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My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs

319 points by luu 7y ago

mlthoughts2018 7y ago
This is terribly useless for anyone else. I’d go so far as to say it is not, in fact, a data point for anyone. - 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market - the coding interview experience of this applicant and requirements of the companies appears to be far more lax than most experiences in tech hiring - it took place right around the pandemic / unemployment / layoff time period which is a nasty confounder to everything - it focuses a lot on start-ups - doesn’t give specifics on negotiation or salary numbers It seems like a fine write-up and all, it’s just critical to emphasize this experience is not translatable to other people. If your experience happened to be similar to this, total coincidence. If you’re trying to predict a future hiring experience for yourself, this won’t offer you that. If you just want to read about someone else’s experience knowing it won’t be related to yours for any reason aside from coincidence and don’t mind it is light on specific salary details, this is fine.
- meddlepal 7y ago
  > 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market Wait what? Is this just an SF/Valley thing? 60 days on the market is a long time IMO. Long enough that my experience with east coast recruiting is that by the time you hit 30 days offers start evaporating so it makes it difficult to play them off of each other for negotiating purposes.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    If you're not good at modern interviews then it can take some time to find a company that either you get lucky on or that uses a different process.
  - Joof 7y ago
    I usually prolong it for travel, but I've always had offers by 60 days in. Anecdote.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    I’m on the east coast and over 20 years and 6 job changes (first one was based on an internship). I’ve had multiple offers within three weeks maximum after I started looking. The shortest was 4 days. None have required any serious algorithm/LeetCode type of interview.
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      Your experience is such an extreme outlier as to necessitate ignoring it when considering how general job searches go.
- itake 7y ago
  > - it took place right around the pandemic / unemployment / layoff time period which is a nasty confounder to everything The article was written in Jan. I don't think the pandemic had hit the USA then. > - it focuses a lot on start-ups Mozilla, Stripe, Reddit, Buzzfeed, and Square aren't exactly startups.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  >- 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market I'm an experienced engineer (10+ years) in a good location. For me, 65 days is absurdly LONG pre-pandemic. Assuming you interview well, you can go from nothing to offer in something like two weeks with most startups. >- the coding interview experience of this applicant and requirements of the companies appears to be far more lax than most experiences in tech hiring How so? Seems pretty standard to me, the usual leetcode stuff with various bits around the edges. >- it focuses a lot on start-ups This is the case for many people especially on this site and the "startups" are very wide in size. So not sure why you consider this to be a non-transferable part.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    > For me, 65 days is absurdly LONG for me pre-pandemic. Assuming you interview well, you can go from nothing to offer in something like two weeks with most startups. Depends a lot on the type of company. I've had startups go from initial contact to offer in about 3 business days. OTOH is Google - I've heard my first hiring process there (5 weeks) was on the short side, and it's not unusual to be held up for 6 months with them.
  - Mandatum 6y ago
    I'm always fielding JD's from recruiters. I don't live in SV so I don't get absolutely inundated, but I get quite a few quality opportunities come my way which become useful during negotiations. My recommendation to everyone, unless you're like the guy above me: Even if you're in a stable FTE, right now you should be practicing and fielding job interviews - just in case. If you're made redundant or caught in a spreadsheet, you'll be better to take the package and jump straight into work somewhere else before culture turns toxic. You'll be up against far, far more people than you were when you last applied for a job. This will be stressful. So get in front of it.
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      Even when inundated with recruiter calls and having a stellar resume, 65 days is very, very short for job searches. From first interview to shortest possible time you can get an offer at most companies is longer than 30 days anyway. People saying they interview and get an offer in a few days or weeks are often lying and otherwise are major outliers. At my company, for example, the minimum interview process is over 4 weeks, and we are a very competitive e-commerce company with huge pipeline of candidates. We are absolutely not offering people jobs in a fast (less than 1 month) turnaround, and this rarely has any impact on who we hire. This was also very true across the 6 other professional jobs I’ve had, at brand name start-ups, no-name start-ups and large tech companies.
- soneca 7y ago
  The title says ”a data point”. This kind of nullify all of your rant for me. You can’t say ”it’s not a data point”, it makes no sense. You could argue it’s an outlier, but it is a data point. I am actually glad that it is not someone pretending to have good advice that might fool me into thinking it is actually good advice. It is refreshing to read just one account that I learn what I want from, without been tricked in to believe it’s anything more than that.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    I think you’re wrong. Being a data point isn’t the same thing as just existing. There has to be some space of models or information that can potentially be different because of the example. If it’s not possible for other people’s models to be different as a result, then it’s not data.
- wuunderbar 7y ago
  > 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market Is it though? For software engineering? > the coding interview experience of this applicant and requirements of the companies appears to be far more lax than most experiences in tech hiring I'm not sure. Difficult LeetCode type questions are less common (based on numerous anecdotal accounts online) everywhere other than with SF Bay Area & NYC based companies than anywhere else.
- JSavageOne 7y ago
  Sorry I'm going to be blunt here, what an incredibly stupid comment. OP applied to well-known companies like Square and Reddit, shared his resume, interview experiences, and outcomes, and you're here on an anonymous internet forum telling him that this information is completely useless because he didn't mention salary details? I personally found it interesting and helpful as an engineer interested in potentially working for some of these companies. You are incredibly out of touch and socially challenged to tell him his post is utterly useless because it focuses on startups and there's a pandemic. I hope I never have to work at a company alongside you.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    It’s not useful for others to predict experiences from it. It’s similar to the selection bias effect of college professors encouraging students to pursue careers in academia because they did themselves. The career details of the professor might be very interesting, but they are useless. Or to be more blunt, it would be like a lottery-ticket winner saying, “the best career advice is to win the lottery” ... there is no actionable info that a listener can take away or use, it’s purely idiosyncratic. I’m sorry you thought it was a stupid comment, but I very much stand by what I said and feel it is not stupid, rather a very critical caveat.
- vertak 7y ago
  > this is terribly useless for for anyone else I bet this was terribly useless for you, but for the wider set of readers here its near impossible to generalize as you have done. I haven’t dived deep to search for “here was my job search” stories and I’ve probably read fewer than 5 such posts on HN over the years I’ve been lurking here. However I appreciated this one for its candid sharing of the numbers (number of applications, rejections, etc.) and his resume + cover letters. Unless you are some interview god/goddess who has seen all the resumes there are to see, it’s valuable to see different ways of approaching the job search. I’m currently on the job hunt myself and have bookmarked this article for a reread.
ganstyles 7y ago
Note this is for a PM role. This isn't mentioned for a long time into the article. I found that slightly annoying personally, as most people on HN seem to be engineers. But I don't think the experience generalizes, as someone who has received eng and pm offers from FAANG companies.
- Shoop 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure the applications he discussed weren't for a PM role. Check out the first footnote which talks about that experience separately: > [1] I actually did also apply to 3 product manager positions. None of them panned out. Made it to an interview stage at one company, and I thought it went quite well. Apparently, it didn’t go well enough. I’m glad. I’m happy where I wound up.
- alkhatib 7y ago
  Check the article again. He “also applied to 3 PM roles” Meaning primary job applications not for PM
- soneca 7y ago
  To add to the other sibling comments, the author mentions several times ”coding challenges “. This is not for a PM role.
sp527 7y ago
The ‘wannabe philosopher to wannabe entrepreneur’ line in the Gradle resume was incredibly cringey. I suspect the author has a very poor understanding of how best to sell himself and this also at least somewhat explains his results (in addition to the factors he mentions).
lynchdt 7y ago
Some perhaps unsolicited advice from a hiring manager in a company very similar to the great ones in which this writer was unsuccessful. - Rare programmers won’t identify themselves as such. - Most great companies hire for humility as a trait.
- soneca 7y ago
  I think I am not understanding your advice (or the post). I didn’t see where the author claims to be a ”rare programmer” or does not show humility.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    It's in the cover letter.
    - soneca 7y ago
      Got it, thanks. Still, I am reading it with more generous eyes I think. It seemed to be used to contextualize their communication skills. Not as ”I am better than most”, more like ”I have this unique trait that you might value”. But I can see how it could be read
      - wolco 7y ago
        Plus he backs it up with speaking. It's narrow and credible enough that it works. It doesn't work with a thin resume.
        lynchdt 6y ago
        This is the crux of it. Even to a well calibrated tech recruiter, the resume reads thin on substance.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  So true, excessive ego is really problematic on an engineering team. There's a thin but very real line between confidant and egoistical. And most hiring managers err on the side of caution when seeing potential red flags.
t_1589165433 7y ago
How on earth do people have these experiences? I have to submit multiple hundreds of applications to get one interview. Throwaway because it could turn into multiple thousands if that fact is linked to my identity.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  In general don't blindly apply unless you have no choice. Use your network, have people refer you, respond to recruiters, etc. Someone you know may know someone who can refer you and so on. That said, going through recruiters alone should give you decently high interview rates. Assuming you have some experience and so on. If it's not then your resume needs work. For whatever reason, hiring manager look at it and don't want to talk to you further.
  - non-entity 7y ago
    I've never get good recruiters. It's always some underpaid external recruiter trying to pass anyone off for some low paying, and probably mibd-killing position. The kind the heavily editorilzaze you resume unsolicited so that it matches the position description exactly and the description they send you have glaring typos and theres a small percentage its even relevant to your experience. Everytime I've tried to follow through with one it's just ended in nothing, they dont even give you straight answers most of the time when asked a question
    - zebnyc 7y ago
      Agreed. This is part of the reason why I refuse to work with third party recruiters any longer. A few more are: a) They cold call you in a way which makes it obvious they don't respect your schedule. b) They just want to shoe horn you into a role, get the commission and keep moving. c) Some third party recruiters get offended when I tell them that I am also trying to get interviews on my own without them or through other third party recruiters. d) I have a sneaking suspicion that third party recruiters are paid if the candidate stays for 3 months. So if things were not to go perfect in the first few months then the company might be more inclined to fire you to save the commission.
troughway 7y ago
Should "mid-career" software developers still be focused on low-balling themselves with having to do "career growth" things like this fellow, or should they plan their exit strategy to get out of that career trajectory entirely? Assuming mid-career is actually mid-career and not the ageist SV type of mid-career.
- aswanson 7y ago
  The latter. Build up cash and invest in a career path that values experience.
  - pragmatic 7y ago
    And what would that be exactly? What's safe from being Ubered out of existence?
    - MattGaiser 7y ago
      > What's safe from being Ubered out of existence? Uberizing an industry.
  - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
    Depends. In Europe, dev salaries and taxes don't allow you to build enough cash for an exit path unless you plan on staying childless.
    - badpun 6y ago
      It's doable in Switzerland and in London, at least until the tax laws around contracting change.
      - oblio 6y ago
        And that's probably 10% of developers in Europe, at best. More likely 1-5%.
    - 6y ago
Thorentis 7y ago
Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage? I can understand using that to give you an advantage for entry-level roles, but by "mid-career" shouldn't your experience and achievements in past roles speak for itself? Or do companies still want to see engineers spending their spare time doing unpaid coding? By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time. Surely this is considered during the hiring process? I don't think I would want to work somewhere that expects a married with kids mid-level engineer to spend their weekends and nights contributing to open source, just to land their next job.
- MattGaiser 7y ago
  > By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time. I have never hired anyone, but anecdotally from a team lead dev who has hired a couple dozen people, that is the exact kind of thing they want to avoid. If someone was a "star" working 90 hours a week in the past but now wants to work 40, they stop being the kind of "star" some companies want.
  - kleiba 7y ago
    It's worth noting that the opposite point of view is also true: in that case, they are not the company the "ex-star" would want to work for, either.
  - SystemOut 7y ago
    As someone who has been in a team lead role and hiring for many years I can't imagine a more toxic viewpoint to team building.
  - x0x0 7y ago
    You can find whatever type of company you want. I find the complaining of most engineers incoherent. Until March or so, more than at any point in time, being a competent software engineer opened doors at thousands of companies. I expect we'll be back there within two years tops. When you are looking for a job, ask the person you're talking to what expectations are. Ask the hiring manager how he or she defines success for the role. Ask every employee you speak to how much they work. You'll get your answer. Pick your employer accordingly. ps -- at my 40-ish person startup, eng rarely work more than 45h/week. And we have plenty of parents. We do however make comparatively boring software sold to enterprises, and have trouble hiring in part because of that (imo).
georgeburdell 7y ago
I look at that resume and I wonder if it didn't hurt more than it helped; it's form over function, and a bit corny. The fact that he got multiple offers in two months shows how strong the software job market is. I'm several years younger, but a staff-level hardware engineer at a second tier company (top tier being FAANG). I've had an incredibly difficult time jumping companies --- 2 years and counting. Despite being twice promoted since graduating with my PhD, most recently this past review cycle, I have yet to get past the first interview stage* with a top tier company, even with close friends at those companies referring me. It's quite frustrating and I wish I knew what the successful candidates had that I didn't. * Note that for hardware engineering, the initial interview is a meet-and-greet with a technical question or two, so more laid back
- troughway 7y ago
  > It's quite frustrating and I wish I knew what the successful candidates had that I didn't. Have you asked your close friends or your coworkers about this?
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  > I wish I knew what the successful candidates had that I didn't It's not what they had, it's what they didn't... unless you're going heavy into research, I would recommend NOT getting the PhD until you hit 45+.
  - georgeburdell 7y ago
    Hardware development jobs are PhD-only in my field (some older people get grandfathered in with an MS, but this is rare). These are not research-y jobs
    - non-entity 7y ago
      Out of curiosity, what field is that?
      - 7y ago
quickthrower2 7y ago
I am working on https://tryjobalerts.com/ https://tryjobalerts.com/ to help developers look for work, at the first stage to find jobs.
cletus 7y ago
So I'd say anyone looking for engineering work should aim to have at least one (and just one is fine) of the following: 1. A good (and well-known) school. MIT, Stanford, CMU, UW, Waterloo, you get the picture. 2. A good (and well-known) employer. FAANGs in particular. Ideally as an FTE but internships are good signals here too. 3. To be known for something you've done. Well-used open source project, well-known blog, that sort of thing. (1) and (2) fall into the category of "social proof" [1] and whether you like it or not, social proof can take you pretty far in life. Like in my case, it didn't take that long from working at Google to getting cold-called almost constantly (and I guarantee you there's nothing special about my situation). My own job seeking experience (pre-Google) tends to be pretty similar to the numbers in this post (applications to interviews to offers). For those of you sending out hundreds of applications let me offer you some advice because I see a lot of people making easy-to-fix mistakes. Hiring is a popular topic on HN and you see the same comments. There are always people who call a hiring pipeline a failure because a good candidate got rejected. This is the wrong way to approach this. The process is asymmetric. A candidate is trying to get through each stage of the pipeline and get hired by somebody. Ideally they want multiple offers to boost the offer they end up accepting. "Success" is accepting an offer. Below a certain size, a company wants to fill a role. It'll have N applications and the pipeline is designed to have filters along the way to winnow down that number to fill the role. "Success" is filling that role with someone sufficiently good. They don't have to be the best. Technical skills matter but usually only to a point. You have to bear in mind that you are a cog that needs to fit into an existing machine. Each step of the process gets increasingly time-consuming so the more you can weed out at the earlier stages while still filling the role, the better. Large companies are similar except you don't tend to be interviewing for a particular role. There is a constant hiring pipeline. Recruiting may well be a separate org. You can use this to your advantage. So, let's make up some numbers for our waterfall: - Recruiting receives 100 applications - The 20 best get sent to a hiring manager - They may well eliminate half for various reasons passing on 10 to one of their engineers - That engineer may well filter out half too meaning 5 will get called - 3 of those will get interviews - 1 will get an offer, another will be the backup Like I said, completely made up but still instructive. And I'd say it wouldn't be too far off the mark for a mid-sized company. The first thing is you need to get through a company's recruiting/HR filter. Well they look at the requisition ("req") they have and try and see if the application seems to fit the criteria and I really do mean seems to. This is what I call the buzzword filter. Anecdote: I once had a conversation with a recruiter who said--and I'm not making this up--"I can see you have 6 years of Java experience but do you have any J2SE experience?" Some of it isn't buzzword related. Like if the req calls for leading a team, they'll look to see if you've led a team in the past. Depending on the company, the seniority of the position and so forth, factors like your school and previous jobs may come into play. Length of employment is a factor here. So how do we approach this to pass this filter? Well we need to cater our resume to the job posting and see how it fills the criteria. We need to have sufficient buzzwords but not too many and not any we can't back up. This may hurt us later. Then again, it's completely valid to try and pass through early stages and deal with that problem later. One point to consider is that the half the applications the hiring manager may never see. To be fair, a lot of job applications are garbage. My numbers are actually pretty generous. I've had people tell me that 90% of applications can be immediately rejected. The hiring manager will have their own criteria and biases. They're trying to judge if you're someone who will fit on the team. Here lots of short jobs can hurt. There are cultural factors too eg in the UK I found having contracting on your CV would really hurt you for full-time roles (this was years ago; I can't speak for the current conditions). Basically the hiring manager is looking for red flags. The engineer will typically be looking for technical suitability. It's from this point onwards that various (ideally cheap) negative filters are used to try and reduce the numbers further. And this is what a whiteboard coding test should be: a relatively easy problem just to see if you're not an idiot. FizzBuzz is easy for a reason. Engineers fall into the trap of thinking the problem needs to be hard. This actually reduces the effectiveness of the signal as you've turned a useful negative filter into a crap shoot of whether or not you know the "trick". For example, I had whiteboard coding problem once to reverse bits. Turns out (I found out later) this can be done in O(log n). I had never had need for such a trick so didn't know it. So what did that test accomplish exactly? Bit-fiddling is applicable to certain classes of programming, just not any I had and (more importantly) not the one I was interviewing for. An early stage startup may simply be the hiring manager responding to emailed applications and they'll hire the first suitably qualified candidate they find because they really don't want to be doing this. A larger company may filter everyone through and then pick the "best" to extend an offer to. So when you apply for a position, I would encourage you to think about what process that company has for hiring and treating it as a waterfall that you need to get through. Find out what you can about their hiring process. If you can't find out, make up something that seems reasonable given the type of company they are and their size. The most important step for your application is to make it through the first 1-2 filters as those tend to be pretty dumb. Your CV needs to stand out from a hundred others in some way. A known school or employer is a good one. Absent that, allowing them to see some evidence that you can communicate in written form and/or actually code is a big plus. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
jldugger 7y ago
> For some of these companies, I applied with a non-traditional, branded resume. ... Since I only used these types of resumes with 6 applications, I’d say glowing compliments on 3 out of 6 is pretty solid performance. If we view the purpose of a resume as getting an interview, then that's how we should evaluate changing them. By my reading Matt scored an interview 4 out of 6 times, a 66 percent success rate. Assuming the rest are the control, that leaves 10 applications and 3 interviews -- 30 percent! That's pretty great really, but we have to wonder, did Matt randomly choose which companies got the experimental treatment, or were certain companies 'too risky' to try something new with? Or did he try to match up his application style to the companies somehow?
ivalm 7y ago
I am curious what counts for “mid career”, he started coding ~6 years ago. Presumably he is in his 20s. Here him talking about leaving philosophy: https://www.philosophicalhacker.com/2014/04/22/why-im-glad-my-dream-job-didnt-work-out/ https://www.philosophicalhacker.com/2014/04/22/why-im-glad-m... Edit: LinkedIn ~agrees with this estimate
- lihaciudaniel 7y ago
  >For the past 5 years, I hoped I was going to be a philosophy professor Assuming he goes to university or somewhere. Because most people find it boring he should have chosen history, latin, or simply other humanities subjects. How does one even jump from tech to humanities anyways???
  - watwut 7y ago
    > How does one even jump from tech to humanities anyways??? Why would that be impossible or shocking? Most people are able to learn multiple different things and have interest in multiple different things. Universities typically allow you to take courses from different topics too.
    - lihaciudaniel 6y ago
      >Universities typically allow you to take courses from different topics too. But in America I don't think you can do that, some families don't have the privilege to spend so much money on somebody to get a bachelor in philosophy and then have no jobs afterwards.
      - C1sc0cat 6y ago
        My understanding is To get a US degree you have to take courses outside your main topic unlike the UK
  - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
    > How does one even jump from tech to humanities anyways??? when you're the type of person who likes to question everything and who wants to build things to make the world a "better place", then switching to humanities with a tech foundation is a good option. It can be very dangerous though. One is at risk of undoing all the previous conditioning (which costed a lot of time and money) and bring oneself to realize that it takes more than just "an idea for an app", or VC funding to actually contribute to society in a lasting and non-fraudulent way. It also might anger your colleagues who will never admit that they've been conned, drank too much of the corporate/academic kool-aid, and besides nobody likes people swimming against the stream especially when the reward isn't monetary and has even got high potential of working against you in the short term financially. How dare those damn fools who want to be better engineers and also better humans by widening their world-view!
Nextgrid 6y ago
Maybe it's just me but I think that "branded" CVs come across as desperate and could be considered red flags that either the candidate is trying to make up for something else (lack of skills, etc) or is unaware of the performance of the job market (I guess if the market is really bad you might try a branded CV out of desperation, but software engineering is still very much a seller's market). Branded CV is something I could see coming from someone fresh out of high school that is working off poor advice they've been given and to try and make up for the fact they basically have zero experience to show, but for someone with experience I'd expect that experience to speak for them instead of their word processor skills, and if that experience is not good enough then the branding wouldn't save it (unless you happen to be interviewing for designing print documents?).
- borplk 6y ago
  I largely agree with you. However one thing to note is that different people are different. Some are easily impressed and not all have the level of sophistication you may expect in their decision making. If such a person is present in your way as hurdle it pays to give them what they want. That's a big part of the difficulty of job hunting and hiring. Whatever advice you try to implement is a terrible idea for some subset of opportunities/people.
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
It's alarming that there's an idea among a people -- possibly bay area -- that mid-career is six years of experience. You are your own worst enemy with that kind of belief. People reinvent themselves and their careers many times over a lifetime. It's hard to return to certain types of technical work but never impossible, especially for those who are sufficiently motivated. You will reach the limit of a pay scale, but everyone eventually does, in all professions.
- sails 6y ago
  I like the framing of a career into thirds of 15 years. 20-35: Find and build your skills/industries/networks and start to align that into a career. Don't be afraid to make mistakes to enhance learning. 35-50: Double down on the skills you have in the industry you know, build your personal brand, achieve your career goals. 50-65++: Give back to those earlier in their career, pay it forward, pass the torch etc. With that framing in mind, mid career would be at least 15 years. I think what is interesting is most people underestimate how long their career is. ps - I think the above notion is loosely based on a book I probably didn't read completely [] [] https://www.slideshare.net/BrianFetherstonhaugh/the-long-view-career-strategies-to-start-strong-reach-high-and-go-far https://www.slideshare.net/BrianFetherstonhaugh/the-long-vie...
  - jasondigitized 6y ago
    I’ve heard this referred to as Learn, Earn, and then Return.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I think in "our" line of work you tend to see at most 30-some year olds actually talk about the job; I don't know what happens to people in the tech industry beyond that, they seem to have a lot less "presence". Mind you, maybe there's just less of them because access to education and work in tech has improved so much over time?
    - mywittyname 6y ago
austincheney 6y ago
The mid-career sentiment that I commonly see on HN is that many developers have almost entirely stopped developing despite remaining in a developer role. That’s really damn depressing. These people, myself included, want out but must sacrifice greater than half their income to move into something of greater interest or less depressing and that is a very tough choice to make. The most common reason why these mid career people have stopped developing at work appears to be that they are well experienced while their peers are not. I suspect that instead of a nurturing environment where talent is developed the mid career people just sit there, because it only take one junior to be offended at not being prized with attention/praise to ruin any sort of mentoring experience.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  "The most common reason why these mid career people have stopped developing at work appears to be that they are well experienced while their peers are not" Everyone's different, but I used to spend a lot of my free time in the evenings and weekends hacking on side projects, learning the odd new tool or language, etc. Now I spend them wiping vomit off my back, cleaning crap off of underwear, reading bedtime stories, singing songs, and making crafts. The side project time has gone down a lot. However, it means I might be less competitive than others as time goes on.
DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
Does grad school and post doc count toward "years of experience" lol
_448 6y ago
You have a C program on your 404 page. That program should return either -1 or EXIT_FAILURE :)
- eequah9L 6y ago
  The job of that program is to write "404". If that succeeded, returning 0 is reasonable. It should be checking the return code from that printf though!
vmception 6y ago
I gave up on my midcareer job hunt once COVID19 hit because it was obvious that it would be a crowded pack, and salaries would go down, and desparate visa holders would be waaaay better at leetcode than me. I think I also did 16 companies or so but being exposed to them took longer than before. In the past I've also gone through 16 companies in one month through one recruiter before, fielded one or two offers and landed a job. I think this took 6 months. 3 months of trying for the wrong higher position, and then the final 3 months getting serious about leetcode. Regarding the article, I would say there isn't much to say about coding challenges, except be ready for them at all interviews now. The article mentions that it is a good test if the company can afford false negatives, which doesn't explain ANY of the startups. The signaling at all the companies is arbitrary but especially startups. I'm just taking a cooldown period so that all the recruiters stop passing my old/current resume around (there are also SO MANY new non-tech opportunities during COVID19 war), with regard to tech I'm going to redo all my resumes to show less experience instead of trying to hit top of market in startup salaries and big tech comp packages. I get callbacks pretty instantly, which was reassuring but something about me wasn't hitting like it used to, even after I was solving the leetcode easy problems in 5 minutes.
- dominotw 6y ago
  I think market now has moved on to leetcode DP/hard in ~30 mins. I got this in my last phone screen at tier 2-3 shop https://leetcode.com/problems/split-array-largest-sum/ https://leetcode.com/problems/split-array-largest-sum/
  - vmception 6y ago
    DP? and yes, I got good at the easy problems, which would be all that appears in some interviews. In other interviews I could tell or got feedback that I was close to the bar, which is about 30 minutes. Or if I had an opportunity to finish a harder question later after the interview, I could tell that writing a working solution would have still taken me MUCH longer.
    - dominotw 6y ago
urlgrey_ 6y ago
I enjoyed the write-up. Iteresting that you say you invested too much time in writing. What are your readership stats if I may ask?

319 points by luu 7y ago

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

This is terribly useless for anyone else. I’d go so far as to say it is not, in fact, a data point for anyone. - 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market - the coding interview experience of this applicant and requirements of the companies appears to be far more lax than most experiences in tech hiring - it took place right around the pandemic / unemployment / layoff time period which is a nasty confounder to everything - it focuses a lot on start-ups - doesn’t give specifics on negotiation or salary numbers It seems like a fine write-up and all, it’s just critical to emphasize this experience is not translatable to other people. If your experience happened to be similar to this, total coincidence. If you’re trying to predict a future hiring experience for yourself, this won’t offer you that. If you just want to read about someone else’s experience knowing it won’t be related to yours for any reason aside from coincidence and don’t mind it is light on specific salary details, this is fine.

meddlepal 7y ago
> 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market Wait what? Is this just an SF/Valley thing? 60 days on the market is a long time IMO. Long enough that my experience with east coast recruiting is that by the time you hit 30 days offers start evaporating so it makes it difficult to play them off of each other for negotiating purposes.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  If you're not good at modern interviews then it can take some time to find a company that either you get lucky on or that uses a different process.
- Joof 7y ago
  I usually prolong it for travel, but I've always had offers by 60 days in. Anecdote.
- scarface74 6y ago
  I’m on the east coast and over 20 years and 6 job changes (first one was based on an internship). I’ve had multiple offers within three weeks maximum after I started looking. The shortest was 4 days. None have required any serious algorithm/LeetCode type of interview.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    Your experience is such an extreme outlier as to necessitate ignoring it when considering how general job searches go.
itake 7y ago
> - it took place right around the pandemic / unemployment / layoff time period which is a nasty confounder to everything The article was written in Jan. I don't think the pandemic had hit the USA then. > - it focuses a lot on start-ups Mozilla, Stripe, Reddit, Buzzfeed, and Square aren't exactly startups.
marcinzm 7y ago
>- 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market I'm an experienced engineer (10+ years) in a good location. For me, 65 days is absurdly LONG pre-pandemic. Assuming you interview well, you can go from nothing to offer in something like two weeks with most startups. >- the coding interview experience of this applicant and requirements of the companies appears to be far more lax than most experiences in tech hiring How so? Seems pretty standard to me, the usual leetcode stuff with various bits around the edges. >- it focuses a lot on start-ups This is the case for many people especially on this site and the "startups" are very wide in size. So not sure why you consider this to be a non-transferable part.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  > For me, 65 days is absurdly LONG for me pre-pandemic. Assuming you interview well, you can go from nothing to offer in something like two weeks with most startups. Depends a lot on the type of company. I've had startups go from initial contact to offer in about 3 business days. OTOH is Google - I've heard my first hiring process there (5 weeks) was on the short side, and it's not unusual to be held up for 6 months with them.
- Mandatum 6y ago
  I'm always fielding JD's from recruiters. I don't live in SV so I don't get absolutely inundated, but I get quite a few quality opportunities come my way which become useful during negotiations. My recommendation to everyone, unless you're like the guy above me: Even if you're in a stable FTE, right now you should be practicing and fielding job interviews - just in case. If you're made redundant or caught in a spreadsheet, you'll be better to take the package and jump straight into work somewhere else before culture turns toxic. You'll be up against far, far more people than you were when you last applied for a job. This will be stressful. So get in front of it.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    Even when inundated with recruiter calls and having a stellar resume, 65 days is very, very short for job searches. From first interview to shortest possible time you can get an offer at most companies is longer than 30 days anyway. People saying they interview and get an offer in a few days or weeks are often lying and otherwise are major outliers. At my company, for example, the minimum interview process is over 4 weeks, and we are a very competitive e-commerce company with huge pipeline of candidates. We are absolutely not offering people jobs in a fast (less than 1 month) turnaround, and this rarely has any impact on who we hire. This was also very true across the 6 other professional jobs I’ve had, at brand name start-ups, no-name start-ups and large tech companies.
soneca 7y ago
The title says ”a data point”. This kind of nullify all of your rant for me. You can’t say ”it’s not a data point”, it makes no sense. You could argue it’s an outlier, but it is a data point. I am actually glad that it is not someone pretending to have good advice that might fool me into thinking it is actually good advice. It is refreshing to read just one account that I learn what I want from, without been tricked in to believe it’s anything more than that.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  I think you’re wrong. Being a data point isn’t the same thing as just existing. There has to be some space of models or information that can potentially be different because of the example. If it’s not possible for other people’s models to be different as a result, then it’s not data.
wuunderbar 7y ago
> 65 days is a very very short time to be on the market Is it though? For software engineering? > the coding interview experience of this applicant and requirements of the companies appears to be far more lax than most experiences in tech hiring I'm not sure. Difficult LeetCode type questions are less common (based on numerous anecdotal accounts online) everywhere other than with SF Bay Area & NYC based companies than anywhere else.
JSavageOne 7y ago
Sorry I'm going to be blunt here, what an incredibly stupid comment. OP applied to well-known companies like Square and Reddit, shared his resume, interview experiences, and outcomes, and you're here on an anonymous internet forum telling him that this information is completely useless because he didn't mention salary details? I personally found it interesting and helpful as an engineer interested in potentially working for some of these companies. You are incredibly out of touch and socially challenged to tell him his post is utterly useless because it focuses on startups and there's a pandemic. I hope I never have to work at a company alongside you.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  It’s not useful for others to predict experiences from it. It’s similar to the selection bias effect of college professors encouraging students to pursue careers in academia because they did themselves. The career details of the professor might be very interesting, but they are useless. Or to be more blunt, it would be like a lottery-ticket winner saying, “the best career advice is to win the lottery” ... there is no actionable info that a listener can take away or use, it’s purely idiosyncratic. I’m sorry you thought it was a stupid comment, but I very much stand by what I said and feel it is not stupid, rather a very critical caveat.
vertak 7y ago
> this is terribly useless for for anyone else I bet this was terribly useless for you, but for the wider set of readers here its near impossible to generalize as you have done. I haven’t dived deep to search for “here was my job search” stories and I’ve probably read fewer than 5 such posts on HN over the years I’ve been lurking here. However I appreciated this one for its candid sharing of the numbers (number of applications, rejections, etc.) and his resume + cover letters. Unless you are some interview god/goddess who has seen all the resumes there are to see, it’s valuable to see different ways of approaching the job search. I’m currently on the job hunt myself and have bookmarked this article for a reread.

ganstyles 7y ago

Note this is for a PM role. This isn't mentioned for a long time into the article. I found that slightly annoying personally, as most people on HN seem to be engineers. But I don't think the experience generalizes, as someone who has received eng and pm offers from FAANG companies.

Shoop 7y ago
I'm pretty sure the applications he discussed weren't for a PM role. Check out the first footnote which talks about that experience separately: > [1] I actually did also apply to 3 product manager positions. None of them panned out. Made it to an interview stage at one company, and I thought it went quite well. Apparently, it didn’t go well enough. I’m glad. I’m happy where I wound up.
alkhatib 7y ago
Check the article again. He “also applied to 3 PM roles” Meaning primary job applications not for PM
soneca 7y ago
To add to the other sibling comments, the author mentions several times ”coding challenges “. This is not for a PM role.

sp527 7y ago

The ‘wannabe philosopher to wannabe entrepreneur’ line in the Gradle resume was incredibly cringey. I suspect the author has a very poor understanding of how best to sell himself and this also at least somewhat explains his results (in addition to the factors he mentions).

lynchdt 7y ago

Some perhaps unsolicited advice from a hiring manager in a company very similar to the great ones in which this writer was unsuccessful. - Rare programmers won’t identify themselves as such. - Most great companies hire for humility as a trait.

soneca 7y ago
I think I am not understanding your advice (or the post). I didn’t see where the author claims to be a ”rare programmer” or does not show humility.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  It's in the cover letter.
  - soneca 7y ago
    Got it, thanks. Still, I am reading it with more generous eyes I think. It seemed to be used to contextualize their communication skills. Not as ”I am better than most”, more like ”I have this unique trait that you might value”. But I can see how it could be read
    - wolco 7y ago
      Plus he backs it up with speaking. It's narrow and credible enough that it works. It doesn't work with a thin resume.
      - lynchdt 6y ago
        This is the crux of it. Even to a well calibrated tech recruiter, the resume reads thin on substance.
marcinzm 7y ago
So true, excessive ego is really problematic on an engineering team. There's a thin but very real line between confidant and egoistical. And most hiring managers err on the side of caution when seeing potential red flags.

t_1589165433 7y ago

How on earth do people have these experiences? I have to submit multiple hundreds of applications to get one interview. Throwaway because it could turn into multiple thousands if that fact is linked to my identity.

marcinzm 7y ago
In general don't blindly apply unless you have no choice. Use your network, have people refer you, respond to recruiters, etc. Someone you know may know someone who can refer you and so on. That said, going through recruiters alone should give you decently high interview rates. Assuming you have some experience and so on. If it's not then your resume needs work. For whatever reason, hiring manager look at it and don't want to talk to you further.
- non-entity 7y ago
  I've never get good recruiters. It's always some underpaid external recruiter trying to pass anyone off for some low paying, and probably mibd-killing position. The kind the heavily editorilzaze you resume unsolicited so that it matches the position description exactly and the description they send you have glaring typos and theres a small percentage its even relevant to your experience. Everytime I've tried to follow through with one it's just ended in nothing, they dont even give you straight answers most of the time when asked a question
  - zebnyc 7y ago
    Agreed. This is part of the reason why I refuse to work with third party recruiters any longer. A few more are: a) They cold call you in a way which makes it obvious they don't respect your schedule. b) They just want to shoe horn you into a role, get the commission and keep moving. c) Some third party recruiters get offended when I tell them that I am also trying to get interviews on my own without them or through other third party recruiters. d) I have a sneaking suspicion that third party recruiters are paid if the candidate stays for 3 months. So if things were not to go perfect in the first few months then the company might be more inclined to fire you to save the commission.

troughway 7y ago

Should "mid-career" software developers still be focused on low-balling themselves with having to do "career growth" things like this fellow, or should they plan their exit strategy to get out of that career trajectory entirely? Assuming mid-career is actually mid-career and not the ageist SV type of mid-career.

aswanson 7y ago
The latter. Build up cash and invest in a career path that values experience.
- pragmatic 7y ago
  And what would that be exactly? What's safe from being Ubered out of existence?
  - MattGaiser 7y ago
    > What's safe from being Ubered out of existence? Uberizing an industry.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  Depends. In Europe, dev salaries and taxes don't allow you to build enough cash for an exit path unless you plan on staying childless.
  - badpun 6y ago
    It's doable in Switzerland and in London, at least until the tax laws around contracting change.
    - oblio 6y ago
      And that's probably 10% of developers in Europe, at best. More likely 1-5%.
  - 6y ago

Thorentis 7y ago

Is it true you still need an "open source coding resume" by mid-career stage? I can understand using that to give you an advantage for entry-level roles, but by "mid-career" shouldn't your experience and achievements in past roles speak for itself? Or do companies still want to see engineers spending their spare time doing unpaid coding? By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time. Surely this is considered during the hiring process? I don't think I would want to work somewhere that expects a married with kids mid-level engineer to spend their weekends and nights contributing to open source, just to land their next job.

MattGaiser 7y ago
> By mid-career, many people have families to support, that they also would like to spend time with in their down time. I have never hired anyone, but anecdotally from a team lead dev who has hired a couple dozen people, that is the exact kind of thing they want to avoid. If someone was a "star" working 90 hours a week in the past but now wants to work 40, they stop being the kind of "star" some companies want.
- kleiba 7y ago
  It's worth noting that the opposite point of view is also true: in that case, they are not the company the "ex-star" would want to work for, either.
- SystemOut 7y ago
  As someone who has been in a team lead role and hiring for many years I can't imagine a more toxic viewpoint to team building.
- x0x0 7y ago
  You can find whatever type of company you want. I find the complaining of most engineers incoherent. Until March or so, more than at any point in time, being a competent software engineer opened doors at thousands of companies. I expect we'll be back there within two years tops. When you are looking for a job, ask the person you're talking to what expectations are. Ask the hiring manager how he or she defines success for the role. Ask every employee you speak to how much they work. You'll get your answer. Pick your employer accordingly. ps -- at my 40-ish person startup, eng rarely work more than 45h/week. And we have plenty of parents. We do however make comparatively boring software sold to enterprises, and have trouble hiring in part because of that (imo).

georgeburdell 7y ago

I look at that resume and I wonder if it didn't hurt more than it helped; it's form over function, and a bit corny. The fact that he got multiple offers in two months shows how strong the software job market is. I'm several years younger, but a staff-level hardware engineer at a second tier company (top tier being FAANG). I've had an incredibly difficult time jumping companies --- 2 years and counting. Despite being twice promoted since graduating with my PhD, most recently this past review cycle, I have yet to get past the first interview stage* with a top tier company, even with close friends at those companies referring me. It's quite frustrating and I wish I knew what the successful candidates had that I didn't. * Note that for hardware engineering, the initial interview is a meet-and-greet with a technical question or two, so more laid back

troughway 7y ago
> It's quite frustrating and I wish I knew what the successful candidates had that I didn't. Have you asked your close friends or your coworkers about this?
WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
> I wish I knew what the successful candidates had that I didn't It's not what they had, it's what they didn't... unless you're going heavy into research, I would recommend NOT getting the PhD until you hit 45+.
- georgeburdell 7y ago
  Hardware development jobs are PhD-only in my field (some older people get grandfathered in with an MS, but this is rare). These are not research-y jobs
  - non-entity 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, what field is that?
    - 7y ago

quickthrower2 7y ago

I am working on https://tryjobalerts.com/ https://tryjobalerts.com/ to help developers look for work, at the first stage to find jobs.

cletus 7y ago

So I'd say anyone looking for engineering work should aim to have at least one (and just one is fine) of the following: 1. A good (and well-known) school. MIT, Stanford, CMU, UW, Waterloo, you get the picture. 2. A good (and well-known) employer. FAANGs in particular. Ideally as an FTE but internships are good signals here too. 3. To be known for something you've done. Well-used open source project, well-known blog, that sort of thing. (1) and (2) fall into the category of "social proof" [1] and whether you like it or not, social proof can take you pretty far in life. Like in my case, it didn't take that long from working at Google to getting cold-called almost constantly (and I guarantee you there's nothing special about my situation). My own job seeking experience (pre-Google) tends to be pretty similar to the numbers in this post (applications to interviews to offers). For those of you sending out hundreds of applications let me offer you some advice because I see a lot of people making easy-to-fix mistakes. Hiring is a popular topic on HN and you see the same comments. There are always people who call a hiring pipeline a failure because a good candidate got rejected. This is the wrong way to approach this. The process is asymmetric. A candidate is trying to get through each stage of the pipeline and get hired by somebody. Ideally they want multiple offers to boost the offer they end up accepting. "Success" is accepting an offer. Below a certain size, a company wants to fill a role. It'll have N applications and the pipeline is designed to have filters along the way to winnow down that number to fill the role. "Success" is filling that role with someone sufficiently good. They don't have to be the best. Technical skills matter but usually only to a point. You have to bear in mind that you are a cog that needs to fit into an existing machine. Each step of the process gets increasingly time-consuming so the more you can weed out at the earlier stages while still filling the role, the better. Large companies are similar except you don't tend to be interviewing for a particular role. There is a constant hiring pipeline. Recruiting may well be a separate org. You can use this to your advantage. So, let's make up some numbers for our waterfall: - Recruiting receives 100 applications - The 20 best get sent to a hiring manager - They may well eliminate half for various reasons passing on 10 to one of their engineers - That engineer may well filter out half too meaning 5 will get called - 3 of those will get interviews - 1 will get an offer, another will be the backup Like I said, completely made up but still instructive. And I'd say it wouldn't be too far off the mark for a mid-sized company. The first thing is you need to get through a company's recruiting/HR filter. Well they look at the requisition ("req") they have and try and see if the application seems to fit the criteria and I really do mean seems to. This is what I call the buzzword filter. Anecdote: I once had a conversation with a recruiter who said--and I'm not making this up--"I can see you have 6 years of Java experience but do you have any J2SE experience?" Some of it isn't buzzword related. Like if the req calls for leading a team, they'll look to see if you've led a team in the past. Depending on the company, the seniority of the position and so forth, factors like your school and previous jobs may come into play. Length of employment is a factor here. So how do we approach this to pass this filter? Well we need to cater our resume to the job posting and see how it fills the criteria. We need to have sufficient buzzwords but not too many and not any we can't back up. This may hurt us later. Then again, it's completely valid to try and pass through early stages and deal with that problem later. One point to consider is that the half the applications the hiring manager may never see. To be fair, a lot of job applications are garbage. My numbers are actually pretty generous. I've had people tell me that 90% of applications can be immediately rejected. The hiring manager will have their own criteria and biases. They're trying to judge if you're someone who will fit on the team. Here lots of short jobs can hurt. There are cultural factors too eg in the UK I found having contracting on your CV would really hurt you for full-time roles (this was years ago; I can't speak for the current conditions). Basically the hiring manager is looking for red flags. The engineer will typically be looking for technical suitability. It's from this point onwards that various (ideally cheap) negative filters are used to try and reduce the numbers further. And this is what a whiteboard coding test should be: a relatively easy problem just to see if you're not an idiot. FizzBuzz is easy for a reason. Engineers fall into the trap of thinking the problem needs to be hard. This actually reduces the effectiveness of the signal as you've turned a useful negative filter into a crap shoot of whether or not you know the "trick". For example, I had whiteboard coding problem once to reverse bits. Turns out (I found out later) this can be done in O(log n). I had never had need for such a trick so didn't know it. So what did that test accomplish exactly? Bit-fiddling is applicable to certain classes of programming, just not any I had and (more importantly) not the one I was interviewing for. An early stage startup may simply be the hiring manager responding to emailed applications and they'll hire the first suitably qualified candidate they find because they really don't want to be doing this. A larger company may filter everyone through and then pick the "best" to extend an offer to. So when you apply for a position, I would encourage you to think about what process that company has for hiring and treating it as a waterfall that you need to get through. Find out what you can about their hiring process. If you can't find out, make up something that seems reasonable given the type of company they are and their size. The most important step for your application is to make it through the first 1-2 filters as those tend to be pretty dumb. Your CV needs to stand out from a hundred others in some way. A known school or employer is a good one. Absent that, allowing them to see some evidence that you can communicate in written form and/or actually code is a big plus. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

jldugger 7y ago

> For some of these companies, I applied with a non-traditional, branded resume. ... Since I only used these types of resumes with 6 applications, I’d say glowing compliments on 3 out of 6 is pretty solid performance. If we view the purpose of a resume as getting an interview, then that's how we should evaluate changing them. By my reading Matt scored an interview 4 out of 6 times, a 66 percent success rate. Assuming the rest are the control, that leaves 10 applications and 3 interviews -- 30 percent! That's pretty great really, but we have to wonder, did Matt randomly choose which companies got the experimental treatment, or were certain companies 'too risky' to try something new with? Or did he try to match up his application style to the companies somehow?

ivalm 7y ago

I am curious what counts for “mid career”, he started coding ~6 years ago. Presumably he is in his 20s. Here him talking about leaving philosophy: https://www.philosophicalhacker.com/2014/04/22/why-im-glad-my-dream-job-didnt-work-out/ https://www.philosophicalhacker.com/2014/04/22/why-im-glad-m... Edit: LinkedIn ~agrees with this estimate

lihaciudaniel 7y ago
>For the past 5 years, I hoped I was going to be a philosophy professor Assuming he goes to university or somewhere. Because most people find it boring he should have chosen history, latin, or simply other humanities subjects. How does one even jump from tech to humanities anyways???
- watwut 7y ago
  > How does one even jump from tech to humanities anyways??? Why would that be impossible or shocking? Most people are able to learn multiple different things and have interest in multiple different things. Universities typically allow you to take courses from different topics too.
  - lihaciudaniel 6y ago
    >Universities typically allow you to take courses from different topics too. But in America I don't think you can do that, some families don't have the privilege to spend so much money on somebody to get a bachelor in philosophy and then have no jobs afterwards.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      My understanding is To get a US degree you have to take courses outside your main topic unlike the UK
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  > How does one even jump from tech to humanities anyways??? when you're the type of person who likes to question everything and who wants to build things to make the world a "better place", then switching to humanities with a tech foundation is a good option. It can be very dangerous though. One is at risk of undoing all the previous conditioning (which costed a lot of time and money) and bring oneself to realize that it takes more than just "an idea for an app", or VC funding to actually contribute to society in a lasting and non-fraudulent way. It also might anger your colleagues who will never admit that they've been conned, drank too much of the corporate/academic kool-aid, and besides nobody likes people swimming against the stream especially when the reward isn't monetary and has even got high potential of working against you in the short term financially. How dare those damn fools who want to be better engineers and also better humans by widening their world-view!

Nextgrid 6y ago

Maybe it's just me but I think that "branded" CVs come across as desperate and could be considered red flags that either the candidate is trying to make up for something else (lack of skills, etc) or is unaware of the performance of the job market (I guess if the market is really bad you might try a branded CV out of desperation, but software engineering is still very much a seller's market). Branded CV is something I could see coming from someone fresh out of high school that is working off poor advice they've been given and to try and make up for the fact they basically have zero experience to show, but for someone with experience I'd expect that experience to speak for them instead of their word processor skills, and if that experience is not good enough then the branding wouldn't save it (unless you happen to be interviewing for designing print documents?).

borplk 6y ago
I largely agree with you. However one thing to note is that different people are different. Some are easily impressed and not all have the level of sophistication you may expect in their decision making. If such a person is present in your way as hurdle it pays to give them what they want. That's a big part of the difficulty of job hunting and hiring. Whatever advice you try to implement is a terrible idea for some subset of opportunities/people.

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

It's alarming that there's an idea among a people -- possibly bay area -- that mid-career is six years of experience. You are your own worst enemy with that kind of belief. People reinvent themselves and their careers many times over a lifetime. It's hard to return to certain types of technical work but never impossible, especially for those who are sufficiently motivated. You will reach the limit of a pay scale, but everyone eventually does, in all professions.

sails 6y ago
I like the framing of a career into thirds of 15 years. 20-35: Find and build your skills/industries/networks and start to align that into a career. Don't be afraid to make mistakes to enhance learning. 35-50: Double down on the skills you have in the industry you know, build your personal brand, achieve your career goals. 50-65++: Give back to those earlier in their career, pay it forward, pass the torch etc. With that framing in mind, mid career would be at least 15 years. I think what is interesting is most people underestimate how long their career is. ps - I think the above notion is loosely based on a book I probably didn't read completely [] [] https://www.slideshare.net/BrianFetherstonhaugh/the-long-view-career-strategies-to-start-strong-reach-high-and-go-far https://www.slideshare.net/BrianFetherstonhaugh/the-long-vie...
- jasondigitized 6y ago
  I’ve heard this referred to as Learn, Earn, and then Return.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I think in "our" line of work you tend to see at most 30-some year olds actually talk about the job; I don't know what happens to people in the tech industry beyond that, they seem to have a lot less "presence". Mind you, maybe there's just less of them because access to education and work in tech has improved so much over time?
  - mywittyname 6y ago

austincheney 6y ago

The mid-career sentiment that I commonly see on HN is that many developers have almost entirely stopped developing despite remaining in a developer role. That’s really damn depressing. These people, myself included, want out but must sacrifice greater than half their income to move into something of greater interest or less depressing and that is a very tough choice to make. The most common reason why these mid career people have stopped developing at work appears to be that they are well experienced while their peers are not. I suspect that instead of a nurturing environment where talent is developed the mid career people just sit there, because it only take one junior to be offended at not being prized with attention/praise to ruin any sort of mentoring experience.

CalRobert 6y ago
"The most common reason why these mid career people have stopped developing at work appears to be that they are well experienced while their peers are not" Everyone's different, but I used to spend a lot of my free time in the evenings and weekends hacking on side projects, learning the odd new tool or language, etc. Now I spend them wiping vomit off my back, cleaning crap off of underwear, reading bedtime stories, singing songs, and making crafts. The side project time has gone down a lot. However, it means I might be less competitive than others as time goes on.

DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago

Does grad school and post doc count toward "years of experience" lol

_448 6y ago

You have a C program on your 404 page. That program should return either -1 or EXIT_FAILURE :)

eequah9L 6y ago
The job of that program is to write "404". If that succeeded, returning 0 is reasonable. It should be checking the return code from that printf though!

vmception 6y ago

I gave up on my midcareer job hunt once COVID19 hit because it was obvious that it would be a crowded pack, and salaries would go down, and desparate visa holders would be waaaay better at leetcode than me. I think I also did 16 companies or so but being exposed to them took longer than before. In the past I've also gone through 16 companies in one month through one recruiter before, fielded one or two offers and landed a job. I think this took 6 months. 3 months of trying for the wrong higher position, and then the final 3 months getting serious about leetcode. Regarding the article, I would say there isn't much to say about coding challenges, except be ready for them at all interviews now. The article mentions that it is a good test if the company can afford false negatives, which doesn't explain ANY of the startups. The signaling at all the companies is arbitrary but especially startups. I'm just taking a cooldown period so that all the recruiters stop passing my old/current resume around (there are also SO MANY new non-tech opportunities during COVID19 war), with regard to tech I'm going to redo all my resumes to show less experience instead of trying to hit top of market in startup salaries and big tech comp packages. I get callbacks pretty instantly, which was reassuring but something about me wasn't hitting like it used to, even after I was solving the leetcode easy problems in 5 minutes.

dominotw 6y ago
I think market now has moved on to leetcode DP/hard in ~30 mins. I got this in my last phone screen at tier 2-3 shop https://leetcode.com/problems/split-array-largest-sum/ https://leetcode.com/problems/split-array-largest-sum/
- vmception 6y ago
  DP? and yes, I got good at the easy problems, which would be all that appears in some interviews. In other interviews I could tell or got feedback that I was close to the bar, which is about 30 minutes. Or if I had an opportunity to finish a harder question later after the interview, I could tell that writing a working solution would have still taken me MUCH longer.
  - dominotw 6y ago

urlgrey_ 6y ago

I enjoyed the write-up. Iteresting that you say you invested too much time in writing. What are your readership stats if I may ask?