Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Some times I think we are wired to believe we have to beg people's forgiveness for not being miserable. Medium term I'd suggest discarding this belief. Short term: on behalf of geeks everywhere, your local online watering hole hereby grants you permission to not be miserable.

Quit. There exist much better jobs out there. The hiring market for people with your skillset is the best it has ever been.

Level up. Portfolios are not, in fact, how most people get consulting gigs or jobs. This is believe due to availability bias by junior employees/consultants because portfolios are tangible and they have some sort of just world theory where the best gigs/jobs go to the people on the top of the ladder in programming skill. There is no one skill ladder. To the extent that there is, skill is not the primary driver of employment decisions.

P.S. The overwhelming majority of jobs are not in modern frameworks. Get good at Rails/AngulAr if they interest you or if you want to work in fields where they're the frameworks of choice. (Rails might be for Valley startups one of a few top contenders. I am insufficiently well acquainted with Angular to understand whether it is. Either way, neither will account for a full percentage point of LOC written in 2014.)

Also, if you haven't done so, I'd sit down and figure "What do I want to get out of my career?" and start optimizing for jobs which get you closer to those goals. This sounds obvious but some people don't do it. Do it. "A job which keeps a roof over my head and doesn't tax me mentally" is a perfectly valid answer but you don't seem to want that so don't continue to seek it out when you get up every morning.

If a portfolio doesn't matter that much, how would you recommend a young programmer, without many connections, get a new job?

I would recommend to make many connections!

Meetup.com might be a start, find fellow programmers there. Go to your local co-work location. Try the freelance sites like e-lance , etc...

But whatever you do, don't let lack of portfolio stop you.

I second what patio11 said about the low prevalence of modern frameworks. Even at the most advanced startups I've seen up close, more of the software is built using custom frameworks than using "cutting-edge" modern frameworks. Adopting each new modern framework has a cost, and if a startup's problems are largely orthogonal to the problems the framework solves, adopting the framework is unjustified. I can remember only one job interview where extensive Rails experience was a hard requirement, but it was probably because the company's founding team wanted help learning Rails. You should be able to find many jobs where experience with modern frameworks is not a hard requirement.

If I were in your situation, I'd do two things. First, I'd write a list of 10 ideas to make my career really fun. This list would probably describe companies to interview at and projects to pursue. Second, I'd write a list of 10 ideas to make my current job really fun. This might require some extreme creativity, but it might be better to make a possibly futile attempt to enjoy the current job while working on finding the next one than continue to waste away in misery.

Here are a few crazy ideas that come to mind. Your ideas will be better:

1. Make a bingo board where each square is a common annoyance you encounter in the code. Share combinations of the bingo board with your co-workers. Give a candy bar to whomever gets bingo first.

2. When faced with an annoying task, set a countdown timer and do everything you can to finish the task before the time runs out. Don't let the bomb explode.

3. Stand up and do a fist pump every time you make an especially clever commit.

4. Listen to music that is fun.

5. Periodically listen to comedy that makes you laugh.

6. Think of the people you admire or respect in your workplace. Try to meet with them and learn from them. Give back to them too - perhaps by giving them ideas that you think could possibly help them in their projects, or introduce them to people you know who could help them.

7. Bring in snacks or some particularly tasty treats to share with your co-workers. It might help build some emotional connection and friendship.

8. Bring a bag of M&Ms and eat one every time you save a file.

9. Try working for an hour using only one hand.

10. If you're in an office setting where talking out loud won't bother other people, try narrating everything you do during the work day like how YouTube stars narrate playing video games. An immensely talented engineer I knew at an internship would sing rap lyrics all morning and swear vigorously at his machine when things went badly wrong. It was ridiculously entertaining.

Best of luck making your career more enjoyable!

+50

For both a great lesson and hilarious yet, a very applicable list of ideas.

I've been saying this for years. Obviously, we all want to progress in our careers, learn new things, and become the best we can be. Having a vision for where you want to end up is extremely important for getting there, otherwise a dream is just a pipe dream.

BUT, if you can wake up every day and do things like are stated above, you are going to be wildly happier in even the worst of situations and in turn, make others around you happier, even if this is only a small stop along the long road.

Just the other day, I wanted to try the new Dunkin Donuts breakfast burrito. If you've seen the commercial where the two guys are sitting down with goggles on because it is "exploding with flavor". I sat down in our kitchen, with goggles on at 8:30am when everyone was coming into the office. It made me laugh and a ton of others.

Happy Wednesday!

I have the idea that AngularJS is requested more and more. I thought it was kind of a "must have" skill.

It's the hot technology in the same way that Rails was the hot technology in 2005-2007.

This does not make it a must-have. I did just fine learning Django instead of Rails in 2007, and when I finally got into Google in 2009, I ended up using neither for the bulk of my time there (okay, I think I had about 3-4 Django projects in my tenure, and knowing Python definitely helped).

There is a certain segment of the employer market that is always chasing the latest hot fad: Java applets in 1997, ColdFusion in 1999, J2EE in 2002, Rails in 2005, Angular in 2009, React or Polymer or Go in 2014. Knowing the latest hot fad can be an excellent way to get your first couple jobs in software, because these employers are always looking for people and typically don't know much about technology themselves. However, it often signs you up for a lifetime of retraining, unless you leverage experience at one of these places into domain knowledge with a longer shelf life. Companies that live by the latest fad die by the latest fad; the same ColdFusion or J2EE skills that got me my first jobs in college are basically worthless now.

Quick search on Indeed shows 56,332 jobs mentioning JavaScript, 4,378 jobs mentioning Angular. So <8%. Plus, the vast majority of those 4,378 jobs are merely including Angular in a list of various frameworks, as examples of technologies they'd like candidates to have experience with — few of them require Angular specifically as a "must have" skill.

Don't you think he should look for a job while he keeps his current job?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com