Ask HN: Am I Doomed as a Dev?

27 points by MassiveBonk51 2 years ago | 32 comments

I have 4 years of experience doing microservices using spring boot, Kafka etc at a large financial institution. However I'm running into trouble when I try to apply for jobs. Everyone wants experience with containerization and public cloud. I basically never got a chance to do this at my job since everything is hosted on-premises using VMware's Cloud Foundry. I have been working on learning all this stuff but I just keep getting rejected because I don't fit this checkbox professionally and it feels like I wasted 4 years. Where do I go from here?

treis 2 years ago |

This is one of those areas where everyone lists it as required for the job but in practice you very very rarely use it beyond the basics. Pretty much everyone has an infra person and in most places it's all automated off of the git commits. You'll very rarely touch the cloud and when you do it will be for trivial stuff like updating secrets.

Add whatever cloud/container tech they're looking for into the skills part of your resume when applying. Take a day or two and do a crash course on Docker/Kubernetes. That will be enough to pass the interview. In fact, I think I've been asked 0 cloud/container questions during interviews. Tech companies don't really ask specific technical questions beyond Leetcode/System Design. Kind of odd but that's the way it is.

Buttons840 2 years ago | |

Even easier than taking a course is to ask GPT about the tech and then talk with GPT about the tech. Ask it questions to make sure you understand. Repeat what it tells you back in your own words. Ask GPT to give you a mock interview. You'll learn a little about the tech and a lot about how to sound like you know the tech.

logicalmonster 2 years ago |

1) Just learn it on your own and embellish your experience. Your new employer is not going to contact your previous employer and ask for details about their containers.

2) Many jobs use containers, but if you get out of the high-tech bubble, you'll find plenty of lower tech companies that haven't even started looking at containers. You'll be just fine with the right company.

lovich 2 years ago | |

Too add onto that, even a lot of shops that use containers are set up in a way where the resident container expert is configuring everything and the rest of the engineers just need to be able to do some basics like `docker compose up` or `docker compose down`

i.e. stuff you can learn in a few hours of tutorials and then building some toy project to exercise the skill

softwaredoug 2 years ago |

You're running into a classic problem.

Employers AND job seekers being overly focused some kind of perfect skills-to-role match. When the reality is, the best employees want to be challenged by new experiences. And employers say their best employees can grow outside of their comfort zone and evolve with their role.

The best you can do in these situations is project enthusiasm to learn & grow. How do you do this? One way is to explicitly share all the ways you've done this in the past. You emphasize how much you enjoy the process of diving in and learning about / mastering new technologies. You say it with joy.

akkpxl 2 years ago | |

> The best you can do in these situations is project enthusiasm to learn & grow. How do you do this? One way is to explicitly share all the ways you've done this in the past.

This feels like circular reasoning. How do you "explicitly share all the ways you've done this" with just a resume or on a job application? Side projects? It would be helpful if you could give some concrete examples.

softwaredoug 2 years ago | | |

You say “oh wow learning underwater beekeeping would be really cool! I once had to learn to manage an ant circus. I learned how to do this on my own, here’s how… I imagine they’d be really similar in X, Y, Z ways. But probably different A, B, C ways.”

You give a thoughtful, enthusiastic response that emphasizes your love of learning, your humility, and highlights analogous experiences. No bullshitting needed at all.

BobbyTables2 2 years ago | | |

I’ve interviewed candidates who did NOT want to learn/grow. Pretty much said so when asked…

danwee 2 years ago |

Step 1: gain confidence talking about containerization. Perhaps come up with a personal project that uses Docker and the public cloud. This should take you around 1-2 months top.

Step 2: Put "Docker, AWS/GCP" in your resume in your "skills" section and in the section that belongs to your current job.

Profit.

If you know about containerization then it doesn't really matter if you have learn it in your side projects or your work. If you pass the interview that means the company is comfortable with your knowledge about containers.

Your CV is whatever you want it to be (with some limitations of course). If HR is expecting to see X in your CV, you can easily put it there if you do your homework. It doesn't really matter if you didn't use X in your last job, just put it there and demonstrate in the interview how well you know X.

weare138 2 years ago |

It's not you. It's an unfortunate current trend in the industry. Most companies are outsourcing recruiting now which is what's causing the hiring crisis in our industry. The *vast* majority of recruiters do not have technical backgrounds or even understand what they're hiring for anymore. They're just mindlessly regurgitating buzzwords and blindly relying on recruiting software to find candidates.

Don't blame yourself. I know that explanation doesn't help your situation but it's nothing you did wrong. I wish as someone a little older who's been skulking around the industry for longer than I'd like to admit to myself that I had a better answer for you but this is legitimately a major problem in tech that has only gotten magnitudes worse over the recent years to the point I have completely given up on the corporate world. This is a serious problem our industry needs to collectively address. Our industry is going down the wrong path and dragging us along with it.

injb 2 years ago |

Of course you're not doomed! Don't worry. You could always do a side project that uses containerization and cloud hosting.

My first dev job was over 15 years in bare-metal hosting (RHEL) and this was one of my biggest weaknesses too. I didn't get penalized too badly for it in the end. I even got an interview with a company that specialized in some kind of Kubernetes based product. I didn't get an offer from them but I did get an offer soon after that from a 100% AWS-hosted product company. It probably helped that I had so many years of development experience and had learned the basics of docker and containerization tech generally, so I understood what it can do for you and I was able to talk about that stuff intelligently. I had run into all the usual pitfalls in bare metal devops over the years so I was looking forward to moving to docker/cloud based stuff.

Over a year later I'm still a bit more rusty than most of my coworkers on AWS stuff. But you can pick it up. If you teach yourself how to use containerization (e.g. docker) and get a feel for what the advantages are, what problems it solves, to the point where you can talk convincingly about how you're exited to get a chance to use it, I think you'll come across ok.

andymoe 2 years ago |

The microservices knowledge is the interesting stuff and transfers to the more complex hard to maintain things people build elsewhere. The infra stuff is generally toil you can figure out if you must. Keep at it or look for places using better infrastructure abstractions. (ok ok, I worked on CF so biased but feel your pain)

I think long term the java spring stuff will shoe horn you more than CF stuff but there’s plenty of work there.

p0d 2 years ago |

Get a Hetzner vps for buttons. Put a docker image on it with nginx and java. Create a simple site and push it to a bare git repository on the docker image. Tweak the bare repo config to checkout files to the public web folder after it receives the push. When asked about cloud deployments and containers say, "doing it".

acqbu 2 years ago | |

@dev_0: daddy, chill!

roland35 2 years ago |

Maybe try getting an AWS certification. Just going through that process will definitely expose you to enough of AWS to answer any possible interview question, and would probably help get you pass any resume screening too. It worked for me, and I started out as an electrical engineer!

isbvhodnvemrwvn 2 years ago | |

It definitely won't make you answer any possible interview question, paper tigers often have issues with putting things together, cicd, iam and practical IaC setups.

It's pretty easy to tell theoretical experience from actual experience.

dev_0 2 years ago | | |

You can do actual practical while studying the certs

logronoide 2 years ago |

Try to learn on your own about the topic and then obtain an entry level industry certification about it. They are easy and cheap, you should consider them as an investment. The hiring company will not check that kind of details with your previous ones.

MassiveBonk51 2 years ago | |

I have the entry level ones for Azure/AWS. Working associate ones for AWS currently. It's mostly me trying to fill in my knowledge gaps but do these mean anything without production experience?

logronoide 2 years ago | | |

I think we are talking about different things: first you need to remove the blockers from HR when screening your CV. Certifications will help. Once you get the interviews you have to train yourself to pass the technical tests, and that’s a different story. If you want to get real technical expertise about a hot topic and have a good technical interview, I would start collaborating with an open source project that matters in the subject you want to shine. Regarding “production experience”, I can guarantee you that most developers in large organizations even with a DevOps philosophy they don’t really have production experience (because they are not allowed to interact directly with the environments). Also be honest with the seniority of the role you are going to apply. Production responsibilities are strongly linked to senior roles.

jraph 2 years ago |

Not every dev position requires knowing containers and public cloud.

In my company, the infra team takes care of this. And not everything is on AWS, Azure or GCP. Most things are probably not actually.

> I basically never got a chance to do this at my job since everything is hosted on-premises using VMware's Cloud Foundry

Yes, still very common I would guess.

For public clouds I don't know, but learning a bit about containers is worth it, at least for debugging things you have developed running on production in a container.

chalcolithic 2 years ago |

I'm in the same boat, I've found a job but that wasn't easy - cloud experience is needed everywhere. I'm gonna build my next project on kubernetis/aws (side project with a hope that it'll make some money, not just a pet project, so I'll list it as a professional experience) although there's zero need for it technically.

anthony_d 2 years ago |

Are you sure your large financial institution doesn’t have some group doing public cloud work? Mine does and we struggle to hire outside. I’d love to find an internal candidate who’s interested in padding their resume for a year or two.

I’d guess most big firms have some group working with public cloud; you just need to find them.

1letterunixname 2 years ago |

What you see as lacking you can achieve for yourself with self-study. Nothing is stopping you from trying things and learning outside of a current or former employer. Always be learning.

Disclaimer: Former AWS consultant, MAANG SRE/PE, once HPC/private cloud sysadmin and self-taught coder with EE/CS.

iamflimflam1 2 years ago |

The AWS certifications can be studied in your own time (or even better see if your current place will pay for the exams).

Stick those on your profile/CV and relate it the work you currently do - e.g. how would you migrate from on premise to the cloud etc...

WinLychee 2 years ago |

if you apply to roles within finance you'll have a better shot of landing something. Also, do a quick project using k3s and / or docker to get the basics, so it sounds like you know what you're doing. You can be creative with the truth.

akkpxl 2 years ago | |

I think this is good advice. Would you be able to give an example of a project to do or a good starting point?

WinLychee 2 years ago | | |

Get a few RPis and get https://k3s.io/ running on them. Get familiar with kubectl. Deploy a few apps to your cluster, tail some logs, restart containers, scale them, etc. Install Prometheus, get monitoring working, make some dashboards with Grafana. This point is to gain familiarity with "modern" cloud infrastructure, but in a low stakes environment where nothing can go wrong. Then, you can talk about your experience, and it will technically be true!

gardenhedge 2 years ago |

Not doomed. Where are you based?

MassiveBonk51 2 years ago | |

East Coast USA