I am in a similar situation to the OP having started off with a ZX Spectrum, did CS, coded, but in my late 20s I was tempted into fixed income finance, and did that for 15 years at the highest level (unrelated to coding - I was a strategist and trader). Then in my late 30s I picked up Python, then R, and now know both really well (plus C and a bit of JS, Ocaml). What I find in my interactions is that the whizz-bang programmer guys, who are better than me at coding (though not by much - I picked up again pretty fast), are completely useless at mapping their skills to the finance domain, while my knowledge of both fields is where my value lies. I would strongly suggest to programmers that they ensure they know a non-CS domain too, preferably a niche one (we're such a big world now), and know it well - practise it as a primary activity for a few years. Climb the learning curve again even if it's hard at first. It is in the nexus between CS and other domains that opportunities are still plentiful.

Better yet, find some more people like you, as you're trying to do, and start a consulting company together. You could each use your connections to find work for the others, put in a bit of your profits towards upkeep of the company, grow your network and so on.

You may be unemployable if you put yourself in the same bucket as the recent college graduates, so make your own bucket.

Since then I've been practically unemployable. It makes no sense if I could make an entire year's worth of salary after a few phone calls and a quick demo. The only downside to this is that you have a lot of idle time. Obviously you can't do sales 24/7 (I wish I could). I'm still trying to figure out how to best use my idle time instead of obsessively commenting on HN or Reddit or playing Counterstrike. Get out? Travel? I don't know yet.

You can do this too. You absolutely can. Don't sell yourself short so you could have a 'secure' job. Don't become a slave to appease others and censor yourself to keep a job. Your time is the single most valuable asset in your life. DO NOT SELL IT FOR CHEAP. Control your destiny. This is capitalism. This is North America.

I had too much coffee, I'm out. mic drop

TL;DR: Get your money's worth. Don't waste time applying and going to interviews for a 9-5. It's not for you.

I really hate this characterization. Are there people at the office like this? Of course. But there are also plenty of offices that have people like this. They just have their own interests outside of the office job that they like to spend their time on.

Have you tried any of the following alternative in your quest to land a job:

1- Theme marketplaces like Envato.

The competition is really fierce but you could make it and establish a name and sharpen your skills and be up to date when the latest trends and movements in our profession.

2- Kickstarter campaign to crowd-fund a technical project that you're passionate about to showcase your technical skills and expertise and as an opportunity for you to reboot your career.

> As a final station, I'd like to describe what online freelancer markets look like for people like me. On freelancer.com and oDesk, you compete with hundreds of lowest-wage programmers from third world countries for exceedingly crappy "projects". It's an unmitigated race to the bottom.

Why does the OP feel entitled to not have to compete with others? Why should he be given a "not crappy" job? Because you were born in the US?

Fuck that attitude. Here's what happened. The OP stagnated, and other parts of the world didn't. Being from a first world country does not make you special. And it no longer shields you from the brutal realities that most of the world goes through with respect to human competition.

> Maybe even more alarming, the nature of these jobs has changed, too. A year ago, you could sell some landing pages and some basic web programming. Today, almost every inquiry you get is for some illicit script to scrape social media sites.

Yes, the world moves on, the nature of work changes, and things that were valuable 10 years ago become commodities. Being a programmer means being able to program many different things; you know how demands are changing, so either adapt or die. Or switch what field you work in. Construction workers can get $35 an hour, and it's better for your body.

> I feel obsolete, and I'm afraid it's starting to show outwardly.

Woe is me.

> While I was asleep at the wheel during my generic office job, the world moved on without me.

So what are you going to do about it?

> Being able to get work in this field without a fancy background is still possible, but only if you have the right connections.

So work at making those connections.

> Personally, I will just keep looking. Maybe something will turn up.

No, don't do that, it's the same shit that isn't working for you. Go to some meetups, conferences, hackathons, etc. Take a part-time job doing something else to be able to afford the time to build the connections you see as being so important. Buy books and read tutorials (and build side projects) regarding new technologies you want/need to learn. Hey I'm not saying this is the best plan, but any plan is better than no plan.

Or are "connections" your way of excusing your ego for slumping in life? I can blame others for having good genetics all day long, but I'm still going to go to the gym to improve my physique.

---

Be proactive when shit hits the fan, when you miss out, when you make mistakes. There is no alternative.

Not saying you should fake it, I'm saying employers need to stop thinking donuts can't be iced by anyone with less than a masters degree. I've seen a masters grad unable to get through a door that had a security card swipe thing because there were no instructions, even though she had the card in her hand. Sometimes a course isn't what's needed to get a job done.

I had another job where I learned a lot, but after a couple years the job became repetitive with no further learning opportunities. At that point it was time to leave, because if you are not moving forward you are moving backwards.

People need to take control of their own careers.

Going mainstream implies major changes, which are not technological, but still exclude many players because big corporate players bring immense business differences.

To be honest, skill and intelligence never mattered when it's about success. Humans want to be happy, technological progress interests nobody. That's where the "overskilled" comes from.

The demand for programming skills varies across locations, skills and age. Certainly you can be an unemployed programmer but adjusting locations/skills can greatly improve circumstances. ODesk/Freelancer gives you very little control over demand and hence, you are just a commodity. I've yet to see anyone doing well out of it from a contractor side but plenty of people doing well who need cheap contractors fast.

Understand the market or someone who does will take advantage of you...

I got my degree in 2009, at the height of the crisis (for now at least... here in Brazil the crisis of 2009 is finally getting worse), I NEVER had a legal job, all the stuff I put in LinkedIn were semi-legal or outright illegal stuff (or my startup).

Also my programming language of choice were clearly a poor choice, I learned C, and C++ and whatnot when I was a kid (I was 6 when I started to learn coding), those are clearly mostly useless now.

The OP was a little bit light on details of the exact work under-taken at the 'company' but I'm guessing it wouldn't be interesting enough to pass the sift of most recruiters.

That's tough but with Open source you could get involved in anything you felt like, make a contribution, get recognition and reboot/re-skill that way?

Still, it's not an easy or quick solution though and YMMV.

Seems like employers would rather just hire a H1-B from TCS instead because then they know are tied to them via the H1-B, whereas a mediocre programmer who is trained up would become a better programmer and might leave once they are good at their salary doesn't commensurate?

Your age, the buzzwords ("skill sets") on your CV, lack of college degree, possibly lack of recent relevant experience -- all of those can be negatives and will keep you out of a lot of jobs. So don't try to get those. You can't fight prejudices or stupid hiring processes.

You have to present yourself as someone who can solve business problems, because that's what companies actually hire and pay for. No matter what the job posting says no company or client actually needs a PHP or Ruby programmer. What they need is someone who can translate business requirements into working software. Get the focus on your ability to deliver.

When I talk to a potential client I start by asking them to tell me their top handful of business problems or pains. I pick one that I think I can help with and talk about that. We almost never get into technology or languages because those are incidental to actual business requirements. Many business problems are not actually programming problems. Just because a client has 300,000 lines of Ruby code I don't need to write Ruby to help them with their PCI compliance audit (real client). Another client had an enterprise logistics system written in Java, but that had very little to do with shipping charges calculating wrong -- I don't have to be a Java guru to figure it out. The problem was fixed with almost no programming, just correcting some data that was formatted wrong between systems.

My point is that you need to present an appealing package with some obvious business value to the client or employer. You don't choose a car based on a list of the parts in it (CV), you choose it based on perceived value, appearance, and emotional appeal.

Instead of applying for every job and putting yourself on job sites and scraping the bottom of the freelancing barrel on Fiverr develop a few skills you are really good at and sell that expertise. Identify companies or business niches you want to work at and knock their door down. Make the deal low-risk: I don't charge clients if I can't fix their problems.

Meet more people. Most people get their jobs from contacts, friends, even casual acquaintances -- I got a job lead from a guy at a bar in LA after we started talking about bourbon. Get out in the world. Don't treat everyone you meet like another node in your network, though. People like to help friends and people they like, so be the guy people like. People don't like to help the constant network-builders.

I'm not saying it's easy, but you need to play a different game, because a programmer in his 40s without a lot of recent relevant experience with the latest toys is not going to stand out. Sorry, but no one cares about your startup experience or what you did five years ago. They care about what you can do for them right now, so focus on that and don't get bogged down trying to win the recruiting numbers game.

Programming is seen as the silver bullet to solve employment in many countries resulting in you competing against a whole continent with a 100 million IT pros, all super smart foreign students who studied in the US, thousands of school leaving kids wanting to become programmers because they grew up playing games or owning laptops/iPads/smartphones and programming is made a core skill in schools. They're even teaching programming in prisons. With all the free online courses and code schools there isn’t a barrier that stops anyone from becoming a programmer where as other industries have barriers of entry. If you are a tech professional, you're competing against the biggest pool of potential workers in the world all willing to do anything to get a foot in the door.

In my experience I find there is a huge ageism issue in the IT sector. At his age the author seems to be insinuating it's due to his lack of degree but I can safely say it's his age and not the degree. I find a manager in his early 30s late 20s won't hire a programmer older than him. Similarly a manager in his 40s won't hire a developer his same age. In applying for positions I find I can make it to the final interview but then it comes down to my age not making me the perfect fit. It's like the unasked question is why you haven’t made it and if you are still looking for a job at 40 so you must be damaged goods. The other big disadvantage in the tech sector is years and years of experience is not valued as it is in all other industries. At 40 the stigma of old tech being listed on your resume is seen as a negative rather than a positive. Fitting in with your co-workers is another big issue with hiring managers and HR and it seen as a risk that you won’t fit in with people 10 to 20 years younger than you.

When I complain to others I hear stories of someone who knows of x developer at 40 who still works as a developer but they’re obviously not starting from step 1 looking for a job so that comparison I always find stupid.

I do agree with other posts that networking is the problem as 90% of job are not on job boards. However as a programmer I find networking is hard because you are focusing on completing x feature/project and generally want to work uninterrupted for long stretches rather than spending time at sucking up to a manager or co-worker that might help you in the future. Also I find unless you have something that someone wants I find networking at 40 is difficult because people generally don’t want to network with you.

The lessons I’ve learnt are primarily the entitlement that I felt x years ago is something I have to get rid of very quickly. I’ve always thought if you give me problems and I always solve it that means I am special. However I realize I’m just like the other billion wannabes with the huge disadvantage of my age. I feel like I have to work 10 times harder now that I’ve been given the scarlet letter of age to wear around my neck. That said knowing the problem is the first step to solving it so I can at least be optimistic.

My advice. Understand you always have to learn and have to solve the networking/self marketing problem. Try to have a purpose even if it’s just a dream of a purpose. Even if have to take up a non IT job full-time because of your situation you can always code part time. With a strong base and today’s ease of access to information, picking up new language is surprisingly easy.

That aside, I think you can still get work. You just sound discouraged after the rejection and sound like you are beginning to think a little fatalistically. Yes, not having a CS degree hurts you and yes, being at one company for over a decade slightly hurts you (not that much though) and yes, being in your early forties also hurts you. You don't say whether you're working that full-time decade long job any more (or maybe I missed it), if you were laid off, that also will hurt you more than if you're still working there, companies prefer hiring people already employed. You are over-discouraged though, you can still get work in this market.

You talk about going through many hoops, talking to many people, and a lot of weight given to college. Which sounds like a lot of applications to big companies. Only a big company could spend so much effort on each person, put a lot of weight on official credentials etc. So one thing to do is - don't just apply to big companies! Apply to small and medium sized companies as well. They often don't worry about college degrees as much, you're often talking directly to the decision makers right away, if they like you they often have the authority to hire you. Applying for big companies is fine, but mix it up a little.

Another thing - you say companies are interviewing dozens of people for each position. OK. What is going to put you over the top? The answer is different in different situations. From small to big companies the answer is usually technical and personal. For technical - picture the people interviewing as being a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution - the x-axis is how technically good you are, the y-axis is how many people reach that level. Where do you have to be on that curve? If a friend is bringing you into the company, you have to be in the middle or better. If you are going into a company cold, you have to be (if you're having trouble like you are) one standard deviation above the mean in terms of ability. If you're two standards above the mean, then you should be having no trouble.

What you have to realize is most people are in the middle of that bell curve. Most Javascript programmers can tell you what data types in Javascript are, what the "this" keyword is etc. You probably can as well. But if you start digging deeper into how well they know Javascript or frameworks their knowledge is not that deep, and they start mumbling the answers. The average Javascript programmer with your experience have an almost interchangeable amount of knowledge - they all have the same level of depth. But every dozen interviews or so you get someone who really knows Javascript and certain frameworks backwards and forwards. People who know more than you. When you are interviewed, you should write down the answers afterwards and honestly ask yourself if you explained things clearly and in depth. Honestly, you should be able to knock every question you are asked out of the park with a very in-depth and clear answer. Because there are people who are being interviewed who can do this. Giving some sort of half-answer where I know you know it a little, and then missing a few questions doesn't cut it - because most other Javascript programmers with your experience can do the same. Knowing this cold is what puts you above the pack.

Insofar as personality - it depends on the company, the people and how badly they need someone. Most of the time, if your technical skills are one standard deviation above the norm, and your personality is normal, we usually offer the job. I've interviewed people with very strong technical skills but their social skills were not just slightly poor but very poor. They continued answering questions after being told several times that their answer was sufficient, and continued talking even after being told "OK, stop talking"! (obviously things had become a little bizarre on their end when we the interviewers felt we had to tell someone "stop talking" - which they ignored, and continued talking!) Or people who were great technically but seemed very angry and had their arms folded in front of their chest the entire interview, and made a kind of sarcastic grunt after each question. Actually I would have even hired that person, but my boss torpedoed him and I wasn't surprised. I mean, I myself have made a faux pas when I have gone on an interview - but at least I knew from the interviewer's reaction that I had made one! Some people seem oblivious.

Another thing - just hit up everywhere. Put your resume on Linkedin, look on Stackoverflow careers, Craigslist jobs board, angel.co jobs, whatever people do in Europe (and also look for remote Javascript positions in San Francisco and elsewhere). Jobs aren't always posted everywhere - if there is a Javascript meetup or jQuery meetup in, say, Berlin, their mailing list might have job postings you can't find elsewhere. See where people are meeting up in your city, or nearby cities, to talk about jQuery or Javascript or full stack web development. Go out, talk to people. Pass out your business card. If you don't have one, make one, they're not expensive, you can make them same day if necessary at some local print shops. Your best resource is often letting programmers you already know know you're on the market. Some of this is for future reference though - one reason it's good to keep in touch with people once in a while is so you're not only contacting them when you want a favor. Not that them possibly getting a referral bonus for their big company hiring you is exactly that much of a favor.

For the longer term (not now), if you think not having a CS degree is blocking you, you might think about getting one, perhaps at night. It helps in a number of ways - human resources prefers hearing you're halfway to having a CS degree to not having one. It also gives you a technical foundation - you'll learn things like what is first normal form, second normal form, third normal form etc. are if you don't already know. Also you meet people and your network can grow - again, that depends on you meeting people and keeping in touch.

Another longer term thing - I am an Android programmer. Android was first released in 2008, but even in 2011 the local Android meetings were pretty empty - we could all sit down at a table in a local bar. Now local Android meetings sometimes have dozens, if not hundreds of attendees. I picked a new technology stack which took off (one billion Android phones sold last year). Lots of companies are looking for senior Android people with a lot of experience, but the only people they have to choose from are those handful people who were sitting around the local Android meetup table in 2011. Whereas Javascript is 20 years old and Javascript programmers are a bit more a dime a dozen. The thing though is - there are a lot of local programmers who write Java web backend programs (for Tomcat, or Wildfly/JBoss). They have a solid job, so why change. Over the past few years, web has been fading a little, and native iOS and Android have been rising. It is still to the extent that it is too early to put much weight to it. It's understandable why someone making $120k a year or more with a lot of Java web work around might not take the risk of jumping to an Android job. Why they wouldn't play around with it as a side project is more of a mystery - this is where they start to get into your situation. Because I can tell you, the middle-aged go-getter guys from our local Java group are always working with the cutting edge so they don't fall behind. They're working with Android Tango at the moment, which even I feel is too far ahead of the curve for me. Although maybe if I was smart I'd order those $500 tablets and start tinkering with them.

You were too complacent over the last decade - it should be obvious to you know. It's not fatal as times are good. When you get your next job, you have to make an effort to get a diploma, keep up with the latest technology, keep in touch with people and so forth, or you'll be in a worse situation next time around.

There is a lot of survival bias. So far, I did not hear any salary higher than 50k euro from face to face talk in Germany (mine is higher, with no coding job). Thus, I am also not clear how real is to have one of those $100k+ salaries just doing "normal" coding (no managerial stuff). If that were possible and achievable even in a 3 years span, I'd definitely jump into it, but reality tells me it's not. At least out of the tech hubs (SV, etc.), but then the 0.1% thing kicks in, so you have a 99.9% chance of not getting any of those jobs, while you have plenty of opportunity to get a steady carrier just where you are.

And finally, programming will go through some kind of "commoditization", it's already happening. It might be good to "only" be coding today, but 10 years from now, older and with kids (so no possibility to work week ends anymore), this will probably not be enough and will move you more towards the unemployable zone.

Just some thoughts from an ex-wannabe programmer.

I've interviewed with a couple companies just to see what it's like out there. I usually ask for some ridiculous salary b/c that's the only way I would leave my current job.

I find the interviewing process stupid. I had one company ask me to code up a fully functioning Angular site from scratch in some jsfiddle clone that I had never seen in 1 hour. It took me around 5-7 minutes just figuring how to work with the fiddle clone.

All the while I went in there as a guy who had written a pretty good Angular JS clone from scratch - recursive compiler and all. You would think that would be proof enough that I am pretty good at JS/front end dev. I just laugh at these interviews.

http://www.likewise.am/2015/07/too-cool-for-school-a-retrosp...

I don't think BS is going to help. So here are a couple of options. If you really want to do startups and glam and make hundreds of thousands... you'll have to learn how to program in modern ways. It's going to take some time and effort. And you will have to build some real stuff. You might not have the time.. you are in your 40's, and you might not have the real desire to put in the effort. It's not you can't do this, you probably can but it's going to be difficult and take some real desire and most important some time and a lot of effort.

Here is another option that might be a better one. Go back to a BigCo. You have a history of job stability. You know about BigCo ways of doing things. You are good with computers. Get a certificate or two if you need to. It's not a million dollars but given the required effort, the pay is pretty decent for sitting at a desk. Forget about the 100K+ salaries you see bandied around. That's for something else.

That sums it up.

Yes, there are plenty of "lowest-wage programmers" on those sites. I never bothered to compete with them on price. I simply charged what I thought I was worth, and ratcheted my price up and up as I discovered that the market thought differently. Interestingly, as my price went higher and higher, the constant noise of "crappy" job offers quieted down and was replaced by a small number of great offers.

If I wouldn't have had a job as a programmer on the side (first a few months as intern) while studying, I wouldn't know much about programming.

Anecdotal story: I found myself working at a warranty company and a friend of mine worked at a specialized software company. We got together one day for drinks and lamented the fact that we had problems finding the right people. His problem was that everyone who applied was fresh out of college and had no true hands on experience, where he wanted senior programmers. My problem was that everyone who applied had a Masters or Doctorate degree and was applying for mid level/entry position.

If you're finding yourself unemployable in a particular area, you're probably right. More than likely though, you could find an excellent job at a company that isn't directly a traditional tech company. Every company in the world now needs to have an IT strategy of some sort. With an IT department of some sort. And I can guarantee that there are enough out there who are just looking for experience that they would hire you on the spot. The problem though is reaching out and finding them.

We're trying to recruit a devops with AWS experience. We really don't care about which uni you went to or didn't go to.

Probably no good for you as we're in Manchester, UK but I don't think we're that unique.

Show to them why you are a worthwhile risk instead of showing them that you are more of a risk than you are.

I don't have time to type up my whole story, and a lot of it is in my comment history, but the gist is:

I started programming with BASIC and later QBASIC. Self taught, no degree. Video games / text adventure games were my thing. Later fell into web dev and loved it... until I got further along in my career and was entangled in some really vicious office politics. I also suffered from untreated depression for years (which I have now managed to get under control). Those things combined with some really stressful personal family issues coalesced into a nervous breakdown of sorts and I holed up in my house.

I haven't had a fulltime job in 4 years - I just contract remotely. Almost everything I've done has been through recommendations which is really the only way to go when contracting. I've had multiple clients whom I've never seen - just spoke to on the phone for a few minutes and then slack / email for the rest of the contract. Sometimes this works out well, sometimes it doesn't. I only made $30k last year and it was very spread out - there was at least a full week where the only food in the house were biscuits made with water. This year has been better thankfully.

Contracting is not my end goal - independent video game development is. At the end of the day I don't care about the money all that much. If magical riches await me in the future then I will accept them with open arms of course - but I'm only seeking enough to survive. I care about making things - I really don't want to go implementing the ideas of clients. I always fancied myself a creator and need to find a way to make my projects profitable so that I can find self-fulfillment through the things I create.

So, in addition to contracting for these last 4 years I've spent the vast majority of my free time improving my skill set (improved my python, dabbled with node, started building "modern" websites - SASS, Bower, Gulp etc).

I also started teaching myself how to make 3d games using Unity and c# (in case you're wondering, I'm creating my own assets, not purchasing them - and I have almost zero interest in creating mobile games). My girlfriend teamed up with me, started teaching herself 3d art and has already produced some pretty impressive models for the game we are working on.

I'm very interested in teaming up with a programmer similar to myself, or perhaps a group of similar programmers.

Edit: left out some words

The benefits are plentiful. I've learned more about JavaScript that I thought possible. It also demonstrates you have a passion for technology and it's just not a job. You have the satisfaction that are helping others solve technological challenges. If anything, you are more marketable which is the point of that article. Good recruiters and hiring managers look beyond your resume and looks for way that you standout.

A degree doesn't show how smart you are, it shows you have the ability to get things done (or at least show up and do your work). But guess what? So does shipping real products.

Best of luck, UP. You seem like a smart guy so keep up the perseverance and get more stuff on that resume!

Unfortunately, people who had a really tough career like the author often tend to lack enthusiasm (which is understandable) - It's one of life's vicious cycles and it's almost impossible to get out of.

You just have to hustle. Try a lot of different things and make yourself known to as many people as possible - It's all about odds. If you find a way to spam out your resume to thousands of potential employers, you're bound to get some responses.

But yeah, 5:1 resume:interview isn't bad. I'm just saying some people do care.

> So you have to send out two resumes where the average degree'ed programmer has to send out one? Could be worse. You did, after all, opt to not spend four years of your life in an academic institution -- there are pros and cons to that decision.

Yeah. That more or less seems to be the case. I'm not complaining, just replying to the post I replied to originally which said "no one cares" about a degree.

I jumped at the first job that even looked interesting to me... I couldn't handle that much mundane.

Personally I'm biased against chem/bio/physics etc. PhDs who come in for development jobs because the ones I've known have had terrible, mind-blowingly bad coding practices drilled into them since undergrad and are strangely more resistant to learning best practices than those from more tech-related fields.

About 80% reject me before phone interviews, etc.

Literally the only pre-interview cited rejection reason was a lack of degree.

he was the original author of a serial class for qt[1]... of course, I know that is not anything like a device driver, but it's something.

I also body-shopped and sysadmined for him on a project that involved reverse-engineering a windows program.

but... you'd have to make it clear that you are okay that he doesn't have linux kernel experience, so long as he's willing to try it.

I think he'd also be cool with contract work, if you want to try him out.

my email is lsc@prgmr.com- I don't really feel like it would be cool to post his email on the open internet but I can forward something.

[1]qextserialport, which I am given to understand isn't the standard.

In terms of skill development? Yes, although it's value you could get for free if you read the right blogs, keep involved in the community, and are a self-motivated person.

In terms of networking? Yes, although perhaps you could get that for free too, if you go to enough hackerspaces and meetups etc.

Ironically, a lot of the people I meet at conferences are the kind of driven, motivated, outgoing people who are well suited to getting those benefits for free. But not all of them!

I certainly derive value from going to conferences.

Other than that, books and screencasts seem to be a good way to spend that training budget as well. But there's a ton of videos online available for free too.

Of course, they all require time. Which is money. :)

I suspect there's plenty of value in the well-known conferences.

In several countries in Europe and in LatinAmerica, landing in a well-enough job can be a matter of several months depending of the skill-set.

2 actual interviews that were offered to me early in my career :

1. The weekend hackathon (which actually ran from Friday until Monday)

2. The full-week trial

I took #1, but not #2. I was working at the time, and in no way could justify taking a week of vacation just to work for free for someone else.

Also, what types of .Net development... how much front end (web specifically). Doing webforms with no JS for a decade and a half doesn't mean much. I'm not saying that's the case, only that it can make a difference in hiring.

It's one of several plausible hypotheses I have for the observed behavior. Very few are compatible with a healthy future employer-employee relationship.

This is one reason why I hate the brainteaser questions. I was told for one such question that I was the only candidate to give the correct answer. Then the interviewer suggested that I must have encountered it previously, even after seeing me "showing my work" on a whiteboard. Can't win; if you didn't lose, you must have cheated. That company blackholed me after I flew in from another city to spend a day-long interview with them. They didn't even reimburse me for my personal travel expenses.

It was Spatial, owned by Dassault, near Denver, in case anyone cares. That was, in fact, the second Denver-based company to do exactly the same thing to me. The first flew me in, interviewed almost all day, then cut off all contact, didn't pay travel expenses, and even tried to stick me with the cost of the hotel stay by canceling their payment. That was Tyler Tech, Eagle Division.

Neither are unique in cutting off all contact, but they certainly are remarkable in waiting until after an in-person interview by a non-local candidate to do so.

I should rephrase my original sentence. When I said what I said I didn't mean that fringedgentian could guarantee he/she would never be unemployed - but that these steps would minimize his/her risk from finding themselves back in unemployment.

To continue your analogy, you cannot guarantee that someone will never have an accident, but you can recommend precautions to minimize their risk. It is these precautions that I was trying to hint at in my prior post.

https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should...

Sounds like the problem is one entirely of your company's making.

Because you're older, or a minority, or female...

At least I found myself falling into that the last time I was between jobs -- constantly watching beginner videos on new thing X, Y, Z instead of actually doing something useful in one of them.

Back in employed world of course it can be the opposite -- you become a master of whatever tech your company is using but get little exposure outside that. It is however often possible to guide the company into a new technology and get the best of both worlds.

Training should be seen as a part of compensation. While there's some alignment with the employers needs, giving employees a training budget shoulder be seen as a cheap way to provide more compensation and they should be able to use it to hone their skills in whatever area they want, regardless of its utility to employers.

or he/she could have faked the resume, or dressed it in a good way. I find that excellent programmers tend to be good communicators, because good, clean programming is about communicating with future programmers (which could be yourself in 5 yrs time). Having clarity in thought and being able to express ideas to other people is so crucial that i would rank that above experience with a certain stack/tech.

Is that really true? I do database programming, and I feel like I would be absolutely screwed if somebody demanded I do, say, embedded programming for small microprocessors. I guess theoretically I could study up, but it would be at least a year or two before I could be competitive in interviews, right?

Maybe I just suck and there are genius programmers who are equally competent at embedded systems, mobile development, distributed systems...

I chose my school and degree based around staying close to home to help with my disabled brother. It turned out to be a poor decision, academically that is, as the course combined software engineering students with business I.T and we weren't covering anything I didn't already know. I got a summer placement writing code and realised I was learning much more during that time, so when they asked if I wanted to stay on, I accepted.

It could be viewed as not being able to complete the degree, on the other hand would it have been a good choice to persevere with a bad decision just to prove I could? I'd be concerned with working with people who couldn't admit to making a mistake, then making the best of it. Or those who refused to see the grey areas.

1) I received several requests for an updated resume with a degree. 2) I was pulled aside in one interview and told I couldn't get what I was asking without a degree.

So, out of the people that I got a rejection reason for, basically.

Last Job Search:

61 applications -> 14 phone interviews -> 5 in person interviews

Before phone interviews:

2 requests from [one of the big 5] to interview that were unsolicited from their recruiters that I refused outright.

I received 9 emails related to the degree. 3 asked why I wasted their time without a degree. 4 asked for updated resumes with a degree. 2 stated their rejection was due to a lack of degree.

Additionally, the "failures" to reach the phone interview were heavily weighted towards places that mentioned a degree in their job ad. [e.g. I saw 150% of the failure rate for job ads with the degree than for job ads that just listed experience requirements ]

After interviews:

6 were too much money [ I was literally pulled aside at the in-office bar, told by the hiring manager that if I asked for $10k less he would give me the job ]

3 were due to other reasons that I didn't think were noteworthy.

I rejected 4 places on the basis of my interactions with them.

How many positions have you applied for that itemized the reasons for rejection? I've had that happen maybe once, and it was for a role at a startup.

Anyhow, often times the degree is a hard requirement. Mine is in Philosophy, and for a long time I left it off my CV because I didn't perceive it as being relevant.

When I applied for a position with a research lab, the [engineering] team politely responded asking if I had any academic credentials whatsoever. They wanted to move me along the interview process, but the lack of a degree would have kiboshed the whole thing.

I do agree with both of these statements which is why I try to level up on a constant basis.

You are correct, apps and closed appliances are definitely the wave of the now, possibly continuing into the future. VR is about to hit the market, video games are going strong, people still think they need phones, and websites are still going strong. So yes tech is a great industry to be in, and what else are you going to do? Swing a hammer?

But the more saturated the market gets with developers (and they don't have to be good as long as they're cheap and get the job done fast... something that is harder to do as you get older) the less value guys like myself or you will serve.

Sticking with a company and one technology is of course a slow form of career death, but getting strangled out by all the new growth and an abandonment of the old (be that human or technology) is also a very real problem that isn't just going to vanish by cramming knowledge into your brain.

I enjoyed that.

Why would they do that if there was no shortage of qualified American programmers in the bay?

Once you cross into contracting, there is no pay scale. The pay rules are largely set by the contracts. And there are thousands of contracts, all different.

The pay rates in these contracts are not necessarily connected in any way to current market rates, or indeed any portion of reality. They might just be numbers made up to sound plausible.

If you have a clearance as an employee of a contractor, and don't get extra pay for having it, you just leave. It's pretty common for the government to give your company $90 for every hour you work, then it turns around and gives you $45 of that. They keep the rest, sometimes for doing literally nothing except paying you your salary in their own name. This gives the company a lot of wiggle room on pay, because you seldom know how much they are actually charging the government for your work, unless your hobby is reading thousands of pages of government contracts. And never mind if you're an employee of a subcontractor.

Right now, I'm probably at around 70% of equivalent Silicon Valley pay, and 120% of same-region private-sector jobs. I want to move cities and get back to the private sector, but I don't want to go all the way to California.

Since he was explicitly told that they wouldn't be sending his resume to anyone else that pretty much means the failings are purely resume-based, not ability or interview skills. I have a hard time picturing a resume making one unemployable other than due to age discrimination.

I don't know if that is really smart, or really dumb. But a lot of jobs I could have probably done really well, I was passed over, and I honestly have to say, inexperienced interviewers have smug attitudes. I got the sense that there was the background thought of "ugh, god, I have to deal with someone's brain that isn't mine".

It's annoying to have to deal with those kinds of attitudes, because it perpetuates them, by causing the people who have bad experience from them to behave defensively next time around.

I've had some okay experience with getting positive feedback leading to callbacks, but these were typically answers to questions that I could have found online verbatim by studying an interview manual. I try not to do that because I think that is dishonest in my actual value.

The best interviews I've had are where it's clear that it is two people talking, and not two computers.

I don't know what is causing it (too much exposure to efficient software?), but in many industries hiring managers would rather keep looking for an absolute perfect candidate while leaving behind several that have the skills but need the training.

I have heard the stories about managers spending 100 extra hours looking for a perfect candidate instead of hiring the best available and dedicating even 50 hours to train them to speed.

There is nothing a hiring manager loves more than finding a hire-able candidate.

That doesn't mean that the interview is going to be a cakewalk, though. The hiring manager wants someone who's going to be a success in the job, and they're going to try to filter for that. The only thing worse than not hiring a good developer is hiring a bad one, and the process is trying to stop that latter from happening, too.

One is the selection problem, that orgs have great difficulty in working out who is a good developer and who is not.

The other is that there are a lot of developers who have difficulty in getting work, and to a large extent a lot of them just aren't any good and would be better off in a different career (sorry but that's just the way it is).

Once you've removed the rubbish developers there are indeed far more jobs than developers.

[1] Some companies will try to put you through for higher clearances than you actually need right now in anticipation of future work, but they aren't supposed to.

If you want to go work somewhere else, that is totally up to you but I'm more than allowed to have a policy stating that you're not allowed to recruit away my entire staff because that destabilizes the entire business, makes the business unable to meet it's contractual obligations and in a multitude of cases can jeopardize the jobs of everybody who is still there.

Most programming work doesn't require a genius level iq. It requires being able to build simple things very, very quickly. As a result, the experience level at a company matches the structure pyramid. The smart, older guys at the top make all the tough decisions and the fresh, younger guys at the bottom code as fast as they can. As those at the bottom age, they find themselves competing with other programmers their age for far fewer jobs toward the top of the pyramid.

A very well tested codebase with resilient systems and tooling takes time to learn, it will take time for a person to become productive within it - and that time is a lot longer than the 4 or so hours you get on your first day after the legal paperwork is done ;)

So pushing on day one - regardless of dangers it poses to the system - seems like pushing to production for the sake of pushing to production.

On another note though - I've worked at companies that have adhered to best practices and done remarkably well with continuous deployment and testing, but the risk of a pushing code to production is never zero. The intent of testing and resiliency is to reduce the odds of catastrophe and increase your confidence in your systems - not to make you overly cavalier.

Why does he need so many entry level programmers?

> We talked about pay, and it wasn't terrible impressive

Is the recruiter trying to staff a company with mostly entry-level programmers, paying low wages? I've seen plenty of companies like that, including those who used mostly trainees. Usually, the work environment was the crappiest possible, and word gets around.

It doesn't sound like you're describing a world in which someone with 10+ years of solid experience with techs is going to be struggling to find a job, right?

How many years of experience and how much demonstrated expertise did he require from these" entry-level" candidates that he supposedly can't find?

It took them 9 months from the interview to get back to me with an offer (which is why I was already working somewhere else) and the offer was $30k for a one year contract.

If that's still typical of their hiring process, I'm not surprised they're having trouble hiring people.

Pass along his email if you can: markcahalan@yahoo.com

You may laugh, but I've seen that far more often than an actual CI/CD process in place...

1. If you're going to swear, don't use an asterisk to try and make it look good. We can take it, honest.

2. Something in between two asterisks on HN gets shown in italics.

That's a ridiculously good trajectory actually. Did you go to each next job based on what you built previously (plus the business experience), or were you also doing your own stuff in parallel to work?

How could you do that if you don't have a degree? Very few grad schools will admit someone without an undergrad degree.

But the good ones look for good matches and good candidates, and don't waste people's time with junk. One recruiter placed more people on my team, with a much higher hit-rate, than any other one I dealt with; when I was interested in changing positions, I let him know, and after a month in which he didn't bother me at all, he pointed me toward an opening that was a perfect fit for me.

If you build up relationships with recruiters, you'll learn which are which, and how to ignore the Robert Halfs and Manpowers while still getting the benefit of the good ones.

We could easily put you in San Antonio or Austin. We might even be able to do Seattle or Cambridge (near Boston), though those are tiny offices.

If I remember right and we did reject you, try a different office.

For example, you might not expect much good in Melbourne, FL. You'd be wrong if you happen to like low-level code (assembly, reverse engineering, vulnerability research, embedded development, etc.) or EE stuff. There are both larger companies (Harris, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, and the http://advancedsecuritylabs.com/ part of Raytheon) and lots of startup-ups.

Since a specialized area (like Melbourne, FL doing low-level stuff) doesn't have too many nerds outside that specialty, the cost of living stays low. You can get a cheap house within a mile of work and there isn't much traffic.

For node work you really need it, but if you're using .net you're running a framework on top of your framework. So kind of more of a pain in the ass than you need to deal with for most things.