Some of the oldest web forums (circa '98) I've been to use the nested comment format you see on Reddit or on here. The flat timeline format because much more popular from what I've seen.
Reddit style forums are not great for posts intended to log something in progress (like a computer build) because they require the user to make a new thread multiple times instead of making a new comment that automatically brings the thread back to the first page. But flat list threads are great for that.
They usually try to compromise with comment replies shown in "comment pyramids" but they can get unwieldy quick. It's a reasonable tradeoff for the flat chronological layout.
It's more than a concept. They already exist right now. Amazon has a returnship program for example. "Return to Work" is another name given to them.
I'm interested in how to find them more easily, and from smaller companies. Finding them in general is like a needle in a haystack (as well as discussions about them, apparently)
I stumbled into it by accident as a junior software engineer. They offered me a 3-month contract-to-hire job, but instead it became a 2-year independent contractor job for the company. Most jobs that followed have been cold applying to startup contract jobs from Craigslist or obtaining them from local word-of-mouth. It's very feast or famine, and not everyone can keep the momentum of new clients going. As for myself, I am planning to leave self-employed work for the first time in over a decade, for the relative safety of a full-time job (even with the current market situation).
No detailed plans for retirement. I'd need a new job first, to start saving again and I'll cross the bridge when I get there.
But, it is true that I did not take my career seriously for a long time. I treated it more as just work, with no clear direction, since I didn't understand the fundamental difference between a career and a series of similar jobs. Every new job, I was just hoping for a modest pay raise and learning a new thing or two, and being able to coast when I wanted.
Coasting is probably acceptable once you hit senior level in a well rounded team, but I figured out the hard way it's bad to do as a junior or mid-level.
I've had my resume re-done several times, and took the aforementioned interview prep. Applied to almost a thousand jobs last year alone. It has not made me more employed. And yes, I do want a job handed to me because the lack of progress has made me very desperate.
I don't even trust myself to do the right things anymore. But I now prefer not to learn anything for work unless I am getting paid for it. There's no positive feedback cycle I can find otherwise.
A couple of things:
- If you were actually desperate, you would be trying to find ANY job. Even a minimum wage job because if not, you will be homeless in a month.
> "But I now prefer not to learn anything for work unless I am getting paid for it." - Do you know what compnay pays you to do this? Starbucks!! It takes them 1 hour of training to teach you how to make a frapachino and you'll instantly be productive. For a software compant to teach you from the ground up? MONTHS of investment when they can hire someone else who actually knows their tech stack and have relevent developer experience.
- Ever since the pandemic started and remote development started taking precedence, the amount of competition for tech jobs have skyrockted. But even then, for the past year and a half, we had one of the hottest tech job markets, besides the past 6 months of downtrend. Yet you could not find a single job offer in that time period means, hey sir, you don't have the skillset that a company will pay you to work for. So what does that mean you should do? You should STOP APPLYING like you're trying to win the lottery and actually go learn some software development skills. Learn Python and data structures and algorithms. Learn how to be a GOOD SKILLED developer and not an entitled brat hoping for the easy times like you had it 5 years ago. News flash, the world has changed and either you adapt or you get out of this industry.
I wish you luck and I hope you stop making these kinds of posts because everyone is going to tell you the same thing over and over and over and over and over.
Am confused by your second paragraph. You refer to "easy times" of 5 years ago, but also say "one of the hottest tech job markets" in the past 18 months. Not sure if this is meant to say that today is as good as it was 5 years ago for jobs.
I just can't see myself improving by learning on my own anymore. As another professional told me, "you're practicing, but with no guidance and nobody to step in and let you know when what you're practicing is the wrong approach." And when a person can spend many hours a week with practice and learning and receive the same result - no job offers - as someone who did little-none, it's entirely reasonable to conclude that learning new things is just a waste of time.
I still code once in a while, just to keep busy. Still haven't gotten a good idea of "exchange rate" for employability with the knowledge I obtained from my personal C and JavaScript projects.
I know that many companies won't train you from the ground up, but there are a couple. So I started looking into WITCH and similar consulting firms with a contract training program.
InfoSys and Deloitte have rejected me for some general SWE positions (not language-specific) but there are other similar places. Don't mind if I have to go to one of these body shops, they seem like my best fit for a software job right now.
I'll say I appreciate you taking the time to get me to understand your situation a bit. To clarify, 5 years ago, it was much easier to get a developer job with less experience and less knowledge. Now there is a much higher bar, even though a year ago, there was a high demand for developers, BUT the bar is now raised. A lot of this is because of the emergence of coding bootcamps and the popularity of software development careers in general.
So again, there is unfortunately much more competition and much more to learn and apply to have a stable career in tech.
As for what to practice and learn, I would start off with what you learned from your actual interviews you've had over the past few years. Remember what questions they asked you, and the ones you couldn't answer well. Find out those answers and truly understand why the interviewer even asked you those questions in the first place.
Remember that the job of an interview is to tell that a company is hiring a COMPETENT person who they perceive can do the job. When you can't answer people's questions, they don't perceive you as competent or a good candidate and will find someone else. Your job is to learn how to be competent, to answer common interview questions (basic programming, fizzbuzz, system design, data strcutures and algorithms, etc). You need to be coding more, like literally everyday. There are many coding practice coding sites where they will give you some typical coding problem and you can practice to implement them. Then you can go online to reddit or what not and ask people to review your code. This feedback loop will help you improve and further your chances of not only being a good developer, but ultimately getting a job.
I've had this happen early in my career- worked permatemp as a junior and finding out what I'm allowed to do as a 1099, so I decided to set my own hours. Co-founder of the company wasn't happy about it. He hired me as a contractor and didn't like that I established my rules as a contractor. Odd.
Wasn't just me at this workplace, but all the individual contributors were as well. We saw the writing on the wall, that the co-founders were not interested in full-time conversions and turnover rate increased.
It actually made me question the legitimacy of software careers for a while, because I was caught in this illicit operation.
I think your advice comes from the mistaken assumption that I haven't already looked beyond FAANG companies and startups. Thereby making some of your intentions hard to follow.
You didn't mention if you've been applying for jobs or not. If the advice doesn't apply then you can ignore it. You really can't expect to get specific advice from a post on HN from people who don't know you, or get offended when people who bother to reply at all have to make some assumptions to fill in the blanks. The only appropriate reply is "Thanks for taking the time."
And this is the only top level reply. Interesting.