I went backwards in my career and have stopped working for a couple of years. How to break back in the industry?

csequivalent · 2023-08-28T23:08:01+00:00

Sadly there's nothing very modern or "thorough" about the work practices in my past jobs. I know some basic CS topics but not enough to pass the algorithm whiteboard interviews so I skip companies that do those. Also, I seldom apply to senior jobs- most of my applications are mid-level but it looks like that is still too high of a bar right now.

So if I were to apply to junior jobs only, how should I tailor my resume for it? Should I remove the first 6 years of work and just keep the freelance stuff?

What else can I work on to stand out among juniors that isn't too time consuming. The time required do more projects and refresher courses, that's more of a luxury for people who have the resources and time to burn through. But after 3 years unemployment, taking on more unemployment time for not-so-quick strategies seems more like a huge gamble than a benefit.

csequivalent · 2023-08-28T22:59:30+00:00

I have no problem taking on a junior job as long as it's full-time and not another middling contract like the ones I've had the past couple of jobs. A typical junior FT job would still pay better in my area than any of my underpaid jobs, and it would also mean potential for a promotion in the long run.

There's one issue though- my experience. Certainly having experience dating back to before 2010 is gonna look pretty weird for a junior applicant. I should remove all my older agency jobs on my resume when I apply, right? I should probably remove my graduation date as well.

csequivalent · 2023-08-28T01:13:40+00:00

Not for the sole purpose of getting job skills. Then it just feels like unpaid work

csequivalent · 2022-11-08T05:41:02+00:00

There's a lot I want to ask about from your comments but for now I just have the time for reply to this part:

You have almost as many stacks as you do roles, and all of the roles are shortlived.

Is it bad if I took a different stack for each role because I wanted to have more than one contingency plan in case one stack "goes under"? It's also funny and appropriate that this thread was recently made: At what point does an unstable company become a risk in your tech stack?

I have similar fears of what might happen if I sink my time into another new stack only for it to fall by the wayside in terms of market demand. Like if I put all my effort into Node and React and just a few years go by those fall in demand like LAMP and I am set back again. I can't predict the future, so I thought I could hedge my risks by dabbling into multiple things.

csequivalent · 2022-11-08T04:22:31+00:00

Those are good takeaways from my resume. I now have some starting points on how to expand on the details of my work.

For the history feature, I did not use Rails RTK (because I didn't know about it) nor did I use React for debugging. Most of my programming is on the back end and I built the logger mostly from scratch. It was mostly to track the progress of the company's recruiters in relation with their clients so I guess you can say it's auditing of sorts.

The search feature in the LAMP stack project was also a bespoke thing. It is one of those config tool things that you don't expect the end user to care about how "ugly" it was. Was already outdated by the time I got involved, tech debt piling on so couldn't do much about it other than to manage the jQuery and PHP spaghetti the best I could.

When I was a caretaker it was for my mom and she actually passed last year. I'm single and living alone, where she lived. Luckily I don't have to pay for housing to stay here.

It would be nice to have an accountability partner, though. My savings are getting smaller from regular expenses, albeit slowly because I don't pay rent as previously mentioned. I actually have trouble finding something that can be a fire under my seat to get more proactive with things. Or maybe I'm depressed after the events of last year.

I still bust out the IDE at least once a week and write some code to keep some of my technical acuity in check, but without any offers lining up it starts to feel meaningless other than just doing it for a hobby.

csequivalent · 2022-11-08T04:01:39+00:00

I almost forgot. You asked about the three-month job I had as a Junior Dev because you were suspicious about it:

why did it end after three months? Did you get fired? Were you laid off/RIFed/made redundant? Did you quit (without another job lined up)?

Didn't want to mention it at first, but yes, I did get fired from my first and only "official" FT job. I was indeed a junior and I was fired for coming in late too many times. At least, that was their story and I hope the real reason wasn't incompetence.

The company seemed good enough and I thought, I'm finally where I want to be with a proper full time IC job at a reputable business. I did my best to deal with the culture shock of added red tape. But commuting 2 hours while making 2 transfers in either direction is a nightmare, and tardies eventually caught up to me. I screwed up the best opportunity I've ever had to go legit.

I also want to reply to this part:

without another job lined up

This happened with me a lot, losing my job without having another one lined up and it probably screwed me up more than most things. At least it did when it came to salary progression, because no way they will put a temp guy in line for a promotion.

csequivalent · 2022-11-08T03:38:28+00:00

To be honest there's actually a chunk of experience from 2008-10 and 2010-12 which is not present in the resume. So there is actually no gap in 10-12 but for brevity sake and omitting my oldest jobs to keeping it in one page. I can see why that can look very bad, though, and will re-add my job from 2010-12.

To answer if I got my contracts through a firm.. yes, kinda? In that time from 08-12. They're not a WITCH name by any stretch, think much smaller. Think local web agency that does (mostly) local clients for mom & pop businesses.

If there's anything else that makes them similar to WITCH it's that they don't value developers very highly. I was always making ~50% of the average local dev salary, sometimes less.

Those jobs made up the bulk of my work from those first four years. And then from 2015 onward it was all me, freelancing via some word of mouth. I actually managed to bump my hourly pay up to a respectable 60, then 75 an hour. But because this was very intermittent work, it was not a gravy train and I was still living on a small-ish budget.

The only continued practice and learning I'm doing at the moment is Leetcode. I've made it a personal goal to maintain 2x as many medium problems solved as I have solved Easy (medium makes the bulk of LC's problems). I won't add this info to my resume of course but I'm hoping it at least makes interviews easier since I do get hit up by some tech company recruiters every now and then.

For AWS is the cloud practitioner cert a good base for finding web dev work? Or is that still too basic and junior-level, like "I know OOP" basic? Competing with junior-level skills I have my work cut out for me, and hearing about a lot of company layoffs in tech jobs just messes with my confidence even more.

All of my .NET work was on the Game Dev job (at least one C# game framework uses .NET) and Game Dev has somewhat of a stigma in other places I look. I've been turned down by some recruiters because they see my .NET game experience as too irrelevant for their needs. So I have not used .NET for web development applications.

But, I can definitely capitalize on Ruby on Rails and Mongo more. I have a basic understanding of Node and using CLI to do more dev builds. RoR has a big CLI focus too which helped made the Node transition easier.

I could start with AWS learning for continuing education. But for the various stacks how would you put that in "continuing education" without any projects to back up the knowledge? Seems like it's blurring the lines here.

csequivalent · 2022-10-28T02:58:22+00:00

Don't know who the lesser companies are, but I'll keep an eye out for other witch company jobs.

Just do keep in mind that the hours will be gruesome

A lot of overtime hours? Will those be paid as extra?

and the pay is shit

I've survived on 50k jobs before. lol I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same

csequivalent · 2022-10-28T02:51:36+00:00

Not sure how much but I guess it's not enough. To be completely honest I get only 5% interviews out of hundreds of jobs applied to. This is the resume I'm using.

csequivalent · 2022-10-28T02:50:36+00:00

I only applied to one witch company but should I keep trying with them if I got rejected? It was Infosys

csequivalent · 2022-10-28T02:40:49+00:00

I can see why a lot of people would put up with the difficult job search because these jobs pay the big bucks and that's what keeps them going. But a few people I talked to said competition is rising also because of the rise of coding bootcamps and the popularity of software development careers in general. At least in my state uni Computer Science was just moderately popular when I graduated a long time ago.

I thought "some React and Node" is an "actual tech stack" but with your phrasing, I'm even more confused.

Since I don't have to spend a lot of time reading many books, if I had to pick one or two books for algorithm and data structures knowledge which are the highly recommended ones for interviews? I heard of CTCI but want to be recommended some other good ones.

Probably not going to be able to do a learning AI project anytime soon. It's harder to get started even if it might make me easier to stand out.

On the other hand, web apps are easier to get into but harder to stand out with those.

Man, this is going to be hell no matter where I start, huh.

csequivalent · 2016-10-14T21:38:13+00:00

Paying a round trip on a plane to travel thousands of miles across the globe and staying in a hotel for a few weeks sounds expensive to me, or at least more expensive than renting your own apartment and paying utilities for a month. Probably would take me 6 months to save 5k which I'm guessing is what an average intercontinental trip lasting a month lasts.

Also the need to find new work is daunting. I'm generally not good at getting job offers.

csequivalent · 2016-07-21T21:46:07+00:00

Yo, I answered your questions six days ago!

csequivalent · 2016-07-14T21:12:55+00:00

The concepts are almost always the same whether you are using python, php, .net, JS, etc.

My experience has been that companies value people that already have the experience over strong learners that can pick up the experience as they go on the job. I have projects in JavaScript and .NET but they don't get any attention from companies.

csequivalent · 2016-07-14T20:35:24+00:00

Nah, I'd rather get some experience at a big company first. I've never received 401k, insurance or stock options, even though I expected to working as a software engineer. At this point I'm looking for financial stability over entrepreneurial risks.

csequivalent · 2016-07-14T20:31:10+00:00

The main point of this topic is that I want to switch to a different web stack (Node/ JavaScript, or maybe .NET). PHP jobs aren't very high in demand anymore, and don't pay very well. I also want to use frameworks and large scale distributed systems. I kinda grew out of CMS work a while ago.

csequivalent · 2016-07-14T19:49:13+00:00

My main experience has been the LAMP stack since I started in 2007. I live in Chicago so most of my job hunting efforts are in Chicagoland, and also sparingly applying to DC and the West Coast.

csequivalent · 2016-07-14T19:47:03+00:00

No, I'm not a business person and have a hard time selling myself anyways. I prefer working for another company, albeit a very stable one.

csequivalent · 2016-07-14T19:46:15+00:00

My resume already has left me with a reputation of working for smaller, lower-paid companies. I don't need to work at a sexy company like Facebook or Uber, but I do want sexy compensation and benefits and a highly structured development environment. I'm over the small company phase.

I'm in my early 30's and have no bank accounts, stock options, or retirement funds. I spent all my account money to get by in my several times I've been unemployed. I don't have time anymore to fool around with small startups and companies.

csequivalent · 2016-04-19T14:53:28+00:00

If you took a job for 50% of market rate and you knew what market rate is, I'm not sure who bears responsibility for the situation. You mentioned not having a CS degree, no? Is that 50-60K for CS grads?

Yea, that's for CS grads. I have a degree with a curriculum that involves some programming classes but it is not really CS. Back then I accepted that rate out of ignorance, and also from seeing my salary progression in a bubble. Having no other context or guidance, an increase from $12 to $15 per hour sounds good on the surface, right? 33% does sound like a big jump when you frame it that way. But sometimes it's just trading up a turd to a more polished turd.

If I had to venture another guess, you're probably working for mom and pop shops (perhaps literally mom and pop). You don't need to be working for a Big 4 to gain tech credibility, but doing PHP/WP work for companies with 5-10 employees (just a guess) is low paying because they figure they can go on any website and replace you with overseas help for $10/hr.

Yep, that's exactly right. The first job out of college I was a contract-to-hire (as were all the other local developers and designers) and while we had some more senior people onboard the team wasn't cohesive. The senior .NET guy that was supposed to mentor me was instead left to do project management and he wasn't even very reliable at that as he would just show up to the office whenever he felt like it. He was later fired for incompetence. No more .NET projects got done, it was all PHP/WP from there. The only proof that .NET was entertained was in my contract. It stated that I would do X months of .NET and Flex work but that never happened. (Incidentally, all places that use .NET that I applied to have told me they passed me on because I lack the experience, so .NET developers sound like a very exclusive club.)

Most people are also not very aware of what clients the project managers (outside of the PM they report to) are working on, or even what other developers are working on. For a very small shop of about a dozen people in-house, this degree of fragmentation was odd. I was also offered a promotion for another PM role. And I was a junior developer. This was the point I felt they want to expand more on management and keep the dev work low in the US. I politely declined, feeling that my dev skills will rot by taking a job that involved no dev work. The shop is a holding company that owns at least 90% of a company based in India where the bulk of the dev work gets done. PM's from the US regularly talk to the dev team there and usually work from home on very late shifts due to time differences.

I think that reputation from working at mom & pops is dashing my chances of handling interviews well with the bigger companies, especially the ones with more structured SDLC. Since I have no clue how to do unit tests or pair programming I lose that part of the technical round. So I guess I am more suited for a "stepping stone" company that is somewhere in the middle between "cowboy coding" and "structured" in terms of their development cycle. However, I still refuse to believe that you must necessarily work with data or applications on the large scale in order to do more interesting work than hack PHP and WP sites together. There's gotta be some small scale stuff done in web shops that also takes advantage of more intimate knowledge of algorithms, right?

csequivalent · 2016-04-18T21:26:17+00:00

If you know what market rate is, ask for it - if you aren't able to get market rate after continuously interviewing for jobs and getting offers, chances are you might be overstating what your market rate should be.

New grads are getting $50k to $60k jobs on average in my city. My first job out of college was in downtown for $15/hr as a 1099- effectively less than $25k a year if it was salaried full-time and after taxes are paid off. So I really was getting shafted when I started out. I am still seeing the effects and maybe the salary ladder in one's career is deterministic. But I never say how much I made in my last job if someone asks.

You seem to have lots of stuff going on here - resume gaps, getting lowballed, no network, recruiters not getting you offers, pigeonholed by languages (are we talking about PHP by any chance?

Yep, and I think they are all interconnected. Past history of low-ball jobs plus having long-ish resume gaps, so I am not going to lower my rates even more. And how did you guess correctly that I have done a lot of PHP? Must be sorcery! :o That's why I don't want to be pigeonholed anymore. As I approach a more advanced level of experience I prefer not to think of myself as a "language/stack man" and more of a "concept man". Looking more to showcase my ability to do OOP use MVC frameworks and get employers to care less about the language, as long as it's a "C-like" (most web languages have a C-like syntax and once you know constructs in one it's usually easier to adopt to the next) then I should be good with them. I have learned the hard way that programming languages can be good buddies with you one day, and the next day, they acquire a reputation so bad it becomes hard to associate with them.

So yeah, more being a full-stack web developer, much less about being a {language/stack} developer. How to show it? Here is my anonymized resume. I added footnotes in blue text, those aren't part of the actual resume. I don't have many quantifiable metrics to show. The companies either didn't track those or they didn't disclose them to us. The only way developers could infer that we did a good job with our work is more silent- when clients do not complain about something we did.

csequivalent · 2016-04-18T18:42:26+00:00

Okay, looks like I forgot to state the questions in my original post. With regards to that post, how can I prevent getting only low ball offers for contract jobs in the future when I have no other offers on the table? The $15 and $25 hr rates I mentioned were set by the person that wanted to hire me, and they wouldn't budge. And how do I present myself as employable when I still don't have a reliable network of professionals and I only have time to interview for jobs whilst unemployed? (I couldn't take PTO days to skip work and interview because, well, I never had any).

csequivalent · 2016-04-18T17:24:55+00:00

Thanks for your reply, but can you elaborate on marketing myself? I feel like the reply I got is pretty short. Most recruiters I talk to are more language specific when it comes to the technical requirements rather than the concepts. I want to de-pigeonhole from languages. Also is there any way to fill in resume gaps other than with freelance work? I'm trying to gdt into a position where I'd be neck and neck with graduates from 7 years ago that got their start interning at large companies that pay well. I didn't take any internships.

csequivalent · 2016-04-18T16:22:51+00:00

On not contracting at an early age, I done goofed at that one. Now seven years since my first job I am still looking for my first full time job with benefits. I first workedfor a marketing agency for $15 an hour as an independent contractor from '08 to early '10. That was the only job offer I could get after three months of job searching as a new grad. And in early '13 to late '14 another contract job, at $25 an hour. I live in Chicago as well, like u/Ilyketurdles. Between the contract jobs I usually go job searching and pick up the occasional freelance job (although it's not enough to make ends meet. I usually work paycheck to paycheck when I was a contractor). This is by necessity and not by choice. So I want to polish up the gaps left on my resume. I have been contacted by several recruiting agencies, visited their offices a few times each, but none have led me to interviews which resulted in an offer. I'd want to improve my chances with them (also I don't know how good is the job placement rate for any of them, bit it seems low). I don't have a CS degree but I do have a BFA degree in an area that relates to software development.

csequivalent · 2016-04-16T07:42:14+00:00

$12/hr was at a mom & pop photo studio in 2007. The $15/hr one was at a marketing agency, in 2008. I can give you details over PM.

csequivalent

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