Usually I have considered internal recruiters from larger companies to be more serious than the typical messages from third party agencies who don't even disclose the name of the company you represent. I didn't know they do the same "spray-and-pray" tactics, but if that is true, that is rather disappointing to know, that they have gotten as flaky as agency recruiters.
What's interesting to me, though is that I've had far better experiences with Amazon's recruiting staff. They were very responsive, usually replying to my questions in the same day, and have gotten in the running for interviews twice with them. I have been as far as being selected for the on-site interview round, but made the mistake of saying I am not yet prepared to travel there at the time.
MSFT did not set me up with a programming test, just something to fill out. The pre-screening document was a questionnaire asking various background-related things like, what is your expected salary, have you worked for mS before, what project or accomplishment are you most proud of, etc. I guess they just didn't like my answers, and am more likely to be considered by Amazon than MS. In any case, I become a "cold" candidate very quickly in the MS recruiting radar.
To be honest, I would rather take more algorithm-focused interview tests than be filtered through the HR perception that I don't qualify for Programming Language Y because I only have experience with Similar Language X. At least most of the companies that do algorithm-based tests are more agnostic about the languages you have used in the past.
Pair it up with the fact that I never look for jobs until I am let go from a job, and I have a double whammy for "hard sell". Something I didn't know that is a bad idea to do until much later in my career. But hey, it's not like we all know about all the things you should and should not do about careers. I just assumed that the only drawback of not having a job is that you have no income stream coming in.
I am able to get through interview rounds with Amazon, and also have gotten the attention of a few interesting companies from my Github projects. But somehow I do not get a good perception with local companies on my resume. Others have helped me out on fixing my resume and they've told me, it's too aimless. It does not have a clear sense of growth and direction, so I am trying out a new resume hoping that my job-searching experience will improve.
I'm mostly talking about people that, for one reason or another, appear to wander around with no clear career progression or direction, so it looks like they are "junior" in experience despite being "senior" in total years worked.
And I think that re-doing careers by switching professions (as you say, chemist -> QA) is different than re-doing career in the same profession. Something like the former is different because it's easier for companies to treat you as a clean slate if you switch to something that has little overlap with your former profession. But I want that clean slate treatement just re-attempting my profession.
For instance, maybe I want to re-do my entry level years because I never got into Computer Science, and would like to get an internship at a leading tech company, because that is a better start than my reality, which was just graduate with no internships, no support group of professionals, nor recommendations for good companies. It was just me going solo and blindly applying to local jobs at Craiglist for low-budget clients.
So yeah, I'm not talking about career switching into another profession, but more like hitting the reset button on one, to do it better the second time around.
Okay that is helpful. In my experience, this situation -> people that, for one reason or another, appear to wander around with no clear career progression or direction, so it looks like they are "junior" in experience despite being "senior" in total years worked. has always been that the person wandering didn't know what they wanted, and if it had been years, didn't have tools to figure out what they wanted.
I am reasonably certain there are other explanations/causes but the three cases I can recall easily were all that the person got into a career in computer programming because someone one else told them they should. And they stayed employed but they didn't have any idea about what they wanted to do so they changed jobs for all sorts of reasons, a girlfriend, a pay raise, a manager that kept bugging them at the old job. All of the change reasons were external to their career path.
One really wanted to be a musician. They could talk on and on about different styles and influences. They lit up and were on fire. One was lost, they had always had their life planned out for them by others and they followed that plan until it ran out (just after graduate college and get a job). And they never previously had been required to create their own plan. I didn't get to talk with the third person I can remember because they moved on to a new position before I had that chance.
If that resonates with you then my advice is to work on figuring out what you really care about. And I recognize that isn't an easy task, it was simple for me I was fascinated by computers and the systems you could build with them, so much so I build stuff just for fun. But a good way to search for the things that you care about are to explore different things (very hard to do as a single breadwinner in a family). As I told my musician friend, even if you're not an artist with a signed label contract, you have a understanding of what they are going through and you can write code. Can you find ways to help other musicians that way? Or music lovers? Or screenwriters trying to match music to scenes? or hospitality businesses wanting to influence the mood with music? You can get quite meta and still exploit the experience you've developed in an area you care about.
Without an amnesia treatment there is only so much you can reset :-) Mostly folks learn basics about work (its not always fun, how you work can be as important as what you get done, your boss may be an idiot but it doesn't change the fact that they are your boss, etc). So instead of 'resetting' it's more like vectoring. Now that you've been in the career for a while, if you know what you'd like to be then imagine you have reached that point and and then try to imagine plausible steps that you would have had to take to get there.
I am trying to specialize more in graphics, though I still have to figure out how large is my skills gap between "doing solo graphics projects" and "full-time graphics programmer", especially in math. After getting advice on my resume on how to hide the slow career growth, I've been told to spin it to show I am interested in this niche and show direction towards that.
If you had been able to read my un-revised resume, it would probably read like a story that feels the same in the beginning as it is in the end, with no clear conclusion. So I am working on a new version with a different spin.
It's probably better to specialize in business verticals than tech choices, and better to choose something that doesn't have so many kids learning it to build games. YMMV
Thanks for the replies, everyone. Keep them coming! I didn't expect this topic to get this popular.
The reason I asked this question is that I am facing a career slump as a software engineer, and finding out that the software industry is brutal if you don't know how to carve a path for your own career.
And when I mean career slump, I really mean it. I'm living with my mom at age 35 which is quite the opposite of what someone expects of a software engineer at this age. Most people I know are buying/have bought houses and starting families. And I'm not at a point of self-sustainability yet. I can barely keep up with the insurance payments of my own car, and just keep the vision of having my own place to live in (once more, as I lived alone before things got tough) close to my mind. No longer be dependent of my family, get some privacy, some autonomy and instead of living every day switching between errand boy and going to a coffee shop for the free internet, to apply to jobs, or simply taking a break from my parents.
So that's pretty much me right now. I have 10 professional years of a "whole lot of nothing", no big signs of progression, maturity, or taking on more responsibilities. I didn't major in Computer Science, but I still expected my first programming job to be like, getting a mentor, working alongside a group of (in-house!) programmers, being able to ask them many questions and learn all about formal development practices.
Well, I got none of that in the places that I worked at. So seeing your stories gives me a good idea and hope that I can just move on from the past and have better companies approach me with hope and optimism, like I'm a bona-fide junior eager to learn.
Generally speaking there are 3 broad career paths for developers these days:
1. Senior developer/team lead
2. Management
3. Startup founder / worker
==========
Senior dev:
==========
PROS: Actually get to build stuff all day. Fun to program the latest and greatest. Be respected as an expert by your peers. Less meeting and paperwork hassle than other roles.
CONS: Can be sat on by middle management. Often don't get to drive product or strategic decisions. Low salary ceiling. Frustrating to be forced to do things you think are bad ideas.
==========
Management
==========
PROS: Get to make decisions (well, more than people beneath you, anyway). Potential path to the 1%. No more keeping up with the ratrace of programming platforms and languages. Can have a positive impact on the lives of your reports.
CONS: No satisfaction of hands-on product building, just lots of sitting in meetings, sending e-mails and crafting PowerPoints. Sometimes mentally exhausting to babysit your reports. Lots of Game of Thrones-style politics.
==========
Startup founder / worker
==========
PROS: Fun (well, more than corporate jobs). Be your own boss / have more independence. Work on interesting problems. Potential path to fame and fortune.
CONS: 90% likely to fail and put you in debt or company go out of business. Potentially limitless time commitment. Doesn't feel life-fulfilling to work on a company dedicated to disseminating cat gifs (or whatever the startup does).
==========
Ask yourself which of these 3 paths appeal to you the most, then write out a list of what you need to do to get there, potentially.
If you're living with Mom at age 35 however it sounds like you need to move to a big city like San Francisco or New York where they pay developers a lot more, but I don't know what your situation is.
I'm definitely choosing path 1, which is to become a senior dev. I prefer technical-focused jobs. Learn from mentor programmers, get into teams and learn formal development practices, and then help out programmers less experienced than myself. I've never held a senior title, never led a group, nor even been involved with the process of hiring other programmers.
I currently live in Chicago which is pretty good for COL/salary ratio, for the average programmer. Caveat: I am not average. I consistently get offers from very low paying jobs- as in "$25/hr on a contract" low. This comes from the tendency to being let go from jobs without having another one lined up, so I never could afford to wait much longer for a better offer to use as leverage. Also, I don't qualify for unemployment insurance.
That has put me in the bottom 15-20% of local jobs by total compensation. If I were to restart as a junior programmer at one of the better companies, I'd actually be getting paid somewhat more than at my last job (and with insurance benefits for once).
In that case, I'd recommend specializing in one particular language/framework/domain.
Whether it's NodeJS, Python, C#, Swift -- pick one and run with it. "General programmer" is fine for management but not great for senior developer.
It seems little odd that at 35 you're still in the $25/hr range. Either you got a late start or maybe there's some soft skills you need to improve (running a meaningful meeting, developing a strong rapport with business partners and management, etc).
>It seems little odd that at 35 you're still in the $25/hr range.
Don't underestimate the negative effects of having no job lined up when you're let go from your current one. You can't realistically negotiate for an ideal salary when you're currently making zero. Taking a less-than-optimal job offer is still better than being homeless, though.
For reference, my first web development job paid $12/hr (part-time) in 2007, in the Chicago area. I found this job by cold-emailing job listings on Craigslist.
Also, I'd like to know if it's possible to change your behavior while still feeling like "yourself". And not feeling fake. I do not like the statement of "faking it till you make it". It makes it sound like you're betraying yourself, and therefore betraying other people because you are not yourself anymore.
If it helps expedite the process of getting an offer, I would go for it. I will not consider it if coaching starts to feel more like a detour than a straight line to getting a job, especially when I am "overdue" for a new job. However, there's also the issue of cost. I only have a few hundred dollars on my account, and life coaching seems too costly to sink into if I go on more meetings.
Job interviews have a great variety. It could be that the variety of job interviews, at least locally, does not easily extend to fit people with my personality type. But I do not consider myself to be one-of-a-kind. I know there are many more like me. I want to find that niche that people like me fit into.
That's understandable. Hard to offer advice without knowing the reasons for the unsuccessful interviews. If you did a few and did not get an offer, that's pretty normal and the solution might be to just keep trying. If you did a dozen and can't see what's holding you back, then maybe you need an outsider's perspective.
Also, move if you can. Do not limit yourself to local opportunities unless you must for family reasons. You will adjust to a new location quickly even if it's intimidating at first.
Very difficult to move with only a few hundred dollars in the bank. Also it's generally not recommended to move to a place where you know very few people or no people, without first having a job lined up.
I feel for you. I have been in that position myself. I have not yet found a great solution. Over time and through several interviews I realized I was not being hired due to my age. I don't know if you are in a protected class, but perhaps you are. We need some kind of blind hiring practices to become the expected standard because illegal discrimination is rampant in tech jobs. It leaves those of us with ample skill unemployed for no good reason and with no access to a strategy that has any hope of working. I'm open to ideas...
This is partially why i've started working on a side project that aims to help developers connect with peers to advance their career. If you're interested, you (or ccdev) can sign up to see what i've built so far at: https://www.coderpact.com
>When you submit your resume to a large tech company on their job site the chances of it getting to a hiring manager are exceptionally slim. If you actually know the hiring manager - or know somebody who knows the hiring manager - your chances are exponentially higher.
This is just from hearsay and personal anecdotes, but many people have experienced that getting attention from big tech companies comes a lot easier as a new grad than as as a more experienced developer a couple years since getting their degree.
College makes it pretty easy to build up a connection to larger companies. If you intern at X, then X is much more likely to give you a job offer. My view is that college is just a means to an end. I agree that just getting a degree doesn't prove much. But what you do in your journey to graduation- that really matters.
Good universities provide many doorways to networking than you don't get as easily afterwards. And it's not just of the professional kind either. How many people have stated how much harder it is to make new friends after college?
Opportunity cost of time is a big one. I personally think it's very dumb that 99% of the time, you must be currently enrolled in college in order to get an internship. On the other hand, I feel like some people do need it despite their experience. There is no age limit to enroll in college, and there is always a ton of stuff that you do not know. There are lots of older people that are dragging their feet, who still need personal mentoring or job training.
Things that you need to master at many job interviews are most fresh in the minds of a recent graduate. Now this is just from reading anecdotes, but people have received more responses from big tech co's as a new graduate than they have after being in several years in the field.
Great post. This is a good breakdown of different niches that I can at least follow as templates for finding related work.
I occasionally run into developers at meetup events who are involved in graphics or data viz and discuss our work. This is how I more commonly get attention from my 3D work, moreso than cold-applying to jobs online.
One of them I met first from seeing his demo work on YouTube and he was equally impressed with mine. He worked in medical imaging technology in his last job and referred me to it, but the company had a change of hiring plans last minute.
For now I say I'm more interested in media agency work. I was brought in for an interview at a small agency that does a mix of animation, VR, motion graphics and web development. They liked my portfolio. But budget issues arose and the hiring was put on hold indefinitely.
So it's just a streak of bad luck I guess. Clearly some people are interested in my work and I just need to find my good luck streak.
What's interesting to me, though is that I've had far better experiences with Amazon's recruiting staff. They were very responsive, usually replying to my questions in the same day, and have gotten in the running for interviews twice with them. I have been as far as being selected for the on-site interview round, but made the mistake of saying I am not yet prepared to travel there at the time.
MSFT did not set me up with a programming test, just something to fill out. The pre-screening document was a questionnaire asking various background-related things like, what is your expected salary, have you worked for mS before, what project or accomplishment are you most proud of, etc. I guess they just didn't like my answers, and am more likely to be considered by Amazon than MS. In any case, I become a "cold" candidate very quickly in the MS recruiting radar.