Here's a brief description of my timeline from beginning to present:
- 1.5 years contract-to-hire SWE (W2 never actually happened)
- 3 months full-time W2 work, followed by 6 months unemployed
- 10 years independent contract work (freelancing)
- 2.5 years of no work, and a lot of job searching
The last 5 years of independent contract work have been very sporadic. During this time I typically made under $10k every year. I don't really know how to "put myself out there" as a freelancer, and after 10 years of doing it, I just want to go back to W2 as a FT employee.
My tech job skills include, PHP, MySQL, vanilla JS and jQuery. I don't know testing, cloud, or CI/CD practices. Jobs involve building small scale websites- at first only WordPress and eCommerce sites but around year 5 become more much web app SaaS-focused.
I have spent a very long time without work because I don't really know how to fit myself into other places with such a skill set. I get interviews and then get rejected for not being good enough. But these are the skills I have the most experience in by far. I don't have any other job skills that come close. I don't have close friends and relatives who have a good pulse on the tech industry. I do have a Github portfolio- it's not very "hot" or "trendy" tech but just things I do them because I enjoy doing them.
What other good options do I have? It doesn't have to be highly relevant to work I've done in the past. Anyone have any ideas of what I can or should do?
A side note: I've been working remote since 2013 (may explain a lot about my how my career has went) and am pretty good with maintaining a schedule and discipline around WFH.
- You have not worked for 2.5 years. That is a big gap and you need to be explain it well. Unfortunately there is lot of competition these days and anyone with that large of a gap without a good and reasonable explanation will find it difficult.
- You have never seemed to hold a proper W2 job and if you now are looking for one, you have to make that case which is not easy. For example, what happened with that 3 months full time W2 and then unemployed ? Did you quit yourself ? Were you let go/laid off/fired ?
I think your biggest challenge is that you have technically "worked" for over a decade but seems like you don't have much to show for it unfortunately. This is where most employers may get a pause.
Good news it that PHP, vanilla JS/jQuery etc are very much in demand. You need to be more focussed in your approach and fix the negatives. Perhaps go back to one of our freelance clients and ask for a job if they are hiring ? You need to have someone vouch for you since you have been out there for a long time. Then go from there.
I hope this was helpful and not overly critical. Just trying to give it to you straight.
"I had bitcoin and like climbing rocks and doing stuff, now I don't have any bitcoinlololol"
and it was totally fine. People just want to see if you will flinch.
God forbid people save up a bunch of money and decide to not work for a year or two.
God forbid people have health issues that keep them from working.
God forbid people lose their job, struggle at finding a new one - not because they're incompetent but because they're terrible at job hunting. Or because the job loss triggers mental health issues (which you can't get addressed because you don't have a job and lots of mental health professionals either don't touch anyone on insurance period, or they don't touch people on the subsidized healthcare plans.)
Employers: "WE CAN'T FIND ANYONE TO WORK FOR US!"
Employee with a 2.5 year gap: "Uh, hi?"
Employers: "Not you."
That's interesting. My assumption is that you would need to work so that you can save a bunch of money.
Judging solely from your "resume", OP, you are in a very good position.
Try looking around Craigslist too for local companies hiring developers. That's how I got my start ~10 years ago making $70k or so. If you have any code you can share, try emailing the CEO/CTO directly explaining your interest and sharing your resume and code.
And always ignore the exact qualifications listed and apply anyway. You don't know what the candidate pool looks like for a company and listings tend to inflate what they need or can get.
Happy to chat more in email (see my HN profile) since I was in a somewhat similar place as you, OP, years ago.
Anyone, not just OP welcome to message me.
Here's the funny thing- My best career years were at jobs I found on Craigslist. They still paid pretty low next to decent traditional job sectors (banking, logistics, etc) that hire devs, but WLB was usually very good. I felt lucky to have worked at a web agency that, while not very reputable, at least didn't work their engineers to the bone at late hours.
Then I tried to "level up" around 2015-16 moving to major corporate listings on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Angel.co for startups etc, and was taken aback at how the jobs market there showed no mercy to me. I was striking out every time.
Falling behind in web tech most likely also had something to do with it, but in any case, it made my plans for a better future more difficult. I was on and off with attempting that side of the market, hence the sporadic nature of my freelance jobs in the late 2010's.
I live in a non-tech MCOL metro area. Is CL still ripe for dev work in 2022? I stopped using it after 2014 but I have noticed back then that listings were starting to dry up.
Other ideas: Would you also suggest consultancies and body shops like Accenture and Deloitte? Or would that be too out of my league? I'm just curious on the "they hire anyone with a degree" stereotype and curious to test how accurate that is.
I will message you later if I have any more questions that might come up.
The job in that link is a junior job. I'm pretty open to reverting to a junior W2 job, with a modest (but not too low) salary, BUT it does raise the concern of presenting myself to employers.
I already know that a lot of employers will see 10 years experience and applying to junior jobs as a big red flag. Do I just present myself with a shorter resume, with less experience? Navigating the jobs market when you're stagnating 10 YOE and "expert beginner" is a big headache.
Resume: Just make it tight and to the point. In interviews, press that you can solve their problems and work well with their team. Avoid companies that want live-coding whiteboard interviews and focus on ones that do take-homes or other assessments to ensure you are a good fit.
Having read a few of your responses, you seem to be over-thinking it. You need to just get in a role, start performing and start working your way up. Don't be afraid to switch jobs at the 1-year mark as opportunities arise if they don't value your growth and contributions, but try to avoid leaving a job < 1 year unless it turns out to be a bad fit and/or unsupportive.
Do you get contacted by recruiters? It's in their interest to be honest to you about your chances, they might be able to provide good feedback or even direct you to companies that fit you.
- Look for PHP/Laravel Jobs in your area
I love the so called TALL stack (Tailwind, AlpineJS, Laravel, Livewire) which is extremely easy to use and allows you to build modern reactive apps. So if you want to work fullstack but don't want to learn a Javascript framework like React or VueJS, maybe check out Livewire, too. Tailwind is IMO the defacto way of writing CSS these days. There's tons of material on that out there, too.
Also, please excuse me from going on a tangent here. I have some kind of paranoia about picking a library or framework for a job, only for it to fall in demand soon after. Like how can I tell if some framework like Laravel is in the twilight years or not? My MVC of choice in 2012 was CodeIgniter. Nobody really uses that anymore. Not a good thing for my career. I just have an irrational fear of just picking the "late" thing again. Like the same fear some people get that every stock they buy in the stock market causes the price to go down.
On the JS side of things, I picked up VueJS and React for some side projects. I'm probably more up to date on VueJS though. (another dev informed me that my React project's code is 6 years out of date and nobody really codes React like that anymore)
Over my life, I've gone deep down countless of such "dead ends". The same goes for most distinguished people I've worked with. Except they're not necessarily dead ends - syntax and APIs aside, so many concepts, practices and thinking can translate across. Ideally focus on first principles.
Being comfortable with picking up some new obscure thing, getting up to speed quick, and then moving on to the next one after x days/weeks/months/years, is one of several distinguishing aspects of a veteran.
That doesn't mean you should scurry around drilling down on random things for the sake of it, rather that a curious and fearless approach will naturally bring you there over time.
Maybe set aside x hours per week for some small personal project where you apply new technologies to get familiar with them and the process. For example Laravel, or whatever else seems relevant or fun to you. Move on to adding on some new frontend library like React or Vue or whatnot. If nothing else it should make you feel more comfortable during interviews.
Most of my work experience has been in Java, Javascript, and Python. I took a Ruby job, and there was a small ramp up period but its not insurmountable.
Experience shipping production code should be teaching you many skills and thought processes that mean the actual specific tool shouldn't matter much.
An incomplete list of tech I know that became pretty much useless: VB6, perl (controversial?), classic ASP, director/shockwave, actionscript 1/2/3, flex, silverlight, GWT, ember, XSLT.. And there must be more!
The good thing is, learning most of this stuff is free and easier than ever before. The big problem is picking something; if it takes 2-3 months to learn you want that to lead to at least 6 months of decently paid work.
Client side web stuff moves ridiculously quickly, but if I were you I'd probably learn React and something like Next JS or Gatsby. You'll be up against bootcamp people in the job market and your broader experience should stand out against them. Pick a common hosted CI service (github actions, circleci, whatever) and learn it in a couple of weekends, the free quotas are plenty for small projects. Learn enough about TDD in your chosen new tech that you can talk about it convincingly and demonstrate proficiency. Often you'll get grilled on it in the interview then find absolutely no sign of it happening once you get the job!
If you want something a bit slower moving, Android and iOS could be good - there's more to learn though, and often you'll end up having to deal with both and/or some hybrid native+HTML/JS monstrosity so that can go from lovely to evil quickly. I really like svelte at the moment, I was lucky to get a project it was a good fit for but it may not be a good "find a job soon" choice. I also have a couple of brightscript (Roku) projects on the go, that's horrible but my client couldn't find anyone else to do the work so I learned it a few years ago. It'll join my list of obsolete tech in the next few years but it's been worth it financially.
[Edit: Also, typescript]
The whole "start entry level, work your way up by impressing" thing doesn't work anymore. These days many companies for most of their entry level workforce just chew people up and spit them out, while fighting for top-skill young talent or older experts.
But fundamentally, if a person has a weak resume, the only way to strengthen it is to do good work that has an impact. Then you get some more bullet points on the resume (and can drop some weak ones).
And if you have a weak professional network, the only way to improve it is to actually work with people and impress them. You can build professional relationships that can lead to new opportunities, even with peers and people junior to you.
Even if you get “spit out” after a year or two, you are better set to get a better job.
This obviously can work because almost everyone starts out with a very weak resume and network. Yet, many people go on to build rewarding careers.
Besides, what do you suggest? Just give up?
Instead, find local meetup groups of businesses and start making connections. Be the local business doing this.
"I'm a master craftsman but I don't know how to use a jigsaw, plane a table top, and also I'm missing my dominant hand."
First, be honest with yourself and your skills, then re-craft your résumé.
Honest to god though? Build a fake e-commerce store in Gatsby that isn't shitty, then get back to interviews. But this time you're "web developer".
And I still don't feel I can adequately call my self an engineer.
I feel like I can't call myself an engineer cause while I'm a decent doer who executes well, I am not the one coming up with high level plans of architecture. I've never been put on the spot.
I would not encourage anyone who's cash strapped to do either of these.
It's easy to learn new tech online if you're motivated.
Although I don't know what to say as much if you're not motivated.
If they offered better financing plans or some "pay back after employment" arrangement, I might consider.
You're still ahead of most graduates because your resume has experience. You just need to commit a solid month of learning to bring it up to date.
There is nothing wrong with Vanilla JS and the rest of those skills.
Pretty specific advice! Blockchain does seem to have a lot of remote-first jobs, so it is good for that. But there is quite a learning curve from basic web development, so it will take some investment in time and courses.
A great way to do that is build a clone of some aspect of their product or business. This will prepare you for the interview and job like an insider. You'll be able to talk about the parts of the product that were hard and why. Then all of a sudden your interview is just a good conversation.
Force yourself to do it the way an actual engineering organization does it, too.
If you aren't sure _how_ engineering teams organize projects, deployments, testing, etc then do a lot of googling and even reach out directly to CTOs, PMs, Senior devs, etc at different companies and just explain your exact situation - even link to this thread.
Lots of people are willing to take the time to help especially if it is as simple as saying... "At company X we do Y and Z" and then that gives you another thing to dig into. And you've potentially made a helpful contact/mentor.
It sounds like you don't have a lot of extra time to develop yourself into the perfect candidate for your maybe dream job, so for now you could probably pay the bills using freelancing job sites and offering IT/web dev help to local small businesses.
I assure you, there are lots of companies right now with a roster of junior developers who are looking for a sage graybeard (if you are nearing 30 that is close enough) on the cheap, so embrace that role and angle yourself for it. Focus on your product and customer expertise and not the tech stack. Find the unsexy companies, plenty still operate remotely.
For me, I got a job at an old PHP shop and after 8 mo. upgraded with a big salary boost to a React/Python role, both languages I picked up while job hunting. The biggest challenge for me? Getting comfortable with the GitHub workflow and working on a bigger team was a bigger shift than learning a language, so I would recommend sticking with PHP for now and find a job where you can get comfortable with that side of things first.
The monthly HN job thread is a pretty good mix of companies so give that a shot.
If you would like to chat tomorrow, feel free to join https://larachat.slack.com/ so we can talk.
I'm using the same nickname.
Have no worries; we will make it.
1. maintain and update the main websites
2. administer other IT-related systems on-campus (may require brushing up on some Linux or Windows Server skills)
3. help with the coding side of their research
There's a lot of low-hanging fruit available when it comes to coding needed for a research grant. Sometimes it's just standing up a basic website for a lab, but you'd be invaluable if you were able to help someone scrape together their pile of perl/R/python scripts into something that can be be hosted on a website. And IMHO the bar for quality is usually quite low -- many labs just want to have enough to earn/fulfill a grant and then move you on to the next project.
I'll warn you that there's not a strong career path available for software developers in Academia at the moment. So you may eventually need to break out. But it strikes me as a viable way to get a few years of real software dev experience working on interesting projects which would definitely put you in a better spot to branch out elsewhere.
- Have a professional review your CV / resume. It's a numbers game. You need more interviews, or perhaps more appropriate ones. A goid resume / CV won't get you hired. It just needs to get you an interview.
- Work on your interview skills. If you're getting interviews then at least some believe you're qualified. The disconnect seems to be at the fit / culture level. When possible, record your interviews and then go back and listen to see where you can improve.
- Looking into volunteering to do WordPress for a non-profit or two. That's worth listing on your resume. Perhaps revist your GH repos, make sure they reflect you and your coding skills.
- You were taking care of a sick family member
- You became a stay-at-home parent to support your spouse
- You were full-time contracting
Keep it simple. 99% of the time it’s not an issue if the excuse is reasonable and your delivery is confident. The more personal the issue, the less likely they will probe.
Can’t change the past of course but seems like you should take this time to also build something and learn in addition to job searching.
If it's a matter of not knowing where to start, I'd say start by looking at what the job listings are asking for. And then beyond that, HN is a good source for keeping a general "pulse" on the industry; that's the main reason I'm on here.
Nothing's standing in your way, you just need to seek out and learn about the current landscape. You're in a perfectly fine position to do so.
Creative Tim which now is at $1.7 million got it's start by I think 3 self taught front end coders as they wanted a killer resume to go after smaller clients.
So they started building UI kits some free ones that point to paid ones business model.
Not saying that you would get to $1.7 million.
However, given you already have half the work done in that you already know jquery and JS. Why not build two smallish UI kits to teach yourself design and put both the free kit and the paid kit out there.
Yes, it is more work than probably what others are suggesting.
But, quite frankly if you can empathy for other humans; YOU can IN FACT DESIGN awesome websites. You just have never push towards as of yet.
Times are a changing, it's no longer enough to code as one has to do the human other side of the equation.
Try to get into https://www.codeable.io/. Haven’t tried personally yet, but might in the future.
Have a look at low-code/nocode tools and become an expert in one of them (Shopify, Wix, Webflow, Zapier, etc.)
Concentrate on landing pages and reach out to marketing agencies to ask if you can contract with them. Might be the easiest way to get a fulltime job as well.
Ignore the requirements and simply apply for some of the job ads. Especially for older big companies, many of them are likely to run on your stack and simply put things like cloud in because the hiring manager has heard that’s what they need to do.
Just some ideas, hope this helps.
Apparently, you took a "sabbatical" to find your true purpose in life or whatever, so you took a long break from working.
But you have experience with PHP and jquery, the foundations of WordPress, which is hosting a large part of all enterprise homepages and newspaper websites.
I'd say do a few freelance homepage projects for small companies to show off that you still have all necessary skills and then you can approach a potential employer to level up to larger and more difficult projects.
If you phrase it correctly, seeking a challenge will make you look motivated and energetic, i.e. like a great employee.
https://wpengine.com/partners/agencies/
Hope to chat!
1) Make a good resume. 2) Work on GitHub portfolio, they need to know what you are capable to do (this is really important) 3) Don't be afraid to apply as much as you can!
If you don't know where to apply, well there are tons of job boards nowadays, check out this great resource, a curated list of the best job boards out there that I am building: https://jobboardsearch.com
Good luck :)
Like has been pointed out elsewhere; if this was carpentry, these would be new words to make "cutting, masking, and gluing" sound modern.
For web frontends, everyone is self-taught, just like all carpenters are self-taught on the job (or as apprentices). Degrees are used as filters and for gatekeeping.
I work as a PM at Webflow with many freelancers who say “First I made websites. Then, I made apps. Now, I’m back to making websites. And, it’s great.”
Developers often overlook low-code. But, their experience lets them dissect the tools super quickly and become incredibly productive.
Feel free to reach out to me - philip.thomas at webflow.com
Remember how fun this job used to be? Design meetings in pubs that included a go at Space Invaders, enabling all sorts of solutions that brought smiles instead of KPI's.
A lot of it was because we were in the Frontier, things built from chicken-wire and duct tape, we had the who, thanks to Usenet and Fidonet, who gave us the where, and we had that common why of being evangelists of a new era. There was no money but that was because there were no VCs, we were free, in the GNU sense
That today pretty much describes the Fediverse and ActivityPub, and the dawning need by non-technical folk that thinking small and 'local' is smarter than surveillance capitalism running recommendation algorithms only machines understand.
So it's just like the world we know, only it includes golang
Not that I've found any work there yet. It just feels way better than tunneling through superlatives on LinkedIn.
