21 ms·

How to prepare for losing your programming job

115 points by itamarst 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MattGaiser 6y ago
We need some startups in the proof of skill space as vast amounts of time and energy are used by developers providing public proof of their skills rather than actually doing work or improving their own skills. Sure, talks and blogs can be useful, but in the same way that companies are harmed by resume driven development, there are community downsides to resume driven blogging if just that things trend towards whatever is new at the time rather than a diverse range of topics. It also is not helpful if a lot of them are geared towards impressing recruiters rather than informing. We want tutorials by people who actually enjoy creating good tutorials. I say this as someone who spent a couple weeks on Stack Overflow answering trivial questions after graduating so that I had more of a public profile. I would answer anything and everything easy as I wanted to get over 200 rep points (so I could say I was "ranked"). Anything challenging was skipped simply because if it took more than half an hour to answer, I might not get 200 points that day. I knew nobody would see me as an expert due to inexperience (so nobody would really read by Stack Overflow answers), so I was trying to generate proof of enthusiasm. That isn't desirable for the programming community as a whole as it meant that niche questions I had the answer to never got answered as I had points to earn. EDIT: Leetcode is for passing the interview. Resumes. blogs, and tutorial writing are about getting the interview. Leetcode doesn't attempt to solve this problem.
- jasode 6y ago
  >We need some startups in the proof of skill space [...] If you're unaware, you can search google for "HackerRank Codility Devskiller leetcode"[0] If you're already aware of those, do you have something in mind that the existing skill evaluators don't do? [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=HackerRank+Codility+Devskiller+leetcode https://www.google.com/search?q=HackerRank+Codility+Devskill...
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    I know about those, but those are about passing the algorithmic interview/conducting the tech interview. I am thinking more about how one might demonstrate expertise in the kinds of things one shows off in blogs, such as expertise in Spring with respect to financial systems. No ideas presently, just something I would like to see.
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      I do; write your CV, provide references. Build a portfolio website and/or blog and just write about things you have and are working on, issues you ran into, etc. I think most developers find their jobs interesting and have a lot to talk about, even if simultaneously they don't believe what they do is much to talk about. Note to self: Do some writing again. i started a portfolio site on Github years ago and started to just word vomit about my earlier projects and jobs (internships, school projects). It adds up over time.
    - decafninja 6y ago
      But do companies care about that stuff? Nowadays, it seems everyone is just interested in your ability to solve leetcode problems on a whiteboard, plus some system design. After that, just make sure you're not an asshole, and voila, you're in. I've long been in finance tech (i-banks, hedge funds) and still am in the industry (though trying desperately to get out). At the start of my career, I made some effort to learn the business domain. After a while, it became apparent that very few people (including hiring managers) cared, and that it was a total waste of time as far as furthering my career - even if I wanted to stay in finance tech. Better to just study leetcode.
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        I guess it depends on whether your problem is getting interviews or getting through interviews. All the leetcode in the world doesn't make them call you in, but it certainly helps you pass.
  - tom_b 6y ago
- gravy 6y ago
  Back in my teens (mid 20s now), I was very (very) interested in Photoshop to the point where I would consume dozens of tutorials a day and just work on projects for things like forum signatures or post headers and graphics. My "graphic design" career never took off, but to this day I still have muscle memory of certain tasks and actions I've created and still set up my workspace in the same way. Now that I'm a programmer I rarely find the itch to dive into things like this again. Every now and then, I'll want to create some silly website with a game or something and again I'd find myself spending late nights just working on it. I've realized that the fact that I "know something" isn't what drives me, it's that I'm interested in what I want so much that I'll learn anything just to get to do it. Lately, I've been starting to feel the itch for doing something related to baseball (again, something I love), like data analytics or amateur scouting or something. I have no idea how to get started, but I just know I want to. I hope I find tutorials from people who are just as excited to share information as I am to absorb it.
  - montecarl 6y ago
    This may be a fun place to start. There is a lot of work in this area and this type of technique is great for baseball: https://docs.pymc.io/notebooks/hierarchical_partial_pooling.html https://docs.pymc.io/notebooks/hierarchical_partial_pooling....
    - gravy 6y ago
      I really appreciate this resource. Thank you!!
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    There is not nearly enough content regarding the Korean/Japanese/Taiwanese leagues that are filling the baseball void right now. I know next to nothing about the players and my typical sources are not putting much out except "the broadcasts are pretty watchable, great circle change." Would love to see more scouting reports on the players who have been very much overlooked in all this.
- eximius 6y ago
  Triplebyte attempts to be this.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    I keep intending to try them. I should do that.
    - eximius 6y ago
      I was impressed with the quality, breadth, and insightfulness from their quiz. Obviously gameable, but still really well done.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  > We need some startups in the proof of skill space as vast amounts of time and energy are used by developers providing public proof of their skills rather than actually doing work or improving their own skills. That completely dismisses the fact that the majority of businesses don't want good coders. They want adequate coders who aren't assholes. You can't create an online test that judges whether someone is enthusiastic, kind, honest, cooperative, and reliable. Nobody wants to work with a "10x developer" who passed coding challenges with flying colors but is unpleasant to work with. I'd much prefer to be judged based on my personality and my willingness to learn. What you're suggesting would not solve any problems, and at worst could harm people's ability to have a job if employers buy into such poppycock.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    The problem I am seeking to solve is people spending time and energy making less than passionate tutorials or open source contributions for the sake of resume development. What does that have to do with screening out assholes?
  - autokad 6y ago
    I agree, I think we need to get away from proof of skill things like leetcode. In its best light, its discriminatory. How is someone with a life, such as children or other things going on, supposed to take huge amounts of time away from their personal life to practice skills that are unrelated to the thing they actually want to do? one of my biggest regrets when doing my masters degree was spending my extra time learning things a data scientist would do. Like learning how to go through huge amounts of data, pull NFL data to see which yard lines on the field have the most injuries (1 and 2 yard line because of % of runs), learning NLP techniques like LDA, etc. Only none of this mattered, the guardian at the gate was asking me how to build and balance binary trees, etc. The fact that I regret spending my time learning how to do the things the job requires is a travesty of the system. It exposes how asinine the whole system is.
    - decafninja 6y ago
      I feel the same way. There are so many things I want to learn and do - both technical and non technical. Including many things that will make me a better engineer for employers current and future. But all of that is put on hold so that I can grind leetcode on my way into a better job first. Because nothing else matters.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  ... or a professional licensing board.
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    Those don't work nearly as well as people around here think they do WRT ensuring competence.
    - eximius 6y ago
      Do they work sufficiently well for the purposes we need it to, though? As another commented mentioned, the bulk of jobs require adequate coding skills with good soft skills. If you have the license, does that mean we can skip the whiteboard coding bunk?
    - commandlinefan 6y ago
      Would you trust a doctor who wasn't certified?
antibland 6y ago
Great advice as always (newsletter subscriber). The other piece of advice I offer is to join Stack Overflow and answer a few questions a week. This helps reinforce skills, understand common developer pain points, and can occasionally lead to a job offer.
kulig 6y ago
Trying to stay up to date with everything is a surefire way to make sure you're never really good at anything
ryeguy_24 6y ago
Read most of this but are there any non-obvious points of value that I missed. Cut expenses and try to get a new job seems to be the primary point. Anything else?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Spend a ton of time generating public stuff?
  - mauvehaus 6y ago
    And get your name out there publicly. The author is right that getting your resume into a hiring manager's hands is a lot easier if you're coming in via a current employee than through the website.
  - monksy 6y ago
    That still won't help with the interview. They'll look at that and say nice! Heres a 2 week coding assignment that we'll call it 3 hours of work.
- komali2 6y ago
  Not really lol. The good bits of the article are the hyperlinks.
- SigmundA 6y ago
  Do extrovert stuff, speak at conferences, network make lots of friends / contacts, be popular. Hard for introverts like me, I am better at computers than people which means I am at a disadvantage even in the computer field it seems. Worried if I ever have to look for a new job especially getting older.
  - ryeguy_24 6y ago
    Isn’t that so counter-intuitive? This clearly means that it’s an inefficient market. I don’t need to have a good social network to buy a nice TV. What a great problem that needs to be solved.
sigfubar 6y ago
Start looking for that new job before the previous one has ended. This is just a slightly next-level variation of simple networking, where you don't merely make friends all over the place, but make it clear that you'd take a better offer if one were to come along.
- downerending 6y ago
  +1 for this. In our industry, finding a job when you're unemployed can be quite difficult. Massively so if you're "old". Networking helps with that--definitely recommended. Also consider gathering "knowledge" resources from your current job. Silly stuff like your dotfiles, but also things like config files from the hosts, parts lists for physical systems, phone directories, etc.
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
  It's called "dig your well before you are thirsty".
justinzollars 6y ago
Other signals to look for is your company's inability to raise a round. This is an important one, typically rumors will circulate internally regarding financing. Not being able to raise a round is a signal that says investors, who have made a best effort to judge your company's books have decided your company is not a good investment. Those investors will have been provided a balance sheet that you typically will not have access to. So pay careful attention to this signal.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  That only applies to the small percentage of companies that isn't profitable and that still relies not only on investor money, but on fresh financial injections to keep their head above water. Most companies aren't like that. A lot of software companies will continue to generate income as well, due to having recurring income like subscriptions and licenses.
mauvehaus 6y ago
At a former company that shall remain nameless, the bigwigs from the head office came out to announce the closing of our satellite[1] office. They offered a relocation package to the head office for some of the folks working one of the projects we had in the remote office. Except it was kind of a crap relocation offer: same salary moving to a more expensive part of the country working for a person everybody thought was an idiot. They also gave everybody a month to accept or decline that offer. In practice, that meant that everybody at the remote office spent a month getting paid to look for a job. It was a bit like the job center in The Full Monty, but folks were actively supporting each other: helping each other practice whiteboard questions, going over each others' resumes, etc. If you can get current on some new technology on company time or raise your profile, do it. Folks who didn't get a relocation offer got to clean out their desks the day the bigwigs showed up. I don't have numbers from the group of people formerly of that office, but from my experience it's a hell of a lot easier to find a job if you have one than if you don't. If your company seems shaky, the time to start looking is now. [1] Edited per suggestion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23181222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23181222 originally read "remote".
- esoterica 6y ago
  Isn’t it a good thing that many companies are paying their remote employees the same? That means people dont have to take a paycut to live where they want.
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    "Remote office" here doesn't mean working at home. It means an office that isn't in the same city as company headquarters.
    - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
      "Satellite office" may have been a better term.
  - mauvehaus 6y ago
    Without revealing too much, this was a remote office, rented by the company, with folks in a variety of roles, including management. Not a couple of random remote employees. The question of paying remote employees the same as "regular" employees is complex. Switching to the hypothetical: If a company is headquartered in Louisville, KY, and somebody wants to work from e.g. Los Angeles, it would be ludicrous for the remote employee to accept the same salary in LA as in Louisville because the cost of living is much higher in LA. Considering the opposite situation, I find it unlikely that a company headquartered in LA is going to jump at the chance to pay an LA salary to somebody in Louisville.
sosilkj 6y ago
This article provides advice for how to spruce up your resume in order to procure interviews. Getting an interview is maybe 10% of the overall process. To make it through the interviews, you need to study an algorithms textbook and practice coding exercises. At the very least, you should be able to solve any of the Easy-rated problems listed on Leetcode without issue. You need to know what things ike "dynamic programming" are, etc. I'm not saying that this is the way things should be. Just that this is the reality of what you will need to do to procure a job offer. Edit: I see my advice has proven controversial. If you have better idaes about how to prepare for whiteboard interviews -- which many of us are statistically likely to encounter should we be thrust into the job market -- please share your suggestions!
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  It saddens me that this is the way things have gone. With 20+ years in the industry I can say that I never encountered this kind of thing until fairly recently. I know it was out there, especially with the BigCorps, just not that common when I was looking for work 10ish years ago. It would be hard for me to stomach an interview like that without just walking out. I do not code on whiteboards.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    start leetcoding hard everyday, its not possible to get a job these days even at tier 2-3 without leetcode screens.
    - twic 6y ago
      I have never, in ten years, had to do leetcode to get a job. And what on earth is "tier 2-3"? This whole subthread reads like it's escaped from r/cscareerquestions.
      - sosilkj 6y ago
        Thanks for sharing your perspective. Your experience is very different from mine. Are you trying to say that you believe whiteboard interviews are less common than I think they are? Or are you trying to say that there are ways to conduct a job search such that one can successfully avoid such interviews?
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I maintain a file of headhunters that I have come in contact with. If I lose my job (or even feel like I'm going to), I've got about 10 people who can earn money by finding me my next job.
- cddotdotslash 6y ago
  Whenever I get recruiters pinging me on LinkedIn, I send them a link to my "I'm not interested right now, but add your email here to get notified when I am" Google Form. So far, I've collected over 400 email addresses from recruiters. If I ever need to find something urgently, I'll send out an email blast to that list.
- the_watcher 6y ago
  The only thing I use email tags/folders for is to tag recruiters. Last time I looked for a job (in September), I just ranked the companies in order of my interest, and went down the list. 80% of the recruiters were happy to hear from me (even those who I had ignored)
  - jointpdf 6y ago
    What is the best way to approach an overdue reply? I always find myself at a loss for words as the thought “sorry for being a spacey moron” ricochets around my brain.
    - triceratops 6y ago
      Unsolicited cold recruiting emails aren't owed any sort of response. Apologies are not needed or expected. Just a "Thanks for getting in touch. Would you still like to talk?" is sufficient. Alternatively compose a "Thanks, not now" template that you send to all recruiters when they email. Then later on hit them with a "How about now?"
    - the_watcher 6y ago
      I don't even acknowledge it. I just say something like "Just wanted to let you know that I'm on the market, are you free for a chat?"
decafninja 6y ago
Quote I've seen a lot: "Leetcode every day keeps unemployment away" Seems the best way to avoid long term unemployment in this day and age is to be "coding interview ready" constantly. My best friend at a FAANG always tells me he dreads having to look for a job ever again - whether voluntarily or involuntarily, as he is in no way shape or form ready for coding interviews.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dominotw 6y ago
  The problem with this advice is that you get good at leets but you knowledge of framworks/aws/cloud stuff gets atrophied. leets are good for FAANGs but not so useful at mid tier.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    I don't know - I've encountered leetcode interviews all over the place these days. The only exception might be more recent front end interviews, which seem to do "code X in JS" questions more. But ironically the more prestigious companies like FAANG seem to do this more, while the lower tier companies are still leetcode for front end engineers.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  A lot of the companies I've seen actually hiring these days are doing more legit work-sample problems than Leetcode tasks. Coinbase and Stripe both have programming tasks that are clearly condensed versions of the actual work you'll be doing there. Google does too if you get a good interviewer, though it can vary a lot between interviewers. Snap, Lyft, and Facebook were all leetcode exercises - but they're ones that have been hurting more from the coronavirus recession. Leetcode is popular now because there're a bunch of tools (CoderPad/Karat for interviews and Leetcode/HackerRank for practice) that make it easy. I'm already seeing the pendulum start to swing the other way though - many of the best companies are building hiring processes tailored to their own business because they get a competitive advantage from doing so, both because they get more signal on prospective applicants and because it means interviewing does not become a transferrable skill that you can use to get multiple competing offers.
dominotw 6y ago
How safe are mid tier management jobs compared to devs. Upside of management positions is that interviews are relatively easier.
- not2b 6y ago
  Less safe in a downturn. When a company wants to tighten its belt but is still mostly solid, and don't have particular products that are clear losers, middle managers are an attractive target: they need the engineers to do the work and support the customers, and the sales people to bring in the money, but if they can get by with fewer managers, maybe they can do all that for less.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    I was looking at airbnb layoffs[1]. There didn't see to be a lot of middle managers on the list. Ofcourse, I don't know the ratio but i was expecting to see more middle management than engineers. https://www.airbnb.com/d/talent?location=&uuid=&relocation=&remote=&function=Engineering&page=1 https://www.airbnb.com/d/talent?location=&uuid=&relocation=&...
    - gowld 6y ago
      Jobs that scale linearly in proppotion to demand, like customer service and sales (anything where most of your time is spent focused on one client at a time), get cut when demand drops.
juskrey 6y ago
A job lost adds options, a job landed removes them.

115 points by itamarst 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

We need some startups in the proof of skill space as vast amounts of time and energy are used by developers providing public proof of their skills rather than actually doing work or improving their own skills. Sure, talks and blogs can be useful, but in the same way that companies are harmed by resume driven development, there are community downsides to resume driven blogging if just that things trend towards whatever is new at the time rather than a diverse range of topics. It also is not helpful if a lot of them are geared towards impressing recruiters rather than informing. We want tutorials by people who actually enjoy creating good tutorials. I say this as someone who spent a couple weeks on Stack Overflow answering trivial questions after graduating so that I had more of a public profile. I would answer anything and everything easy as I wanted to get over 200 rep points (so I could say I was "ranked"). Anything challenging was skipped simply because if it took more than half an hour to answer, I might not get 200 points that day. I knew nobody would see me as an expert due to inexperience (so nobody would really read by Stack Overflow answers), so I was trying to generate proof of enthusiasm. That isn't desirable for the programming community as a whole as it meant that niche questions I had the answer to never got answered as I had points to earn. EDIT: Leetcode is for passing the interview. Resumes. blogs, and tutorial writing are about getting the interview. Leetcode doesn't attempt to solve this problem.

jasode 6y ago
>We need some startups in the proof of skill space [...] If you're unaware, you can search google for "HackerRank Codility Devskiller leetcode"[0] If you're already aware of those, do you have something in mind that the existing skill evaluators don't do? [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=HackerRank+Codility+Devskiller+leetcode https://www.google.com/search?q=HackerRank+Codility+Devskill...
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I know about those, but those are about passing the algorithmic interview/conducting the tech interview. I am thinking more about how one might demonstrate expertise in the kinds of things one shows off in blogs, such as expertise in Spring with respect to financial systems. No ideas presently, just something I would like to see.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I do; write your CV, provide references. Build a portfolio website and/or blog and just write about things you have and are working on, issues you ran into, etc. I think most developers find their jobs interesting and have a lot to talk about, even if simultaneously they don't believe what they do is much to talk about. Note to self: Do some writing again. i started a portfolio site on Github years ago and started to just word vomit about my earlier projects and jobs (internships, school projects). It adds up over time.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    But do companies care about that stuff? Nowadays, it seems everyone is just interested in your ability to solve leetcode problems on a whiteboard, plus some system design. After that, just make sure you're not an asshole, and voila, you're in. I've long been in finance tech (i-banks, hedge funds) and still am in the industry (though trying desperately to get out). At the start of my career, I made some effort to learn the business domain. After a while, it became apparent that very few people (including hiring managers) cared, and that it was a total waste of time as far as furthering my career - even if I wanted to stay in finance tech. Better to just study leetcode.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      I guess it depends on whether your problem is getting interviews or getting through interviews. All the leetcode in the world doesn't make them call you in, but it certainly helps you pass.
- tom_b 6y ago
gravy 6y ago
Back in my teens (mid 20s now), I was very (very) interested in Photoshop to the point where I would consume dozens of tutorials a day and just work on projects for things like forum signatures or post headers and graphics. My "graphic design" career never took off, but to this day I still have muscle memory of certain tasks and actions I've created and still set up my workspace in the same way. Now that I'm a programmer I rarely find the itch to dive into things like this again. Every now and then, I'll want to create some silly website with a game or something and again I'd find myself spending late nights just working on it. I've realized that the fact that I "know something" isn't what drives me, it's that I'm interested in what I want so much that I'll learn anything just to get to do it. Lately, I've been starting to feel the itch for doing something related to baseball (again, something I love), like data analytics or amateur scouting or something. I have no idea how to get started, but I just know I want to. I hope I find tutorials from people who are just as excited to share information as I am to absorb it.
- montecarl 6y ago
  This may be a fun place to start. There is a lot of work in this area and this type of technique is great for baseball: https://docs.pymc.io/notebooks/hierarchical_partial_pooling.html https://docs.pymc.io/notebooks/hierarchical_partial_pooling....
  - gravy 6y ago
    I really appreciate this resource. Thank you!!
- jrumbut 6y ago
  There is not nearly enough content regarding the Korean/Japanese/Taiwanese leagues that are filling the baseball void right now. I know next to nothing about the players and my typical sources are not putting much out except "the broadcasts are pretty watchable, great circle change." Would love to see more scouting reports on the players who have been very much overlooked in all this.
eximius 6y ago
Triplebyte attempts to be this.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I keep intending to try them. I should do that.
  - eximius 6y ago
    I was impressed with the quality, breadth, and insightfulness from their quiz. Obviously gameable, but still really well done.
ravenstine 6y ago
> We need some startups in the proof of skill space as vast amounts of time and energy are used by developers providing public proof of their skills rather than actually doing work or improving their own skills. That completely dismisses the fact that the majority of businesses don't want good coders. They want adequate coders who aren't assholes. You can't create an online test that judges whether someone is enthusiastic, kind, honest, cooperative, and reliable. Nobody wants to work with a "10x developer" who passed coding challenges with flying colors but is unpleasant to work with. I'd much prefer to be judged based on my personality and my willingness to learn. What you're suggesting would not solve any problems, and at worst could harm people's ability to have a job if employers buy into such poppycock.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The problem I am seeking to solve is people spending time and energy making less than passionate tutorials or open source contributions for the sake of resume development. What does that have to do with screening out assholes?
- autokad 6y ago
  I agree, I think we need to get away from proof of skill things like leetcode. In its best light, its discriminatory. How is someone with a life, such as children or other things going on, supposed to take huge amounts of time away from their personal life to practice skills that are unrelated to the thing they actually want to do? one of my biggest regrets when doing my masters degree was spending my extra time learning things a data scientist would do. Like learning how to go through huge amounts of data, pull NFL data to see which yard lines on the field have the most injuries (1 and 2 yard line because of % of runs), learning NLP techniques like LDA, etc. Only none of this mattered, the guardian at the gate was asking me how to build and balance binary trees, etc. The fact that I regret spending my time learning how to do the things the job requires is a travesty of the system. It exposes how asinine the whole system is.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    I feel the same way. There are so many things I want to learn and do - both technical and non technical. Including many things that will make me a better engineer for employers current and future. But all of that is put on hold so that I can grind leetcode on my way into a better job first. Because nothing else matters.
commandlinefan 6y ago
... or a professional licensing board.
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  Those don't work nearly as well as people around here think they do WRT ensuring competence.
  - eximius 6y ago
    Do they work sufficiently well for the purposes we need it to, though? As another commented mentioned, the bulk of jobs require adequate coding skills with good soft skills. If you have the license, does that mean we can skip the whiteboard coding bunk?
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    Would you trust a doctor who wasn't certified?

antibland 6y ago

Great advice as always (newsletter subscriber). The other piece of advice I offer is to join Stack Overflow and answer a few questions a week. This helps reinforce skills, understand common developer pain points, and can occasionally lead to a job offer.

kulig 6y ago

Trying to stay up to date with everything is a surefire way to make sure you're never really good at anything

ryeguy_24 6y ago

Read most of this but are there any non-obvious points of value that I missed. Cut expenses and try to get a new job seems to be the primary point. Anything else?

MattGaiser 6y ago
Spend a ton of time generating public stuff?
- mauvehaus 6y ago
  And get your name out there publicly. The author is right that getting your resume into a hiring manager's hands is a lot easier if you're coming in via a current employee than through the website.
- monksy 6y ago
  That still won't help with the interview. They'll look at that and say nice! Heres a 2 week coding assignment that we'll call it 3 hours of work.
komali2 6y ago
Not really lol. The good bits of the article are the hyperlinks.
SigmundA 6y ago
Do extrovert stuff, speak at conferences, network make lots of friends / contacts, be popular. Hard for introverts like me, I am better at computers than people which means I am at a disadvantage even in the computer field it seems. Worried if I ever have to look for a new job especially getting older.
- ryeguy_24 6y ago
  Isn’t that so counter-intuitive? This clearly means that it’s an inefficient market. I don’t need to have a good social network to buy a nice TV. What a great problem that needs to be solved.

sigfubar 6y ago

Start looking for that new job before the previous one has ended. This is just a slightly next-level variation of simple networking, where you don't merely make friends all over the place, but make it clear that you'd take a better offer if one were to come along.

downerending 6y ago
+1 for this. In our industry, finding a job when you're unemployed can be quite difficult. Massively so if you're "old". Networking helps with that--definitely recommended. Also consider gathering "knowledge" resources from your current job. Silly stuff like your dotfiles, but also things like config files from the hosts, parts lists for physical systems, phone directories, etc.
fred_is_fred 6y ago
It's called "dig your well before you are thirsty".

justinzollars 6y ago

Other signals to look for is your company's inability to raise a round. This is an important one, typically rumors will circulate internally regarding financing. Not being able to raise a round is a signal that says investors, who have made a best effort to judge your company's books have decided your company is not a good investment. Those investors will have been provided a balance sheet that you typically will not have access to. So pay careful attention to this signal.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
That only applies to the small percentage of companies that isn't profitable and that still relies not only on investor money, but on fresh financial injections to keep their head above water. Most companies aren't like that. A lot of software companies will continue to generate income as well, due to having recurring income like subscriptions and licenses.

mauvehaus 6y ago

At a former company that shall remain nameless, the bigwigs from the head office came out to announce the closing of our satellite[1] office. They offered a relocation package to the head office for some of the folks working one of the projects we had in the remote office. Except it was kind of a crap relocation offer: same salary moving to a more expensive part of the country working for a person everybody thought was an idiot. They also gave everybody a month to accept or decline that offer. In practice, that meant that everybody at the remote office spent a month getting paid to look for a job. It was a bit like the job center in The Full Monty, but folks were actively supporting each other: helping each other practice whiteboard questions, going over each others' resumes, etc. If you can get current on some new technology on company time or raise your profile, do it. Folks who didn't get a relocation offer got to clean out their desks the day the bigwigs showed up. I don't have numbers from the group of people formerly of that office, but from my experience it's a hell of a lot easier to find a job if you have one than if you don't. If your company seems shaky, the time to start looking is now. [1] Edited per suggestion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23181222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23181222 originally read "remote".

esoterica 6y ago
Isn’t it a good thing that many companies are paying their remote employees the same? That means people dont have to take a paycut to live where they want.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  "Remote office" here doesn't mean working at home. It means an office that isn't in the same city as company headquarters.
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    "Satellite office" may have been a better term.
- mauvehaus 6y ago
  Without revealing too much, this was a remote office, rented by the company, with folks in a variety of roles, including management. Not a couple of random remote employees. The question of paying remote employees the same as "regular" employees is complex. Switching to the hypothetical: If a company is headquartered in Louisville, KY, and somebody wants to work from e.g. Los Angeles, it would be ludicrous for the remote employee to accept the same salary in LA as in Louisville because the cost of living is much higher in LA. Considering the opposite situation, I find it unlikely that a company headquartered in LA is going to jump at the chance to pay an LA salary to somebody in Louisville.

sosilkj 6y ago

This article provides advice for how to spruce up your resume in order to procure interviews. Getting an interview is maybe 10% of the overall process. To make it through the interviews, you need to study an algorithms textbook and practice coding exercises. At the very least, you should be able to solve any of the Easy-rated problems listed on Leetcode without issue. You need to know what things ike "dynamic programming" are, etc. I'm not saying that this is the way things should be. Just that this is the reality of what you will need to do to procure a job offer. Edit: I see my advice has proven controversial. If you have better idaes about how to prepare for whiteboard interviews -- which many of us are statistically likely to encounter should we be thrust into the job market -- please share your suggestions!

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
It saddens me that this is the way things have gone. With 20+ years in the industry I can say that I never encountered this kind of thing until fairly recently. I know it was out there, especially with the BigCorps, just not that common when I was looking for work 10ish years ago. It would be hard for me to stomach an interview like that without just walking out. I do not code on whiteboards.
- dominotw 6y ago
  start leetcoding hard everyday, its not possible to get a job these days even at tier 2-3 without leetcode screens.
  - twic 6y ago
    I have never, in ten years, had to do leetcode to get a job. And what on earth is "tier 2-3"? This whole subthread reads like it's escaped from r/cscareerquestions.
    - sosilkj 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing your perspective. Your experience is very different from mine. Are you trying to say that you believe whiteboard interviews are less common than I think they are? Or are you trying to say that there are ways to conduct a job search such that one can successfully avoid such interviews?

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

I maintain a file of headhunters that I have come in contact with. If I lose my job (or even feel like I'm going to), I've got about 10 people who can earn money by finding me my next job.

cddotdotslash 6y ago
Whenever I get recruiters pinging me on LinkedIn, I send them a link to my "I'm not interested right now, but add your email here to get notified when I am" Google Form. So far, I've collected over 400 email addresses from recruiters. If I ever need to find something urgently, I'll send out an email blast to that list.
the_watcher 6y ago
The only thing I use email tags/folders for is to tag recruiters. Last time I looked for a job (in September), I just ranked the companies in order of my interest, and went down the list. 80% of the recruiters were happy to hear from me (even those who I had ignored)
- jointpdf 6y ago
  What is the best way to approach an overdue reply? I always find myself at a loss for words as the thought “sorry for being a spacey moron” ricochets around my brain.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    Unsolicited cold recruiting emails aren't owed any sort of response. Apologies are not needed or expected. Just a "Thanks for getting in touch. Would you still like to talk?" is sufficient. Alternatively compose a "Thanks, not now" template that you send to all recruiters when they email. Then later on hit them with a "How about now?"
  - the_watcher 6y ago
    I don't even acknowledge it. I just say something like "Just wanted to let you know that I'm on the market, are you free for a chat?"

decafninja 6y ago

Quote I've seen a lot: "Leetcode every day keeps unemployment away" Seems the best way to avoid long term unemployment in this day and age is to be "coding interview ready" constantly. My best friend at a FAANG always tells me he dreads having to look for a job ever again - whether voluntarily or involuntarily, as he is in no way shape or form ready for coding interviews.

deleted 6y ago
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dominotw 6y ago
The problem with this advice is that you get good at leets but you knowledge of framworks/aws/cloud stuff gets atrophied. leets are good for FAANGs but not so useful at mid tier.
- decafninja 6y ago
  I don't know - I've encountered leetcode interviews all over the place these days. The only exception might be more recent front end interviews, which seem to do "code X in JS" questions more. But ironically the more prestigious companies like FAANG seem to do this more, while the lower tier companies are still leetcode for front end engineers.
nostrademons 6y ago
A lot of the companies I've seen actually hiring these days are doing more legit work-sample problems than Leetcode tasks. Coinbase and Stripe both have programming tasks that are clearly condensed versions of the actual work you'll be doing there. Google does too if you get a good interviewer, though it can vary a lot between interviewers. Snap, Lyft, and Facebook were all leetcode exercises - but they're ones that have been hurting more from the coronavirus recession. Leetcode is popular now because there're a bunch of tools (CoderPad/Karat for interviews and Leetcode/HackerRank for practice) that make it easy. I'm already seeing the pendulum start to swing the other way though - many of the best companies are building hiring processes tailored to their own business because they get a competitive advantage from doing so, both because they get more signal on prospective applicants and because it means interviewing does not become a transferrable skill that you can use to get multiple competing offers.

dominotw 6y ago

How safe are mid tier management jobs compared to devs. Upside of management positions is that interviews are relatively easier.

not2b 6y ago
Less safe in a downturn. When a company wants to tighten its belt but is still mostly solid, and don't have particular products that are clear losers, middle managers are an attractive target: they need the engineers to do the work and support the customers, and the sales people to bring in the money, but if they can get by with fewer managers, maybe they can do all that for less.
- dominotw 6y ago
  I was looking at airbnb layoffs[1]. There didn't see to be a lot of middle managers on the list. Ofcourse, I don't know the ratio but i was expecting to see more middle management than engineers. https://www.airbnb.com/d/talent?location=&uuid=&relocation=&remote=&function=Engineering&page=1 https://www.airbnb.com/d/talent?location=&uuid=&relocation=&...
  - gowld 6y ago
    Jobs that scale linearly in proppotion to demand, like customer service and sales (anything where most of your time is spent focused on one client at a time), get cut when demand drops.

juskrey 6y ago

A job lost adds options, a job landed removes them.