CSCareerQuestions

Hello everyone,

Wanted to discuss that topic as every year a few people consider a PhD.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11175824

Tips for getting contract work

I'm looking for part-time and/or short term contract work, but having a hard time because all the major job sites have either no ability to filter, or the posters just select every option so their post shows up in every search.

Does anyone have any tips on how to find this kind of work? Is it best to source it on my own, or are there good agencies to work with?

I'm looking for any kind of developer roll (I've done backend and full stack), and am open to mentoring/tutoring as well.

I have 7 years of experience, at this point software development is mostly a job. I have hobbies that have nothing to do with it.

I'm curious to see if this is the general trends, or if people are still fidgeting with side projects even after years in the industry.

What talking with a friend who transitioned from marketing into cloud (AWS) and then into security, and he spends a lot of time studying to ensure he understands all the concepts required for technical discussions.

Curious to see what the community opinions are. Feel free to share your initial background as well.

Curious to see the answers, as I know some people just work a few hours per day

Asking because I'm currently in a pretty happy position. Work is chill, colleagues are nice, full remote, pay is quite good. I've been here for one year and a half, and I could see myself staying here almost long term. My practice lead has been here for more then 10 years, he still seems pretty happy.

I know that goes against the usual consensus of moving every 3-5 years, so I wanted to see what you think about this.

Hello everyone,

I was about to post a link to an interesting article (https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity-bae), but I then remembered that this community only allows questions.

Could we maybe update that rule so that interesting career-related articles can be shared too? The alternative I see is having a dedicated "cscareer" community, but I don't think it would be really useful as the current activity here is quite low

Not really looking myself, but just curious to see if people have insights to share

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/7188164

This community is currently admin run and doesnt have a dedicated mod team. Recently been getting a bit more activity

I just went through and updated the sidebar for the community to give more of a description about it. If youre interested feel free to say so below

[email protected]

Note: to be a mod its preferred if your account is within the instance since lemmy doesnt handle cross-instance modding that well and this makes it so you have access to features added to pangora that other instances may not have

We usually hear that it's London or Zurich due to high salaries being available there, but the high cost of living might take away a good part of it.

In your experience, which is the best city? Feel free to give your own criteria, be it the weather, culture, ability to navigate in English, etc.

I am planning to write some articles related to tech news to pass time. I am just wondering whether it is a good thing to include those in resume to strengthen my portfolio. I don't really mind writing them even if it doesn't, but I just have some space in my resume that could be filled with some good things.

Who here has gotten a dev job in the last few months and is excited about it?

Did you bump your pay? Improve your work life balance? Get a better manager or team? Are working on something you enjoy?

I want to hear all the positive career news you folks have to give!

If you look up my username on LinkedIn, you can get a good summary of my career. Most of my jobs have been go in, fix things, then on to the next thing; though the immediate COVID period was pretty bumpy in that regard (shorter-term gigs). I'm pretty sure I need another cert or two at this point, but have had some family issues distracting me the past few months from studying/focusing on what's next. I'm also working three different things right now (1 5-10hr/wk PT job + 2 intermittent gigs). I can't remember the job market being this bad or picky in my life; and I actively wonder how I'd be able to leave the field entirely. It feels like everyone wants a unicorn on the cheap these days.

Something with a "solid" 10-15/hrs a week would be an improvement over what I have going on right now; let alone full-time work. How do I even find such a thing on LinkedIn/Indeed/whatnot? Reddit's gotten me at least two jobs in the past, but the state of things there seems to be less promising these days. I figured I'd ask here to see if anyone else is in a similar situation, and how they're managing.

Thank you.

I just graduated with a B.S. in CS in May 2023. I've been working at a big non tech company in a data engineering type of role with AWS and Terraform. My team's culture, team members, and PTO hours are great. The work is easy, but I also don't learn much from it.

I've only been at the job for three months, but I was just headhunted by a recruiter for a tech company similar to iRobot ( they don't sell robot vacuums, but they sell hardware with similar levels of tech behind it and are in the same stage of growth and have also been recently bought out by a magma company). They are offering about 25% higher base than my current total comp. Both jobs are remote btw.

However, I am wary of the notorious culture of the magma company that bought it and how often that new parent company fires its devs. I am also wary of how a 3 month job would look like on my resume.

Edit: yes, this is in the US

Poor mental and physical health condition is the reason why I did not apply for college placements, and I've been jobless since then. Looking at the job page, I get discouraged so easily, as they are paying laughably low wages while also looking for experience and skill, and I'm having second thoughts about completing my degree.

I have graduated at the end of last September, and it has been more than a year. I don't have any job experience, including internship. What should I start with? I've been learning SvelteKit for quite some time, I'm taking a break from my portfolio webpage project right now, and learning to create a TUI editor in C. Any advice would be appreciated.

What do you think about applying (or hiring) applicants who have experience but not in the specific stack of the job? I've found jobs in fields I'm passionate about, but I don't always have matching experience in the stack. Does YOE matter more than stack or is stack experience quintessential?

Ex: 5yrs experience in C++ but the job asks for 5yrs experience and Node.js

I know some basic HTML, CSS. JS, and very little React -- I'm learning it currently. One of the things I see mentioned online is freelancing as a way to earn income. Now, I've tried this before in the past on UpWork, and it was nearly impossible to get anything out of it, I rarely received a response and that required submitting a lot of proposals which in turn cost a lot of money.

When I go on UpWork, many of the jobs need WordPress developers or an array of skills I simply do not have and appear to require a lot of time to learn.

Furthermore, I'm in an odd place financially and career wise, where I can't seem to get a job anywhere, not even at places that would've hired me before, and certainly not as a junior developer.

I suppose I'm asking for advice. If freelancing is an option to pursue, how do I go about it in the cheapest and most cost effect way possible? If freelancing is not the right option, then what can I do with what I do know? Lastly, is the job market in a weird state for every sector?

Hey there, everybody. Recent joiner who's been lurking. I have been searching the posts here and gotten some great info from them, but I've now got some questions of my own. Hopefully, they're ones that others have and they might benefit from the thread, as well.

TL;DR: I feel like I need more skills to apply for new positions, and I don't know which skills to learn or the best places to cultivate them that an employer would recognize as legitimate.

I am currently working as a Data Analyst (though that title is a reach, you'll see why below) since Spring of 2022. It's my first corporate position, though not close to my first work experience, and I have advanced very quickly. I am in line for my second promotion right now, depending on the completion of some goals. The trouble is, this company fucking sucks. It's a mess at every level. I am one of the most competent people on my team "data analytics" wise, and some of these people have been here for the better part of a decade. I really don't say that to make myself sound like some sort of savant, but to highlight just how poor the standards of quality and skill are. Our R&D department is basically one guy whose file organization is about as clear as muck. All it took to be a walk-on was some creativity and a VERY baseline understanding of computers.

All of this to say that I do not have the same industry skills as other data analysts. My team is really pigeon-holed in the scope of what we do. Without giving away too much detail, it's basically just bioinformatics quality assurance. So the softwares I now know, and the processes I have learned, are largely industry and company specific. I opted to teach myself Excel macro construction to make my own life easier. I'm only one of two out of 15 people on my team that knows how to make them. All of it is self study. I can't go to anyone at my company, because they don't know anything, either. They don't even "allow" us to use SQL, and the data we produce is far, far too large for Excel.

I am currently finishing up the Google Data Analytics Certificate on Coursera. But I don't feel that any of it is enough when I read these job ads. There's another course that follows this one, but I'm thinking that I'd rather pivot to data science. That just leaves me with more uncertainty on which skills to invest in.

All this to ask: once I've completed the Data Analytics cert, what do next? Those boot camps don't seem worth it price wise, and I imagine that workforce is very saturated. I have considered applying to graduate programs for bioinformatics, but I'm on the fence about returning to academia unless I can get some sort of grant, and that's so competitive these days I'm not sure if I will outshine other candidates. I have some experience in JS. I am learning Python, R, and SQL. I have ordered the book "Automate the Boring Stuff" for my python learning, too.

Once I decide what to do, it'll be easy. I'm very good at learning these things and solving my own issues as I learn (which is most computer shit anyways). The problem I have is that I just don't feel like I have a good read on the industry outside of the very small corner I'm in.

Thank you in advance. Sorry that got so long-winded.

I'm extremely scared my career is fucked. My GitHub username is linked to my real identity. However if someone were to search my username up, the reddit profile of someone who posts regularly on porn subs and tweets inflammatory political shit appears.

Searching my name brings up that GitHub. I changed my username on GitHub, but searching my name still shows some Chinese github archival site that links me and my old GitHub name together. I tried emailing the admin and he won't remove it. There's no plausible deniability because that site also lists my projects.

My name is also very unique. I'm so scared. This has been stressing me out for the past few weeks.

For the past year and so many months, I've been in a front-end web developer boot camp. It's self-paced, and for the concepts I know, I feel as though I have a decent grasp on how to use them. Still, based on my failed freelancing attempt and the job requirements I see listed often, it seems like it'll be a long time until I can get a job.

What I currently know is HTML, CSS, JS. I know some basic git and node. I'm currently learning React and Typescript. I am very certain that this is not enough to land a job, and I would like to know any skills I should know by this point.

When I do have the skills, what is the best way to apply to jobs, and what should I know when applying?

So I'm going into my final year of Uni, passed the first semester with distinction. Unfortunately had to defer for a couple years but kept up studying since.

My job ended due to the unexpected passing of my boss. It was a great gig, WFH, flexible hours and not great, but decent pay. Not programming, though.

I need money to get through the year - and honestly, I really don't want to work at anything other than programming.

I'm not even that good. I know what SOLID principles & RESTful services are - but not really how to implement them. I've grinded a bit of leetcode and hackerrank and try my best to learn from the highest rated results only after finishing the assignment on my own. Can solve medium tier Q's, badly and inefficiently.

I know some Java, but only vanilla. I've used python a bit more, but mostly due to all the API's available for it. I know basic JS, HTML and CSS. I can set up a docker instance, but I haven't delved into it because I need to better understand the permissions behind the container and how to secure that properly. I've used Apache Tomcat to serve some localhost projects, and also to host things on AWS freetier and maybe Azure too? Can't remember. Built a DnD bot for a discord group of mine that's easily scalable and has been running with no issues for over a year.

I understand multithreading, Async and anonymous functions. Still getting the hang of using the latter across all languages. Need to figure out specifically wtf Lambda is because I think I might be misunderstanding it. Or the things I've read are referring to two different things.

I know enough SQL to google what I need, but need more exp with Databases in general (design in particular).

I suck at writing tests. Working to get better with that - note to self; how to check code coverage of tests.

There's definitely other things I've done, but I can't think of anything RN.

Am I still too green to be applying to JR roles? Also what kind of roles are there for Jr Dev's outside of webdev? Do I just search "Jr software developer" in job sites? (And on that note having done so, god there's not really much out there right now. Are you still supposed to be a JR with 3+ years exp?!) Any advice (or constructive criticism!) is very welcome.

Thank you for your time, and best of luck with everything you're up to. :)

I am actually thinking a lot about changing my current job at a reasonably big fintech company.

Background: I am an intermediate developer who joined this company about 1 and a half years ago. Before that I worked at another medium sized local company for about 6 months, and before that I worked 1 and a half years at a local start-up which was my first job as a dev.

Reasons for leaving current job:

• I feel like no manager / senior engineer cares about my growth here. I have not had a 1-on-1 in 5+ months (my team finished our last project, my previous manager jumped ship even before it, and after that there was an organizational re-shuffle and the manager in my new team is soon leaving so he DGAF, with no replacement in sight). Senior engineers are too busy to even think about it. If it continues this way I am sure I'll be overlooked for promotion next review cycle (I know promo is not guaranteed but with no Manager to work with towards promo and put up my case to higher ups promo seems really difficult)
• I am absolutely NOT loving the current project (it's basically replacing old code with new, and by old I mean 20-25+ years old code which no one in the org knows how it even works).
• I do NOT like the tech stack in the new project (it's Java, a language I did not want to work with. The previous project was with JS which I was more comfortable in). Ideally I would love to work with Rust or Elixir or JS/TS.
• Despite finishing the previous project on time, my team got paltry raises and 1 promo (from a junior to mid, which is seen as auto in the company).
• I want to work hands-on on a fast-paced project and build something cool, deploy it, feel closer to the users and the product, rather than being a small cog in a huge wheel.
• I want a remote job, the company is bent on hybrid, which while not enforced strictly, I am sure they are monitoring which will come into play next performance review.

I realize my current job also has positives:

• pay & benefits are good
• work life balance is good
• no pressure most of the time
• teammates are good (it's more siloed work now in the new team where I feel some engineers hide information from others just to get the edge, but overall good teammates).

Changing jobs too frequently will also make me look bad to future prospective employers, but at this point I am just not feeling the connection to the project and to the team anymore, with no one to talk honestly to. (and coz of recent organization re-shuffle zero chance of change in project). My original plan was to leave this company, if I had to, after getting a promo, but that now feels very distant, and with me being demotivated, even more so.

Am I thinking of switching too early?