Ask HN: Fallback remote job options for an experienced developer in the U.S.?
I'm an unemployed mid/senior-level developer in the U.S. with a reasonably popular skill set struggling to find remote work. I'd like to keep this general enough to apply to more than just me, but if anyone is curious there's a little more context at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33596779.
I'm starting this discussion to generate ideas for fallback options for finding development work, meaning places that hire quickly but might be low prestige, low pay, boring, contract, stuff like that. Recruiters might seem to be an answer but I haven't had much luck there: very little inbound traffic or response to outbound applications. I might just not be using them correctly, so any advice on working with recruiters might be helpful.
Thanks in advance on behalf of everyone struggling to find work that might find this sort of advice useful.
48 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadI don't want to make this about me, largely because there's a lot I won't share due to privacy concerns. However, I've had plenty of happy coworkers and managers over the years and can definitely be some random IC on some random team.
https://reddit.com/r/overemployed
do it.
Seems crazy to me, they never had any free time.
I hope this clarifies what a job shop is.
Not to criticize you specifically, but I was hoping to get much more general advice from this discussion. There are several million developers in the U.S., how are the bottom 500k of them finding jobs? They're not all using Toptal, Upwork or Wellfound/AngelList. These are very HN answers, which I guess we should expect here.
I don't see how general advice is going to help you, though. My general advice is: update your resume to highlight themes in areas you want to work, discipline yourself to apply to one or two jobs every M, W, and F, and practice algorithms for interviews. I expect that's not going to be very helpful for you, though, since I assume you're already doing that.
The general advice I was hoping for was about hiring for jobs at the lower end of the market, since the jobs I've been applying to have been inaccessible to me. For example I asked a month ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33696004 regarding "regional trucking companies and retail chains", "How are these companies trying to find employees?" I would really like to have a discussion on how hiring works for these companies because I'm definitely open to that work, updating legacy line-of-business or payroll software or whatever it happens to be.
I agree with your other advice, though I recommend that anyone seriously searching apply to many more than five jobs a week.
One caveat is that Contracting time is kinda a career blackhole in that if you go back to employment you're both kinda weird because you're used to contracting, and a lot of managers/interviewers don't really know how to see you're experience when you're doing 3 month contracts, sometimes layered, over the span of years. They don't really get it. (Nor realize that contracting is usually really dense experience, so actually more valuable)
I did a few years of contracting/freelance and since i re-wrote my resume it looks better, and seems to be valued the same as fte.
A couple of friends and I have been doing a casual consulting agency for just under a year and I was thinking of ways to expand our client base and I am looking at Upwork as a possibility.
While I do write code, I'm more of a Cloud Architect and I get multiple recruiters contacting me each week. When it's heavy, I get multiple messages per day.
The majority of the positions are remote and while I reject most of the offers due to various reasons, if I were desperate for any job, I think I could get one within a few weeks.
It's my understanding that software developers/engineers are in even higher demand than Cloud Architects, so that's why I'm a little confused.
Code review job would involve running commercial tool such as checkmarx or fortify and then reporting on issues that tool finds.
For web application testing these two sites are a good start. https://portswigger.net/training and https://www.pentesterlab.com/pro Most web app testing is performed using this guide https://owasp.org/www-project-web-security-testing-guide/ Hands on is the best way to learn web app testing.
Companies give you 24-48 hours to test vulnerable web app. After you send them report with findings if they like they have final interview round.
Some of the better companies are ncc group, bishop fox, nettitude, google certified security companies and others. You can find them as sponsors on security meetups like bsides.
Some of the more technical ones are https://cure53.de/#publications. You can read their reports. Also https://www.trailofbits.com/
As for pay it’s decent but the ceiling is lower than SWE. Entry level positions usually make below 100, senior low 100, manager mid 100 and more senior positions are around 200. After that it’s harder to move up.
Lastly the job itself can get pretty boring at times. Code review is something most people try to avoid. It’s useful when combined with web app testing to perform greybox testing.
Web app testing can be boring as well, when testing multiple web apps in a row that were tested multiple times and not finding anything decent.
What makes up for all of that is excitement from testing newly developed or older web apps with lots of vulns, performing network pentesting and developing new tools for different projects.
It’s a great feeling when you publish a new tool and lots of people start using it and appreciate your work.
I'm sure these are great jobs but they don't really strike me as fallback options, meaning places where developers who are struggling elsewhere could apply and count on finding something. How many entry level testers in the U.S. do they hire each year, would you say?
Are you creating a custom cover letter for each job you apply to? How do you apply - do you submit a form or do you try to get your resumé to someone's email either HR or someone related in the department where the position was posted for? If you're willing to work for low pay, are you sorting job listings where the bad pay shows up first? Are you labeling yourself as a "mid-level" engineer in your application or do you use your cover letter to demonstrate your comfort and experience with the skillset or domain?
Creating a nice cover letter that shows sincere interest, thought and understanding of the industry and the duties that come with the job then getting it into someone's hands who knows who to pass it along to or is a decision maker is your best bet.
Writing all those cover letters though can be draining, I know, I once did it manually and could get one a day done, maybe - never got a job that way. At some point, I realized all the best cover letters stuck to a format, and job listings weren't too different either. I made a spreadsheet that could draft cover letters for me, I'd just add a row for a job listing in my spreadsheet, select from some dropdowns (or add to the list as necessary) and then it would pull some statements relative to those parameters in and generate a cover letter that usually needed less than 5 minutes of editing (the cover letters could get long winded and sound conceited sometimes, good problem to have) to be ready to send out. I also added some job/skill type parameters where I could rank my compatibility for a job, like if two jobs were the same except one used PHP (not that experienced) on the backend, and one used Ruby (more experienced), I'd be able to prioritize the one that was a more likely fit. Once I built this spreadsheet to generate cover letters and rank jobs, I literally got the first job I applied to despite being mostly self-taught and trying to break into the industry. I just sent it to hr@companyiwasapplyingto.whatever and got a callback in 10 minutes too, FWIW. Pretty sure the general gist of this advice applies to any job - send a nice cover letter!
I've generally looked at smaller employers with simple applications that I assume go either to an internal recruiter or the technical team. I don't think these are situations where there's a need to bypass a lot of bureaucracy.
Deliberately searching for lower pay is a good idea if done carefully. If it's too low then the job might be abusive or not actually a software developer role. Maybe $80k is the floor depending on industry and location. Unfortunately it doesn't look like the major job sites let you search that way, but I might be able to figure something out.
Just like what at least one other person have said, ensure that you've an up-to-date LinkedIn profile. In addition, have someone in recruiting or in software development to read over your resume. Remote jobs could receive many applications because the applicants are not bounded by their locations. With the number of applications, it is easy for the recruiters and the hiring managers to stop reading weak applications even if you are experienced. I used the paid resume review service from levels.fyi.
Another angle is looking for jobs at smaller employers in industries outside of tech. With that though, you have to first identify all these little companies, then dig down to their jobs page, and then maybe you find the jobs aren't remote, or don't match your skills, or maybe they don't list any tech jobs because those are all hired through an external recruiter. This is why job sites exist. I'm not sure how to look for these jobs specifically.
Also, if you like, see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111780 regarding my situation.
Why do you decline nearly every piece of advice the community here offers? It seems like each time someone makes a suggestion, you come up with a reason why their advice doesn’t work for you.
I’m just pointing this out because otherwise you seem well-spoken and eager to find work, but perhaps you are making things harder on yourself by being inflexible.
Anyways, good luck with the search, I don’t really have any tips but stop calling yourself a mediocre developer and talking poorly about yourself. You may be just as good of a developer and just as smart as anyone at some big tech company, but the other guy had opportunities you didn’t get which led to his success.
A tech equivalent of some of the advice given is when someone asks for help with library X, and a bunch of people recommend they use library Y instead. That might be good advice except if the first person has unspoken reasons why they have to use library X. This happens all the time.
I don't hold it against anyone for trying to help even if they're answering a different question. It comes from a good place and it might help someone else, and I sometimes engage with it, but in the end it's just not very helpful to me personally.
I'm not sure we can talk about HN as a monolith but I think there's a bias here where posters who are successful in their careers run into the just-world fallacy in the hiring context. If someone is struggling then they must be doing something wrong, or they just aren't good enough. It can't be that things sometimes aren't fair, and that the best way to help is to answer what's being asked even if the situation is something you're having trouble understanding.
I've described myself as mediocre to keep the conversation general and to head off accusations that I'm sabotaging myself with a huge ego. However, based on lots of objective evidence and my own subjective opinion, I'm actually a good developer. Based on past experience, many of the employers who have turned me down sight unseen would have been happy with me as an employee had they given me a chance. As I've said elsewhere though, there are issues with my overall situation that I'm unwilling to discuss here, and things aren't always fair.
Is it drugs? A criminal record? You blew up the systems at your previous employer? You met Jeff Bezos, and then called him a gauche bald-headed jerk?
Just come out with it.