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there is a benefit to owning your story and owning your narrative. If you can concretely demonstrate that you’ve grown through your experiences, it may earn yo

there is a benefit to owning your story and owning your narrative. If you can concretely demonstrate that you’ve grown through your experiences, it may earn you the respect of prospective employers. It is a big risk to be dismissive of critiques though. It is productive to engage with critiques and be able to explain and convince. Being dismissed from two positions for perf is not a good look. What can you say has changed since then?

brailsafe 9y ago
I appreciate the feedback. If I was asked about your second sentence, I'm pretty sure I could show that I've grown through my experience. At least in some sense. I can't quite tell if you're asking me, or asking whether I'd be able to answer what's changed, but I'll answer your last point. In the first position, I was pretty fresh with version control and SPA frameworks. I've learned to not be overly optimistic in the sense that I think I can work through recurring glaring problems in code that have no obvious source and no obvious solution. I was hired on a tight deadline project, using EmberJS and Git for the first time. This is when Ember was pretty new and with bad docs. I was coming from an Angular background which also had bad docs and a high learning curve. I'd regularly run into problems that weren't visible to me, undocumented, etc.. I also didn't know how to approach these problems from a human perspective. As in, how and who do I ask for advice? This slowed development a lot. I also learned later that the framework was designed with convention over configuration in mind, but those conventions weren't clear. With Git I messed up in a lot of ways while learning to use it on a team. The last position has mostly been a learning experience about recognizing burnout early, when there are systemic problems within a company, how to pick golden handcuffs, the importance of culture fit, and the importance of using the best tools for the job. Personally, I was perhaps overly optimistic about my personal ability to finish code on time given the environment. Otherwise, I was working in an environment that in some ways I'd compare to water torture. I've learned to recognize earlier when I won't be able to succeed long term in a place, whether it's me or the place.
- squiggy22 9y ago
  It sounds like you werent given the space and time to learn as a junior dev on a project that needed seniors. I'd recommend making some commits to open source to publically demo your skills which will prove youve learnt from early mistakes and show a commitment to learning new things.
  - brailsafe 9y ago
    Good suggestion and you're probably right. At least in terms of JavaScript programming expertise in 2014. Looking back, I did have the skills in other areas but was perhaps overconfident about my JS programming skill. Since then I've developed more humility. My github is here https://github.com/LukeTully https://github.com/LukeTully. Whenever I'm using something that isn't working like it should, I try to find a way to contribute. I could definitely be more proactive about looking for contributions to make.
    - godot 9y ago
      Just going by how you talk about the tech stack you work on and a brief look at your Github, my opinion is that you should have the qualifications needed to land a job at the Software Engineer level. Going off the tangents a little bit, I think as an industry we're going through a phrase where we're having a whole new influx of qualified candidates and we're being overly picky in hiring. A bit of anecdotal points -- I went through a job search earlier this year after my startup went through a shutdown. I have 10 years of industry experience at this point and have done well in all of it, having moved up in a big company from SE to Architect in 6 years, and then as CTO of my startup. I had a surprisingly difficult time landing an offer during my job search. After I did, and started at a company, I quickly also began interviewing new candidates for the company as well. This time from the other side's perspective, I found us to be surprisingly critical when selecting candidates. We have a ton of candidates coming from programs like Hack Reactor and other similar ones, who all have good working knowledge of our stack (the most common one out there now -- Node, React), but we're being almost overly selective in choosing who to take in. Many of the candidates who we rejected, though junior level, actually did relatively well in their interviews to the level where, 7 years ago at my last big company, I would've hired them when I interviewed them there. I have a completely unproven and unbacked up theory that programs like Hack Reactor and others are giving us a massive influx of new qualified candidates now, and every company is seeing it, and suddenly every employer has intentionally or unintentionally raised their expectations in hiring because the supply allowed them to be a lot more selective. This is a bit of a counter-point to the general consensus that there's always huge demand for tech talent and not enough supply.

brailsafe 9y ago

I appreciate the feedback. If I was asked about your second sentence, I'm pretty sure I could show that I've grown through my experience. At least in some sense. I can't quite tell if you're asking me, or asking whether I'd be able to answer what's changed, but I'll answer your last point. In the first position, I was pretty fresh with version control and SPA frameworks. I've learned to not be overly optimistic in the sense that I think I can work through recurring glaring problems in code that have no obvious source and no obvious solution. I was hired on a tight deadline project, using EmberJS and Git for the first time. This is when Ember was pretty new and with bad docs. I was coming from an Angular background which also had bad docs and a high learning curve. I'd regularly run into problems that weren't visible to me, undocumented, etc.. I also didn't know how to approach these problems from a human perspective. As in, how and who do I ask for advice? This slowed development a lot. I also learned later that the framework was designed with convention over configuration in mind, but those conventions weren't clear. With Git I messed up in a lot of ways while learning to use it on a team. The last position has mostly been a learning experience about recognizing burnout early, when there are systemic problems within a company, how to pick golden handcuffs, the importance of culture fit, and the importance of using the best tools for the job. Personally, I was perhaps overly optimistic about my personal ability to finish code on time given the environment. Otherwise, I was working in an environment that in some ways I'd compare to water torture. I've learned to recognize earlier when I won't be able to succeed long term in a place, whether it's me or the place.

squiggy22 9y ago
It sounds like you werent given the space and time to learn as a junior dev on a project that needed seniors. I'd recommend making some commits to open source to publically demo your skills which will prove youve learnt from early mistakes and show a commitment to learning new things.
- brailsafe 9y ago
  Good suggestion and you're probably right. At least in terms of JavaScript programming expertise in 2014. Looking back, I did have the skills in other areas but was perhaps overconfident about my JS programming skill. Since then I've developed more humility. My github is here https://github.com/LukeTully https://github.com/LukeTully. Whenever I'm using something that isn't working like it should, I try to find a way to contribute. I could definitely be more proactive about looking for contributions to make.
  - godot 9y ago
    Just going by how you talk about the tech stack you work on and a brief look at your Github, my opinion is that you should have the qualifications needed to land a job at the Software Engineer level. Going off the tangents a little bit, I think as an industry we're going through a phrase where we're having a whole new influx of qualified candidates and we're being overly picky in hiring. A bit of anecdotal points -- I went through a job search earlier this year after my startup went through a shutdown. I have 10 years of industry experience at this point and have done well in all of it, having moved up in a big company from SE to Architect in 6 years, and then as CTO of my startup. I had a surprisingly difficult time landing an offer during my job search. After I did, and started at a company, I quickly also began interviewing new candidates for the company as well. This time from the other side's perspective, I found us to be surprisingly critical when selecting candidates. We have a ton of candidates coming from programs like Hack Reactor and other similar ones, who all have good working knowledge of our stack (the most common one out there now -- Node, React), but we're being almost overly selective in choosing who to take in. Many of the candidates who we rejected, though junior level, actually did relatively well in their interviews to the level where, 7 years ago at my last big company, I would've hired them when I interviewed them there. I have a completely unproven and unbacked up theory that programs like Hack Reactor and others are giving us a massive influx of new qualified candidates now, and every company is seeing it, and suddenly every employer has intentionally or unintentionally raised their expectations in hiring because the supply allowed them to be a lot more selective. This is a bit of a counter-point to the general consensus that there's always huge demand for tech talent and not enough supply.