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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I have depression issues, and have been coding for 10 years now. I don't know if I'm bad at programming, or if it's because I lack a degree, or because I have been chronically unemployed and lack experience, or because I'm too selective with the jobs I apply on (I can't bear php or js stuff like angular), or because I live in france or in the wrong city. I may have an atypical profile.

Programming has not been very good to me.

When I hear "programmers are in high demand", I don't see it applying to me.

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>When I hear "programmers are in high demand", I don't see it applying to me.

This is a very nuanced statement and depends highly on region.

When you hear "programmers are in high demand" it actually means "senior/experienced programmers in the company's stack who can quickly solve the issues piling up on their desk, are in high demand".

Juniors or devs with near zero experience in that particular stack are getting rejection letters as most companies never consider on how transferrable dev skills are and prefer to wait until the perfect dev shows up, instead of giving someone new to the stack a few weeks to ramp up.

At least that's how it is in my current country of Austria, but back in Eastern Europe, the demand for devs is so high due to US off-shoring and Western EU near-shoring, that companies will hire absolutely anyone who can write a for loop and even give them trainings to ramp them up quicker. It's literally impossible to be unemployed there even as an inexperienced slow learning coder. Sure you won't make six figure salaries, but you'll live far more comfortably than 90% of the population.

IMO, just like in dating and real-estate, the dev jobs market is very much about "location, location, location".

Which countries you have in mind saying Eastern Europe?

Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, basically most former eastern bloc countries that are also EU members.

Programmers are in high demand, even in France.

That said, there are some major caveats: - Salaries posted on HN are way over the top compared to anything you can get in France - Most of the recruiting is done through SSIIs/ESNs (capgemini, sopra, atos, etc), which is often shit pay, shit management, shit missions (which is not really a boon if you are already depressive)

For stability and peace of mind, the most straightforward way is to either enter software dev in a big corp (banks, etc, which have in-house teams), or some "éditeur logiciel" whose product is software. Video game development is a big no unless you knowingly want to be exploited for a while until you burn out.

If you have experience, you can increasingly ask for full or close to full remote work if you insist a bit, but most of the time you will only be offered 2 to 3 days of remote work a week, which implies relocating.

Although I don’t like saying this, if you do not have experience you could prep up a bit by working publicly on FOSS things that are relevant to your interest, to have technical things that you care about to talk about during an interview, even if it is totally unrelated to the domain you interview in.

Plumbers are in high demand too, but if you are a plumber with depression, lack of experience, that doesn't want to touch waste pipes or shower units, and live in the sticks, it won't apply to you either

I know, but it's not like employers are begging people to work for them either.

The job market has always been a market that favors employers, not candidates, whatever the domain of work.

Ditto!

Depression will distort your vision of reality and make things look worse than they are. It will also make it much harder to take even small risks for greater gains.

In all likelihood, you're stuck in your position because you're limiting yourself in some ways. I'm not saying it's easy to get out of, I've been there, it's not.

> I don't see it applying to me.

It only applies to a small set of people from top unis or those who have the FAANG brand names on their resumes.

Otherwise, I know several people who tried for months to switch jobs and finally gave up due to exhaustion.

I have NO university degree and ZERO affiliation with anything remotely FAANG (I'm based in Europe, where relatively few people work for FAANG). There are no globally recognisable names on my CV.

I am still the highest paid person I personally know - by a rather high margin, because of my experience as a software engineer.

Since I dropped out of university almost 20 years ago, I have been consulting and contracting, focusing almost exclusively on Python, PostgreSQL and, more recently, AWS. This simple combination (I usually refuse to learn anything new - I don't think there have been many noteworthy new technologies in the past couple of decades) has made me millions over the years and I have never been left without work for any significant period of time.

Since the pandemic began, I have actually found myself contracting multiple roles concurrently, from my home, each paying significantly above the average developer rate. I've found I can do up to 3 - 4 at a time and still deliver results for each (declining to attend regular meetings helps).

Good for you. I have experience with all 3 of those technologies and it's nearly impossible to even get an interview.

This is honestly baffling to me, I can't imagine how this can be. I get multiple emails each week from recruiters looking for that exact skill-set, and this is AFTER I've tried extra hard to unsubscribe from all such emails.

My final straw was when I was asked to code this problem in 20 mins :

https://leetcode.com/problems/reverse-nodes-in-k-group/

Maybe I'm just too stupid.

There's something wrong with your resume or other personal information then. I was in the job market recently, I live in the boonies, and there is nothing impressive on my resume. There were literally not enough waking hours to schedule a call with every recruiter flooding me through LinkedIn. I had at least 5 interviews per week. I don't know what you're doing wrong, but it's something.

lol I found the same awful experience at the above poster when I tried to look for something to bump my salary recently.

To be fair when it comes to France, any job being in high demand generally wouldn't apply there. That country is the capital of unemployment from my experience, and I don't see it getting any better.

But yes, lacking a degree is a big part of your problem. Fortunately, it's purely specific to France and you'll get better luck elsewhere in Europe. In my case I made my escape into the UK back when it was still possible.

That does not match my experience at all, devs are in a very high demand in France, and once you have some dev experience on your resume you start getting a lot of Linkedin spam.

As for unemployment rate in general, France is not amazing but it's far from being 'the capital of unemployment' (0.4% above the EU mean rate) : https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/unemployment-rate?...

Did you have anything specific in your experience that could explain why you did not succeed there ?

> Did you have anything specific in your experience that could explain why you did not succeed there ?

I didn't have much besides self-employed/freelance experience back then (which was enough to get me a job in the UK) however even low-skill, non-tech jobs were impossible to get.

Maybe it's improved since then and if so I'm glad. I might out of curiosity apply to a couple jobs with my current profile (now having ~7 years of work experience) and see what kind of offer they come back with.

Thanks, this comment really helps. Seems like it's a lot of wrong place, wrong time.

It's true that not having degrees is like being a leper for some reason.

Salaries in Europe are definitely subpar compared to other locations.OP should try moving to Australia. Lots of jobs and the salaries are very good even for junior/mid.

I'm guessing if you don't live in a big city (Paris, Lille, ...) & stay on low-level programming (like C), there is really less demands.

However, I guess most come down to your network, your confidence and how you represent yourself (having the same "cultural" code as experts).

My 2 cents is to treat yourself well first (a healthy mind for a good body), travel more, and work on public stuff / connect with others.

> When I hear "programmers are in high demand", I don't see it applying to me.

Because it probably doesn’t apply to you. It’s not that programmers are in high demand but that hiring programmers is in high demand, which is massively different. It’s the difference between people who solve problems as compared to people who reproduce the same problems to solve.

In what city do you live and what languages are you seeking?

South of france, neither toulouse or Marseille. I'd prefer lower level languages, and as it was said in another comment, they're in lower demand.

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