From web developer to database developer in 10 years
notes.eatonphil.com
notes.eatonphil.com
This is extremely annoying. This also means if your first job is doing X, it is very difficult to break into Y even if you know quite well about Y, and even have side projects. I have tried attaching cover letters indicating even if my current experience is in X, I am quite familiar with Y, to no luck. (No one reads those stuff).
If you are a truly exceptional dev in your previous field and can convince me of that, along with an up-front and transparent explanation of why you lied to me as our first interaction, it is possible to overcome this. However, that is a pretty small pool of people.
Though, it definitely can work at some companies.
Then next time, it's no longer a lie and they can (in theory) get by on merit
I switched from Dev to SRE at the same company, and within like one week of remembering to update LinkedIn job title, the random recruiter messages switched from Dev to "oh we are looking for someone like you with lots of SRE experience" (having worked in SRE for <3 months).
So yea, it's difficult to get traction for something that isn't already your job title.
This is a failing of the hiring manager. If the recruiter can't tell who is and isn't a good fit, the hiring manager should have corrected the situation or not partnered with the recruiter.
I find that practice disgusting personally and will never do it myself or condone it in others, but it does seem to work.
The LinkedIn random recruiter messages are a different game than resume screening. Most of those recruiters are using the LinkedIn search tools. Searching for keywords like "sre" is essentially useless because so many people do keyword stuffing. So instead, many recruiters will either be given or will ask for a list of companies to try to pull candidates from.
For me, the key was twofold:
1) Spend a lot of extracurricular (not work) time, exploring new tech that interests me. This often included purchasing expensive kit, and attending classes, on my own dime (but I could usually use the spend in my tax write-offs).
2) Be willing to accept being paid a lot less than my peers.
My career is a fairly eclectic one. I’m now retired, and spend a lot of time learning stuff, which is fun.
Also, I just like doing this stuff. My work is also my hobby. There's not that many things that I'd rather be doing.
I have also had a very good venue for doing volunteer work, and that has always provided a driving force.
Of course, now that I'm retired, I have the time.
My work is my hobby too, that is why I struggle sometimes wondering if I will ever retire. Why retire when what I'm doing is for the most part fun. Sure, there are days that I'd rather be "doing X", or more like "studying X" than actually working but I'm enjoying work so much lately that it soon passes.
Work also forces me to actually DO instead of thinking about doing. I have to perform. People are depending on me to get stuff done and that is a big motivator. With my personal projects, no one needs it or is expecting it so it is too easy to abandon.
In my case, I was fortunate to have projects that people depend on. Even my "hobby" work has always shipped.
"I don't have freetime" is usually a tell sign that people either don't know how to manage their time / prioritize free time activities, or have made choice that they refuse to see as choice but as obligations instead (which implicitely just means they prioritize this activity a lot)
Overwhelming majority? Plenty of people don't make enough from their 40h/w job to pay all their expenses and have to get another job or have to share responsibilities with a working spouse. Having kids or aging parents is also a common demand on ones time.
"Only" 5.2% of US job holders hold more than one job https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm
If you want to argue that this doesn't add up with "The overwhelming majority of people who work around 40 hours a week have plenty of free time." then please provide sourced numbers rather than baseless internet doomerism.
Oh and I'll add that the average commute time in the US is among the shortest in the OECD, since the long commute boogeyman always end up popping up in these discussions.
However, there was never the "996" shit, you see, these days. I generally did about 50 hours per week. Sometimes more; sometimes, less.
Sometimes, if the extracurricular stuff also benefitted my day job, I could get the company to help out, there.
I wouldn’t do it without a decent accountant. In my experience, they always paid for themselves.
You would not be able to (legally) do that today
Thanks for not immediately going on the attack.
Some other professional got royally screwed - e.g. a concert violinist can no longer deduct a $50,000 violin purchase if they're employed by an orchestra as a W2
That's why I say we should have accountants.
I'm always thrilled to have strangers on the Internet attack me, and even attack an accountant that they never even heard about before. Thanks!
Have a great day!
Have a great day, or whichever passive aggressive sign-off you'd prefer!
In agencies, a bit like startups, everyone "knows" everything up to the point of winning projects.
While everyone knows here how famous some of those projects end up being, but if you can take this ongoing pressure to "know" everything, it is much easier to switch between roles and programming stacks, than the usual HR looking for X on the CV and nothing else.
The type-casting part is relatable. It definitely feels like we're all being pigeon-holed by hiring managers and ATS systems that categorize us and rank us by keywords and work history. It can sometimes be quite difficult to switch from something like web development to embedded to databases. Good on you for breaking through.
I'm also looking to break into databases. But despite having worked on database libraries, general programming experience, and years of designing and operating systems using databases... there's at least hundreds of people who have been working in databases for years longer and getting one's foot in the door that way is tricky.
Keep sharing your passion, that seems to really help stand out. Not all of us might be in a position to found a company or run a user group in a major city (if it doesn't already exist)... but we can write blogs, attend those meetups, give talks, and help each other out on projects.
I’ve been working in web development for many years now. It’s okay. I still don’t know what I want to be in the future. I still don’t feel like a “real dev”. But still do some side learning. I’m happy it worked for the writer, and I hope it does for you too.
Anyone can learn this stuff. Ignore the gate keepers and the little voice that tells you only smart people can do this. You're a smart person. Crack a book, open a new file, compile some code. You'll get there.
When people ask for advice about changing fields, I recommend working at smaller companies that have work in their current domain and also the domain they want to switch to. The most accessible route is to look for a startup that will hire you for your current expertise but that also has needs for the type of work you want to do. Startups are much more willing to let people bounce between domains than a big corporation with a giant org chart and middle managers defending their domains.
I've been at a couple companies that were open minded about interviewing people with backgrounds that didn't match the role. We had a few success stories of people making big changes, including one person who transitioned from tech support to junior developer and then continued to grow.
To be honest, though, hiring people far outside their work history was more often a failure than a success. A lot of the applicants were applying to the job because they thought the grass would be greener on that side of the fence, but then became disillusioned when they encountered the same software engineering challenges in a different domain.
A couple of the people we hired just wanted to jump from domain to domain over and over again. As soon as we started getting them trained up enough to be productive, they demanded to switch to another new domain. In the interview phase it's hard to tell who wants to commit to the new domain versus those who want to explore and switch around a lot.
So I reluctantly admit that I get it. In a job market like this where hiring managers get 100 applicants within hours of posting a job, filtering for people who have the experience instead of candidates who want to learn on the job is a rational choice.
IMO pivoting fully into DB development would be a very natural path, for me at least.
I've done the IC to engineering manager back to IC thing and it is indeed a huge relief to learn that it's OK to do that. My favorite piece of writing on that is The Engineer/Manager Pendulum by Charity Majors: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
Charity makes a very convincing case that it's OK to swing from manager to IC and back again several times over the course of your career and that doing so will make you more effective at both of those things.
That's the spirit! And it worked.
Every time I've felt like I didn't understand something and felt overwhelmed at the scale at a task, 3-6 months down the line of throwing myself at the problem and trying to understand it, I've realised it's not as hard and part of the barrier was just the unfamiliar terminology and unfamiliar tools. Sure, there is a degree of needing to learn new stuff - which is true in any job and in life - to do new things. But those barriers are not normally insurmountable. That's been true for me in basically every area. It is also why I'm fairly willing to give people a chance, so long as they are able to demonstrate some knowledge which would be able to transfer.
Watching Eaton's journey online was very inspiring but sadly I have also seen a lot of people doing this to no avail. This is eerily similar to how musicians do busking until they got noticed by a record label.
The only thing that is sad to me is watching someone with 250K+ annual cash salary for a solid decade somehow becoming destitute after mere months of trying to do things without active W2 employment. Savings rate is a huge part of the "no avail" aspect. You can beat the pants off this game by simply being frugal. Income is 50% of the battle. How you spend it is the other 50%.
Still, it might be worth keeping in mind that W2 salaried upper middle class is the highest taxed segment of the US population. People who make more by owning companies and assets are taxed less, people who make less are taxed less.
If you spent those 10 years paying for daycare, paying for after school programs, saving for your kids’ college (because you expect to pay nearly full price due to your income), and making other logically sound luxury spending decisions like eating fresh healthy foods rather than survival staples or taking a vacation because you only live once, I can see how you can end up with not quite enough savings.
Or you might have a runway but you know it is really unwise to spend it, which ends up effectively making you functionally destitute by choice.
So there's hope that with consistency and patience, one could build expertise in a totally different area
https://quasar.dev/introduction-to-quasar/
That being said, Erlang/Elixir abstracts most db use-cases with ecto, and has some other incredibly powerful scalable features for sites:
https://www.phoenixframework.org/
* Distributed
* Fault-tolerant
* Highly available
* Hot swapping
Depends on the use-case, but if your product is <14 month lifecycle App/shovel-ware, than go JS for the labor compatibility... Yet if you are hitting >40k concurrent users, the options winnow down fairly quickly.
Have fun =3
I think it is hilarious people assume 3NF or 4NF db schema can save them from bad design. Yet, many have tried to make SQL scale efficiently (with some obvious caveats) =3
I would love to hear people's stories of interesting jobs they've gotten without a degree in this space.
May I ask what country you live in?
https://github.com/maxnilz/sboxdb
Now, trying to implement a rocksdb-like LSM based storage in modern C++ and call it from the sboxdb, just for refresh my old C++ memory.
You're able to learn and grow an incredible amount in environments that don't lock you out of work based on the shape of the cog that the company hired for.
You have to have serious motivation to not just stay with what you know, but it's a nice kick in the butt to the rest of us to see that it can be done, with you put in the work.
Every other use I have ever come across has meant the development of the databases themselves, the file in which data is stored in a relational (and recently, non-relational) manner.
Because when we talk about “a database”, we are almost never talking about the engine that works with one, we’re talking about the file that holds all the data. The former is invariably called a “database server”.
Wouldn’t a much more accurate and subject-separate term have been “database engine developer” or “database server developer”? That alone, I think, could have reduced or even eliminated a lot of confusion.
And no, not a newb: working with computers since 1982, on the Internet since 1988, on the web since 1992, and in the IT industry since 1997. In the English-speaking world, too.
Both are declarative ways of traversing graph-like datasets (DOM nodes vs tabular relations).