Ask HN: Am I the only “unlucky” software engineer?
I've been looking for a job that suits me, a meaningful and/or interesting job, in what many call a "hot" market, and I'm at a stage where I wonder if it's raining only on me. Many would say I have unmatchable standards. When in fact, I believe my ask is fairly basic.
For starters, many recruiters/employers seem to get stuck on a keyword in my profile, or lack of a keyword, and want someone to help out with said keyword. It's enough to ask a simple question as "why <keyword>?" that they freeze. "What do you mean why should we X? Because that's what everyone does, because otherwise our employers will not find it cool here and leave, etc"
I get that teams want to redo their tech stack at times, but if they don't specifically ask for it, nor does the product/company have plans to expand/grow, then why create unnecessary work? Hire for boring maintenance. Many are happy to do just that. But more work will not make your people happier. It's just maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand.
Sometimes you like the hiring manager (which is important!) and go to the next interview only to find out that the hiring manager is actually about to leave soon, or that the manager is 100% misaligned with the team/product.
Sometimes you go through the entire process, get a really good offer, and they ghost you.
Sometimes they throw at you some shitty challenge, exactly like a school exam where they test your memory and obedience, but not your abilities.
Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score).
Sometimes you rephrase your entire pitch to highlight what you want to do next, but nobody reads that, their eyes still fall on stupid keywords.
Sometimes they think you're a good match, but they dig and dig only to find something that doesn't fit, and then you catch them red-handed: actually a former employer left and now they hire for a replacement, and they are looking for the exact set of skills. A clone. Because a clone will be so happy to replace the quitter... That's some fine logic right there! Not.
Sometimes you get the job and when you start rolling questions and ideas, you get a "talk to the hand" followed by "that's now what you're here for". Why hire a senior person as a poster, if you're not willing to be challenged and listen to different ideas? Nobody is asking you to agree, just play ball with convincing arguments. Too much of an ask, I guess.
I have worked and hired at times some of the nicest, most loyal, most engaged people I'll ever know - almost none of them checked all the boxes. I hired for potential. One of them even confessed years later "I'm baffled why did you take me in without a test, knowing that I don't know the tech stack, etc". Because you had mega potential, and you exceeded everyone's expectations in the end!
Almost nobody seems to hire for potential these days! Everyone wants to be different, by doing the exact same thing as everyone else, and then complain that they can't find good people.
Am I the only one in this dark movie? Am I the only "unlucky" software engineer?
165 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadAlmost always asking for "meaningful" jobs. What even is that? I'll challenge the notion and call it "An inability to find meaning in the available work."
Feeling attacked about their profile, but not changing them to accommodate.
Supposedly seniors relying on recruiters and job offers instead of using their network, if they've worked with people in the past, and can't draw on that, I wonder how that is, is it that everybody they worked with are not nice people and don't like them ?
Sense of entitlement, _YOU_ liking the hiring manager? It's your job to get the hiring manager to like you, not the other way around.
Sense of pride, interview went well, got offer, got ghosted ? Well, what did you do to fix it? I'd have walked into office, hardcopy of offer in hand and told the first person I meet: "Hi, I got this offer, I'm glad to accept! Who can I talk to ?"
Not knowing your place: You were supposedly not hired into some leadership position to change the world from day 1, you have opinions, they are based on previous experiences, made elsewhere. Shut up, listen, learn, observe and do your best to do what they ask of you, at least the first half year or more, and then start gently providing input and resistance, show that you can do it their way before trying to get them to do it yours.
You don't sound unlucky, you sound hard to get along with to be rudely honest.
Having an impact. Right now, I'm stuck in a glue code + terraform + maintaining third party code job. 2 years ago I did platform engineering with high impact features for ~100 people across ~20 teams.
> Sense of entitlement, _YOU_ liking the hiring manager? It's your job to get the hiring manager to like you, not the other way around.
Particularly in tech, if you forego extreme salaries, you should pick who you want to work with. You spend more than half of your time awake with these people after all.
> Not knowing your place: You were supposedly not hired into some leadership position to change the world from day 1, you have opinions, they are based on previous experiences, made elsewhere. Shut up, listen, learn, observe and do your best to do what they ask of you, at least the first half year or more, and then start gently providing input and resistance, show that you can do it their way before trying to get them to do it yours.
This is the kicker. You can make things better, but you have to pick your fights, and even with those you need to be careful and have some diplomacy skills to seem helpful rather than a rude know-it-all. Remember, if you call something crap, you're probably doing it close to the person who is responsible for it being crap. They might even know it's not good but were restricted by time. Choose your words carefully.
I got bitten by this once. It turns out there's a variable φ(crap) representing the amount of time you have to work at a company before – what I thought were – self-deprecating comments, about the app being a piece of shit, are regarded as self-deprecating, rather than an outsider trashing their work.
> if you forego extreme salaries
Just FWIW, to forego is to go before, whereas to forgo is to go without.
This is closely related to the ingroup vs outgroup distinction, but not quite the same: e.g. I could be a former employee, even someone who was disliked or who left in disgrace, and still be under the aegis of the 'us' in this context.
Edit: On reflection, I kinda ignored the rest of your message and got stuck on the answer to your clarifying question. I do totally agree with your point about maturity. I suppose my only caveat is that I was moaning/joking/joking-and-moaning at the time, rather than making a serious point that would have been relevant to our work, so I don't think it was immaturity in a sense that caused any actual problems.
> Supposedly seniors relying on recruiters and job offers instead of using their network, if they've worked with people in the past, and can't draw on that, I wonder how that is, is it that everybody they worked with are not nice people and don't like them ?
I'm good at my job, senior and even led teams (tech lead) a couple of times at large public companies by now and when changing jobs I couldn't use my network. I don't live in a tech hub (also sounds like OP's situation) and most of my former coworkers/managers lack ambition/drive to get to companies/teams I aim to get hired at. The reason being that most of the companies I worked for were not tech and this is a severe handicap - to put it in perspective I make almost twice what my manager made 5 years ago
I'm not talking about necessarily getting a dream job, or even a good job through your network, especially if you're aiming high, but then rules are different then, you can't both be "perpetually rained-upon unlucky never getting a break unlucky dev" and be "well, I could get _THOSE_ jobs, but I'm so unlucky because I can't land absolute top-tier ones even though I definitely feel like I deserve it." at the same time.
- 3 companies/year (3y on average at a company) - 2 teams/company (1.5y on average in a team) - max 10 members/team - add a 5x factor meaning you will BOND!!! (closely enough to dream of working again with you) with 50 other people outside of your team, which is crazy if you ask me, but I'm playing along
3x2x60 = 360 people. That's your entire network in 10 years, pure acquaintances, not people that you bonded with.
My humble view is that maybe you bond with 2 team members and maybe another 5 people outside of the team. 3x2x7 = 42 people. Which is actually not far from Dunbar's number of 50 friends and 150 meaningful contacts.
42. That's how many people would actually vouch for you within a 10 year period.
My network is not my problem. Everyone is wonderful and supportive. But you know very well that recommending someone isn't everything. You make it sound like if someone recommends you, then you shortcircuit the interview process and the stars align and you should just say thanks for having a job, any job.
Your colleague may also let you know of upcoming jobs, or steer you towards a particular job that you’d be a great fit for.
> Almost always asking for "meaningful" jobs. What even is that?
A lot of people like to feel like they're contributing positively to the world. If you can't explain how their job does that then maybe your company isn't a positive in the world.
> Sense of entitlement, _YOU_ liking the hiring manager? It's your job to get the hiring manager to like you, not the other way around.
It's a two-way street. Why would I want to work for a jackass? That's a recipe for unhappiness. I want a manager I can work with, not one I have to suck it up and work for.
> Not knowing your place: You were supposedly not hired into some leadership position to change the world from day 1, you have opinions, they are based on previous experiences, made elsewhere. Shut up, listen, learn, observe and do your best to do what they ask of you, at least the first half year or more, and then start gently providing input and resistance, show that you can do it their way before trying to get them to do it yours.
Ok, this at least is decent advice even if I don't care for the 'know your place' framing.
I'm totally not buying into the silicon valley "we're changing the world!!1one" hype, get real, we sit in comfy offices, playing with computers all day.
You're not working for the hiring manager, don't screw it up before you've at least come inside to have a look around, and have had a shot at making a nice environment for yourself in your position, which won't happen when you get offended so easily.
Places change around with experience, respect is something you earn, and you start from scratch every time, even within new teams in the same corp.
Ok, that I can agree with. I think I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't push back on ideas I thought were bad, but at the end of the day it is my manager's responsibility so it is their decision.
I always loved how the show Silicon Valley poked fun at that. Pretty sure the words "making the world a better place" were sprinkled around many places.
Most companies exist for a single purpose: Profit. Sure, maybe some start as "Hey, this would be a cool thing to have", but eventually the focus is switched to extracting as much money from the population as possible.
I know a guy who is obsessed with this idea of finding fulfilling work. He's an artist who has despised every job he's had because he expects fulfillment, like his job should give him heart-felt purpose. He actually had a job once where he got to use his artistic skills, but he hated it because it didn't allow him to draw the things he wanted.
I'm just like...you're not going to find a job drawing fan art of video game characters. -_- Get over it.
You don't expect any job to provide meaningful, fulfilling, satisfying work. It's all done so someone can profit. Find a non-profit organization that helps the poor if you want fulfilling work.
Creativity is a one of the big 5 character traits and pretty immutable. If you are highly creative you #need# new experiences, it's not just a preference, it's necessary for your psychological well being.
Moving into and working with companies dominated by non creative types, who prefer order and structure and consistency, can be soul destroying. People of this type often find themselves pushing against huge structural resistance to change within organisations and it can seem inexplicable because they fail to appreciate how different others are to them.
It can be quite a revelation to appreciate that other people might actually be adverse to change, rather than energised by it.
Your response is a standard response from someone who isn't high in creativity, who is not particularly open minded. you do not appreciate the #need# for creative expression, just as he does not understand your strong preferences for order and consistency.
Both kinds of personality on this axis of the big 5 are useful to a company in their own ways. Low creativity is useful for maintaining systems, keeping things running in known environments. High creatives are best placed at the frontier of the new, where the land is not yet known.
There is also some merit to the farmer/hunter stereotype imho. Farmers like consistency and routine, hunters are open and distractible and creative.
My recommendation to the OP is to go work in startups. Big companies are usually heavily populated with farmer types low in creativity and high in other traits. The OP needs to go to the edge where he is needed, not in the middle where he is not.
But honestly in my career it has not been easy to find the right positions either and over time I have come to understand the problem as described above. Creatives need to be in a role where new ground is being broken, with freedom to express their creativity. This is not an easy position to find and won't really become available until later in a career. But this isn't unique to the developer career, it's a general problem for high creatives to find a place in a society that wants them to be a cog when they have a deep, powerful, unchangeable and fundamental need to be anything but a cog.
It's a hard challenge, and they should treat it as just that, a challenge requiring a creative solution.
I do not consider myself particularly creative, no, if I was "highly creative" people would pay for my paintings and other artworks, as it stand, I'm lucky to even get invited to display them anywhere. I paint abstract acrylics, enjoy photography, program fun little projects and games, sculpt and print 3d models and build other inventions and electronics, pursue research that has no obvious practical application, the normal stuff that able people do, but I don't feel entitled to do so at my job, I work my job so I can afford to have my hobbies.
The vast, vast majority of jobs are, by their very definition, stuff that is hard or un-fun enough that you _HAVE_ to pay someone to do them.. They're the category of human endeavour that are needed (some more than others) and that people ALSO don't want to do anyway.. I'd pay money for the privilege to program _MY_ programs.. People will sing, dance, play music and write stories and pursue all these lovely, meaningful things, not because they are incentivised by money but because they WANT to, HAS to do them. And yes, there's some small fraction that get to find that their life calling coincide with their paid job, but setting the bar at that level, that is setting yourself up for failure and dissapointment.
I know, you're reading this as if I'm saying you should accept shitty jobs you hate, but read my other comments first.. I'm not saying that. I'm saying you should find an acceptable job, and find something to like about it. You need to at least give it a chance before getting offended that it's not everything you so rightly deserve.
OP asked a question, I gave an answer as best I could, it's not the one true answer, but it is my point of view, how I perceive what he has written through the lens of my own experiences and values. It is not a critique of him as a person, but of the way he comes across, and hopefully, he can use that, together with the other comments, to synthesize some kind of model that he can use to better understand his situation.
You clearly are creative, although you mock me by claiming that you are not. People who have worked hard to change an aspect of themselves are often especially harsh to those who have trouble with that same aspect.
For instance someone who is distractible may be a messy person by nature. But say they worked really hard and managed to stay neat and tidy by force of will and habit? They can often be more judgemental of untidiness than those to whom it comes naturally. "I have accepted this and overcome it, and it has cost me a lot.... Why have you not put forward the same effort?" Also, when you are confronted with an external image of the thing you have fought against, those emotions get transferred onto the thing. The emotional tone of that internal struggle with disorganisation becomes placed over the external world, over the top of the person who has not yet organised themselves.
And so it is with people who have struggled and sacrificed pieces of themselves to live in the world. When they see that part of themselves in others it can bring out the emotion of that internal struggle, which probably includes a little self loathing.
I think maybe that dynamic influenced the tone of your original message.
As my own dynamics influenced my reply. My anger with this world for being on average different to me led me to write something that had an undercurrent of resentment.
But it is only through the tension of our emotions that we find the will to act in the world. We may not always be the most reasoned beings, but it is this imbalance that gives us agency. It is through my anger and indignation that I act to change the world. To find myself at peace with the world is to find myself impotent, and I still suffer from the delusion that I have something of value to give.
I believe you are, at least in part, right in that. I'm going to reflect on this further, later in the day, but it is a very insightful analysis, thank you.
I do believe this is part of "growing up", learning to not just accept (as defeat) the way things are, but to find something in them to thrive on, even without changing yourself or who you are.
I've been a fierce Free Software advocate, a Linux fanatic, I've stood on my principles any chance I got, and it's been necessary for me to do so, and I understand that other people have other things about themselves that limit them in one way or another, but it really is important, not for the world, but for the individual, to be able to find some way to live in the world that is not entirely without compromise or adjustment (whichever fit the situation).
Again, I'm not advocating for compromise, or for changing who you are, but to seek reasons that things can work out, instead of seeking for reasons they can't. I just cannot muster sympathy for this particular concept of "feeling entitled and not having a job" at the same time.. It's like some famous chef, who used to work at a 3 star michelin restaurant and goes to bed each night hungry because he's absolutely refusing to work at the "not even 1 star" high-end restaurant, while lots of other people are able to function just fine in their job at McDonalds, it's a display of privilege that I don't care for or respect.
It’s not about whether you’re a special creative snowflake, it’s about whether you have the disciple and emotional fortitude to keep working on something after the easy parts are done.
"Uncreative farmers" is insulting, and this isn't? The claim that your standard megacorp legacy maintainer is altruistically keeping the world spinning seems a little self-important, too.
It is the result of not placing value in "what currently is" as a default position. The what 'is' and 'has been' has little value to many. "What we have now is not good. It is not worth my sacrifice.".
And thinking about it rationally there are many ways to justify this position: The world is heading towards ecological disaster. The world is a sickening mess of inequality, from the starving to the over fead. From the free to the stultifying world of North Korea.
Propping up the inner processes of facebook, is not worth my sacrifice. What 'is', is not worthwhile, what is important is what can be made, what can be created to better the lives of others. Continuing to do what we do is inadequate and counterproductive.
And while you may view this as childish and something to be grown out of, I contend this is an enduring personality trait. I also contend that it is a personality trait that has merit, it has utility to society as a whole. Who is it that is going to go out and change things for the better? The personality dynamic of the entrepreneurs and the artists (because they are very similar personalities) is one of dissatisfaction and it has to be, because the discomfort of being on the edge away from the herd has to be less than the discomfort induced by remaining in the herd, otherwise the creative behaviour would not be realised.
What you are saying in your response is simply that your emotional makeup allows you to function in a maintenance role without too much discomfort because while you would prefer more creative aspects to your job, you can find solace in contributing to society. And what I am saying is that there are some for whom their personality makeup does not permit this as a solution. For these people it is better to at least attempt to make something new. They will probably fail, but it is by evolutionary design that a certain proportion of people will be forced to try.
In the end there is value to maintenance and there is value to exploration. Some will be happy with a world dominated by maintenance, some will be mildly unhappy and learn to find value in it. But some will be so adverse to it that they will be forced to perform the role of exploration. All of these kinds of people contribute. I am making no value judgement here, what you hear in my voice is only resentment born of being in the minority.
Creative people can thrive in many companies. You're right startups tend to be good for novelty seekers.
Of course the other side of this is that you will HAVE to write a lot of code. Just be prepared for that responsibility.
Half my network of previous managers has joined facebook/meta :-(
Go out for lunch / coffee / beer
Or come to HN and compain
There are lots of companies that are always "looking to higher" but they aren't actively highering, bullshit "job opportunities" are everywhere.
> Feeling attacked about their profile, but not changing them to accommodate.
Their profile should be an honest description of their abilities. Suggesting they change to "accommodate" sounds like you are suggesting they just bullshit to get the job like every one else?
> Supposedly seniors relying on recruiters and job offers
Unless your friends are recruiters they are probably too busy with their own work to find you a job. Looking for job offers and recruiters are two very well proven strategies to get a job, implying otherwise is odd.
> It's your job to get the hiring manager to like you, not the other way around.
Again sounds like your advice is just talk bullshit to get a job you have no real interest in. Bad advice.
To be rudely honest you come across as a bullshitter with no useful advice.
You can find meaning in anything if you look at it the right way, even if you're writing soulless fintech code to steal from the poor, there are probably interesting challenges in there.. How facebook manages to infer so much about their users based on the data they're stealing? Interesting problems even if they're distasteful.
> Their profile should be an honest description ...
They most certainly should ,what I mean by accommodate is not to bullshit, but to gain actual experience with [keyword] if that's really something that's a problem (I've NEVER encountered anyone saying that I miss [keyword], if asked about [keyword] I will answer honestly, ranging from 'heard of, not touching' through 'know well, not touching again' to 'no idea, can probably learn'.
> Unless your friends are recruiters they are probably too busy with their own work to find you a job...
Usually you can get a job by asking a friend to put in a word for you at their place, or just letting them know you're looking.
> Again sounds like your advice is just talk bullshit..
Making someone like in as socially-shallow a situation as a job-interview _IS_ bullshitting, it's called social norms, it's being polite and pleasant and well dressed and whatever else is typically expected. I'm not suggesting they lie or mislead, if they're genuinely an unlikable person and feel like they want to be, well, sorry, but that's probably a contributing factor to not getting a job.
> To be rudely honest you come across as a bullshitter with no useful advice.
I'm perfectly okay with that, it'd be rather a boring thread if every perspective was exactly the same, but OP feels like a typical overly spoiled primadonna to me. It's probably because I come from a somewhat less privileged background, having seen what cards other people are dealt, it seems incredibly bratty to come on HN, whining not that you can't find _ANY_JOB_AT_ALL_NOMATTER_WHAT_ but that you can't land your absolute dream job because you're basically intolerably picky and absolutely unable to adapt yourself. I'm sure OP has a lot of potential, but they seem to be so hard-set in their ways, wanting everything to be just-so in order to even give it a chance, that they cheat themselves out of it.
tl;dr
You'r advice is to depend only on your network? No serious developer with a network would do this.
You don't feel you can turn down jobs, in 2021? You have an abundance of work from your network but can't afford to turn down the shit jobs in place for higher paying jobs? I don't think so.
Your advice is laughable any senior would recognise you don't do what you say, you wouldn't follow your own advice. I think you are just trying to front on some one with no job to make yourself feel successful.
Your advice boils down to "If I was you people would just bring me work, LOL get gud" as advice this is obviously useless and arrogant the real point behind it is to make yourself feel better about your position as you put it "a somewhat less privileged background" you think you are the only one who has overcome adversity? I don't think you have faced real adversity. Your attitude of just be successful and people will bring you work is all the proof I need that you have not done a days work in your life.
No, but read OP again, I'm replying to someone who tells they cannot get a job, that consider themselves unlucky, I have to assume they'd be willing to actually take a job, but they somehow manage to get themselves out of it.
> You don't feel you can turn down jobs, in 2021?
You can turn down all the jobs in the world when you're in a position to do so. Beggars can't be choosers, and when I'm reading OP, I'm seeing a privileged beggar, someone who feels they deserve better than they can manage to get.
> Your advice is laughable any senior would recognise you don't do what you say..
As you say yourself, if he has no job, he is not in a position to turn any job down. "Oh! But I was a senior in my previous job! I'm way too fancy to be a senior in this, slightly worse job!" -> "Well, no worries there mate, you're not getting it!" If I found myself out of a job, I'd get a new job, _ANY_ new job, preferrably one as a developer, sure, I can't have junior in my title, but I can easily enough go back to being "just" a developer, and work my way up from there, or keep looking for a new job, but I'd no longer be in a position of no job or unlucky.
> Your advice boils down to "If I was you people would just bring me work, LOL get gud" as advice
No idea how you get that from anything I write, is it because I hinted at OP maybe _feeling_ better than he could prove to be during an interview (as far as I read, he never got far enough into a position to actually prove himself?) then again, others have declared me lacking in creativity, maybe that's why I can't see where you get that idea from :-)
My attitude is not to be just successful, it's to do your best and be grateful for what you can get, instead of demanding the world right from the bat.
Thats shitty advice, advice you admit wouldn't work for you but think is good enough for others.
This always stands out to me
I’ve had 6 jobs since college: only #5 was outside my network (which I leveraged into #6)
> Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score).
Just for reference, if an employer ever asks me to perform an IQ test I'm definitely walking away.
Just because there's an entire consulting industry behind convincing you that to build the perfect team you must have "complementary personality types", does not mean it's true.
Not like the IT industry has the luxury of choice based on such a lot of the time either.
People rely on these things to make hiring decisions. I personally know people who hire based on reported personality that closely matches their own. I’ve seen people making biased opinions after being coached on these tests.
“No scientific backing, Makes people rely on confirmation bias” should be plastered all over these things, just the way we label cigarettes with photos of smoking consequences.
Also even if people answer honestly the science behind it is very shaky and when applied to real world situations it seems about as useful as astrology.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288772
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
I might have lost few opportunities because of this but that was my choice.
It's a horoscope for smart people, with slightly more utility.
Well, I guess there's the issue. You think there's very little value in it. I think there's much more than you do, though I agree it's certainly a subjective measure. I say that any of the 3 archetypes that you might "test out" as would give a potential manager some measure of useful context in predicting how you will respond/react to various situations and people, despite criticism of the accuracy of the system.
You can be data-driven or sentiment-driven, but not both.
You can favor disciplined structure, or you can favor creative chaos, but not both.
You can favor generalists, or specialists, but not both.
You can favor ambition or humility, but not both.
But companies will gladly tell you they have room for diverse personalities, and only after being there a number of weeks, months, or sometimes years, will the untruth of that scenario hit you.
See this article for a summary of the criticisms: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personali...
And there are a LOT of people that are awful at introspection.
('Scandanavians are the best employees' perhaps, based on this thread..! But that aside.)
Hiring is hard. People are complicated. Trying to reduce them a couple of letters or a number is hogwash.
The problem is that these tests do not sell themselves as "just one data point", and even if they did, you'd have to do so many other things to compensate for the shortcomings of standardized IQ tests, they're really not worth doing in the first place.
IMO the best way to assess fit is to ask someone to handle a hypothetical, or to ask for previous experiences fitting a problem or situation.
(And I would refuse to pick a candidate based on one number. No good can come of this.)
I definitely do NOT want tests of ANY kind to be the norm, but if I'm forced to find a "fit", then I try to take myself out of the picture and balance the team instead. I respectfully reject the idea that this is similar to "measuring skulls" (a comment in the thread).
Thanks for pointing that out. Hopefully I made myself clearer now.
I guess thats one of those local idiosyncrasies
Unless you've ever independently (non-circularly) corroborated your 'idea of how smart someone is', my guess is that it just serves as a proxy for qualities like academic education (which != intelligence), social class, similarity to yourself, &c.
For the record, hiring is hard, no company seems to have got it right. Think IQ tests probably says more than someone being forced to nervously scribble down bubble sort on blackboard or estimating how many water melons there are in pakistan. None of these obviously says anything compared to working with someone for a week.
edit: People are different, if it was as simple as evaluating a conversation it wouldn't be a very hard problem.
Welcome to modern startups where the goal is to build an engineering playground and not to solve a business problem.
> Hire for boring maintenance
From a candidate's perspective, being stuck with a boring stack makes them less employable in the long run unless every company does this, which is not happening (see first point).
In addition, "boring" people typically cost more than those who chase the new shiny all the time and might settle for less money to work on "exciting" tech.
Finally, again as I said above, in a lot of cases especially in tech startups, IT has stopped being a solution to a business problem and started being a goal itself. Instead of doing the bare minimum to solve the business problem at hand, they build an overcomplicated engineering playground to justify hiring tons of people and being able to brag about solving their (self-inflicted) problems at the next AWS conference, which then helps hiring more suckers in who constantly chase the latest hype.
Furthermore, "boring maintenance" means there is a successful, profitable product that you merely need to maintain. That's not the case for most tech startups where the approach is "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" and profit is nowhere to be seen, nor is it a true objective (the objective is to either get bought out or get that next round of VC money so you can prolong your status as a founder of an exciting an innovative startup). In this case, there is nothing to maintain, you always build and rebuild from scratch.
> Many are happy to do just that
Maybe, but I'd argue they would require more money to stay in place compared to hiring people who are happy to take lower pay to work on shiny stuff. I guess most software engineers' goal is to accumulate experience in all kinds of hyped up technologies and then capitalize on that at a FAANG or similar - merely solving business problems with boring tech doesn't give you that option, so you'd have to ask for more salary to compensate.
Whether an engineering playground costs more than a "boring" stack maintained by well-paid people is a different question, but so far most companies don't bother doing the math, especially when it's startups that play with VC money they don't particularly care about.
> Sometimes they throw at you some shitty challenge
They do so because they can get away with it. You can decline. They'll have to change once everyone declines and they can't hire anyone, but as above they won't change as long as they have enough suckers that are happy to go through this.
> nobody seems to hire for potential these days
These days in tech startups you don't need long-term potential. You want to extract the maximum value now so you can "grow" and get that next round of VC money or get bought out by a bigger fish. A lot of these are outright not viable and will fold as soon as the money runs out and no bigger fish comes along, so in this case trading future potential for current results makes sense, because the company may no longer be here to capitalize on that future potential.
This is where I know I have a big ask to think outside of the box, but companies don't need to pay extra and that boring environments shouldn't reflect negatively on employees.
Employers can pay the same salary and say 1 day a week, 2 days a week, you can do whatever, you still get paid. And you can get a certification, or you can try out exciting tech on a side project or for a company project even. There are still many ways to keep people happy, competitive etc without "extra" pay. Just thought it's important to highlight that money isn't the only thing.
It's not that they reflect negatively, it's that in a world of hype, not having hype technologies on your resume puts you at a disadvantage for future opportunities as you just won't have the skills they are looking for, which means the company needs to offer a higher salary to compensate for that downside.
Have you tried measuring their skulls as well?
This describes me exactly. I'm basically a cartoon character with a rain cloud following me. I'm in the US, 10 years experience, a Masters degree, and I don't even make $100k. I've spent years working with obscure tech on the initial promise that the company doesn't outsource or lay off. Now the company is doing both and I basically have to start over. The company has repeatedly violated it's own policies to my detriment, and changed the promotion/pay structure to be less attractive.
Lesson learned
I thought the OP meant the median salary for the entire American population.
You can’t change the past, or outsourcing - but you can change your circumstances
A company will hire you when they have confidence that you can meet their needs, so your goal is to find roles that you're confident you can deliver value to and then help the hiring managers share in your confidence. That's it. You need confidence. A technology match might be a component of delivering confidence but it is not a fundamental. My most recent software engineering job hired me because... I was the candidate with a specific experience _outside_ of software engineering, as they valued that experience _more than they valued my experience with the technology they use_!
I don't know what motivates you, whether it's internal or external, but on the chance that you're motivated by external factors... I have a challenge for you to complete. First part is to be completed this week: explore job boards (e.g: linkedin, stackoverflow, workatastartup) and look at many different roles, but rather than focus on the requirements or technology, consider what the day to day is like for each role and decide if you think you'd be capable of it. Make notes of each role you look at, and keep track of the commonalities between roles you think you can do day to day and the commonalities between roles you think you can't do day to day. Then, next week, compile that information into a single document that represents things you're confident you can do, marrying up to the language used by hiring managers.
The goal is to get to a point where you can look at a job posting know whether or not you can give the hiring manager confidence that you are a good candidate. You don't need to be the best candidate, you don't need to be a genius or expert, you just need the hiring manager to think "Yes, giantg2 could do this job" ... and then it's a numbers game: find jobs you're confident about, apply with a bespoke application that emphasises why you're a candidate they can be confident in, and repeat.
There'll be hard days and I don't mean to downplay the hardship of the situation you're in, I absolutely appreciate that "just be optimistic" is unhelpful at best or offensive at worst... but that really is the key, and so anything you can do to bring yourself the optimism and energy to apply to new jobs will pay dividends. You deserve to be happy at work, you deserve to be treated with respect, and there are companies out there that will give you that, you've just got to find a way to get yourself into the right mindset.
Apparently I'm not. I got a further development needed rating this year. Although I should say that will all the BS that happened this year I should be proud that I even was able to hold down a job.
I've already been looking for other jobs, applying, and even interviewing. Nothing is working out so far.
When you want to get serious about this game, you learn how to interview. It is an unrelated skillset where you learn what to say and how to do the technical problems. You lie on the behavioral interview, there are books on it. Everyone is lying you could probably pass a polygraph test and guard the nations secrets with this skillset, fortunately you are only interested in making 5-10x (Scandinavia low end, US high end) what a public servant with a top secret clearance makes.
What exactly would an IQ or personality test accomplish?
> Everyone wants to be different, by doing the exact same thing as everyone else
They're called "hipsters."
For example:
> Sometimes you get the job and when you start rolling questions and ideas, you get a "talk to the hand" followed by "that's now what you're here for". Why hire a senior person as a poster, if you're not willing to be challenged and listen to different ideas? Nobody is asking you to agree, just play ball with convincing arguments. Too much of an ask, I guess.
There’s nothing wrong with asking for clarification about reasoning, but when someone is constantly challenging every decision made by management then it becomes an impediment to getting things done. If you want to be the person calling the shots, you should probably be applying for management positions. If you want to take an IC engineer position but constantly argue with the work, the company will eventually need to isolate you with a patient manager or remove you from the team in order to keep everyone aligned.
> Sometimes they talk so much about fit fit fit, but they don't even bother with a personality or IQ test (which as a former hiring manager, I find very valuable because it allows you to balance the team, not because you see how high/low people score)
I’m kind of stunned that you think coding challenges and tech interviews are useless, but you insist that companies use IQ and personality tests to hire coders.
Personality and IQ tests have been widely panned by the tech industry because they have very little signal but very high noise. If you expect companies to give you IQ and personality tests, you’re going to be disappointed. More broadly: If you expect every manager to reflect exactly how you would choose to run things, you may be trying to act as a “backseat driver” manager without taking the responsibility of actual being a manager.
> It's just maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand.
It’s clear you have a strong lack of respect for everyone you’ve interviewed with, from your description of “shitty challenges” to “maniac managers” being disappointed that they aren’t giving you IQ tests. It may not be obvious, but this level of anger tends to show through during interviews even if you try to hide it. Experienced hiring managers are going to pick up on it and flag you as a likely difficult employee to manage.
To be blunt: If you find yourself interviewing at and working for a significant number of companies and finding intractable problems with all of them, it’s time to consider that maybe your own perspectives are the common denominator problem. Part of working a job is accepting that other people are making decisions and setting the direction. Providing constructive input and feedback is good, but you need to also have a good attitude about disagreeing and committing to go in the same direction as the team.
If we take it at face value that he is experienced then we can say he is running up against culture fit problems.
And honestly I can relate to him because I have found most companies to be overly structured and resistant to change. In my opinion it comes down to personality types. The OP is not the standard developer architype and has trouble operating in an environment others find comfortable.
Rather than dismissing this as a problem with the candidate we should consider that it can be a problem with the environment.
My contention: Large organisations are a horrible environment for individuals high in creativity (big 5 personality trait). They very strongly tend to be populated by people who are low in creativity.
Experienced people who are high in creativity need to find leadership positions in companies breaking new ground - startups. They either need to find a position where they call the shots in a startup, or they need to create a startup themselves.
A person very high in creativity is designed to be working at the edge and if they find themselves working in the middle, doing maintenance, then they are going to be unhappy and misunderstood by others who are fundamentally different from them.
My advice to the OP is to get out of large companies and to go as small as possible, go take some risks on some new technology and architectures.
> More broadly: If you expect every manager to reflect exactly how you would choose to run things, you may be trying to act as a “backseat driver” manager without taking the responsibility of actual being a manager.
These hit close to home. Need to do some introspection, since I think I kind of behave this way. Thanks for writing this!
To the original poster:
If you find yourself in a management position ever, you will understand the challenges at the management level are much different than what you would encounter in a tech-centric role.
The advice I would get the original poster is that of compassion!
I have limited insight into who you are, which is a post that was likely made in an irritated state and probably is a bit over the top, but various phrases in it are red flags. Having hired and managed for two decades, they sound irritatingly high maintenance.
Questioning why someone uses something is completely valid, for instance, and should never be met with resistance. Questioning in a derogatory or dismissive way (which if you're going to go on about "maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand" seems likely), on the other hand, is going to yield eye rolls and a complete lack of interest in humouring your question. Angling to be "smarter than thou" in a discussion or interview by trying to prove the existing team or group dumb in their choices will never, ever succeed.
We've all been there with the guy who sneeringly questions everything being done. It's incredibly boring.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, and it isn't personal. I'm just going on the limited bit posted.
I'm not irritated. I'm more lost for words. And I honestly wanted to ask others what's their experience. In 2021. In Scandinavia or worldwide. In a so-called "hot market". Post Corona etc.
My examples come from tenS of interviews, maybe even hundreds. It's not 10 interviews. Obviously many have been totally fine, regardless it still ends in a "no, thanks" on any side. But a good chunk of them are light years away from "we have a problem to solve, this is us, this is you, can we work together?"
I truly respect even snarky comments pointing out how rude and infatuated I come out, but my experience is exactly the opposite: everyone seems to be doing things perfectly, except they can't find replacements or more people, and when someone gets interested in joining, they become defensive.
As you point out, one needs to ask the question: is it me the problem? And nobody is perfect, not even close. Not me at least. But that thing is that I am expected to be perfect. Like a comment says: I should learn to lie and pass the polygraph test. Well, I will never do that, so now we know what that will get me (from the same comment).
IMO, go to a career coach, or psychiatrist, and get a neutral perspective of whether they see you as having a difficult personality. I've read that most people decide on hiring on the idea of whether they'd want to have a beer with that person. Yeah it's not fair, but well, they're paying for those beers (being metaphoric here), and how badly do you need one?
If I had a physical discomfort and asked online for ideas what it could be, and someone said e.g. "it could be that you're lacking magnesium, you should confirm that with a professional.", I would do so. I already asked for advice, to dismiss people giving them would be, well what's the point of me asking?
How are you going to fix this? If you were a weak developer there are things you can do to about that. Fixing a persons inability to get along with others is more difficult. So now they're in the position of firing you. You'd have to be really bad not to make it an unpleasant business and afterward it's going to take weeks to shake off the bad feelings.
As a hiring manager I'm never going be given a hard time for passing on what might have been a good candidate but I'm definitely going to hear it about hiring someone who makes their lives miserable on a daily basis.
See the problem now? That isn't a description of you but they don't know that but they've probably had experiences like that so they're simply playing the numbers at risk mitigation and when you give them reason to think that might be the way things are going to go they pass.
/s
It's a rule of thumb, not an absolute. This part I'm not being sarcastic abour: sorry if your social anxiety problems also include not being able to get nuance.
No good sentence ever started this way.
Did you consider their culture could not have the idiom? Or they could be young and inexperienced?
On a less emotional side, dude used the term "social anxiety", he doesn't seem like he's lacking the cultural know-how. Don't be so condescending towards people... or to put it in your terms, did you ever consider not to be so condescending in your opinions of other people?
Sorry to dang for breaking many rules.
Acting like a 'yes man' will subconsciously put you in a certain bin in recruiters' head. Acting a bit fussy means you value yourself, you are confident so you know what you are doing. That naturally puts you above everyone else who follows the script and tries to please the recruiting side.
When interviewing you want to be relaxed, ask them questions. Make it a bit about them trying to sell you the position. Again its a subtle power dynamic.
Other one is not to give CVs to every single recruiting agency, as it often will result in burned CV. If two agencies forward your CV for same position, the company will often drop you automatically as they dont want to deal with litigation between agencies fighting over who got you the job.
Good luck
Convincing arguments can be hard. I know I've been asked about convincing arguments in the past and I've tried my best, but sometimes its really difficult to recall the exact details around why a particular approach didn't work. I'm working on this by using Obsidian (or better, the company's Wiki) as a knowledge graph that I can refer to in the future, but in most situations you are not able to reuse the knowledge graph from a previous job fully. Architectural decision records / design docs work well for this - perhaps ask if they have those?
I agree though, convincing argumentation is not really common in software engineering for some reason. The way we approach best practices is the most revealing IMO: instead of explaining the reasons for the practices in detail, most of the time we just list and cargo-cult them.
And of course there's other more standard job-finder boards for fully-remote workers, such as http://weworkremotely.com .
Looking abroad for remote work both vastly increases your pool of options, and also puts you in a very different hiring culture from what you have described. In my limited experience, my remote-only jobs/clients tend to be much more results-oriented and less buzzword-oriented or checklist-oriented when interviewing me and evaluating whether I'm a good fit. Also, with remote jobs it's easier to do a 3-month "trial period" where both you and the client can evaluate whether the relationship is a good fit, and part on good terms if not.
One downside of remote work (ignoring the risk of social isolation / staying home all day) is that you're likely to take a pay cut in the short term... but in theory working remotely saves an immense amount of money for both you and the client/employer, so I don't take this too seriously as a long-term concern.
Anyway... good luck, and don't give up hope of finding meaningful work.
What that recruiter wrote you is pretty much what I got from your post. Here is what I would do: pick some of the keywords you heard asked for and research them with genuine interest. Then apply to few jobs you don't even care about and show genuine interest (or give your best shot at this). And just pay attention how they are reacting. You are not going for a job, just a research. It should be fun.
As a colleague, I wish you find your groove and job you will genuinely enjoy.
Companies are insular enviroments (reflected in another popular thread today) that operate by dogma and will happily march to their deaths while not achieving real change to how things are done internally.
Unfortunately plenty of companies have to die this way for things to change. We are individuals. We are capable of rapid course correction (usually prompted by severe internal pain and outward meandering and failure).
Best of luck to everyone and hopefully we ride it all out.
I sometimes feel like we are in a game of chess, but somewhere someone forgot to start the clock again.
Employment implies a power gradient between you and the employer.
The thing that sucks is that income is tied to employment for most of us, and it's OK to express the fact that this sucks.
How do we go beyond this? This is a problem I've found difficult to resolve myself.
For people who are creative, and good at what they do (as you seem to be) it's always going to be a struggle to fit into a structure like that.
Because I am a freelancer, I've worked at a lot of different companies.¹
What I've noticed is that sometimes they love you and praise you, and other times the hate you and blame you. In one situation you are a hero, in another a pain in the ass. Sometimes both even happened in the same company/team.
All the time I'm the exact same person. We all have a mix of personality traits that we bring to our work. Some traits the employer will like, some they won't. But what I've learned is that they all come together. They are a package deal.
So despite the posts below that encourage you to change who you are, I am suggesting you should just be more conscious of the interplay between the qualities you have in your 'bundle' and how to best deploy them in each situation.
I've also learned to take blame and even praise from employers with a grain of salt.² They are just trying to shape your behaviour, and will probably change their opinion of you next month.
So in the end it's a relationship. In some cultures they don't look for soulmates, they just marry a decent person and move on, saying to themselves, most [husbands|wives] are pretty much the same.
I think they are onto something. Find a 'good enough' employer, and stop looking for your 'soulmate job.' Do decent work, then go home. And find some hobbies!
1: Lots of short contracts, by mutual agreement. Also a handful of full time jobs.
2: A quote from the Buddha on this:
Also just to add one point. When you are an employee you will never get to be more than a sharecropper, growing your crops on someone else's land.
I find it's best to always remain clear about this. Do good work sure, but remember it's never yours, really. Corollary: it's not worth investing too much ego in it.
If you want to work on something you love, then start a side project.
Lots of people do this. I find the STARS framework a good way of assessing what's expected of me in a senior role: https://hbr.org/2009/01/picking-the-right-transition-strateg...
As senior people, we're usually pretty opinionated. There are different outcomes from sharing those opinions at different times, depending on the context (see the framework above).
If you are looking for a role that values strong opinions early on, then roles that require a start-up or turnaround approach, are the ones that will match this. They are also the roles where the org is most open to change.
Outside of these situations (I'm talking role types, not whether a company is a start-up or not), orgs are resistant to change, and unlikely to hire someone that challenges things before they are even through the door.
From what you've said, it sounds like these are not the roles you're looking for, in which case, the process is working. There are very few start-up or turnaround roles that go to unknown candidates. In my experience, these roles go to folks that have been personally recommended, as the price of failure is so high, and people want a known quantity. (Whether that is what they get is beyond the scope of this comment).
Network, get to know people and get known as someone who can bring these types of changes to an org, and one might come your way.
Of course, if this isn't the type of role you're looking it for, then you are simply rocking the boat way too early.While most places would benefit from some level of change, they will still resist it.
If you challenge things before you've started in a role, a hiring manager will probably speculate that if you are this much trouble before you've even started, you will be even more trouble once hired. And they will reach for the next candidate, because there's always the next candidate.
You don't have a right to work for certain companies. People hire you to work for them, if they need you. Maybe it isn't about luck, but actually accepting that it is a dreadful process and you need to focus on what is important in order to get that job. If you aren't willing to do those things, no job for you.
It might help if you would take some therapy. I see a lot of emotion on your sentences, like "shitty challenge", "fit fit fit", stupid keywords and so on. It reads mostly as a rant from a frustrated person that can't fit in not because the circumstance doesn't like you, but rather the opposite, you just dislike IT and all the processes involved in recruitment and is not willing to work on getting better and getting through that. Therapy can help you.
Humanity is full of shit.
Take no one else seriously because they’re just projecting their own biological awareness, and since none of them matter, fuck em.
There’s billions of people on the planet that know nothing about computers. Let’s shut a lot off and see how valuable these folks are.
It’s a stupid contemporary con just like all the rest. Relying on the same biochemical addiction capacity as religion did before it.
I don’t believe in any of this shit (oh wow you can make a machine designed to do just that do just that! amazing). I just extract my $1xxk/year now and let less politically networked people bear the costs like a rich person.
What I'm trying to say is that many times we don't want to see the "luck factor".
Assume in a job interview there is a 90% of probabilities to be rejected. Maybe because of your background, maybe they closed the process, maybe there is somebody that is not as good as you but earns waaaay less, etc. That's life, and that's hard.
My advice: accept it. It's happened to me and it's hard. But life goes on and we shouldn't worry about things out of our control.
However, IMHO, if you don't care for work-life balance, look for positions in startups. You'll learn many new skills and also you'll somewhat "restart/refresh" your career.
If you don't want to work in a startup (job insecurity, no work-life balance, etc) my advice for you would be start looking job at a medium-size company, and change jobs each 1.5-2 years. After several changes, your network would have increase and hence, the probability of having delivered some opportunities.