3 ms·

Through all of my career there have only been two career routes: 1. Do what others cannot 2. Do what is most trendy I always followed route 1, which mostly h

Through all of my career there have only been two career routes: 1. Do what others cannot 2. Do what is most trendy I always followed route 1, which mostly harmed my career as a JavaScript developer. I no longer know what the best answer is, at least for juniors. Now that I am in management in a niche area route 1 is all that matters, but it still bristles at personalities that are higher neurotic.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
This advice is honestly unhelpful. What exactly can a new grad do that others can not?
- al_borland 8mo ago
  How about doing what others are unwilling to do? There are some tasks that aren’t exactly fun, but need to get done. Doing those jobs can also help give you more skills and deep information on certain issues other may lack or let atrophy. We had a new guy who liked doing the same thing 1,000 times, so I asked him to fix agents on severs that were always broken and would cause deployment failures. Doing it proactively instead of reactively. Our failure rates dropped dramatically, which is a nice feather in his cap. That was low hanging fruit that anyone could have picked up and started doing for 10 years, but no one did. It was a slog at the start, but once he got caught up and everything was clean, it would take him maybe 20 minutes each day to maintain, and he knew more about fixing those issues than anyone. He became the expert in the room. As issues were discovered, fixing them probably could have been largely automated, by putting the various fixes into code and having it run on broken agents each day to see what it would fix. The gaps could be addressed and added to the fix-it script if possible. This would have been even better. No one actually writing code knew enough about fixing the agent to do this, or cared enough, they’d just deal with things failing periodically. Look for these gaps in your organization and come up with ways to address them and do it.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    And those things that no one wants to do that are mundane increasingly AI can do. Even if that wasn’t the case, trying to sell yourself as the person as “you should hire me because I will do the shit work” is not exactly a winning proposition to get a job.
    - austin-cheney 8mo ago
      That sounds like a baseless assumption. Once you get good at doing things others are incapable/unwilling to perform people will notice. The soft skills are more important than the technical trendiness everybody else is already doing.
      - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        Maybe but that’s also not the point. He needs actionable advice on how to get the job in the first place.
        austin-cheney 8mo ago
        The catch-22 for getting any first job is to invest time into that which appeals to the desires of the hiring personnel. That said they still have to choose to invest that time into either skills advancement or trendiness. What they can do is reach out to hiring managers at various employers to get a feel for what job providers actually want. The challenge there is finding people and asking the correct questions. It’s the same challenge most hiring managers have, so once they solve it from their perspective they will be uniquely advantaged.
        raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        That’s not the reality post 2023. I spoke about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=raw_anon_1111&comments=t https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=raw_anon_1111&comm... Short version: If I couldn’t get any responses from random companies looking for “enterprise developer with AWS experience” because every open req gets hundreds of applications and I had at the time a decade of experience (on my resume I actually had more) including leading AWS architecture at two companies and working at AWS, how is a junior developer going to stand out? Of course submitting my resume to random ATS’s was an experiment. I had multiple offers via my network including a Director of an F500 company. But I was 49 at the time I don’t think you realize how much of a shit show it is our there now for any developer especially junior developers

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago

This advice is honestly unhelpful. What exactly can a new grad do that others can not?

al_borland 8mo ago
How about doing what others are unwilling to do? There are some tasks that aren’t exactly fun, but need to get done. Doing those jobs can also help give you more skills and deep information on certain issues other may lack or let atrophy. We had a new guy who liked doing the same thing 1,000 times, so I asked him to fix agents on severs that were always broken and would cause deployment failures. Doing it proactively instead of reactively. Our failure rates dropped dramatically, which is a nice feather in his cap. That was low hanging fruit that anyone could have picked up and started doing for 10 years, but no one did. It was a slog at the start, but once he got caught up and everything was clean, it would take him maybe 20 minutes each day to maintain, and he knew more about fixing those issues than anyone. He became the expert in the room. As issues were discovered, fixing them probably could have been largely automated, by putting the various fixes into code and having it run on broken agents each day to see what it would fix. The gaps could be addressed and added to the fix-it script if possible. This would have been even better. No one actually writing code knew enough about fixing the agent to do this, or cared enough, they’d just deal with things failing periodically. Look for these gaps in your organization and come up with ways to address them and do it.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  And those things that no one wants to do that are mundane increasingly AI can do. Even if that wasn’t the case, trying to sell yourself as the person as “you should hire me because I will do the shit work” is not exactly a winning proposition to get a job.
  - austin-cheney 8mo ago
    That sounds like a baseless assumption. Once you get good at doing things others are incapable/unwilling to perform people will notice. The soft skills are more important than the technical trendiness everybody else is already doing.
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      Maybe but that’s also not the point. He needs actionable advice on how to get the job in the first place.
      - austin-cheney 8mo ago
        The catch-22 for getting any first job is to invest time into that which appeals to the desires of the hiring personnel. That said they still have to choose to invest that time into either skills advancement or trendiness. What they can do is reach out to hiring managers at various employers to get a feel for what job providers actually want. The challenge there is finding people and asking the correct questions. It’s the same challenge most hiring managers have, so once they solve it from their perspective they will be uniquely advantaged.
        raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        That’s not the reality post 2023. I spoke about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=raw_anon_1111&comments=t https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=raw_anon_1111&comm... Short version: If I couldn’t get any responses from random companies looking for “enterprise developer with AWS experience” because every open req gets hundreds of applications and I had at the time a decade of experience (on my resume I actually had more) including leading AWS architecture at two companies and working at AWS, how is a junior developer going to stand out? Of course submitting my resume to random ATS’s was an experiment. I had multiple offers via my network including a Director of an F500 company. But I was 49 at the time I don’t think you realize how much of a shit show it is our there now for any developer especially junior developers