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.
I would learn (or highlight it if you already know) React.js and Node.js immediately, along with Postgres and MongoDB. That should get a good boost to the resume.
If you are going full stack, you would definitely need to put in AWS, especially micro services and serverless experience along with golang if possible. You can also learn Python if you want to try your hands on Machine learning as well, but I would recommend just focussing on React and Node.js as they are low hanging fruits and there are good enough openings for those two alone..
I have been in your shoes before and I know it could be overwhelming but you can do it.
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?
Adding Salesforce, Docker, AWS, PostgreSQL, mySQL, MS SQL and stuff like that sometimes get scraped as keywords.
Does anyone else think it's crazy that you need to know: React, node, Mongo, AWS, the Python machine learning stack, golang, a bunch of databases, microservice patterns, serverless infrastructure, Docker...to get a job in the tech industry?
Who are the people that actually know all this stuff?
Between my last two roles, familiarity and/or proficiency with the following technologies was required: React/Redux/JS/TS, Node/NPM, PostgreSQL, AWS (specifically Redis, ElasticSearch, Cloudwatch, CodePipeline, Lambda, S3, SQS, and RDS), Kotlin/Java/Spring/Maven/Gradle, C#/ASP.NET/MVC, Python, etc.
As well as testing frameworks / unit testing technologies like Selenium, JMeter, Postman/Chai, and Junit/Nunit/Pytest.
All of this hit me like a brick in the face over a 3 year period. I am NOT a master of any of them, but was definitely expected to be able to readily work with them. At times, it felt like I was supporting 5-6 different roles.
These were two startups with <100 people, so maybe that's why.
True. As if they expect every 80 year olds to be nobel laureates. The thing is those with power to hire are hardly smart people, they just happen to have the power to hire, by chance.
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 wrote "job" because working as a salaried employee is not the only way to make a living, or have a successful career. Consider that the freelance/contractor career you're currently having is 1) a career and 2) might be a better fit for you. Furthermore, some contractors I know make a lot more money than most of my salaried friends. The tradeoff being, of course, that you have no guarantees wrt to steadiness of your income (protip: salaried jobs come with no guarantees either, you could be out the next day, any day) and sometimes you have to chase down projects and deal with bad customers.
Sorry if something came out wrong, English isn't my first language.
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.
I wish you all the best in finding work as quickly as possible, sir.
1) Decide which software engineering related role you want to work on (e.g. web frontends)
2) Enumerate the top skills that are relevant to that role by visiting job postings in companies you would like to work for. e.g.: React.
3) Enumerate the subset of those skills that you have. Those are your strenghts. Work in acquiring the skills you do not yet have. Those are your weaknesses (for now).
4) Visit Linkedin profiles for random employed people in such roles in various companies you would like to work for. Compare that to your own Linkedin profile.
5) In your profile, emphasize your strengths, deemphasize your weaknesses, while working on them in your spare time. And most importantly, list your skills using the skills feature. Recruiters use that to find people.
Personally I think you should leave out all mentions to "looking for a job" and such. That is a red flag. You do not want to tell recruiters that your skills are in low demand.
Also try to keep your job descriptions consistent and relevant to your target role. Rather than "role 1/role 2/role 3", just pick the most favorable/relevant description for role and stick with that.
It usually takes me 1 month to find a job.
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 am not sure what your core skills are, but in my case if I want to go work for a bank, via referral I get an immediate response (and even one other bank intercepts the referral).
Without a referral I don't even get a response.
I don't socialize often to begin with but I always separate people into "family or friend" or "professional" buckets, never mixing the two.
