toexitthedonut

Yeah, I've been using those sites for a while already. Meetups is very helpful in finding other programmers. 1871 and Angel.co I haven had much luck with getting interviews.

That's the way I see it. Programmers have been automating themselves out of menial tasks since the first compiler, or possibly even before.

What is considered "menial" depends on the context of the problem needing to be solved and a mix of your personal experience.

The increase of hardware performance also helped allow software abstractions to the ridiculous levels you see. That's what also makes it possible for computers to solve a greater array of business problems.

Engineers making tools that are used for making other tools, that are tools for other tools for other tools that eventually helped make someone's wedding photography site on Wix.

Sounds interesting. How do I PM you for details?

I'm the same age as you, 34 (single and have no kids though), and like tostitos1979, I don't yet see a way out of the rat race. I live in a medium CoL city (Chicago) and still trying to make ends meet.

To answer the first question, I see myself with a decent paying job that has 401(k) and benefits in 5 years. Sounds average, like a typical college student's goal, but I still feel like a college student in some ways. I graduated at age 25 and 9 years later I am not able to make a living for myself.

I have been burnt out from companies paying so far below the local market rate, going through several periods of time with no work only to get another offer form a company that doesn't pay well, doesn't provide insurance, don't withhold taxes for their workers. And then getting laid off again. I'm spinning my wheels here. I cannot save money with that kind of thing going on indefinitely.

In 5 years I also do not want to be living with my mom. I want to have my own home, being able to set my own rules instead of running errands every day for family. And in 5 years I do not want to use her money to go to a coffee shop almost daily because that is the only way I can get internet access (and thus the only way I can send lots of resumes for a job).

There are two sides to this coin. You can be good as in, you know fundamentals very well and can make connections with familiar concepts, or good as in, readily employable because your skill sets check the right boxes of keywords and names for a recruiter or HR person.

The former doesn't necessarily guarantee the latter. I'm gonna answer with the path less traveled in this thread with regards to your question. When you mention competitiveness, do you actually mean in terms of the job market? If so, unfortunately most people that are your first eyes to your resume when you hit that submit button are not as technically inclined as a programmer. Which is why it's often better to directly reach out to a team lead of the programmer department. Fundamental concepts don't work with 3rd party recruiters either, as most of them are not very language agnostic when it comes to matching you with job opportunities. The exception is with the largest of companies. They'll value fundamental skills more highly because they can absorb the risk of hiring someone to ramp them up with their work environment. Most medium to smaller companies can't afford much ramp up time. From my experience they want you to hit the ground running (seems to be a popular phrase with them) in whatever web framework they use.

So for your benefit, you will look more appealing to hire by applying to larger companies. Smaller companies tend to interview more in concrete framework trivia while the large ones tend to test you on algorithms and other language agnostic concepts.

>I am somewhat confused by what do you mean by "feeling connected", however. What do you expect to give or receive from that connection?

I guess I'm expecting more momentum to be built from my professional experience. Being in touch with a circle of people that talk shop, and bounce job opportunities back and forth. Right now keeping in touch with people in the industry doesn't feel as organic. Meetups help but it's still a bit forced from my view.

I believe that benefits occur more organically simply by making friends. But as I said, my friends are not very familiar with the software industry, nor know anyone who hires in that industry, so they can't really help me out in the professional world.

>This leaves out agencies where software is seen as just an operational department and developers just have to endless do 'transform Photoshop in css+html' stuff.

I worked at a web agency before so I know how that is. If software is just a means to an end, what are they exactly selling if not software? Websites as a service, perhaps, but that still doesn't support the business model that focuses on hourly billing, that puts a perverse incentive for developers to produce less satisfactory results.

I actually have about seven years of work experience in the field right now. But I don't stay in touch with my co-workers much. I don't really make many friends at work, and instead keep to a small circle of friends I know since high school. Most of my job search really is like yours- just solo bombing resumes to job sites- very seldom do I get any leads for interviews from people I personally know.

The problem is that there is no self-regulation mechanism in place to keep people from going too much into the deep end of un-employability. A feedback loop that exacerbates a bad situation sounds like a quality of bad design to me.

An interesting phenomena I heard is Cunningham's law. It states, "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."

It probably is stated because people are very quick to correct other people when they are wrong, I guess.

I'm on mobile so not much time to type, but I do have a few JS projects. Some of them novel. I made a software renderer in JS that rasterizes triangles and takes JS shaders, emulating a programmable pipeline.

I hope that I would at least stand out from most JS developers with stuff like this. I don't really have an interest in making a Twitter clone with a Bootstrap UI. I'm hoping someone takes a chance at my skills with my not so typical JS projects.

It is interesting to note that company and employee loyalty is becoming more scarce, as well as on the job training being uncommon. It does not bode well for the state of the industry, if more and more companies are having a revolving door problem with employees.

Sounds good. Email sent.

To all those questions I can answer 'no' to all of them, besides no. 4 because I do use Git. Damn. Now if only I can get offers from companies that have the other qualities.

>One challenge I face with applicants is that they actually have 1 year of experience 7 times and not 7 years of experience. You should consider if that's what they are seeing.

I think this is very real. So how do you correct this problem and sell the perception that you are able to do well?

Interview prep, like Pramp? I did get some feedback from TripleByte at least.

Coincidentally, I'm age 34 right now. So at that point where you were at a crossroads you turned things around. Did you work at large companies to correct that? Do you think development team size make an impact on your career growth?

Two instances where side projects caught an employers interest just fell through with an offer in the last minute. In both cases, they over-estimated their need and funds to hire a new employee. So I'm just chalking that up to bad timing. Hoping to get the attention of larger, more financially stable companies with my projects.

I'm aware that job titles tend to be loosey-goosey in many programming jobs, aside from the largest of companies that have a big enough sample size.

For instance, my title for a web marketing agency was 'associate software engineer'. It was the typical job of setting up CMS sites, customizing plugins for them, or occasionally making a very static site from scratch.

I gradually got into doing more complex work like writing apps on MVC frameworks. But I think there may be indeed another career ladder I need to jump on if I want to actually do the "engineering" part correctly.

For a while I was building only websites, but eventually took on web app projects that leveraged MVC frameworks and had to build upon in-house REST APIs that to integrate with the products.

No algorithmic problems, though, you're right about that. The closest thing I can think of relating to time complexity for web dev are when N+1 queries are used unnecessarily. I fix those, and change them into single queries.

For what it's worth, though, Amazon did reach out to me and I did two rounds of interviews with them. I bombed the tech on the second one.

Senior level web? Heh, even in web don't even think I'm that far. I have zero professional experience with anything but PHP which is going out of demand in newer positions.

On the JavaScript side I have done two React projects, all the companies I worked for had old-school JS though. Bunch of vanilla JS with jQUery strewn in, hundreds of files, no usage of Node nor modules.

Thanks, I'll be in touch with you soon.

I've been lucky enough to have collected feedback from at least a handful of companies. I've also interviewed with TripleByte. They didn't match me with a job but they are detailed on what I did wrong in the interview. They also said I sounded a bit nervous. I don't stutter or shake my voice so I'll have to figure out what are other signs of nervousness that I might be showing.

Most of the non-generic feedback I got on tech skills followed the same theme- I have breadth in knowledge, but not depth. I'm not as "T-shaped" as I thought I was.

You're on point, dav.

For me I think the best strategy to take in being more employable (and hence having an easier time advancing to a more ideal position) is to start building up desirable experience in the next job I take.

It's been a while since I have been gainfully employed (my ex-boss gives me freelance work at least) so right now in downtime I apply for jobs and set up interviews. I've been fortunate enough to get detailed feedback from a few places.

In particular with TripleByte. They've been very helpful in finding holes in my interviewing style, and knowledge base. Even though they couldn't find a targeted job match for me they run down in detail what I did wrong and what I could do to improve. And I do feel like it's hitting home.

I feel like I've "Peter Principal" myself to a junior role. Most of the companies I've been with are on the smallish side, with small tech departments. A marketing agency that outsources to India, shows little care on the craft, no basis on testing, integration, or automation.

Another one, a magazine company where I was the one man band when it comes to programming. Nobody else knew how to code. I had to deal with putting out fires working with a legacy code base and had to cowboy-code my way out of problems.

These experiences have made somewhat of a self-starter, but I need more structure. I need to know how to apply TDD principles, figure out the best way to solve an algorithm, or depending on the company, pair program with someone.

It's like competitive games. I can't get really good unless I can practice alongside someone that can consistently kick my ass. Eventually I may be able to kick theirs more consistently. Craft my own problem solving approach that I can call my own, use it as a selling point.

Granted, I'm only just about one decade into my career, so I'm not that late in the game.

The "one year of experience" phenomena is too real. I'd like to read some articles not just that show examples of it, but also teach effective methods to correct it. I don't find a lot on dealing with the latter.