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by darksaga 5207 days ago
As someone who just went through this, I had a similar experience. I was on contract through January. January comes around and I figure I'll have a gig no problem. As a front-end developer, I already had recruiters knocking down my door.

A month later, I finally landed a gig. I had a few offers, but over the course of a month, I had more frustration with people I was interviewing. Three places I interviewed with weren't looking for a front-end guy, they were looking for a Javascript programmer (my goal wasn't to write JS 7 hours a day - sorry). Also, I had several instances where the company had no idea what they were looking for. One company said they wanted someone who did a lot of server sided Javascript (node.js and backbone.js) as well as being a great designer. Seriously? WTF?

I agree that most of the interviews I excelled at, was where I got up and showed the company the app I just helped build. As opposed the the "code quizzes" a lot of places now use. I actually stopped a guy in one interview who kept asking me basic CSS stuff and said, "Did you even look at the sites in my portfolio or my personal site I built?"

All in all, it was very frustrating and I felt like I really had to go way out my way to try and convince people of my skill level. At other times, I was trying to pry out of them what they were really looking for.
1 comments
mechanical_fish 5206 days ago
Your story sounds… normal? This is how interviewing works, especially if you know what you want. It's a two-way street. Most jobs are pretty lousy, and even the great ones often don't fit you. You need to interview them and figure out whether or not their job is worth taking, then turn it down and move on.

(This is especially true for folks who program Javascript in 2012. It's a field in enormous flux.)

In many fields, it's normal for interviewing to take months. They warned us grad students to expect to spend a minimum of three to six months looking for Ph.D.-level jobs, because you tend to be searching among a fairly small pool of employers who are looking for folks with specialized training very similar to yours.

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