5YOE in JS Fullstack/ Python. SF. On student visa.
5YOE in JS Fullstack/ Python. SF. On student visa.
Get a job first. Even if not remote.
Then you keep applying for remote jobs.
Since you asked,
there’s a series of scenes in Silicon Valley where people are hired and just put on ice just to keep them from advancing competition.
This reflects reality.
And even then, those companies weren’t looking to hire up all of the random enterprise CRUD full stack developers.
I put myself in that category. If you take away my AWS account, I’m just a senior enterprise Dev who knows how to talk to people.
Lots of devs don’t even know how to talk to their colleagues or spouse, let alone an arbitrary person for business development.
Almost out of money.
As a wise man once said: I'm cooked
I was looking for a job in 2023 - a standard C#/JS/Python development job where they wanted AWS experience. At the time according to my resume, I had 10 years of experience (many more years of experience. But not one cares about my programming in C on mainframes in the 90s) including 2 leading AWS architecture at a startup and 3.5 working directly at AWS (full time consulting division).
After being Amazoned for shits and giggles I randomly applied for hundreds of jobs that I was qualified for - I heard crickets. I never do this and I didn’t expect much to come from it.
I did her multiple offers in a couple of weeks via my network and targeted outreach to recruiters where I was an industry expert in a niche of AWS that’s popular. But not many people have experience with.
On another note, the mid size company I work for sent around 300 offers last year and we had an offer/application rate of 0.4%.
Every opening for any remote job gets literally hundreds of applications within 24 hours. It’s almost impossible to stand out from the crowd.
The sys admin job had a lot of downtime, so I started automating some stuff to make my life easier. Then improved upon that stuff to make it more robust to share with the team. Then at some point my boss told me to just work on whatever I thought would help the team, and do that (officially ending the sys admin work that I had largely stopped doing on my own many months earlier). He didn’t really talk to me for 2 years after that. By that time, I had so many projects that I couldn’t do them all myself and he ended up building a whole team around me. Everything went at my pace. Since it was all value-add of stuff that otherwise wouldn’t exist, there were no timelines or pressure. However, I enjoyed it, so I was working 60 hour weeks most of the time, but it all felt very chill. No one was asking me to put in those hours and a good deal of it was more social. As a result, I saw the biggest jumps in salary in my career, while at the same time having the lowest stress, and most enjoyment from my job. But all this started in an office after I had a good deal of time with the company. I didn’t walk into it as a new hire.
These days I feel like I have more stress, but don’t feel like I’m growing at all, because there is no room for exploration and growth with all the deadlines and shifting priorities that have me never knowing which direction to go or when the direction with drastically change.
For me, growth happens when I’m bored. It’s a way to avoid the boredom. When I’m pushed too hard, I tend not to grow, I shutdown. The best way for a company to get the most out of me is to stick me in a room and let me get bored, as counterintuitive as that sounds.
It's that yea.
I'm working at a job where I have a lot of time to explore. It's the first time I can tell that I'm growing.
Non-chill means constant stress. Chill means you have the flexibility to do either, or at least the autonomy and trust to stress yourself as needed.
Your job should be manageable day-to-day with certain period of stress or extra work where you need to push yourself. This is where growth occurs.
Example: You need to learn a new language/framework and maybe spend some extra hours outside of work for a few weeks to ramp up for a new project. But once you have a handle on it, you go back to your regular schedule. And that might even mean now you can relax and work less than your regular schedule. It's all about managing when you grind and when you "coast".
As mentioned by others, nobody gets paid to “chill”, but with fewer responsibilities there can be more opportunities to take initiative and grow in a direction that interests you. Once you clear out your backlog if things are slow you can start looking for ways you can improve the system while sharpening your skills on your own terms.
Never join small, privately owned (or even worse, privately controlled!) companies with extreme accountability and ownership. No startups. Run if they mention they are a company that is performance driven or a place where you can make an impact.
You want to be one of many random swe who can hide among his peers and you want to be able to make tons of meetings and red tape responsible for your slow progress.
Government, insurances, banks, big-corpo-bodyleasing consulting (like accenture, NOT „high pressure boutique consulting“). Body lease consulting is ideal, you can regularly leave behind the mess you caused and move on.
You would do good to consider what "chill" means to you. Not a lot of work? Work that is easy? Relaxed environment with cool collegues that don't have sticks up their asses? Once you found that phrase it more precisely, since chill mainly imples you want to not work but get money for it.
i've noticed that it is sometimes less about the type of company and more about the immediate manager and their mindset. a competent manager can set expectations with external stakeholders while not overloading their engineers. a good middle manager who can play politics with multiple stakeholders and becomes "liked" really leads to a chill job if they have the correct expectations of their career as well.
It's definitely about that. The current company I'm at, I met my manager and have good chemistry with him. Since then, within a year, I got 3 new managers. The department is a mess. My first manager is mentoring me formally. I'm mostly still a part of his team.
His mentorship makes it much easier to stay for me.
Absolutely no idea how I'm going to get another job. The area I live in is horrible. Hope for the best.
saulpw•4w ago