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What are you trying to get out of a new job? Are you worried your tech skills have atrophied due to your current employer's tech stack? What space are you interested in heading into?
I think answering these questions might help the rest of HN provide more relevant insight. If you're just chasing a larger paycheck, I think the best bet is still MANGA/FAANG. No lack of documentation out there about landing jobs at those companies.
Thanks for this.
In terms of a new Job, I am looking for work I find engaging, with a mission that I think is worthwhile (Which for me could be anything from useful business enabling tech like Stripe. Uni / Training websites like Udacity / Coursera, or a non-profit. I don't particularly care about tech stack as long as its in some way used across the industry.
I am worried that my tech skills have atrophied mostly because I find the projects that I have been working on for the last 3 years have been very low velocity due to a massive development team (1000+) and a lot of bureaucracy. I have written <1000 SLOC this year. A lot of time is spent doing devops work (which i never wanted but thats how my position evolved) and documentation/process design and execution.
Regarding paycheck - for me personally that't not a motivation. Tech salaries where I live are universally more than enough.
If someone was looking to change stacks how does one go about it? Say I know someone who has been going through tutorieals, reviewing the docs, creating a personal project. Technically they feel like a solid intermediate at times but still beginners with the ecosystem. They are at a senior level in another stack.
What's the next step? Apply for new stack with existing resume? Do you try to work in new stack at current role?
How does one acual transition?
For some details this friend has 20 years with php/jquery experience.. a year as an angularjs developer along the way and wants to be part of a react / vue ecosystem but has a hard time of letting go of php.
One option is to choose companies that let you learn on the job and stress fundamentals, usually larger companies in SV. I've been in quite a few front end interviews where all questions involved only questions about native methods, CSS, and general browser knowledge.
In terms of becoming skillful enough to pass interviews testing stack specific knowledge I've seen two strategies be broadly successful:
1. Take 1-2 months full time to work on a serious project in the stack.
2. Spend 1-2 years just being in the ecosystem and absorbing the collective groupthink, doing a few tutorials and occasionally hacking together small projects. A couple hours of your time per week throughout the process.
Every hiring manager is different. Some have some bullshit "requires 3 years in this stack" kind of requirements. Personally I feel like the important thing is knowing how to program period. I think knowing paradigms is what's more important than stacks. Id take someone who knows how to build a oop backend with a spa front end for my position I'm hiring for even if they don't have specifically .net/angular experience. You can always ramp up on the specifics while learning paradigms can be much harder.
What if "larger paycheck" is only one of goals, with others being something like "bringing benefits to humanity" or "pursuing long-term hard problems while being software engineer, not researcher"?
I think there a few things that could help. One is to respond to recruiter emails, even if it is just to say "sorry not looking to change right now, would love to check back in a couple of months," even if its a company that you're not 100% sure you're interested in. If you have time, do an informational call to learn about culture / team / etc. Who knows, maybe you'll get excited enough to interview (item #2 in your list). Regardless of interest, I think once every 6 months or so it is a good idea to go through a full interview loop with at least one company. Interviewing is a skill that is largely unrelated to your day to day work, so this is probably the best way to practice. It also gives you a rough sense of what companies are paying (item #1) and what skills/technologies they are looking for (item #3).
Maybe an unpopular opinion, 3 is a bit unimportant, if you're hired for one tech skill, it's not a good place to work IMO. The dev-marketing-blogosphere often outpaces reality. Everyone blogs about <cutting-edge-thing> -- with lots of exageration, no doubt. Nobody blogs about <boring-legacy-code-that-works>.
Thanks. I would have thought this also, but then when my team was hiring this year, the interview questions were quite closely linked to our tech stack (which wouldn't have been my preference). Even though we also can end up moving tech stack entirely, between projects.
In that case, they were probably looking for someone that could hit the ground running with very little training or onboarding. I’ve been hired for that case before… I was literally pushing code to production my first day on the job, and let go a few months later once the big push was done on the project. It wasn’t worth it and now stack-specific questions are one of my red-flags.
I did this after 4 years at BigCo. It helped to set a reasonable deadline for when I wanted to hand in my notice, then I worked backward to set milestones for myself (e.g. identify a round of companies of interest by X date, apply by Y date...). I ended up missing my "deadline" by a bit, but it got me off my ass.