Re:Ask HN: Been writing code for 40 years and can't get hired
by tomcam on Sunday December 26, 2021 @08:20PM
(#29698038)
Thanks for asking. It was a combination of studying the market carefully, taking measured risks, and trying to make myself more competent than 80% of my peers (I am not particularly smart and I learn very slowly, so I never expected to be much better than that).
I have always studied for one career path, and a backup. The thought about the backup was that if I couldn’t get what I wanted most, I would still have something I enjoyed. So I keep up on C but specialize in Go, which was a bit risky 10 years ago.
Another tip is that I have chosen areas that I like, but that are also somewhat challenging. For example, when I started out the first thing I did was learn assembly language because I knew it scared other programmers. Because I didn’t have a degree, I wanted to choose something that would make me irresistible to hire without a degree.
Finally, I thought for myself. When Microsoft called to hire me 25 years ago their own people were fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, because it appeared from the press at the time that Microsoft was losing the Internet wars. My own coworkers were selling their stock like crazy when I joined, and they said the good all days were gone. When I left four years later, my stock options had appreciated 1300%. It wasn’t that I was blindly supporting Microsoft, it was that I chose to believe my own eyes as opposed to what people who had nothing to do with the company were reporting about it.
When I left Microsoft it was during the dot com crash. I bought a small company that provided a service to eBay users and it made in the two digit millions over the next 20 years. My former friends and Microsoft were polite but uncomprehending when I did it, because there just wasn’t any concept of charging for websites at the time. I risk a small part of my retirement fund to buy the company, but not enough that it would’ve hurt the family drastically if I failed. Measured risk.
I have always studied for one career path, and a backup. The thought about the backup was that if I couldn’t get what I wanted most, I would still have something I enjoyed. So I keep up on C but specialize in Go, which was a bit risky 10 years ago.
Another tip is that I have chosen areas that I like, but that are also somewhat challenging. For example, when I started out the first thing I did was learn assembly language because I knew it scared other programmers. Because I didn’t have a degree, I wanted to choose something that would make me irresistible to hire without a degree.
Finally, I thought for myself. When Microsoft called to hire me 25 years ago their own people were fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, because it appeared from the press at the time that Microsoft was losing the Internet wars. My own coworkers were selling their stock like crazy when I joined, and they said the good all days were gone. When I left four years later, my stock options had appreciated 1300%. It wasn’t that I was blindly supporting Microsoft, it was that I chose to believe my own eyes as opposed to what people who had nothing to do with the company were reporting about it.
When I left Microsoft it was during the dot com crash. I bought a small company that provided a service to eBay users and it made in the two digit millions over the next 20 years. My former friends and Microsoft were polite but uncomprehending when I did it, because there just wasn’t any concept of charging for websites at the time. I risk a small part of my retirement fund to buy the company, but not enough that it would’ve hurt the family drastically if I failed. Measured risk.