How do you make that business mindset intuitive for people that are used to being technical workers?
I actually would not want to limit myself to one industry. Working at a digital agency has its short comings but one thing I enjoyed is the variety of clients we get.
For example, I have a mixed skill set of web development and graphics programming. That's allowed me to interview at companies from a variety of business problems that leverage the graphics skill set, such as CAD/CAM, indie video games, or space mission simulation.
I want to say "I solve these problems" without limiting myself to one industry but relying on my tech skill as the niche. Is that just as good?
Sure, it's possible to focus on a tech-specific niche (security consultants come to mind) - but if you do so, you should be sure you know _exactly_ who your potential clients are.
The trap I fell into: I specialized in WordPress performance. I was really good at solving complex performance problems. But...who is my client? Maybe eCommerce stores, but which of them have performance problems? Typically, when they did have performance problems they felt it was a temporary problem and didn't _really_ want to spend the budget to fix it.
So that's my warning: If you tout yourself as a tech-specific problem solver, you should have a clear picture of how you're going to find clients with that specific problem. I find this harder to do than the reverse process of picking a type of client and THEN identifying their problems.
Looks like a recommendation to use the plain language of problems solved instead of dropping tool names. Ironically, the opposite needed to get past HR at a big company.
Leetcode problems rarely come into play outside of tech hubs or quant firms. I live in Chicago and rarely encounter such problems in job interviews. And just Leetcode easies at that. They do ask you do take-home assignments, though.
The only reason I accepted is because the alternative is having no work. It's harder to bargain for a fair wage when you're unemployed.
When we were discussing rates, I proposed $60/hr which is perfectly passable in the city I'm in for a contractor with my experience, but they couldn't do higher than $35. I am seeking something new but I need a plan to live comfortably in the interim.
So why are you paying $25/hour to develop someone else's product for them?
I'm not trying to be facetious here. Imagine yourself a talent broker (even if that talent happens to be you). If the going rate is $60 and you're only collecting $35, you're paying the extra $25 to get the work done.
I get that you're in a tight spot. That sucks and I hope it gets better for you. But "I can't go higher than $35" should be firmly met with "I can't go lower than $60". If the product really isn't worth developing at that rate, it might be a product that shouldn't exist at all. At the very least, you should be bargaining to own about 29% of the completed work since you're subsidizing it.
That's an interesting idea for a resume layout, although the columns will probably look very unbalanced with my set of jobs. I've only had two FT developer jobs, both of which are too old or too short to have made any meaningful impact or progress.
Web development jobs. Ranging from CMS-based websites using WordPress and Magento, and built in frameworks in stacks, LAMP-based to Ruby on Rails to using React.
These jobs all are underpaid, 1099 jobs. Made anywhere from $15/hr to $35/hr in a medium COL American city. I need work that is more stable and doesn't have me hopping around, and not having to live paycheck to paycheck.
All of these jobs are for small business clients, with usually me as the only developer. It sometimes feels more like consulting work, but I want more experience working in a dev team. I don't know how to pass interviews for FT jobs working in larger groups.
Definitely don't go back to college to get a CS degree. At this point in your career the only thing employers want to know about is your previous job experience. I have a bachelors degree in computer science and have never once been asked about it in a job interview.
> Recruiters contact me a lot about FT jobs but any interviews I get through them never turn into offers.
You mention this almost as a side note but I think its pretty clear thats your problem and not the "job-hopping". If job-hopping was the problem then you wouldn't even be getting interviews because they can already see that from your CV when you apply.
Whats going wrong in the interviews? Do you ever get feedback from the companies that reject you? Are there questions they ask you that you stumble on? This is what you need to be focusing on. A CS degree won't help you one bit with that problem.
It sounds like you have been working on fairly run-of-mill CRUD based applications that don't require that much thought. Can you be more picky about what jobs you take? Try getting jobs which will build up your experience rather than simply pay the bills. That way when you go to an interview you might sound more enthusiastic about your past experience - this will come across well to an employer.
Also try and pick a field and specialise in it. You mention LAMP, Ruby on Rails, React - all of those are good platforms to work in with good employment opportunities but maybe you should specialise in frontend or backend. Also I would ditch the wordpress & magento stuff.
>Whats going wrong in the interviews? Do you ever get feedback from the companies that reject you? Are there questions they ask you that you stumble on?
Several problems were spotted through mock interviews I took, as well as real ones that gave feedback. With the mock interview, I dragged on too much explaining my past experience because of all the disparate jobs. With Triplebyte, I was told that I show breadth in talking about different topics but not much depth in any of them. And very little knowledge on large system design (which I want to get a beginner job at).
>It sounds like you have been working on fairly run-of-mill CRUD based applications that don't require that much thought. Can you be more picky about what jobs you take?
That is true, about 90% of the work I've done is CRUD web dev. The most in-depth project I worked on is for an indie game written on a C# .NET framework. This was a one-off opportunity that I got browsing job requests on Reddit, and I was given the offer based on some personal projects I had. But it didn't lead to more substantial game dev jobs. I suck at getting the ball rolling.
I have to just fall back on applying blindly as my networking game isn't very strong. Whenever a contract ends, I come off as too transactional when I speak to people about seeking work and that turns people off.
Even though Ruby on Rails has started to be past its peak popularity I like using it, and also want to use React and Vue more. I'm definitely not going back to CMS work. A colleague once forwarded me a Magento job because he became an expert in it, but had no interest in going back to that.
>Spending more than 2 years at Eng I or Eng II is considered a cause for serious concern.
Is this just for within Google or also from Google's perspective of hires from elsewhere? Because I have to admit I have not been past mid-level (which I guess is the Eng II equivalent) for over five years.
I have 10 years experience in my career and never held a senior position, officially. Do I miss out a lot in seniority by just being a permatemp and contractor for small shops?
Agreed. This has been an eye opener for me as someone who has worked mainly in smaller companies whose job levels didn't go beyond junior, mid-level, senior/lead in my profession. Granted, the concept of target schools still adds some bias to candidate hiring, but it's better than in many non-technical careers.
I am not sure how Leetcode would help out here in specific, for someone who already has years of proven programming experience with other companies. Any company who holds any water in what they do would substitute rote knowledge of algorithms with real world programming skills.
Leetcode is used by many companies for interviews and whiteboards. For example when I interviewed at Facebook the first screening problems were from the site and the later whiteboard problems for the on-site interview were as well.
I have no experience working with software "at scale" so it may be that my interviewing experiences are different from yours. Generally speaking, though, software developers at non-tech companies, or at agencies for small-med business clients (what I tend to work for) don't ask those kinds of technical questions.
