the job market and it doesn't even seem like HR has a clue what programmers do. My favorite was: "Must be fluent in: C#, .NET, and .NET Framework..."

The best I've seen is (verbatim) "Excellent Javascript(ES6) and CSS skills with minimum 10 years of Java (enterprise) for services/apis development experience, 5 years experience in ReactJS/redux or similar, 5 years nodejs"

I've found that the understood meaning of .NET has changed from when the term was first defined by Microsoft. Originally it meant the C# language and the multi-language library that it employed. Now it means specifically the parts of that library that are used for server applications.

Eh, I hear people talk about .NET desktop apps all the time and they are understood quite well. .NET (and, frankly, everything that isn't HTML/CSS/JS) may be less used outside of backend use than was once the case, but I don't think .NET is conventionally understood to be backend-specific in any general sense.

Perhaps that's still true in casual conversation, but in the hiring world .NET appears to be about server applications exclusively. At least in my observations.

Yeah when I see anything .NET related, it's always backend or fullstack oriented positions.

You overestimate how much expert experience matters.

I recently went from a start-up to FANG after a gap in my resume, and the new job is in an area I have no experience in. Many people I know have gone through similar experiences.

You do need strong interview skill though.

You stagnated because you don't have a job that stretches you.

Even if you think the best you can do is the same job you have right now, but in a different place, you'll see a significant bump. But it's highly likely you can do better than that.

Why not try?

> Even if you think the best you can do is the same job you have right now, but in a different place, you'll see a significant bump.

Because I doubt I could get the bump I’m looking for doing the same thing I do now with current restraints

> Why not try?

Time sink, especially with people talking about 4-5 stage interviews. Without some level of confidence I’d rather not use all my PTO or try to schedule hack at the moment.

> Time sink, especially with people talking about 4-5 stage interviews.

From friends who are at FAANGs, it sounds like the prep work has been about 100 hours. That's re-reading things like Sedgewick and burning all your spare time at things like leetcode.

Maybe, but I don’t have much energy anymore, I can’t even manage to pay attention to a 15m YouTube video before describing to slump off back to bed. I also feel slow in general these days, probably from a number of factors.

But I was mainly referring to the actually interviews themselves. 4-5 seems like so many, especially if they fly you out vs just being done remotely.

Friend, it doesn't sound like this is really about skills or scheduling. It sounds to me like you're simply depressed. Have you considered talking with a therapist?

There is no shame in staying comfortable. HN makes us feel inadequate all the time but that’s not what matters.

If your job is comfortable, pays well enough, and doesn’t demand all your waking time then why chnage?

Sure you can always get more money elsewhere, sure there are jobs that pay double what you’re making now, sure there are jobs where you get to do insanely cool shit… but it’s a lot of luck and effort to get these jobs. And then, you free time might vanish (either because it turns out these jobs are “always on” type of jobs, and/or because you’re so drained at the end of your day that you don’t have energy for anything else)

There is really nothing wrong with contempt in my opinion. Especially after 10+ years when you understand how most jobs are basically the same, that there is more to life than work, and that we can’t all be doing cool stuff all the time.

To hedge against being in a position where you’re laid off and can’t get a new job anymore, consider saving aggressively. 50% of net pay is a good starting point. This makes you give very little fucks about whether you’ll get laid off or not and after about 12 years of doing that, you won’t even really need a job anymore.

You’re right. You can’t take advantage of it. But not for any of the reasons you listed.

You’ve already decided you would fail, and that’s all it takes to seal the deal.

Dare a little. You’ve already made a list of your weaknesses. Now make a list of your strengths. Then sell yourself on how each weakness can be explained as a strength. If there’s nothing there at the end of the exercise, you haven’t lost anything. But you may just end up with some useful clarity on your worth in the marketplace.

You should go for it anyways! Like the article says, people are desperate for talent! People are skipping technical interviews, offering immediate remote opportunities, and are willing to teach the skills required as long as you have some previous experience and work hard

15 years at Oracle? I doubt it's as bad as you think. Go for breadth and see where you're weak. Practice leetcode, system design and do mock interviews on pramp

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