I felt the same way over the past few years and decided to switch to a Technical Product Owner role at the beginning of this year. I used to be your typical HN user who was extremely passionate about programming, learning new frameworks, functional programming, etc, but at some point over my 10 year career I kinda stopped caring about tech entirely. Switching to a product owner role was great for me. I still get to leverage my technical knowledge without having to worry about the actual implementation too much. I also get to develop my soft skills like planning, communication, and conflict resolution, which is frankly a lot more interesting and satisfying than programming ever was.
Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills! You can learn can't you? Life means learning new stuff all the time. Learning never takes a time out.
The military was a bastion of learned lessons for me. One key takeaway: You are your own best advocate. Everything in an interview or negotiation related to you springs from that viewpoint. That's one of the most basic you will repeat infinitely. Use it boldly, not arrogantly.
It’s just about time really. I could skill up but what’s the market going to look like by the point I’m ready.
To the point where I went back and had to rethink applying only to companies I really want to work for.
This is not a flippant reply! I’m totally serious.
I've broadly tech-savvy, and I can do some programming. I taught myself Lua for the sake of making game addons, I've dabbled in Java and Javascript (and tiny bits elsewhere). Most of my projects of note, outside of gaming, are simply little utility scripts for my own curiosities, nothing shared. My career thus far has been a decade of retail, but at least I'm currently in an entry-level management position.
Is there a core there worth trying to sell for a tech job?
Getting your foot in the door is the hardest part (like many other industries). I don't have a lot of recent experience, but a boot camp or something similar might be needed to get past the first line of hr screening.
But doing some leetcode and sending out some applications is a pretty low investment way to start!
I used a software support role to get a foot in the door of the tech industry without any college degree, then used that was a way to learn whatever I could/display that I know how to code to get into a SWE role. I think the biggest learning curve I faced was learning "enterprise" software development in terms of design patterns, testing, etc. but it's all learnable once you unearth some of the unknown unknowns.
I'd also avoid using wording like "dabbled" because I've found that people are off-put by that and it comes across as selling yourself short, especially without a formal CS background.
> Most of my projects of note, outside of gaming, are simply little utility scripts for my own curiosities, nothing shared.
Put this stuff up on GitHub or similar.
I was recently involved in recruiting a junior dev at my company, and I was baffled by how lackluster people's portfolios were. Many people didn't have one. Those that did, had one or two school projects, or had a bunch of empty 0-commit forks.
Even one single passion project will make you stand out from the rest.
I'm assuming you have actually learned something and can show the results. Don't just declare yourself a learner, unless your real skill is amazing charisma.
Graduating and acing leetcode is evidence of ability to learn something. What's yours?
I'm sorry, but what does this even mean?
Nothing has changed in a significant way since 1996, other than ops per second and memory bandwidth. If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works, you're better than 99% of the total trash new-school Node.js/Django/Rails/React developers who think JSX is some sort of "innovation".
Having "stagnated" is definitely a hiring plus. It means you're less likely to slow down my systems with eight quadrillion layers of dynamic dispatch and abstraction, and you're not going to agitate for infecting my systems with Kubernetes specifically because I now need to orchestrate ten times more production machines to run the ensuing inefficient bloatware.
I can't imagine anyone being more highly sought after than a "stagnating" programmer.
I'm someone who's (supposedly) quite good underneath but has stagnated a lot over the last few years (and on and off before that, sadly) as other issues drained away my ability to work. I'm gradually stabilizing things and trying to find the best way to maneuver, and I'm pretty worried that everything's going to pass me by because my experience isn't of the right kind and I'm not legible enough. The people who are getting the jobs with all the traits I want are the ones who got a Real (that is, close to culturally archetypical) Job in 2018 and did their time in the salt mines with the three verifiable contiguous recent years of experience.
If what you say is true, then it's possible what I mostly have is a marketing problem, and it may be that e.g. some of the “actual demonstration of ability” is more readily solvable with “pull some stuff out into public repositories and freshen it up” than I've been imagining.
Aws is like 800 services, but under it all is ec2 and s3 -- just get familiar with those and the rest are conveniences.
So by stagnating I don’t only mean not up on all the new hype tech, but also the caricature of a “code monkey”. Certainly on paper at least.
> you're not going to agitate for infecting my systems with Kubernetes specifically because I now need to orchestrate ten times more production machines to run the ensuing inefficient bloatware.
Sadly this seems to be the sort of thing that most employers want.
I’ve barely written code in over a year, and haven’t done any significant greenfield work my whole career. The work I have done has been mostly in legacy or obsolete technologies, and by that I mean mostly old version of stuff that’s still out there.
A lot of companies are not allowed to interview the contractors (since they are not employees) and the contract firms can swap anyone into a spot after they get the contract signed. (Granted there is a lot of wink and nod stuff that goes on)
Horrid pay, not allowed to say you worked for (GE, Microsoft, whoever...) and crap benefits but you get real world experience and may even get lucky. You can say..."while at Microsoft I..."
Green field code is easy-mode, not hard mode. Nothing is in your way, nobody expects anything from you (yet) because they have no basis of comparison. The real reason people want to do rewrites is that they want that greenfield experience without having to quit. It almost never works.
It seems that a lot of things are just no possible to learn on the side as well. For example, doing anything at a large scale. That could be HPC stuff or just designing and building systems that need to handle high throughput without slowing or failing. I can’t afford to have the sort of projects that would allow me to learn those things.
The exception I can imagine is working on high visibility OSS projects and is a huge time sink and might as well be a second job.
Also, you’d be surprised how much you can get done on a modern PC with vms or containers, it isn’t the nineties or aughts any longer. We used to run a full vfx company on what amounts to a single souped $10k PC today.
Or, rent a heavy-duty cloud vm for $100 a month, small investment but clock ticking will get you motivated.
bonus points if you created a vuln or two :)
Hell, pick a dumb company you'll never want to work for, like Uber, if you want real-world practice. Then you at least know what real-world failure looks like.
I recently went from a start-up to FANG after a gap in my resume, and the new job is in an area I have no experience in. Many people I know have gone through similar experiences.
You do need strong interview skill though.
Even if you think the best you can do is the same job you have right now, but in a different place, you'll see a significant bump. But it's highly likely you can do better than that.
Why not try?
Because I doubt I could get the bump I’m looking for doing the same thing I do now with current restraints
> Why not try?
Time sink, especially with people talking about 4-5 stage interviews. Without some level of confidence I’d rather not use all my PTO or try to schedule hack at the moment.
From friends who are at FAANGs, it sounds like the prep work has been about 100 hours. That's re-reading things like Sedgewick and burning all your spare time at things like leetcode.
But I was mainly referring to the actually interviews themselves. 4-5 seems like so many, especially if they fly you out vs just being done remotely.
If your job is comfortable, pays well enough, and doesn’t demand all your waking time then why chnage?
Sure you can always get more money elsewhere, sure there are jobs that pay double what you’re making now, sure there are jobs where you get to do insanely cool shit… but it’s a lot of luck and effort to get these jobs. And then, you free time might vanish (either because it turns out these jobs are “always on” type of jobs, and/or because you’re so drained at the end of your day that you don’t have energy for anything else)
There is really nothing wrong with contempt in my opinion. Especially after 10+ years when you understand how most jobs are basically the same, that there is more to life than work, and that we can’t all be doing cool stuff all the time.
To hedge against being in a position where you’re laid off and can’t get a new job anymore, consider saving aggressively. 50% of net pay is a good starting point. This makes you give very little fucks about whether you’ll get laid off or not and after about 12 years of doing that, you won’t even really need a job anymore.
You’ve already decided you would fail, and that’s all it takes to seal the deal.
Dare a little. You’ve already made a list of your weaknesses. Now make a list of your strengths. Then sell yourself on how each weakness can be explained as a strength. If there’s nothing there at the end of the exercise, you haven’t lost anything. But you may just end up with some useful clarity on your worth in the marketplace.
I would love to start the process, to try and get a salary increase anywhere from 30%-100% but unfortunately I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise. Don’t qualify for the jobs I see I think I’d enjoy, and don’t even qualify for the jobs that meet my salary preferences that I’d otherwise dislike. I also would have to be looking at immediately remote roles which just makes things harder. I also am about 90% I could not perform on interviews at most places. Digging myself out of the aforementioned stagnation and prepping for interviews is likely to take years at this point and who knows what the market will look like at that point.