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Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

1. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume.

2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. "I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team" --> is a desirable skill in and of itself.

3. Stop working 80 hour weeks, stop working weekends. When the only thing you do has little/no reward, that is what causes burnout.

4. Fill your time with something else that you prioritize above work. Make it hard to find time to work. This both prevents slipping back to 80 hr weeks, and forces your brain to prioritize important things within your work life (like executing and finishing projects).

5. Networking is key. I don't have good advice here as this is a challenge for me also. But -- switch jobs often (every couple years), and be friendly and helpful (within reason) to your co-workers. They're now your network.

My background -- coding since I was 6, now 36 -- but I've shared many of the same feelings.

[1] I am assuming you have the basic financial stability to support this. My apologies if not.

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> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume.

On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving.

Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?

I would agree for small gaps. But I think it's at least somewhat understandable why a significant gap would be a concern. With the pace technology moves at, if you have not been working for an extended period of time, it's reasonable that you might have fallen behind. Certainly this shouldn't be reason in itself to reject a candidate and it at least somewhat depends on what you were doing during that time, but I find it hard to expect employers not to consider it at all.

Significant gap in this case will be several years, no less, but regular technical interview can answer all the questions about qualification.

It really should be put in the context of someone's life. Did they spend a year or two travelling? Did they spend it working on personally productive projects? Or did they do nothing but play video games or do drugs?

These are all very different extended gaps. The first two should be fine - if someone's skills have atrophied than that's another issue (but nothing a good interview or probation period won't pick up on if it's actually even a problem). The second one might be fine or a problem - and I can see why employers would be wary.

And even if someone spent their time video gaming and doing drugs why can't they turn their life around if they want and demonstrate to have the skill. Burnout, depression, horrible circumstances and families all exists and sometimes you have to hit a stable rock bottom to start climbing.

Yes. I can see why people might be wary although I don't necessarily agree with those who would be (excessively) wary.

> It really should be put in the context of someone's life.

Absolutely agree.

why would I care as an employer that you spent a year playing video games and doing drugs?

When I interview people I couldn't care less about any gaps in their resume, we're going to sit down, talk about tech, what you've done and what we need, etc. If there's a match in skills, needs, personality and expectations then that's it, anything else are invisible cargo-cult walls

You might care about their judgement and their state of mind and whether they'd be prepared for the job. I think understanding what someone did in a long gap is important - some are just very easy to understand (person in 20's decides to quit job for a year to go backpacking) while others might be harder. If I was interviewing I wouldn't ever automatically discard a resume because of a long gap, though, so I suppose I'm just thinking of what others might be cautious about, and other people may simply adopt a heuristic to automatically discard to minimise variance.

I've taken sixth months off and mostly played video games and no one ever cared or asked??!

Yep same here. When I ran out of money I thought I'd better start writing some code lol

I'm actually very glad this is the case.

Guess it depends on how you define a significant gap, 1 year? 5 years?

Also working doesn't necessarily equal keeping up with technology. If i'm maintaining some legacy system, I wont have a gap but i might've not learnt anything new for years.

I worked a corporate job for several years where I pretty much learned nothing. As far as my skills go, the end result was almost no different to not working at all.

I'd second that. "Classical companies" are rarely-ever at the forefront of technology, even if they are technology companies themselves.

It's a broad statement, so keep it in context. Examples: Think, Apple has had the iPhone out since 2008 now. Working there on the iPhone 16 HW / SW specs or the M3 processor design may well be cutting-edge stuff, but working there as SRE for the App Store infrastructure is likely "an SRE job with some legacy in it". And working on their developer infrastructure, devtools / CI etc, very very likely is full of "proprietary dead ends" (i.e. tech noone outside the AAPL orchard will use or have use for). A Wall Street bank, once above a certain size, is going to adopt tech more slowly - much of their proprietary software stack is likely still in C++ / Java where a five-year-old small trading house may have written all that in Rust.

I've had jobs at such "S&P 500" corporates in the past; I wouldn't say "I learned nothing" - I learned how to navigate companies. Call it "coping strategies" if you like. It still helps to get stuff done knowing how-to-do-it on a procedural level - or via human-interaction. Tech-wise ... regretted some of these. My experience, though, is that one can "come back".

"Just" keep the ambition under control that you need to know everything, and need to be able to do everything. Today's "tech stacks" have so many parts in it that are out of your control and that you cannot inspect - the sheer will to "rule them all" will burn you. It's easier said then done, but: know your limits. Everyone has them. You'll recognize the "boasters" soon enough, those that claim they can rule it all.

Same. I think my skills may have regressed because they were working with legacy tech. I did get to go to a ton of zoom meetings, though.

It's that attitude of recruiters' that keeps me unemployable.

The fact is that the IT world does not progress in a linear direction. It's like a puddle that grows into multiple directions. But it is still covering most of the same spots as before. Banks still use COBOL. High-performance code is still in C or C++ with assembler (but that "C" may run on a GPU), etc.

Just give the gap a name and it stops being a gap. Maybe you started your own company to unproductively mess around with stuff. Or call it a sabbatical. Those are popular.

No the real issue is not the gaps themselves but why so many different jobs that don't last long. Tech evolves fast but in a week or 2 you're up to date if you've been away few months. I have many gaps in my resume but I have many different jobs, which is a lot more problematic. A question that pops up often is why did I left after X months and I need to explain all my choices. It is fine because I either didn't like the projects/companies, I wanted to switch technologies ... they do ask why 6 month off and that seems fine when I tell them I've been travelling.

trust me they care. especially in a fast moving technology space like cloud, k8s, ML. if you are hired for COBOL yes sure a gap wont matter

Trust me they don't.

I've had all sorts of gaps in my career. 6 months, 1 year and more, to explore different domains. I'm in computer graphics/front end, pretty fast paced.

Nobody ever asked.

Please, never feel guilty about taking a single month off. If your body needs rest, you need to listen to it.

Yeah, all you have to do is say "I took a year off to tend to personal family matters," and they should hear "none of your damn business" loud and clear or they don't understand boundaries, in which case they're disqualified from employing you.

You have to be careful with this one. "Family matters" can raise a flag if it's an ongoing issue. You're trying not to look like you're going to be a problem employee, as much as that should or shouldn't be a thing.

I think the proper answer is "I just took some time off between jobs." Sounds fine, sounds like you took advantage of an opportunity, and doesn't sound like you're somebody that had a hard time finding a job.

To be frank, if they infer "ongoing problem" out of a single data point like that, they fall into the "not qualified to employ me" bucket. One instance of "tending to family matters" doesn't really say anything beyond, "I have a family."

Yup, I second this. I took almost a year off to work on a personal project and drive GrubHub to make rent. Had no problem getting interviews and hired after a few weeks of looking.

Not every industry is like this, but tech has little reason to care. If anything, employees with more life experience are a benefit to the employer.

for a position that is well paid there is competition. it is a risk to take someone who took a year off. any kind of manager will think that way. obviously if the pay is low and the tech is not changing every month then it is not a problem

>especially in a fast moving technology space like cloud, k8s, ML

You are kidding yourself.

Indeed. Here's why we know this isn't true: everyone has areas they focus on, and they aren't defined as "everything fast-paced that exists." You can spend literal years working on problems in the security space, or on web front end crap, or in audio processing, or object storage, learning absolutely jack squat about cloud, ML or k8s, and you don't shrivel up and die. I basically completely switch disciplines every time I job hop, and nobody's ever questioned me about keeping up with whatever fast-paced stuff I was doing two jobs ago.

Problem solving requirements don't just disappear once you fire up jupyter notebook or set up minikube.

>trust me they care.

The Boomers might.

Thankfully, one of the best things to come out of the recent progressive movements is that work is the be all, end all. There's more to life. More and more companies are being run and staffed by people who understand this.

> On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all.

I think that at least in tech it was only ever a thing in companies that didn't know better.

I mean, I throughout my career I was fired multiple times and at least twice that resulted in a 3-month gap, only one of them being voluntarily that long.

I now take them on purpose and collected a total of five over the course of 10+ years.

I don't remember anyone ever even touching the subject - perhaps there's something about the date format I'm using in my CV (MM-YYYY - MM-YYYY/present).

In any case my experience is that companies with such ridiculous criteria end up hiring contractors to fill their gaps - this time in their workforce.

Contractors, naturally, don't go through nearly the same recruitment process and yet they manage to do the same job and do it well - those who don't are promplty fired.

My last job search it came up a lot. I took about 8 months then started looking. Because I could at that time. Since it was the current thing I was doing it came up a decent amount.

Took probably double the amount of time to get a job. I finally asked someone why they cared? They said it looks like others were passing me up for some reason and they did not want to pick someone up who everyone else was passing up.

Hiring in many ways is a guess if you can stand to work with someone or not. Being in any way undesirable hurts you.

So the opposite of FOMO... Hiring is broken.

If I had a voluntary gap like this and I put something like "Sabbatical" on my resume and made a few notes of how I spent my time I wonder how that would go over. The last time I was in the interview process I saw my interviewer as a kind of interviewing pro, it wasn't until I got hired that I realized he was just a guy and he had really only interviewed and on-boarded a handful of people before.

I think that is pretty common on resumes and I've never heard anyone raise it as an issue. Some examples I've seen include "cycled across europe" and went back to school to work on a new degree, but then decided that they didn't like marine biology as much as they thought they did. There's no reason most employers would be concerned about reasonable life choices.

What employers are concerned about is people problems and problem people. Dealing with problem employees is very unpleasant and a huge time sink. Since difficult people tend to have difficulty staying employed, time gaps and short engagements on resumes are a somewhat reasonable heuristic. When there are more applicants than you can interview, you have to prioritize the list somehow.

> Hiring in many ways is a guess if you can stand to work with someone or not.

This, although it seems not everyone got the memo, hence a recent conversation I had:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31528057

> Being in any way undesirable hurts you.

Does having gaps make you so though? I'd say not necessarily. I mean, isn't there a workforce shortage at the moment?

Personally, I don't care. I just checked a recent candidate of mine and he... didn't put months in the start/end dates of his projects. If there's a gap there, I wouldn't even know.

In 40 years I have only ever put the start and end year of each item on my resume. I guess this dates to when most jobs / education lasted multiple years. But I've stuck with it and no-one has ever questioned it.

The couple of jobs I have had which were less than one year spanned a year-end so it never looked odd.

When I am reviewing incoming resumes small gaps never bother me. Ocassionally I have seen multi-year gaps on interesting resumes and made enquires which always turned out to be completely legitimate career breaks and never lead to us not making offers.

Curious what you would consider an illegitimate career break?

Jail time.

Not all "jail time", but yes, many convictions would preclude candidates from employment at my current company... and most of the previous ones.

why this gap in your resume?

Yale

That's very impressive, you're hired.

Thanks! I really need this yob!

If you're worried about a criminal history, do a background check.

This heuristic would miss people who lie about "consulting" during the time they were in jail and would incorrectly catch someone who was falsely accused and then exonerated.

Working for Oracle. ;)

I actually laughed out loud, and really needed that today. Thank you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31548548 was great too. You should turn these into TikToks or do standup or something.

Prison for 5 years for being a black hat lol

Oh gods, and I misread it at first as "Legitimate career break". :O (Also Laughing Out Loud!)

Haha we just had someone leave our team to work on Oracle Cloud. I hope it works out for them, but it's not a job I would have taken.

Substance abuse related career breaks. At least recent.

Hang on, you are going to penalise someone for taking time off to get clean... presumably on the basis that it's better they come to work hiding the fact that they are high, than that they get help?

How would I even know they are clean? And if they are clean and they presumably have a greater chance of a relapse than other random candidates.

Drug tests are pretty common. If they pass that, there's no reason to prevent hiring. It could even be illegal since it's a health condition.

This comment makes me sad. It seems illegal biases in hiring and management practices are rampant. Worker protections seem to be a joke when they're blatantly ignored.

Well... I don't hire people so don't take my comment as proof that any illegal biases are rampant. I was just stating one possible issue an employer might have with career breaks.

I do hear a lot of illegal things from other discussions on here too. So it wasn't based on just you.

Why should you even know they were not clean at some point in their past. And what about the future?

Like the sibling comment, I find this very sad.

Perform drug tests if you're worried.

I'm imagining a scenario where a candidate explicitly says that they just had a career break that was due to drug abuse, I think it would be hard to stay objective after that. I don't hire people but that would affect a lot of employers.

The only reason you should care is if you're employing someone in a position where it's dangerous to themselves or others _on the job_ if they're intoxicated, or if it's legally required.

Otherwise it's none of your business.

>How would I even know they are clean?

This question applies to all employees. You don't, because it's none of your business if it doesn't affect their work performance. It is entirely possible, and probably likely that some your current employees use drugs. And almost 100% sure that some of them use alcohol, which is stronger and more problematic than many illicit substances. Many companies even throw parties where they give out free booze to the employees! How's that for a double standard?

People have always used drugs, and always will. Pretending to care about substance abuse only when you come across someone who openly admits their history is insane. You are treating the honest people worse than the people who hide their problems from you.

> And if they are clean and they presumably have a greater chance of a relapse than other random candidates.

That's skirting uncomfortably close to discriminating based on medical history or a disability, which may be illegal depending on where the employer is located. Cancer survivors have a much higher chance of recurrence than others do of developing cancer for the first time, but most would probably balk at denying a job to someone whose cancer was in remission because there's a higher chance they'd need extended medical leave in the future.

Companies do not like risk. That kind of time off has high potential recidivism. If there are 2 candidates then lower risk one wins. Years ago I had HR decline a candidate because of a messy divorce because of perceived risk that I still don't understand.

Yet companies turn a blind eye towards people who abuse alcohol, even throwing parties where people are encouraged to drink alcohol. If your chosen substance is alcohol, you can even be an alcoholic and still keep your job if it doesn't affect performance.

Every hire is full of risks. Nobody knows whether they'll get into a car crash, get cancer, or get shot, or become a substance abuser. Whether they admit their medical history or not. That's because they are human beings. Humans are inherently risky. If you want to eliminate risk, then hiring humans is not for you.

All you do by punishing people who are honest about their history, is to encourage even more people to lie in interviews. Those people are only the tip of the iceberg, and a significant number of people companies hire already have such history but they just keep their mouths shut.

That decline, was that in the public sector, where the security clearance process necessarily digs up that kind of dirt? Or did a private sector company actually investigate a candidate to the terms of their divorce?

In the US it is generally illegal to ask about an employee's medical history in the US due to ADA. Psychiatric care is considered medical care.

"what did you do between 2016 and 2019?"

(Silence... )

-- won't that seem suspicious, even if the interviewer can't ask:

"Oh so you had a drugs and substances career break?"

Medical issues

Prison, at least that's how it was explained to me in the mid 90s when I started out.

Obviously this depends on the job and what someone did that landed them in prison, but that shouldn't be an automatic dealbreaker. If they are applying for a job after being released from prison, then they're trying to reintegrate and should be given a fair shake.

If a criminal record is an insurmountable hurdle for a specific role, then it would come up in a background check (which would almost certainly be a requirement for such a job), and the job posting should be explicit about the required clean criminal history. A gap in someone's resume is a pretty worthless signal for whether they've ever been incarcerated.

>they're trying to reintegrate and should be given a fair shake.

Agree. Things were different in the 90s, think peak crime and crime bill. Also, everything wasn't categorized as a felony back then, it seems like felony was limited to much more severe crimes (except drugs crimes), unlike today.

>it would come up in a background check (which would almost certainly be a requirement for such a job)

It would, but background checks cost money and I'm guessing it was a pre-screen method to save. I'm not defending it, I'm just repeating what I was told back then.

>A gap in someone's resume is a pretty worthless signal for whether they've ever been incarcerated.

Unfortunately, people have been doing stupid filters on hiring for decades. It's not a new phenomenon.

The current landlord for my shop has several businesses and mentioned that he specifically hires guys getting out of prison (presumably selectively of course). He said that they tend to be grateful and incredibly loyal. He had one on my site doing some setup construction who was very good, worked very hard (including driving 1.5hrs to get here around other work), and did really good work, so can confirm to the extent of that anecdata. It's enough for me to seriously consider it for some roles. People really do need to get a leg up.

Overall, for me hiring, I never considered a resume gap to be a problem, and think that employers who do are literally stupid (sadly, nothing prevents such stupidity). At most, it is a potentially interesting interlude for a person's life and career - what did they do with it?

For OP, I'd definitely recommend rearranging your work situation so you are not so exploited and pressured. Either get your employer to hire more people so you can work on something other than a constant firefighting basis, or leave. It very much looks like the main reason you have not yet "come up with a solution from scratch of my own and provide any value" is because you aren't given a moment to breathe (and your assessment of not adding value is wrong - you are obviously adding value, it's just that you can see some left on the table).

Seems what you need, at almost any cost, is to get perspective.

Good that you see it and here's to your future success!

I also only put years on my resume. 15 years into my career and I have never once been asked to elaborate on the exact timeline of my resume. I've taken breaks, some voluntarily and some not so much.

If I ever take a multi-year break I'll just take occasional freelance clients and list it as "consulting".

I've taken multiple six month stints off, and in the UK no one has ever asked about it.

I'm in management, writing to confirm this. I've seen many CV's, many gaps, never asked about it, I don't even assume why it happened.

Burnout is a known problem in our profession, I approach people with open mind, I experienced burnout myself and taking time off is desirable for mental health.

I am replying to this reply here because I can't reply on the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31203871

Firstly: Do you think every comment should be positive? Secondly, how is my comment negative enough for you to make that reply? I asked a question and gave (honest) feedback on my reading of the article/post.

> The list is obviously not for you

But it IS on HN which I read. HN is a public forum that anyone can join and make comments. It is fair game to give feedback on articles.

> this reflex where one needs to be so angry and vocal about something so benign (and useful) is what makes me question what have we done to ourselves as a society.

The usefulness of the advice is completely subjective and the main point of the comment section is to discuss that. Would you rather comments like "love this", "+1", "all great advice!". That seems completely useless to me.

Your questioning of society based on my question and feedback seems outrageously ridiculous to me.

Ironically, a quick look shows you have multiple grey posts and are not a positive commenter yourself. Maybe your reply was actually some self reflection.

And if you feel self-concious about it, just write „freelance projects“ and in the ultra slim case someone still inquires about that telling them point blank you‘d love to divulge it because it was a very interesting project, but you‘re bound by an NDA.

Thats a dangerous way though and leading to the road of fraud.

Would be a red flag for me, if someone boasted about secret NDA work, which did not exist at all. And this can show up very quickly with some questions.

The issue is earlier in the resume screening process, before they’re talking to you at all.

If a company receives 200 applications and 50 of them have flawless resumes, even something as small as a couple unexplained gaps could be enough to move you below the cutoff for getting a call back.

I think the thing that confuses people about gaps is that it doesn’t make it impossible to get any job. It just raises questions for interviewers who have a lot of resumes to sort through.

If you’ve only ever applied to jobs in less competitive markets or times, it may not have mattered at all yet. There are actually a lot of small hiring quirks that an entire generation of engineers hasn’t encountered yet because we’ve been in a decade long bull run.

This makes sense from the company perspective, but gaps still shouldn't bother candidates because there are many thousands of companies in the world. Since companies give no feedback on an initial rejection, you can't even see how often you're being rejected for gaps vs. other things, so it's not even worth worrying about.

> On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving.

I think you can better make sense of it as a vestigial organ of hiring process from before background checks were widespread, no "wageslavery" explanation needed.

> Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?

Many (questionable) reasons, but among other things, it's a convenient way to exclude women trying to return to the workforce after they took time off to have kids, without overtly appearing to discriminate.

In my country, it's illegal to fire a woman(or man) on maternity leave and company must give her(him) same place back, when they return. Maternity leave is usually taken till a kid is 3yrs old, so after 3yrs they must give you your old place back, by law.

These laws usually have loopholes, in the case of the job no longer existing. Which it is very easy to make a job no longer exist, especially in a 3 year time-span.

I'll second this. After I had to disclose a disability during a merger between two companies, HR moved me into a role they made just for me. That role was removed once a merger was complete.

>Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?

I agree, and if they do?

I'm not telling you to lie on your resume, but...have a good story to tell about what you during that time off. If that doesn't cut it, you're probably not dealing with a company with a good culture.

"I was driving a startup venture that failed..." ought to do it.

yeah - you better have your background story on that straight though, my next question would be "tell me about that" and then "what happened"

Actually a great behavioral line of questioning - how clearly the the candidate can explain what happened, how they describe whatever part they played or mistakes they made...

> Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?

It's not that. Having a gap in your resume might mean that the candidate is trying to hide something. E.g. a job where candidate was fired and doesn't want to be asked to provide references.

If you took a gap to pursue other things, put whatever this was on your CV, don't just leave a gap. If it was something interesting, it might even put you in front of other candidates for some employers.

Common gaps are for protected things (raising children) and can cause problems if put on CVs. The idea that employers need to treat every applicant with maximum suspicion is frustrating.

The concern is that someone was fired for cause or has a pattern of abandoning jobs.

Taking time off to raise children isn’t a big deal at most companies (at any big company, you’re more likely to find more parents than non-parents in hiring manager positions). Even gaps for things like travel aren’t really an issue as long as the candidate explains it.

You have to consider that hiring managers aren’t only seeing resumes of flawless candidates. There are a lot of candidates out there with things like anger issues, chronic performance issues, interpersonal issues, and so on that have already been removed from other companies for these reasons. It’s difficult to deduce it from a resume alone but small signals like unexplained gaps can be a hint that you need to dig deeper.

just curious - if someone is "fired for cause" (don't feel that this term is universally accurate in its implications but thats another discussion), do you feel they should never get a job again? its some sort of Scarlett letter or brand on them?

The argument I've seen and heard many times is that someone who was been fired before is likely to get fired again. Also applies to medical conditions. You don't want an employee who might get sick and not be able to work.

oh for sure there are examples where people abuse the employment relationship - those who churn jobs simply looking for severance/unemployment, chronic medical issues or absences which lead to very low output, etc. and its understandable that a manager would try to weed those out.

that can also lead to many false positives, IMO. personal example, in my first job out of college my manager and i did not get along. i assume they wanted to fire me and began to build a case against me, emailing HR every morning i was not at my desk by 8:30 AM. i was naïve and the HR rep basically told me i should quit because my manager had "evidence". so i did, and it took a LONG time to find another job because of the "Scarlett Letter".

it then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy since the longer you're without a job the more suspicious it becomes. it all just feels very classically corporate to me, from a time when people stayed in one city/town for a long time and if you had a gap in the resume it was automatically detrimental to you because all the good people already have jobs.

it's illegal to ask about or discriminate on medical conditions though, unless there's a strong, concrete reason to ask - e.g. you don't have to hire someone with uncontrolled epilepsy to be a bus driver, but you can't refuse to hire a receptionist because her lupus might make her call in sick occasionally.

I'm terrified of all this, since I started using a wheelchair. a friend told me she did 10 interviews with no offers, when they were in person, but got a great offer when she interviewed on Zoom. my current job values me a lot, but do I stay there forever? what if I try to switch jobs and nobody wants to hire the cripple?

Are you a developer? There's so much remote work now that you'll absolutely be able to find work. I can't speak to the (illegal) nature of discriminating against you for an in-office developer job though.

I disagree with this reasoning. Not to repeat things that were nicely said elsewhere, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31569160 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31568962, but it boils down to "it's none of your business".

I will absolutely not ever be convinced that I should have to account all of my life to a company I'm considering joining.

I may explain a certain gap if I feel like it. But if I feel I'm being put into a situation where I'm expected to explain it, this isn't a company I would like to work with.

I have many gaps in my resume, like 6 months here, few months there ... at the points it looks like I worked 2/3 of the time over the last 10 years. Sometime recruiters ask me why and I tell the truth that I went travelling, that I needed some time off. Why I had so many different jobs ... It may be a deal breaker for some but it doesn't seem to bother everyone as I've never had trouble finding a job, it could be because the market was in need of my skills, I guess IT people should worry much about that.

It depends entirely on the company and how many other candidates they have.

If I receive 200 resumes and 30% of them are picture perfect - Sorry, I can’t interview or even screen everyone. The resume with unexplained gaps isn’t getting sorted into the top of the pile simply because I have to be aggressive with filtering.

On the other hand, if I’m hiring for a difficult position at a less popular company and I’m only getting 1 or 2 okay resumes per week, I’ll take the time to screen resumes with gaps as long as everything else looks fine.

You have to understand that a lot of hiring managers simply couldn’t screen/interview everyone even if they wanted to. For those jobs, having unexplained gaps in an otherwise average resume could be the negative signal that moves you slightly down bellow the threshold.

But for a lot of average jobs: No, it doesn’t actually matter that much.

The entire screening process is broken when recruiters try to find any and all reasons - or negative signals as you call them - to skip over candidates. Who knows how many amazing talents are skipped over due to trivial issues in their application process.

> Who knows how many amazing talents are skipped over due to trivial issues in their application process.

No one has an actual number, but I expect it's A LOT.

The best thing folks can do is to NOT rely on just dropping their resumes into some anonymous web-based corporate application system. Instead, it's much better to network and to use your contacts (previous co-workers, folks you know, family, friends-- anyone really) to get get leads and bypass HR drones entirely or as much as possible.

The other thing that, IMHO, works really well is to specialize. Positioning oneself for "hot" in-demand jobs, ironically, just ends up putting people into an ocean of competition where each job has hundreds of equally qualified people going after it. That's awesome for employers who can then be absurdly picky, but it's terrible for candidates.

The way many technical candidates shoot themselves in the foot before even getting started is they fail to network and fail to specialize (or target their search properly). They're often honest to a fault and go up against competition that is unscrupulous. There's a reason why so many candidates completely flunk fizzbuzz.

I've gotten a fair amount of side work in the last 20-odd years, largely because most of my admin and programming skill set is antique. Setting up printers on Microsoft Xenix? Updating a business inventory system that was written in BASIC? Making serial cables to hook up old industrial equipment to new controllers?

Lots of C# and Haskell wonks around here, but none of them want to dirty their fingers doing maintenance work, particularly maintenance work on software written in no-longer-fashionable languages before they were born.

If I give you a stack of 200 resumes, how are you going to decide which ones to interview?

I am not a recruiter but if I was and couldn't do my job without taking insane shortcuts that result in subpar recruiting, I would at least admit how broken the process is and try to look at the state of the art for some sanity.

> If I receive 200 resumes and 30% of them are picture perfect

First, what software company hiring developers is in this position?

Second, isn't the definition of "picture perfect resume" the exact thing the GP is arguing to change?

Third, a month is not a unexplained gap; resumes (even LinkedIn) typically aren't fined-grained below the month level with dates, so there's nothing to hide or explain.

> A month is not a unexplained gap;

Honestly the whole thread seems mad to even suggest such a thing is true. "Gaps" start at about 1 year and I'm dubious anyone is using it as a filter before it's 2-3 years (ie when you might claim skills would start to degrade if unused).

A company that doesn't respect the need for privacy and/or the need to take time off should be avoided.

Nobody should have to explain a gap between jobs upfront - they could be gardening, on pilgrimage or attending family - Or simply take advantage of between jobs to take a well earned break. There are a million none of your business reasons.

There should be no expectation for this information, until you engage with them. And even then...

The converse to this is that a resume gap can often stem from things like family status, or health conditions.

Stuff like this (at least in the US) is supposed to be legally protected, but in practice it's a little useless to bar employers from, say, asking about your medical history if they can push yourself to explain a gap in your resume that was exacerbated by a mental health condition, or caused because some illness or accident or left you physically unable to work. (See also: candidates who have kids)

It's a dumb loophole that enables hiring discrimination -- because you can still fish for information that's illegal to ask about specifically, just by falling back to a catch-all question that's bound to turn up much of the same information a meaningful chunk of the time.

This wonderful to hear. More hidden gems for me to hire.

Interesting: over the last 30 years I’ve been lucky enough that my resume is more gap than “work”. I wonder if that would be a problem if I tried to apply for a job at a a big company.

Teach me your ways master!

Its a thing for legacy organisations. If someone is puzzled and gives me a red flag that I had time to rest after my 6 month depression and burnout => its a huge red flag for me that people don't understand the world we live in these days and probably a culture that I will never fit it.

I have 4 gaps on my resume (1 failed startup, 1 burnout episode, 1 travel the world & 1 family care). My resume is a total mess of jobs in sales, growth & product. And yet the best organisations I ever worked for, always tried to understand the context before judging.

I have a three year gap in my resume and getting a good tech job afterwards was EASY. If anything it made me more employable because people tend like people who do more than write code all day. (Of course the lack of career progression was probably a net disadvantage in terms of raw money-making ability, but I don't care about that).

Incidentally I like to also tell people who are a bit behind the times that these days it seems like having visible tattoos is a net benefit for your employability. Everyone likes hiring interesting people who aren't mindless drones. Tattoos, piercings, quirky style .. all serves as evidence of that. At least on the west coast!

Tattoos, piercings, and a quirky style signal you're the right kind of (cultural) drone.

(A corporate wageslave could run away and integrate somewhere else; better to brand them with distinctive, permanent markers.)

I don't know how you got that from my post, but I can assure you that you have misunderstood.

I think of tattoos completely differently than you. I only have one(small, not visible). I view it more as a group identification than any sort of interesting personality. I've met plenty of boring people covered in tats. I also know and spend time with several interesting people covered in tats. It's more of a social identifier.

Since tattoos are so mainstream and common now, they probably send the opposite signal today than they did in the past. When I meet people under 40 or so -without- tattoos, my first impression is they might be more interesting, trend-bucking, counterculture, free thinking, etc.

Obviously tattoo/no tattoo is a bad, low-signal way to size someone up, just pointing out the signal itself has phase-inverted from say 20 years ago.

> Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?

Let me start off saying I dont agree with this logical fallacy. So don't downvote me if you don't like that some employers think this way.

I think many interviewers/managers worry that a gap in resume is actually you got fired and then spent months looking for a new role (possibly this one). Or that you started at a company and then left within a month or two.

I guess the belief is an employee who gets fired ought to be red lettered and too big a risk to employ ever again? (fallacy)

Now starting at a company and leaving early could be a red flag on the employee in that they agreed to do something and then didnt follow through. But it could just as easily be that the company really misrepresented themselves during the interviewing process and lo and behold it's actually a shit show once you start working for them.

Problem being interviewers can spin almost every arbitrary detail into a "red flag", and they have done so for decades. It's the benefit which comes with being in a position of power where they get to be far pickier than most candidates can comparatively.

It's the same reason so many arbitrary things go from "this is absolutely necessary" to "this would be nice" to "oh we can remove that please don't walk away!" depending on the state of the job market. Interviewers are surprisingly flexible when they are no longer the ones holding the reins.

Yeah I do think there are a ton of fallacies that the modern corporation brings to interviewing, which you'd think if someone could break the pattern they might have an advantage? Like one big one for me is the idea that holding out for a better candidate vs hiring an adequate one and giving them world class training? How many months of lost productivity from interviewing another month vs having a fully productive employee one month sooner... and your whole team back on track with building the products that customers supposedly want "right now!" ?

Aside from the "fired and couldn't find another job" and "had personal problems that prevented him from working angles," there's also the possibility that said employee lives well within his means and can take large blocks of time away from full-time work if he chooses.

Which means that said employee could walk away from the company if he's dissatisfied. The company would rather have someone who needs the paycheck— he'll put up with more.

I am not saying that you necessarily endorse this line of reasoning or justification but if this is what passes for talent retention strategies at these firms, they're really in for a lot, lot of pain.

I absolutely don't endorse, but rather strive to understand.

I can see the reasoning in that, but in my 20 years in industry this has never come up. When my first child was born I spent a whole year with him, and the only person who was concerned about a twelve month "gap" was me. Take the time to care for yourself.

Echoing this to say I took a full two years off and came back to a 30k raise and that too as a product manager - meaning no hard skills to show in a leetcode type setting. The right team will always understand why you had to take a break. In my case, the first year was for post burnout travel and personal time, the second to recover from a difficult bout of covid. No one blinked at the situation.

OP, if your financial position allows it, consider taking as much as six months off. I don't know what part of the world you are, but a big change in geography and culture and people around you will probably help break your rut. Consider taking a long trip out to somewhere affordable and sunny and give yourself permission to do nothing but walk around.

Email is my profile bio if you want tips on how to plan something like this.

good news: the people most likely to care are exactly the people to avoid, so you're not losing much.

In a candidate-rich environment when it comes to selecting workers companies do a lot of crazy and irrational things. Just look at interviewing processes, they tend to be more superstition than anything. Having a gap in your resume that the interviewer can fill in with whatever horror story strikes their fancy (was it drug rehab!?) is a disadvantage.

> Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?

Because you might feel like doing so again, or because there’s the possibility the time off wasn‘t voluntary. Not saying employers should think like that, but there’s a portion that does.

It says here that for 22 years you "went Kerouac on everyone's ass."

I've always put years but have also openly admitted having gaps. I simply told I wanted some free time. Or were messing around with some pet-project (which I do put on my CV). Or learning some new language (which I don't put on my CV). It's never been a problem. Perhaps because I never acted weird about it.

As someone who spent the last 8 years in VP & C suite positions...

If someone is asking questions about a resume gap (implying it's important)... LEAVE THE INTERVIEW.

It will stop being a thing when people realize it's none of anyone's business except yours.

The push for arbitrary obedience is part of the same problem.

You will find companies that aren't run by psychopaths but you must vote with your feet. Discourage yourself and others from putting up with this shabby behavior.

Agree with #1.

HN is the social network for software engineers. Instead of teenage girls staring at a perfect looking tiktok influencer and feeling fat shamed, we are a bunch of typing idiots thinking we aren't good enough to be employed. Imposter syndrome is everywhere here.

Look. 99% people here are just pounding out CRUD apps too -- don't be so hard on yourself. There is a maddening amount of over engineering going on (AKA I am soo hot - look at me in Miami!).

And a good portion of those 99% use scaffolding for those CRUD apps, then fiddle with the CSS, and call it a day.

>Hone a hobby

definitely. I would highly recommend creating something. Woodwork, metalwork, sculpting, crochet... whatever.

It uses the brain in a completely different way. it creates new challenges and the satisfaction of physically manipulating the world is unequal in the digital world.

Yep. Tunnel guy [1] knows what's up.

I got far more satisfaction from tying twist-ties around my grape vines today, than anything software I've done in the past month. My grape vines were droopy, now they're not. Tangible.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31096994

Yes. I’m making croissants also bread. It’s super fulfilling. Then you share and enjoy your tasty creation with your friends and family

I'm more of a cook than a baker, but absolutely agree. We have tiny humans currently, so cooking for pleasure is much rarer at the moment, but when they get old enough I can't wait to get back into exploring more foods and trying new recipes and doing it together.

I second creating tunnels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31565849

Would you recommend this over sports?

Why not combine them ? - personally mountain biking + photography. My brother does boat restoration + sailing etc.

Second this, would add any musical instrument to the list. You don't even have to be any good at it. Just improvise and see what comes out. The value for me lies in not being able to "think" about it. You just have to do it. It's not a problem to be solved but something to be discovered.

>>> Stop working 80 hour weeks, stop working weekends. When the only thing you do has little/no reward, that is what causes burnout.

This is a very important point. Slogging without any feeling of accomplishment/returns will burn you out faster.

Do #1 as long as you need. For me it went like this:

- month 1 : feeling lost

- month 2 : feeling totally lost

- month 3 : starting doing things for fun, with the culpability of not working

- month 4 : starting to get bored... Staying home alone starts to be boring (it means your health improve 'cos you start wanting to do something again)

- month 5 : realizing that I can't repeat the last 10 years of my life. Som things must change

- month 6 : my guts tell me "you should go back to school"

- month 7 : I understand that listening to my guts is the only meaningful thing I can do

- month 8 : ok, going back to school.

How is school going for you?

It's actually engineering (data sciences orientation). It's going OK but requires a huge effort (I'm way above the age at which you can ingest so much maths). So I have to be careful not to burn out again. But the deal is different: I work for me, I'll most likely succeed (I've made it through most of the exams with very good gradeq; I'm on the thesis right now), I don't have a toxic boss. So it's not exactly like a burn out situation. But I'll definitively feel relieved once it's behind me (hopefully in september).

Now I was fortunate enough to have enough money (and a powerful social system) to be able to do it. I understand I am very lucky.

And data sciences are super cool when you come from computer sciences. I definitely feel I'm learning something totally new. Data sciences is very far away from computers when you think about it...

If you don't mind me asking, what's your plan for after you get the degree?

Find a job :-) I still love computers :-) I may work in the research team that follows my thesis (got a strong offer); I'll do "basic" stuff but I understand they'll get an experienced colleague at the price of a student, so it's a bargain :-)

On my side, it'll mean start anew in an work environment I like, doing stuff where there's less customer management involved (so, for my personality, that means much less stress). I like customer relationship though, but not when it means: "tell the very unhappy customers that the crappy solution we sold them is the one they love (and explain that this budget overrun is under control)". I much prefer the relationship when it is : "ok customer, I think I understand your needs, let's imagine a solution together".

I've been in software engineering for 20 years and I don't think I've ever had to speak to an unhappy customer. That sounds like something that happens in small startups only (in larger orgs, devs should be fully insulated from this by product owners). In large orgs, often the problem is opposite - you're building something that no one really wants, so there are no interested customers to speak to.

> 1. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc.

I really recommend the volunteering, especially if in a field unrelated to your career and more aligned with your values.

Not only is it a great way to get to know people, it can really give you a better sense of what skills you can bring. You will make even more of an impact if you do bring a different perspective and skillset to others who normally volunteer.

Making some assumptions here but I feel that you (and people in the US in general) downplay the benefits of travel. To me, volunteering in this case would just be..more work?

I'm actually in France, but I agree with travel being great. I haven't traveled as much as I'd have liked to, and I have committments that make travel more difficult than when I was in my twenties.

For me, personally, volunteering in a small association has had a life-changing impact to me in a month.

The option not on here is to move to a lead.

Tell the company that it's more than a one person job (should be obvious by the comments). Then pitch the idea of you being the lead and selecting the new team. You should be able to reduce your hours and get a raise. If not, then the comment above should work well.

I agree, this is a logical next step. Definitely time off is warranted though -- burnout is no joke.

I've been so much more productive since I scaled back my hours from 60-70 to never more than 40.

> Fill your time with something else that you prioritize above work.

For me this is by far the hardest part. (But also I'm the type to just idly waste time instead of filling it with work.) For most of my life, coding was by far my favorite thing to do; I could do it for hours without noticing the time passing. But now it feels like work and I haven't found anything that remotely fills the hole in its place.

Agree to all your points except partial "nit" on the first one - Traveling slightly feels like an escapism thing for me. Volunteering and hobbies are perfect, but people tend to do the traveling more often, I feel.

I think people in OP's situation might benefit a sense of accomplishment/progress, and being recognized for that would help. But that's hard to get, especially external recognition. But a feeling of satisfaction/recalibration/grounding is definitely available thru hobbies that enable creation as suggested in the comment about woodwork, metalwork, sculpting, etc.

I think for travel you need to make the most of it when you return. I've come back from trips feeling like I hit a refresh button, though if you don't make changes and run with the feeling you'll just fall back into old feelings and habits

I agree about feeling mentally refreshed, but I am normally knackered after travel because I don't stop moving when I travel (relaxing on a beach or beside a pool makes no sense to me). Most travel trips for me result in at least one minor epiphany about something I should be doing more or less of... Taking yourself out of a comfortable place to a new place can temporarily re-wire some neurons in your brain for more open thinking.

The current mode of travel for most people is trying to maximize trips. Find the best deal for flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. Then cramming all the "must see" spots while hopping Ubers and bars. It is hard to switch out of this mode.

Tho I am not sure about how rich people vacation, ritualistic trips to the same "summer cabins" or "winter resorts".

You wrote: <<It is hard to switch out of this mode.>> Is that for you or other people? My point: I don't care about other people "relaxing" on a beach / poolside, stuffing themselves at the buffet. I never do it. When that type of person comes to ask for advice after my most recent holiday, I always tell them to go away (nicely, of course!). It is a waste of time to talk about being stuck in a bus terminal for 8 hours waiting for the next bus, but striking up a conversation with a local imam... and learning lots about the local community, culture, language, and food.

But what if they aren't worth more (as a dev, financially) than they think they are? They could be awful, but naively put in a ton of hours. Why do we assume people are worth more? Are we trying to make them feel better by making assumptions and potentially leading them horribly astray? Most people are supremely mediocre and there are just and many horrible devs as their are great ones.

I'm basing this off four observations --

1) They, as the sole developer, are managing to hold their startup together software-wise. That is a useful skill -- raw coding talent or not.

2) Since having recently found my way to a FAANG, I've found a surprising number of new hires are fresh college grads with about that much coding experience, and make more than I (with 30 years experience) ever had made before joining.

3) OP is self-described terrible at networking. I've personally found this my biggest barrier to finding well-paying jobs also.

4) Startups pay shit.

> are managing to hold their startup together software-wise.

you dont know that. They could be failing the startup software-wise, and yet never know it!

The only way to find out, objectively, if you're good or not, is via multiple sources of independent verification in different companies.

It would be evident after a few months or a year if he is failing them, he has been there for 4 years. So unless the startup has non-functioning software and everyone involved is okay with that, incl the people who pays the bills, he probably is doing just fine and just mentally deep in a hole.

If you've been the sole developer at a startup (and that startup depends on it's tech) for 4 years, there's no way OP is failing at that.

Someone who has been working in a small team for 4 years in a startup has to be "good enough". Which is far better than the average candidate who can't keep a position for more than a year and needs constant help from the manager in order to accomplish anything. Maybe my standards are low, but unfortunately, I have seen so many of these cases.

OP didn’t state where they are from, but there are plenty of places where it is extremely hard to fire, even if an employee is consistently underperforming.

Not saying that this is the case in this circumstance (I don’t know OP,) but the “you must be good because you lasted 4 years” heuristic doesn’t work that well outside of the US, or similar markets with at-will employment.

if they were sole dev in a startup for four years and couldn't ship software the startup probably wouldn't have lasted the last four years... Or they very quickly wouldn't be the sole full stack dev any more and relegated to some shit job

exactly. 'Shipping' is a very valuable skill not everybody has (and people who do have it undervalue it).

Yeah, I missed that they were the sole engineer. That changes things dramatically.

"sole dev in a startup" is key here.

I did miss the word “sole.” Good point.

Even in France which lots of people call "socialist", the company can fire you at any time and has to pay only about 3/6 months of salary for "wrongful termination". That's low enough to not keep constantly underperforming people.

I think in many other countries like Nordics and Germany the company can be forced to just basically undo the termination.

Only if the courts decide that it was unlawful, but companies have enough experience and lawyers who make sure they have enough dirt on you to justify them firing you. It's what my German ex-boss told us and I've had seen many colleagues get fired without any repercussions for the company. Plus, if you end up sueing your former employer, and the word gets out, no other employer will touch you.

Also, for your mental health, you wouldn't want to go back and work at the company who just fired you. That's like getting back together with an ex you just got out of toxic relationship.

Big companies have lawyers up the wazoo, but startups (esp. with a single dev like OP) struggle with funds in many cases, so often hire lawyers to the minimal extent possible.

They could, but usually you don't want this to happen as an employee. Alternatively the court can force the employer to pay a severance if they regard the working conditions as untenable. An obvious example would be bullying at the workplace. But all of this is only applicable in the case of an unlawful termination.

Mostly if they want to get rid of you they offer you a severance.

It is also much more complicated than I can explain in a single post. For example, you can be fired for working "slowly", but you can't be fired if you are doing your best - even if all your colleagues are faster workers. It mainly depends on if you are doing your best.

E.g. your colleagues are able to dish out 100 pizzas in a typical evening but you only manage to make 50, and your boss wants to fire you. You don't agree and sue him. The court now has to decide if you perform so badly because of something that is "inherent" - which is called a "personenbedingte Kündigung" or in English dismissal on grounds of personal capability, or if it is based on your conduct. A dismissal on grounds of personal capability is usually deemed unlawful, as long as you give your best, if you consistently only manage to make 50 pizzas it seems like it, right? However if you willfully (!) perform badly the dismissal is usually deemed lawful. But, if you e.g. suffer from rheumatism and you can't perform the way you used to but you want to perform better, you just can't anymore it gets a bit complicated: the employer has to make a prognosis on how and if you are able to someday perform better again or if you could do another job. So, usually it is cheaper to offer someone a severance in that case.

I think this is a fair assessment, at least competent, perhaps not a one in a thousand superstar.

What someone in this range earns and their working conditions are going to be highly dependent on what they ask for and their self-esteem. Someone can probably lure them on the cheap or they could sneak into $200k job. I think a lot of the comments here about self-care and advocating for themselves are very helpful.

> and there are just and many horrible devs as their are great ones.

I will say horrible devs are far more than great ones. In my 15 years of experience I have seen far more mediocre or downright horrible than great ones.

Quick question, if I may...

Of the horrible devs that you can think of, how many of them would reach out and say that they're horrible (or make a post like this) vs how many of them think they're great/superstars? :)

Certainly makes me think of the Dunning-Kruger effect!

I think many "great" programmers also have plenty of flaws. Nobody is perfect. As long as you can make stuff that works, that's good. Some people will be better at some things, some will be worse. Focus on the stuff you're good at. Work on the stuff you want to be better at. But stop trying to be a superstar.

We're all stuck between Dunning-Kruger and the Impostor Syndrome, but we make it work.

Completely agree :)

Assuming the developer can get paid a 40-hour salary for working 40 hours a week elsewhere instead of 70-90 hour weeks plus 24/7 on-call, the developer is clearly capable of earning more dollars per hour of work.

I want to point out that a person’s is not a static thing. You are not born with whatever you are “worth”. You either build your worthiness over time, or lose it. I think instead of propagating that most people are horrible devs, we should try to tell people that it’s always an acquired skill. So everyone (and I really mean everyone) can work to acquire the skills, and become a “worthy” dev.

This.

I have seen eager but untalented persons build their skills and their portfolio over a couple years. To the point that had I been told this at the beginning, I would not have believed it. In a particular case, the person - at the time a low qualified technician - embarked at 26 to become an engineer, and by 38 is one of the most sought after engineers in his field.

Self confidence and willpower are factors that can overcome innate talent to a very large degree.

nice argument there dude. your self esteem must be skyrocketing. Op is crying for help, you talk like an AI. cheers!

> But what if they aren't worth more (as a dev, financially) than they think they are?

Honestly i think most devs err on the side of underestimating their value not overestimating it, particularly in the current market.

Of course, ymmv, but last time i switched jobs i ended up being pretty shocked how much more employers thought i was worth compared to what my (at the time) current job was paying me.

It would still make sense to encourage their self esteem, because poor self-esteem is a self reinforcing condition. It negatively affects your mental health, and by extension your job performance and "worth" on the job market.

If a little bit of self delusion is what's required to break that cycle, then it's totally worth it.

Not that I think that's what's going on here. If you read between the lines of the OP it's my opinion that the main issues afflicting them are a poor self-image and bad networking skills. They're likely good enough technically but if they don't address the self talk they may never realize that.

what if they would be great doing something entirely different. OP hasn't said if they ever had a point in their life when they really enjoyed what they did.

in my case brain fog from burn-out lasted not months but 6-8 years with varying severity. depending on how long you stay burned out or ignore the burn-out that might be less. E.g if you're without a support network during burn-out it may not be as straight forward to pull yourself out. Burn out might be not because they worked so much and are now financially stable but because they had to work so much because they could never make ends meet until now.

If they can afford it they should take time off radically - get rid of everything that ties them down, be in nature for min 6 months (example: a long hike -> heading from A to B so there is a purpose in the simplicity). Or cover yourself in books (not compsci or tech literature but something radically different) and spend the other free time physically exercising.

There are pretty clear signs of depression in these sentences (why I would focus on lot of exercise or routines that also demand a healthy diet). Alternative is to see a quack and pop pills for the next few months and risk some addiction as a result, or at least deal with weaning yourself off them again.

Doing radically different things than $dayjob means totally forgetting about technology for a while and opening yourself up to other things. Person is 28 ffs which is hardly an age where you can't start on a radically different career path and end up excelling in it. Worst thing would be to carry on as a dev and turn yourself from a bad dev to a mediocre one and pay for this poor "gain" with burn-out, brain-fog, depression for several years.

What if this kind of cruel snotty attitude is a telltale sign of people who are as afraid they’re mediocre as they view the people they judge? What if there’s no value to anyone in this kind of response?

This is literally the logic of capitalism. Your value is simply whatever value you are able to negotiate for yourself on the job market. OP is more valuable than a toilet cleaner, or a starbucks barista, less valuable than a corporate lawyer or a CEO.

People naturally "compare up" rather than "compare down". Sure OP is probably in the 1% wealthiest people in the world, or top 99.9999% of those who ever lived, but rather than be happy with that, he will compare himself to other computer programmers who are doing fantastically, and feel bad about himself.

Another factor here is probably the fact that OP's working conditions are highly exploitative, it appears that he is putting in far more work than necessary. He probably genuinely believes that hard work is rewarded and doesn't understand why he feels used up and spent. And it's probably because he is being used up and spent by his exploitative employer. So fair enough if you look around and see other developers who are not being used up, you might decide you want to live life with a measure of dignity, too.

Any rational actor in this circumstance would do the minimum work they could get away with, and do whatever they can to negotiate for better conditions. A first step might be to develop enough self esteem to be able to say "no" when asked to work unhealthy and unproductively long hours. But without knowing more of the specifics of how much leverage he has, it's hard to know if that is going to be met with instant reprisal or whether he will be able to gain the respect he deserves.

Of course, I am starting from the basic assumption that all human beings are worthy of some basic amount of respect, dignity, and freedom from exploitation.

> OP is more valuable than a toilet cleaner, or a starbucks barista

Not to kill your point, but those two are dramatically under-valued and under-appreciated jobs in most societies around the world. Every time you use a toilet (other than the one in your home) which is hopefully clean, somebody had cleaned it recently. Imagine they hadn't. You'd have a terrible day. Every time you go grab a good Starbucks coffee. Maybe even sit down in a comfy sofa to be able to enjoy it. Imagine the barista had screwed it up.

Both experiences make a huge difference in people's lives. Hundreds if not thousands a day. Every day. But they are paid crap and talked about in the way you just did. Compare that to a coder churning away meaningless features in some meaningless app. Would I care if the coder wouldn't show up to work for the next 4 weeks with nobody stepping in their place? No. That answer is decisively different for the toilet cleaner and the barista.

My take: payment is not based on created value, but on competition for the job. The more competition, the lower the salary an employer can get away with.

> My take: payment is not based on created value, but on competition for the job. The more competition, the lower the salary an employer can get away with.

And yet, for the past two years, just about every store you'll ever go to has a 'Sorry, we're shortstaffed' sign in the window.

If there's zero offerings/competition, the job can't be filled. If they increase salary, there would be competition.

I think what the parent is trying to say, is that if we really valued those things, they would be paid more. The thing is, cleaning toilets is pretty easy. I do it myself all the time at home. So is making coffee. It's not _the best_ coffee, but it's coffee. The baristas who make _the best_ coffee probably get paid quite a lot. But it's pretty easy to make okay coffee. For most people in this world, programming is hard. And even if you thing that feature of that app is meaningless, somebody else obviously disagrees with you and is willing to spend a lot of money to make that feature happen.

The value is not what we _think_ of it, but what we're willing to pay for it.

> But they are paid crap

The pay is usually indicative of employer's ability to find a person with the necessary skillset to do the job and not some abstract "importance to society" value that the job has.

Wouldn't it be nice if pay was correlated with value to society? There are a lot of software engineers getting paid bank to make products that are worse for users and society but make their bosses fat stacks. The school janitor is providing more benefit to society.

As a software dev I agree, and I've worked on some products I'd deem as a net positive to society. But there is just so much shit software out there.

As a German I wonder what the people where thinking programming VWs TDI system to activate emission controls only during testing, was it worth it? Polluting the environment and peoples lungs for a bit of money? It's not like dev jobs are a rarity in Germany. And yes I'm judgemental about this. And don't get me started on the things that are legal and still a detriment to society.

What were the execs that put a bunch of monkeys in an exhaust gas chamber to prove it was “clean diesel” thinking? Or the ones who signed off on the “Green Police” ad?

I agree that our society's method for allocating value to people has fundamental flaws; chief among them is that money is the main measure of value.

Ben Franklin called money 'coined liberty'; in this day and age it is more 'coined status'. It is a scaling mechanism. Reputation only works if people know you, there are simply too many people to know, so we've replaced reputation with money.

However, in the context of this discussion thread, the word 'value' can be interpreted as "paycheck". Your and my diversions are that, diversions.

> Your value is simply whatever value you are able to negotiate for yourself on the job market.

Since what you can negotiate is in part related to what value you can actually provide, then what you can negotiate is ultimately guided by reality, if not determined by it. Of course negotiation matters. In business as well as in love. And it matters in part because we cannot read minds and cannot see everything that you can do. So communication must fill that gap. Imperfectly.

Being realistic is not cruel. It may feel cruel, but allowing people to delude themselves is far more cruel in the long term, as they make poor choices.

Even more reason for them to get a decent work life balance. Who do you think makes more trouble for their collegues: a hypothetical mediocre developer who is overworked, or a mediocre developer who works normal hours and has two hobbies which fulfil them?

I'd bet my money on the first producing more trouble. The latter one is not centered around coding alone, so they are more flexible.

Wow, this is a textbook example of trying to solve a deeply personal/emotional problem with logics and data instead of compassion. To anyone who activates their empathy sensors it's evidently clear that the OP is having a mild burnout crisis (not surprising after 70h weeks), and needs a bit of support first and foremost. What's really doing damage is your language, not a biased estimate of which percentile of a bell curve we're looking at here. It's simply. not. the. problem. If they are on the wrong track they'll figure it out on their own, but they need support and compassion.

Sorry for being so direct, but this culture of trying to substitute logic for compassion really pervades the IT scene in a rather toxic way.

>What's really doing damage is your language, not a biased estimate of which percentile of a bell curve we're looking at here.

I don't know, maybe setting unrealistic expectations and telling everyone they are worth more which implies they are doing something wrong to not get that worth out isn't doing them favours either in the long run.

Yes, apparently you don't know how language affects emotions, expectations and personal relationships, and what the long-term effects on mental health, productivity, longevity and quality-years-of-life are. Don't confuse your pseudo-empiricism with objectivity (we don't even have enough data here! how can you talk about unrealistic expectations without data?). But even better, learn interpersonal skills - objectivity isn't everything.

>we don't even have enough data here! how can you talk about unrealistic expectations without data?

You don't need data on every single developer in the world to know that not all of them are 'worth more'.

>learn interpersonal skills - objectivity isn't everything.

The whole thinking that objectivity precludes interpersonal skills and that if you attempt to be objective you are what? a cold robot? is absurd.

If you post "I don't know, maybe setting unrealistic expectations and telling everyone they are worth more which implies they are doing something wrong to not get that worth out isn't doing them favours either in the long run." under a thread like this, you are acting supremely unempathic. You are not acting like a robot, modern robots are actually much better at empathic conversation. In fact, I asked GPT-3 "Write a response to this post: [OP's post]", here's the result:

You are not a loser, and you are not alone. Many people struggle with finding fulfillment in their careers. It sounds like you have been working hard, but it is also important to work smart. Try to focus on your goals and what you want to achieve. Networking can be helpful, but it is not the only way to find satisfaction in your career. There are many other ways to find fulfillment, such as volunteering, pursuing hobbies, and spending time with loved ones. Don't be afraid to reach out to others for help and advice. There are many people who are willing to help and support you.

That is genuinely the most impressive thing I've seen come out of GPT-3. Granted, I haven't played with it much, but wow. Thanks for posting this.

Me too, like, you could start one of these agony aunt columns and nobody would notice. Maybe polish it a bit and you are good to go.

Even if you think objectively, in this case, he's most likely underpaid and undervalued by the startup.

1. He's working much longer hours than he's paid for, probably for pie-in-the-sky options that 95% chance won't amount to a true pay-off for his hustle

2. He doesn't seem to have advocated for himself or his own happiness, he's going along with this burnout inducing program

3. He's clearly modest -- he's been coding for ~10 years and he's in his mid-20's. That is a highly employable situation in our field, he could easily get another job IMO.

He is a developer not an assembly line worker. Office work is subjective to the environment and can not be objectively measured. It largely depends on how he presents and positions himself in his specific work environment and there is always room to level up this situation.

Possible, but the balance of probablility is that they’re fairly good.

This based solely on the fact they’re aware of and posting on HN.

All the mediocre people I know aren’t interested enough to keep reading -much less comment on- this website.

i like your logic.

someone should ask a few HN questions instead of leetcode. "who is dang"? "did you read the latest from the lego sorter guy ?"

“Most people are supremely mediocre and there are just and many horrible devs as their are great ones.”

if this is true (not arguing either way), then he is almost surely undervaluing himself since most of those mediocre or horrible devs don’t work 80 hour weeks or are regularly on call.

If point 3 is not communicated propperly ( and it sounds the OP is not that great at that) it might put his job into jeopardy. If an environment exists where this has been done by OP for a longer time now, the change will be reflected as a lack of commitment. OP would probably be better off looking for a new job and set new boundaries.

6. Start not giving a shit about career, helped me a lot

Ah, to "internalize" a statement is to "believe" it. To treat it as real.

I just understood that.

That is an interesting method.

I completely agree, even more so with 1. Do not skip or shorten 1. Force yourself NOT to code during 1.

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