For me the recruiter went on holiday and by the time they came back I had a new job lol
345 karma · joined June 26, 2021
Other than that, most of my open source work was just created by myself. If there's something you think could be useful or interesting, just make it and open source it.
But it seems unlikely for me that anyone in general tech would know much about the science industry or positions of "research engineer" without having prior exposure to that industry somehow.
Like, I could spend 2 more decades doing full stack dev, it would change nothing to the kind of jobs available to me. I'm already as high as I can go in this area without going into management (which I have no interest in)
The engine I'm making is for a very specific need (initially made to help someone else make a specific game), a few people have been using it to make their games, but it's a pretty niche thing for narrative games - https://get-narrat.com/
I'm making it for fun, but I don't expect something like that to ever make money, for that I'd need some big companies to decide to sponsor it and pay me, which is super unlikely.
Not everyone has to be an "entrepreneur". I like making things, not running companies and managing people/talking to investors and all the other things that come with trying to create a startup.
And yes, sorry but if you're not aware, some people have life situations that don't allow them to simply quit their job and start a company without a safety net. There's a reason the vast majority of "entrepreneurs" are of a very specific demographic
It's really hard getting out of the boxes we're typecast in.
I still like programming a lot when I do it on interesting things (which are side projects really), but I haven't had interesting programming at my job in years.
It's a good way to make yourself hard to replace, but they're probably gonna want you to keep doing the thing you're hard to replace at.
On the other hand I've found those companies hard to break into because they often expect you to have specific expertise in things like "very high scale applications" or specific low-level things.
I only tried Gitlab I think, and never really heard back.
FAANG might be interesting but their interview processes kill it for me. I have no idea how people find the time to do homework for it + are willing to spend months in this lengthy interview pipeline.
(Also there are problems with FAANG type companies being generally kind of evil these days, of course)
Maybe eventually it could get to the point where I could do part time freelancing supplemented with github sponsor income, but even that would take a long time.
I suspect outside of a few super-popular repo managers, github sponsorship doesn't bring much income (don't know if there's any public data on that)
Actual technical recruiters will contact me and be interested despite me barely matching their stack, and I once god hired on a job doing a technical test on a language I had (almost) never used before.
But if I try actually applying to a job with my CV? Often rejected because I don't have keyword X. The same company would probably hire me if I came from a recruiter lol
You might be right with the boring sites, I tend to look on those tech recruitment platforms (or really most of the time I just let the recruiters come to me).
Outside of that, and outside of the obvious snarkiness, the whole "why don't you make your own job" thing isn't a real solution. Not everyone can be creating companies, otherwise who would be working at those companies?
I don't have much security net in my life so I can't really take the risk of creating a startup on the hope it might turn out well. There's also nothing specific I'm interested in making that would have revenue at the moment.
Because indeed, almost everything I find on tech recruitment platforms is either big corps (often doing nebulous B2B things) or VC backed startups that clearly don't really provide real value besides making VCs hope they can get their 10x returns
A lot of things that would be good for people/society have no good way of really being profitable (unless lawmakers do something to rebalance the game to somehow help them).
And a lot of things that are profitable are objectively bad for society.
So ideally I want something that satisfies as much of those things as possible.
I'm not necessarily blanketly against fintech or any other thing, but for example a lot of fintech will just be used to further the interest of people who are leeching the world's money and resources and increasing inequality. So I would feel bad about it.
Some fintech is genuinely innovative useful stuff though
I was originally in the game industry and left it because I was stuck in a hyper specialised niche (web-based game development). I went back to more general full stack, but even here a lot of companies will specifically look for people based on them having multiple years of commercial experience with their specific stack, rather than just holistic experience in the broader area.
In my case, I'm generally a mix of full stack dev and game dev (specialised in HTML5 game dev). I want to do more systems stuff (particularly Rust), and I've recently created a scripting language with a VM from scratch for a game engine as part of a side project.
But I don't have any commercial experience or keywords for recruiters to find in my CV outside of what I'm already "expert" in, and it's hard to find companies that will understand that a good programmer can transfer skills from one language to another.
To give an example, I recently got rejected at one job at the CV stage for "not having enough React experience" because my last job was in Vue so I wasn't technically using React in recent years (even though it's an extremely similar area of expertise)