[lovich]

Do you think you’re a productive and valuable employee with marketable skills?

If the answer was yes, why do you think we’re in a situation where you need to dedicate that much of your own free time, sans compensation, just to make yourself attractive to companies so you can at best fall back on temporary employment?

I do not mean to attack you personally, but your comment is incredibly black pilling and dystopian to me. It’s seems like every year we are going to be asked to do more, get culled if we don’t, and half of the commentary from our community is about how you can avoid the yearly culling by working even harder.

[JustExAWS]

Who said anything about working harder?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089377

The company gets a simple deal from me. They put the amount of money in my account they agreed to every month and in return they get 40-45 hours a week from me and all of my experience and skills.

They want me to fly out to a customer’s site or sit on a zoom call to close a deal? They got me. They want me to lead a large cloud implementation? No problem. They want a 50+ page management consulting style assessment with pretty diagrams? Say the word. They have a customer with an empty AWS account and they want someone who can do AWS architecture from the “DevOps” [sic] perspective and development? Say the word.

What they don’t get from me is burnout, time away from my wife and exercise in the evening, weekends or on call work. They get 40-45 hours of work from me.

It doesn’t take that much time to write down a summary of what you accomplished every quarter and keep an updated resume and in my case go on LinkedIn and post a banal “thought leadership” bullshit post once a quarter to keep me on the top of people’s mind if things go sideways at my current employer.

I would much rather be in my position where interviewing means some behavioral questions and talking to people than having to grind leetcode and reverse a btree on the whiteboard.

[lovich]

Respectfully, You are not putting in 40--45 hours a week if you are

>I’m 51 and I stay interview ready. My resume and my career documents are updated quarterly and I keep my network warm.

All of the extra bits of work you have to do outside of the 40-45 to stay "interview ready" count as work, youre just not getting paid.

Speak to other professional fields about the requirements they have for getting a job. Even in ones where there is an expectation of continuing education like for doctors, that is usually covered both in time and money by the employers of said doctors, not just something they are expected to moonlight on.

The other professions are even more agahst when they hear things like having to go through 10 round interviews or being grilled on the same set of college basics that dont get used in the day job, as a part of every single interview

At some point since the dotcom bubble, employers figured out a way to convince software engineers that since a bunch of nerds who were interested in this skillset as a hobby were doing it in their free time, the rest of us should be doing that too

[JustExAWS]

How much extra time do you think it takes to summarize what you did at the end of a project? I do that anyway on the job during working hours to prepare for performance reviews and put it in our performance tracking system.

The banal “thought leadership” posts I’ve done on LinkedIn was also done during working hours. It’s encouraged at my level as marketing for the company and it also helps me.

I work remotely, do you really think I don’t do all this during working hours?

> Speak to other professional fields about the requirements they have for getting a job. Even in ones where there is an expectation of continuing education like for doctors, that is usually covered both in time and money by the employers of said doctors, not just something they are expected to moonlight on.

We get $1000 per completed professional AWS certification and a few others the first time and renewal and have time to study between projects. Even when I didn’t work in consulting and working in product companies - the last one as the lead architect - I took time during working hours to study.

You did see where I said I haven’t done a side project outside of work for my entire 30 year career?

> The other professions are even more agahst when they hear things like having to go through 10 round interviews or being grilled on the same set of college basics that dont get used in the day job, as a part of every single interview

My interview at AWS was one full day and five rounds of behavioral questions. But all of my other interviews were two rounds and then an offer. The last two companies I worked for before AWS, it was talking to the director and CTO about business outcomes and strategy and my previous experience. Do you really think high up people in their 40s are going to ask another 49 year old to balance an AVL tree?

[lovich]

Well then congratulations, you seem to have progressed high up enough in your career to not have to deal with that.

I have literally never had an interview process with a company consist of less than 4-5 hours of interview rounds or an equivalent sized take home project. Roughly 50-60 interview cycles over 12 years. That includes companies where I was referred in by the hiring manager.

[MarcelOlsz]

Tell me about it. I'm in the 9th circle of interview hell and if I wrote a blog post about my recent experiences it would die as a [flagged] post because it seems too made up.

[lovich]

I just today spoke with a recruiter for a position that is 3 steps back in my career, but asking for more skills than I have.

The compensation is also going back about 5-6 years in nominal payment, not even accounting for inflation. It’s titled and compensated like what looks to me a 3-6 year in their career senior engineer working at a successful but not mag7 level company like a DraftKings.

They won’t even move to the first stage of the interview process until their CTO has personally read and approved it.

At this point I’m more mystified as to why everyone’s wasting their time like this on filtering. I can’t see a rational situation where it’s worth executive time to bother filtering for a role that’s so minor to the organization, but that’s the circus we’re in now so I guess I’ll jump through the hoops

[Daishiman]

> If the answer was yes, why do you think we’re in a situation where you need to dedicate that much of your own free time, sans compensation, just to make yourself attractive to companies so you can at best fall back on temporary employment?

Do you think good products just sell themselves? Do you think marketing departments exist because companies love to waste money? There's your answer.

[danaris]

Do you understand that what you're saying is that in order to be hired, you not only need all the skills needed to do the job, but also all the skills of a full-fledged marketing department, regardless of whether the job requires any of that?

Some of us think that's top-shelf bullshit.

[Daishiman]

Yes. Because knowing the job and showing people you know the job are two complementary skillsets. Spends some time working with technically-illiterate managers and clients and you'll see. Don't do it and you'll be left hanging wondering why people can't see your brilliance and competence.

I'm sorry you don't live in the world you'd like to live in but that's life. Been at this game for 25 years and it has never been different.

[JustExAWS]

Look up the concept of “luck surface area”.

https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/surface-area-of-luck

It’s about doing the work and telling people you do the work. It was never my intention to land in BigTech at 46. I was actively opposed to it because I didn’t want to move from my big house in the burbs and we were fine. I had spent the last seven years at startups leading projects and “transformations”, learning AWS and updating my LinkedIn profile. AWS reached out to me in 2020 (as has GCP since I left but I rather get an anal probe with a cactus than go to BigTech again and I’m damn sure not going into an office) and I said why not interview?

While I was there, I was building a network with coworkers and clients, learning how strategic consulting works on the highest level, contributing to an official very popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche. Releasing my own open source solutions in their official repository, did a couple of blog post that are still on their website, etc.

When Amazon started Amazoning, I waited for my severance offer and had multiple job offers within two weeks with a $40k+ severance in the bank just by reaching out to my industry contacts I had made.

It may be bullshit. I might think gravity is bullshit. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to jump off of a 25 story building out of defiance. I play the game because I have an addiction to food and shelter.

[sfn42]

How are employers supposed to know you're productive and valuable if you won't even maintain a decent resume?

Honestly you come off as whiny and entitled, everyone has to present themselves through a CV. If you want to stand out you need to put some work into it.

I work as a consultant/contractor, so I am actively encouraged to polish my resume during work hours. You could look into the same if you also want to be paid to polish your resume. I don't see why other kinds of employers would want you to work on it, the only thing you could use it for would be to leave them.

[lovich]

Maintaining a resume is burying the lede. Being "interview ready" in software means maintaining a separate set of skills that are rarely used in the day to day.

When companies are asking for people to reverse red black trees and then turn around and expect their employees to hook up wordpress sites, or build generic REST based CRUD apps, they are implicitly putting the burden of training on the employees.

I posit that the software field is one of the worst fields when it comes to this

[sfn42]

I have never been asked to reverse a red black tree. Maybe they all do that in SV but in my corner of the world I haven't seen nor heard about anyone doing that. I've been asked to write a class to store Car objects and get them by plate number and some stuff like that. I've been asked to write a simple tax calculator with the specific tax rules and brackets provided.

I thought these were perfectly reasonable tasks, certainly within my capabilities. To me, being "interview ready" is simply being competent at my job. Nobody's expecting me to memorize obscure algorithms that I could just look up if I needed them. They're just asking me to demonstrate that I can solve a simple task by programming. That's totally fair, I wouldn't want to work with the people who went through 3 years of university (and even years of actual work afterwards) without learning how to solve these kinds of basic tasks.

I don't even remember what a red black tree is, I think they were covered in our DSA class but not much. Despite that I think I could give a pretty solid go at reversing one, given an implementation and maybe a summary of how it works. I wouldn't mind getting that task, sounds like a fun challenge. Maybe I'd complete it in 30 minutes, maybe I wouldn't, in either case I'm sure I'd be able to show that I'm pretty good at programming. That's all I've ever needed for my interviews. Haven't done an interview that hasn't resulted in a job offer.

Meanwhile I see all you people on the internet complaining that interviews are so unfair and require this "interview prep", so I'm left to conclude that either employers in my country are way less selective than they are in yours, or you're only applying to the most selective employers, or you're simply exaggerating the difficulty of the interviews. If you want to work at Google earning $500k then you're going to have to be exceptional. For everyone else there's plenty of very lucrative jobs that aren't nearly as hard to get. And if you can't even get those then maybe you're just not particularly good?

[lovich]

I’m not young or new to the industry. Not every place is this bad but it’s still highly common to get asked questions that seek to test out how many algorithms you’ve memorized.

This is not 500k/yr jobs but 150-250k year jobs where companies try to ape the practices of mag7 but fail at it because they are unwilling to implement fundamental aspects of those processes.

I also(until this current economy, lol) didn’t really ever have a problem crossing this barrier and getting jobs. But I still hate the extra effort needed and the extra hours of my personal life I have to sacrifice to brush up on or keep up to date on skills that the employers have, in my experience, never once had me use or even worse, blocked my efforts on working on tasks that would make use of the skill.

I grin and bear it because the moneys worth it but I think it’s inefficient posturing done to filter out social classes at this point, like how unpaid internships are used in the finance field

[sfn42]

To be fair, $150k is still a very good salary. That's like 3 times as much as most other people make. So it seems to me like we're still talking about fairly high-tier jobs, where I live most developers make less than $100k. The only devs I know who make north of $150k are self-employed contractors which comes with a lot of downsides.

I can see how it might be frustrating to have to maintain a separate set of skills just for interviews. I just haven't experienced that myself.

[lovich]

High col area, was paying 3 grand per month before utilities for 1000 sq ft and rats. Surroundings are fun at least. 150k is well off still but not secure from financial problems after being out of work for even a few weeks.

Like I said, the moneys worth going through the hoops but it’s aggravating to go through them when I don’t think they are benefiting anyone, even the employer.

I also felt this way when I was on the other side of the table doing hiring mind you.

[JustExAWS]

I explicitly said “being interview ready” for me was not doing coding interviews on the whiteboard. It was being able to talk about my past accomplishments and how I would benefit the company.

Yes I am self aware enough to realize that I have been able to avoid that because I was 50 years old when I interviewed last year, with industry experience, connections and AWS ProServe.

But on the other hand, cry me a river that younger developers must prepare for coding interviews for a few months and make $160k+ straight out of school. A former intern I mentored when they were an intern and when they came back is now 25 years old and making over $200K as an SA at AWS.

I am not at all bitter. I am happy for all of the up and coming fresh college grads I met when I was there.

[JustExAWS]

While I have never been encouraged to work on my resume on the job, I have been paid to post to the company’s blog and various “thought leadership” posts to LinkedIn and at a previous company open source work.

While it was marketing for them, it also helped build my visibility