ccajas

I'd rather see the increase of job security for developers that are lagging behind, and an increased quantity of accelerator and returnship programs for developers across all sorts of backgrounds and experiences, to get them out of stagnation.

I have worked for less than $25/hr at various web shop LLCs, less than what some tech internships pay. I'm also going through one of my longest unemployment periods ever. Yet, even I don't think unionizing tech jobs is going to prevent these sorts of situations for developers.

  Location: Chicago, IL
  Remote: Preferred
  Willing to relocate: Depends on the opportunity
  Technologies: PHP, Ruby on Rails, MVC frameworks, JavaScript, Node.js, C#/.NET, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB
  Résumé/CV: Available upon request
  Email: chris.cajas.m at gmail
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccajas/
  Github: https://github.com/ccajas/

I'm a software engineer with over 8 years of experience creating websites and web applications for many clients, and looking to go back to working full-time after taking a break from work. I also have around 5 years of experience working remotely (pre-COVID). Most of my work has been for small business clients, but I'm open to working at larger corporations as well.

It sounds like a sad story. PHP's specialization is in rendering dynamic web pages. It was its ONLY purpose (ignoring niche projects like GTK bindings, etc). And yet even against general purpose languages/VM's (where using it for backend web is a choice, not its only purpose), PHP could not remain competent in its own class.

It's like building a car designed for just one thing, to go very fast on straight roads, then a general-purpose car comes along and somehow beats this car in this category.

How did it lose its grip? Did the PHP Group become too complacent being at the top?

Re: getting your foot in with interviews. Mileage really varies here. I agree with you that getting an interview is very luck-based. I have no contacts in FAANG that would be strong referrals. But from my own experience, I garner more interest from recruiters passively from my job history, than from taking a more active route of applying to FAANG jobs. (And I have no history with any big or "corporate" work environments either)

There's a different "knowledge" problem that must be tackled here.

Someone can form a cognitive bias from only being exposed to a few ways to solve a problem. Maybe it's because they haven’t seen it to larger scale, or that they only worked with monoliths, and thus are limited to only that problem scope.

Throwing more MySQL databases at a problem won’t fix all problems, but for a lot of people, this is all they know. How do discover those unknown unknowns, to learn the applications of tools you haven't yet been made aware of?

They must be willing to eat their own dog food or else the question won't make any sense for the interview.

The department should run the interviews through their own employees first. If some questions cause an "interview anti-loop" (a set of other employees S who would not hire E) it's time to revise those questions.

Revise and rehearse these practice interviews within the department, and do it blind, until all of S are willing to "hire" each other for their respective roles.

>"Take home" questions are heavily biased in favor of the employer because they're not required to put anything on the line.

Not to mention it doesn't test the collaboration aspects of real work. Imagine doing your job but you're not allowed to talk to your teammates in case of a blocker. How are we doing our jobs here?

But when it comes down to actually starting them, I will always pass if they come before any interviewing round. You don't yet have a stake in the process.

> People easily identify that white-boarding interviews suck for more than just the interviewee. And yet any time a solution is proposed that involves doing something other than putting the candidate in a room in front of a whiteboard for an hour, it's shot down.

Most people take issue with the repetition of similar tests and evaluations for multiple companies. If A, B, and C were considered different stages of a technical interview, candidates are repeating A and B too often, whereas applying A and B once would suffice for several companies.

It's a problem that is realized when opportunity cost is compounded when interviewing multiple companies and it's not something that a single company alone can fix. A more "Docker-ish" solution where using one of "A" to lay the foundation for many company interviews (and not just the ones expecting you to practice Leetcode) might curtail the problem of using more time and resources than necessary.

But more than that, there is also a cognitive dissonance with the beliefs of how to reform a broken system. Programmers largely oppose industry-wide regulation while also expecting the vetting process to be more consistent and make more sense. This is a tough nut to crack because we seemingly want to have it both ways.

It's kind of a blessing in disguise that we live in the heaviest terrestrial planet in the solar system. It's like learning how to climb by starting with the most difficult mountain. You don't need as much energy to escape the gravity of the other planets and moons, and therefore can take less outlay of fuel with you for the return trip.

Side question: How is relocation going to work (for the larger companies) when shelter-in-place is in effect?

A situation like this one may actually speed up the need for many business to digitize their business models.

I try to use referrals whenever I can. A few years ago got one which lead to two on-site interviews. Lately though people have been giving me the cold shoulder on LinkedIn or email, understandably they are tired of being pestered about jobs.

I don't socialize often to begin with but I always separate people into "family or friend" or "professional" buckets, never mixing the two.

I'm not concluding that it's simply ageism, because this is feedback I'm getting from mock interviews, not real ones. Professionals tend to be more honest and open about how you interview if it's just for practice.

However the fact that you are using numbered levels instead of broader decscriptors like "junior" and "senior" means that we are thinking on different wavelengths. I guess you're talking Google-ese because it is harder to know what is "L3" without context.

I have obtained various kinds of feedback and working on some of my weaknesses, but "underqualified" and "repeating the same basic experience many times" are the most common themes.

I live in Chicago, and will email you soon.

If I consistently fail interviews then it's reasonable for me to conclude that I really could be an imposter. But I have gotten interviews from many places small and big, including some FAANGs and Bay Area companies.

If it's just first impressions then I could be like a decent TV show but with a bad pilot. Seems like I might be an "acquired taste" kind of professional.

I have "hobby" experience in React, Vue and Node if that counts. My resume contains a Github link plus one open source contribution on a React-based project. I just don't put them in my LinkedIn profile because it would be confusing to say "I know XYZ" in a professional profile but cannot list XYZ for something I did at work.

I think I've seen that roadmap diagram before and I notice that in every place I've worked/contracted at, their skills needs usually stop short after the "Version control" part. They don't do packages, modules and I am left in the dark about the deployment process. And I don't know if that lack of transparency of SDLC is done to me on purpose since for a long time I've been a contract dev hired to do some specific thing.

However, not everyone is privileged enough to go through the "standard techie" experience. Some of us never even heard about Leetcode until long after graduation, some of us only have experience in companies that don't believe in concepts like testing and good security.

Looks like the ideal places for me are somewhere that bridges the gap between the haves and the have-nots. A place that still has legacy work to be done but also is up to speed with newer things in other aspects. Does working at traditional F500 companies cut it?

> it seems to me that the real reason you are having a hard time finding a "job" is because you have a history of leaving jobs after a short tenure.

Brevity is to be expected in contract jobs. But I don't know if you are purposely trying to discourage me from finding salaried work which is my main goal.

I actually don't like freelancing at all, I prefer lower risk than freelance, and it is not paying me well anyways. No exact numbers but I made under 5 figures last year. Not really great for a US freelancer. I only do this to make some ends meet while I'm searching for a FT job.

A remark about the unrelated tip: A good chunk of companies, if not the majority, out there are looking for "just a programmer", noted by how much they advertise and place emphasis that you must know specific languages and software tools (especially if React or Java is gonna be part of your job title), over broader concepts like design patterns and algorithms.

This can be a problem when you want to sell yourself as a proper SWE, when the people in charge of the hiring pipeline only understand simple pattern-matching for "React Wizard with 5 years experience". And you can't be too picky about where you want to work, even though they might continue to be picky for employees. It unfortunately makes it so you either already have to already be a very good match for their specific needs, or you are compelled to lie on your resume.

I have been laid off just before 2015 and I haven't found any stable work since then. I have been under-employed for a long while before the outbreak, and I don't even know what new change-ups in job hunting I should be doing now.

For a long time, many people have said that my years of experience make me valuable so that I should have gotten offers very quickly, but the reality hasn't shown that. Heck, even the founder of the startup company has told me, when I asked for his reference, that he was "very confused" that I haven't found any work for so long. And that was only a year in.

He unfortunately can't give me work anymore as he's tied up with his business. He did consider me for a follow-up freelance job before, but that was more due to a technicality that they needed a US developer for a particular job.

After being evaluated on mock interviews, turns out I'm in the peculiar situation where I am too underqualified for my years. But at least I have some experience working remote that should make me more appealing to employers.

I just can't call it impostor syndrome anymore if I consistently fail at getting full-time offers even when the economic climate was good.

Location: Chicago, IL USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Depends on location

Technologies:

(professional) JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, PHP, C#, MonoGame, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, WebGL, Three.js, CSS, SASS, HTML

(amateur) C, C++, Ethereum, Embedded, Node.js, React, Vue

Resume/CV: Available upon request

Email: chris.cajas.m -at- gmail.com

Github: https://github.com/ccajas

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/chriscajas

Mostly a web developer with a few years of remote work experience. Also willing to return working on-site and full-time. Aside from delivering many websites and web applications over the years, I have also professionally contributed on two indie games that were launched on Steam.