Even a CS degree is useless in this day and age. Gee, did I waste four years of my time, only to end up unemployed? My other fellow CS grads are in positions that have nothing to do with their degree. Sales, HR, QA, what the fuck.
Not to invalidate your job hunting experience, but did you get a four year degree not to learn but only to get a job?
I’m a fifty year old tech lead without a degree or high profile companies on my resume, and I can’t relate to this blog at all and I’m wondering what the difference is. I switch jobs every few years. I’ve been doing mostly contract work. Last straight job I had, I lost after two years when COVID hit, and I had another job lined up in three weeks.
I’m not saying this guy’s experience isn’t valid, just that there is something else going on here whether it’s a changing job market that hasn’t caught up with me yet or soft skills or that market or outdated skill set or what.
Note: I know things are shit for Juniors and mid-level devs, but this guy sounds like a fairly senior level guy, which is why I think my experience is relevant.
I’m not saying this guy’s experience isn’t valid, just that there is something else going on here whether it’s a changing job market that hasn’t caught up with me yet or soft skills or that market or outdated skill set or what.
The blogger described his career path as “After more than a decade of sitting behind a single company’s desk, my CV looks bleak.” That doesn’t sound like someone who was mindful of their career path.
I also don’t think the blogger is completely honest or factual with regards to the job interview process. The blogger claims that “Nowadays, you have to pass through several layers of random and arbitrary screening in order to even get invited to the even more grueling in-person interviews.” As someone who somewhat recently switched roles, my personal experience is not the same. The bulk of recruiting processes start with a phone screening to verify that you really exist and have basic social skills, but technical screenings follow right after. Some organizations do pride themselves in having close to a dozen interview rounds, but you are expected to prove your worth in each and every single interview round you’re pulled into it.
The truth of the matter is that as labor supply is increasing, you have to do more than show up in a meeting to get a job offer. Not having a degree is also a red herring because that’s effectively irrelevant for the bulk of the development positions out there.
There’s however a critical factor that I feel everyone should have in mind: the bulk of IT services/consultancy recruiters out there might post job ads but they actually have zero positions to fill. The blogger briefly mention those without appearing to connect the dots when they mention “Mr X was very impressed with your skills, however, we don’t have any opening for you right now”. Odds are they really really do not have a opening, and they just forced you to go through tests and assessments just so that they could add another entry in their database.
I was trying to avoid sounding condescending and privileged, but I think you’re right. My first ten years were spent in very niche programming (Lotus Notes) without any mentors. It nearly sank my career and ultimately took me about another five years to rebrand myself as a full stack Java/JavaScript developer and now I’m strictly back-end/leadership. It took a lot of effort to pull myself out of that rut including carving out leadership roles for myself and other tasks above my expected duties. This guy might have to similarly do a lot of work to catch up with market demands.
@Aboel3z@programming.dev are you going to actually interact with the community or are you just trying to drive traffic?
Also if you could code from a young age why would you say you only learned in 2019 while working night shifts in a factory?
There was some repeated patterns that this user seems to have been doing so I gave them an instance wide ban
- Posts would be deleted and then reposted (especially if the original post had a negative score)
- Conflicting information in some of the articles
I really appreciate it! I noticed the same stuff.
Entrepreneurs will sometimes complain how they can’t find good programmers, and how there’s a shortage in tech. But they’re not talking about people like me, they’re talking about twenty-something Ivy League post docs with stellar CVs.
And this is when the author devolved into nonsensical ranting.
I agree that the hiring process for programmers is too full randomness but many of the authors other complaints have been alleviated. Most of the companies I interact with have modified their requirements to state “degree in ‘X’ or equivalent work experience”. In other words, having had years of experience with a solidly composed resume that showcases that experience far surpasses the requirement for a degree. Also, “Ivy League” degrees are, for the most part worthless when competing for bottom tier Dev work like the author is. Any company or manager impressed by an ivy league comp sci bachelors degree is not someone you want to work for.
Working in IT is a great equalizer. The only things that matter are your experience, your skill set, how well you can compose a resume, and your network (very important). By the author’s own admission, they self-sabotaged their own career by sitting on their ass for a decade, letting their skill set become obsolete, let their experience be limited and out of date, and clearly never grew (probably shrunk) their network by isolating themselves in their little corner.
My advice to anyone in the field is to see yourself as a professional athlete. If you keep your skills sharp, expand your toolkit by learning new skills, become proactively involved in projects (even if they are your own side ones), and stay up to date with emerging systems (tons of free online classes or relatively inexpensive courses), you will not only always have a job, you will be well compensated. Don’t and you cut from the team.
The hiring system is inefficient. It’s hard for workers to find work and “entrepreneurs” to find workers. Those who succeed are those who go the extra mile. That applies to workers but also to companies. Want to attract top talent consistently and without drowning in less than mediocre resumes? Pay more and offer incentives like profit sharing and work life balance . The days of coasting by just existing and with minimum effort have past.
I’m in Northern Europe, and we still have trouble recruiting software engineers. Granted, we don’t offer Silicon Valley salaries, and have a few requirements that prevent us from hiring globally. But still, there are lots of companies hiring if you aren’t picky.
Yes. Fully possible.
I read the blog post as part of a grieving process. I’m pretty sure there are jobs out there for the author. But he needs to come to terms with the labor market and his place in it.
Based on his anecdotes he sounds like he’s about my age. When we entered the job market we were the keepers of a secret and arcane art. We were paid well, pampered, treated with regard. Placed in positions of authority just because of childhood hobbies were useful.
Then the suits figured out that for the amount of money they were paying us they could train people with actual work ethic. Actual professionals that come in, crank tickets for 8-10 hours straight, then go home and never think about computers or code again until they sit back down at the desk the next morning. And that’s how software development became just another profession.
The places that still hunt for actual nerds are few and far between, and often have super high skill requirements and/or pay relatively little. The other outfits expect to hire well rounded professionals. Being able to write code is just one of the many job requirements.
I think you hit it right on the head and with far more empathy than I. Well done.
We are one of those “nerd hoarding” shops and I, the CEO, am close to the lowest paid employee. These guys make bank but they are also worth every penny. If people knew how few people keep our world from imploding, they’d be an insomniac like me.
As far as the rest, I wrote an article back in 2008 or 2010 where I outlined how IT was going to become commoditized and many of my colleagues thought I was an alarmist. Ten or so years later everyone has moved their infrastructure to the cloud (RIP in-house sysadmins and network engineers), and developers are now mostly ticket punchers as you said. Lord knows how AI streamlined processes will affect the Dev sector.
And that’s how software development became just another profession.
I don’t think that’s a healthy way of framing things. Software development was always, from the very start, just another profession. What changed in the last decade or so was a) supply and demand in the job market, b) the quality of the pool of workers searching for jobs. Companies still look for developers, and most still pay handsomely well, but the hiring bar is currently met only by those who are far more experienced and/or paid attention to their career growth. You still see companies hiring people straight out of bootcamps, but they come out of the bootcamp pipeline with proper portfolios and they hit the ground running without requiring that much training or onboarding.
In contrast, the blogger states that “After more than a decade of sitting behind a single company’s desk, my CV looks bleak.” A decade is a very long time to stay idle by without updating their skills, isn’t it?
I saw this phenomenon throughout the past decade in the hiring loops I was involved. In the demand peak I already saw a few developers with over a decade of experience interviewing for senior positions that started their interviews already defeated and broken, complaining that in their last roles they just went with the flow and never bothered to do anything relevant with their career. They claimed they could fit the role and do whatever needed to be done, but the truth of the matter is that that’s true for each and every single developer called for a technical review. We needed to have some assurance that we were hiring the best candidate for the job, and these developers with a long experience of “sitting behind a single company’s desk” gave us nothing to work with. So why would we hire them over those who could show off something?
You are right in all regards. It was always a profession. My aunt who was a programmer in the 1980s sure as hell treated it as work.
But there is a slice of a few years, less than a decade, of people that entered the job market during the great Internet gold rush, that are (for lack of a more polite term) simply entitled as shit. I know, I used to be one. It took me a long time to acknowledge that.
This article reads like someone working through that.
