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So I learned to code... (hexbear.net)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

... and now I'm job-hunting in earnest and jfcsstrrssfgchujbgfryhgftyhgerswww. I hope this is the right place to vent about this sort of thing, but I'm feeling so incredibly stressed and frustrated because I really want to change careers (TEFL teaching is a dead end, and the conditions have got so much worse in recent years) and I know I could do a junior frontend job perfectly well — I've put so much with into getting good at it in my own time — but it's beginning to dawn on me that there's basically no way in to the industry unless you know someone who can help you get a foot in the door.

I don't know where I'm going with this tbh — I just needed to vent somewhere — but it would be nice to hear any advice anyone can offer, or even just the lamentations of anyone with similar experiences...

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm working through a cybersecurity degree right now and honestly I sometimes question the point, it looks like tech is just dead, and I doubt with the west's decline it's gonna get any better. Same with the housing market.

Sorry to vent I guess, but weirdly I've been feeling less doomer about the world overall lately, but more doomer in terms of my personal life. Like, I actually have some faith humanity is going to pull through this, but I think things are pretty fucked for me where I am now and I don't really know what to do about it, maybe I should just go full Crust Punk and learn the play the banjo for wine cooler money shrug-outta-hecks

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I mean, you could try and build a presence on LinkedIn and stuff like that. But realistically, networking is probably your best bet. And I don't mean do a bunch of mixers. I mean find a company you wanna work for and then stalk and infiltrate the personal lives of people who can get you a job there. That's the only way to really level the playing field.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I hate to say it but this is sound advice. I've only ever gotten long term jobs through some form of nepotism or another.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've spent my entire adult life watching capitalists boom and bust the IT related labor market by using bootcamps and other fast track learning institutions to flood the labor pool and drive down wages every time there's an "innovation" in the industry. You'll spend a lifetime playing keep up if you don't look at what the "elite" are doing and how you can take the same shortcuts.

Of course, all that being said, before getting too deeply into the industry I would start to think about if you wanna play by the rules of capitalists and just spend all your time being a wage slave. It's one thing to pay your bills, it's quite another to dedicate your life to being a gear in the machine. Being in IT often gives you access to information and systems that are crucial to the imperial core.

Learn to Hack, Learn to Quadcopter/Drone.

But most importantly, Learn your history.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Oh dgmw I very much want to get to a point where I can meaningfully contribute labour/expertise to causes I actually care about, it's just that I do also kind of need to eat lol

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

And I get that. Not calling you out specifically or anything. But beware of entrenching yourself too deeply into a world which considers you expendable.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The industry is very, very bad right now. I have done software dev for close to 15 years and I'll be two years unemployed in January. I don't know how much of this can be attributed to my very specific medical needs but I can say for a fact that I have had these needs longer than I have been of working age and I have never had this much trouble finding a job before even just cold calling and never, ever as someone with my current level of experience. I genuinely don't know what to tell people looking to break in. Keep at it as long as you can, and if you can't, I don't blame you.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It's all just having an in or "right time right place", literally chance and luck lol, and the number of times and places are shrinking with automation and shit.

I didn't know anyone going in, not sure if it's helpful experience though. I wouldn't say I have any particular acumen and the experience only reaffirmed my prior socialist tendenciesI was basically obsessed with the computer as a kid. This led to me as a minor contributing to P2P software, getting involved in the operation of a torrent tracker+website, ultimately getting charged with lots of felonies which were luckily expunged at 18. But I learned infinitely more doing all of that than I did in a year and a half of uni before I left. I did computer repair in the area and then my first office job was a company with 40K employees in the country. Just migrating people's shit from busted/failing PCs when they took PTO or the device had become unusable. I buddied up to the ancient infosec team who would come around if they needed to grab/image hard drives for investigations/legal holds. I spent some down time at work on one of their big projects, that involved 20 years of asset->employee relationship history that wasn't of super high quality. I think they were originally trying to figure out how to do it with Excel. I moved from infosec to data engineering/legacy migration consulting off that experience and the referrals at that org.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

My masters focuses on airline research. I graduated in August 2020 . Probably the worst kind of specialty you could have graduating at the time. I applied to jobs for 17 months before I landed one.

I don't have any advice for you OP. All I can say is try not to let the world get you down. It's hard right now.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What all frontend do you know stack-wise? If you have HTML, CSS and the fundamentals of JavaScript down, look into picking up Angular or React. I see jobs listed for these 2 a lot.

Another bit of advice that I've heard plenty of times is that you should have a portfolio of projects to show what all you can do instead of just listing langs on a resume. I have one with 4 websites and 2 mobile apps but it hasn't panned out much but ymmv. Not only will you have something to show potential employers but it will keep you engaged and learning more. I made the mistake of getting a degree in programming and then not touching code for like 3 years and I got rusty.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I'm pretty competent with React, and I just finished a crud project with Next.js (never again lol). It does seem like there are a lot of offers looking for Angular, so I guess that's next on the list - just as soon as I get good enough with Go to use that as the backend. My portfolio is hosted on my own hardware with a self-hosted git server and Jenkins pipeline. I worked so hard on it, and felt so proud, but it seems getting anyone to even look at it is incredibly difficult shrug-outta-hecks

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

One more bit of advice speaking from experience: pick a few languages you like and get good with those. I've spent the last 10 years dicking around with just as many languages and I'm not really great with any of them.

A lot of the fundamentals and syntax is easy to adjust for like going from Java to C# or whatever, but each language has its own nuance as well. Right now I'm taking a gamble and stubbornly focusing on a stack that I hand picked. Typescript is here to stay but TailwindCSS and AstroJS are in various stages of wide acceptance so my future hirability is contingent on if something like Astro takes off. I'm not super worried since it's practically ReactJS-lite in a lot of ways and even supports drop in React components. But it's still a gamble against HR.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Also I feel you on the portfolio part. Keep it up tho. It's a step above the hiree that doesn't even have one.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I remember aboot 10 years ago one popular idea was register your own company create some .io domain and website for yourself and add it to linkedin or CV. Idk how well it worked tho I just opted for lying my ass off approach in my CV and interviews.

"Why yes mr capitalist sir I have 10 years of experience in C# at 18" (haven't even looked at the language) hired specifically cos boss man liked my bullshitting prowess.

I got pretty lucky and got a job when programming apprenticeships were popular so my position was basically government subsidised and i took off from there. Any grad schemes or intern style placement positions available for you? Also my approach was to just claim I know everything and figure it out on the job if ur confident enough you can learn quick.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

hired specifically cos boss man liked my bullshitting prowess.

when so many jobs are bullshit jobs, bullshitting prowess is a highly valuable skill. best possible economic system btw

Death to America

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

It really is (a valuable skill). I moved from a high-bullshit job to a low-bullshit job and actually have had to explain to a manager: "look, like 99% of my job description over the past decade has been 'come up with pleasant BS to distract other teams'; you're totally wasting me by having me actually do work"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

My favorite CS professor confessed that was how he'd gotten into the field. Just straight up lied about knowing how to program for some niche system. He got the job and then taught himself as he went along.

Later went to school for it, got his PhD, and became one of the leading researchers in his field.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Look for a job in government or for a think tank policymakers love bespoke data analytics and dashboards and whatnot, so if you can combine your coding abilities with a topic you're capable of illustrating interest in and some basic stats knowledge, you'll have a promising (and probably less technically challenging) career outside of tech.

There's also bioinformatics, biostatistics, and data science, all of which can come in the form of bolt-on certifications. I know more school is probably unappealing but they could be an easy way to make a lateral move.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I work for an FFRDC.

In the US, they have passed a continuing resolution and a lot of labs are nervous about the election. They are waiting to see how this turns out. That continuing resolution is going to make hiring difficult.

If Trump is elected, a lot of those jobs are cooked. Mine may be in jeopardy too. I'm applying for PhD programs in Europe to get ahead of the potential brain drain.

The only safe space right now is nuclear.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

State and local governments and NGOs will continue to exist even if Trump wins; if anything, I see blue states trying to get more independence from the Feds if Trump wins so there might be more opportunities there. The roles at these orgs tend to be somewhat boring and more like business analytics than true programming or research, but they pay decently well and are fairly stable. Not really sure if Europe will be better off than the US during a second Trump presidency but there are definitely some cool PhD programs over there that I've considered. Hope your application process goes well!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

True. However that money will have to come from somewhere, and there are very few states in the US that fund those efforts heavily. I could see Trump using a carrot or stick with federal funding to kill a lot of those.

Will see though. No idea what's going to happen other than it's going to be a rough few years no matter what.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

And geospatial analytics/satellite data processing are hot right now in certain spaces.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

hate to say it but coding is a dead end now too

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

the real beauty of living in late-stage capitalism is that sooner or later it's all a dead end!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

end it! xi-plz

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

TEFL teaching is a dead end, and the conditions have got so much worse in recent years

Could you elaborate? I thought it was doing okay, since only so much of the demand for English teachers is satisfied by the under-qualified, under-the-table supply of failsons (as opposed to the more qualified failson supply)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

So this problem may be local to Spain, but over the last fifteen years there has been a huge change in the industry, with everything consolidating into these huge, HR-driven companies. The era of small academies wasn't perfect, but they were generally friendly, family-run places whose strategy was to deliver a good service. The new model is about getting people in and out the door, and monetizing propriety materials — which are increasingly AI-generated. Oh and pay is stagnant or worse.

There has been a change in the profile of student too — from people driven by a desire for personal enrichment and just enjoyment (no-one has the spare cash for that anymore) to people who need to pass a particular exam for work.

There's also the timetable — split shifts every day, all but ensuring that you never see your kids. That isn't new, but there used to be enough demand that you could piece something together as a freelance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thank you for elaborating.