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Good advice from the pragmatic engineer article. Particularly the advice to "aim wide". It is so tempting to put all your effort into that one perfect job. Bu

Good advice from the pragmatic engineer article. Particularly the advice to "aim wide". It is so tempting to put all your effort into that one perfect job. But in down times, you want a steady paycheck and to start getting practical experience under your belt. The only thing I would add is to always try to shoot for a company where technology is seen as an asset and not just a cost center. Traditionally, that was software companies and places like Wall Street. Now that net is wider, but beware jobs with titles like "Programmer II" or "Programmer/Analyst", indicators of companies where IT is a cost center and you get stuck as a minor cog in a minor wheel.

btown 4y ago
To the last point, it's important not to find yourself in the IT-as-a-cost-center trap if you're being asked to spend 90% of your time working on {IT tickets, business analysis, customizing-Salesforce, creating-old-school-java-beans-all-day} work, so much so that you can't write about software engineering with features you're proud to have worked on, in the bullets on your resume. On the hiring side, I've found quite a bit of anecdotal success finding really talented junior engineers who have fallen into this trap, where a close read of the resume and cover letters shows a passion that's not covered by the actual keywords on the resume. I'll often stretch our requirements to give interviews to people I have a good gut feeling about - "diamonds in the rough" so to speak. But it takes a lot of time and focus to not simply screen out a resume based on these negative keywords - and given that recruiting teams at a lot of companies have been reduced as well, many won't have the time to do this well, if they ever did to begin with. As a candidate you can absolutely mitigate this with open-source contributions, if you have time. But it can be hard to find that focus, time, and mentorship/community, especially if the day-job environment is toxic.
- steve76 4y ago
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btown 4y ago

To the last point, it's important not to find yourself in the IT-as-a-cost-center trap if you're being asked to spend 90% of your time working on {IT tickets, business analysis, customizing-Salesforce, creating-old-school-java-beans-all-day} work, so much so that you can't write about software engineering with features you're proud to have worked on, in the bullets on your resume. On the hiring side, I've found quite a bit of anecdotal success finding really talented junior engineers who have fallen into this trap, where a close read of the resume and cover letters shows a passion that's not covered by the actual keywords on the resume. I'll often stretch our requirements to give interviews to people I have a good gut feeling about - "diamonds in the rough" so to speak. But it takes a lot of time and focus to not simply screen out a resume based on these negative keywords - and given that recruiting teams at a lot of companies have been reduced as well, many won't have the time to do this well, if they ever did to begin with. As a candidate you can absolutely mitigate this with open-source contributions, if you have time. But it can be hard to find that focus, time, and mentorship/community, especially if the day-job environment is toxic.

steve76 4y ago
[dead]