I have been a professional programmer for 44 years and have NEVER had "job market anxiety". Why? Because I sincerely believe that there is zero correlation between the job market and my ability to find work.
I don't pay attention to what anyone says about the economy, the market, or anything else macro, especially on the internet. And I have gone through times that were much much worse than now.
I never worried about losing any job because I was certain I could find another. The longest I've ever been out of work was for a few weeks.
A few tips:
- Have x months expenses in the bank. Take the pressure off.
- Have multiple resumes ready to go, programmer, analyst, sys admin, manager, even data entry.
- Stay in touch with your network. Not to get a job. Just to stay in touch.
- Keep your skills fresh. Always have a side project.
- Remember we're not in energy, education, or manufacturing. Their cycles are killers. Our in tech are not. Everyone else depends on us.
- Fuck anxiety. We build stuff out of nothing. We're stronger than bad news.
This is all good and optimistic but is a little bit in denial of the currently reality.
I don't think it's super surprising news to anyone and most people have done everything you've mentioned and are still struggling to get a job so it seems a little cruel to place the blame on them when the market is gone.
> This is all good and optimistic but is a little bit in denial of the currently reality.
The current reality is still better than 2009-10, when millions of fresh grads even in technical roles went into economy with 11% unemployment and had to take close to min wage jobs if they could find them at all.
I have many peers still recovering from that recession, and some never found meaningful employment and are still in dire straits financially.
The current situation is far better in comparison, especially for techies who had a decade of cushy jobs to pad their safety net.
> Pick was originally implemented as the Generalized Information Retrieval Language System (GIRLS) on an IBM System/360 in 1965 by Don Nelson and Dick Pick [...]
My first job involved working on a Pick system. The system started life on a Prime mainframe and was migrated to UniVerse on Solaris.
I seriously miss it.
Every once in a while I try to get back into it. Usually it takes the form of trying (and failing) to get a demo/personal version of UniVerse, but lately I've been poking at ScarletDME a little bit. I'd even pay money (not much since this is just hobby stuff, but some) for UniVerse, but even the cost of it seems to be a closely guarded secret.
Thanks, Mister_Snuggles, for reminding me I'm not the only one left.
I HAVE to code in PICK.
"Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it." - Charles Burkowski
(Funny, they named the current support company "Rocket".)
Here's the link to the current Universe trial version (free and good until 04/2025. Get it, install it, and make something with it. Please don't let that part of you die.
Yup, this is exactly where I get to when I try and fail to get UniVerse.
What's the trick to making that form work? It won't accept my @gmail.com address, and I don't really want to use my work email address and potentially mis-represent things. Especially since my work used to use one of Rocket's products.
1. Don’t exercise to be strong. Exercise to be healthy.
2. The best place for ideas is where ever works best for you.
3. What she said. And carry and pencil and pocket-sized notebook everywhere. People say I have a great memory. It's a hack, not a gift.
4. In relationships, the most important thing is love. If you have it, no problem is too big. Without it, who cares?
5. If sex ever becomes hard work, become a hooker. You might as well get paid.
6. Consider a pet before having anything else.
7. At any age, if you take care of yourself, you will not experience irrational weight gain. Nothing happens out of nowhere for no reason at all. There are no rewards or punishments, only consequences.
8. Sometimes in life, the best thing to do, is to <insert whatever works for you>.
9. In a long term relationship, be either "all in" or not. If you're "all in", be "all in".
10. Learn the difference between issues and details. Issues matter. Details don't.
11. Allow aquaintances to come and go. True friendships are so rare and precious, never lose them. (I learned that the hard way too many times.)
12. Give every "no show" one opportunity to apologize. After that, ghost them. No matter what happens, it will be for the best.
13. Never allow anyone to "make you feel" anything. You must always decide how to feel yourself.
14. If you're too stupid to use a condom, you get what you deserve. Unfortunately sometimes your child gets what you deserve too.
15. The more you know, the lower the percentage of everything there is to know will be known by you.
16. Don't pick the phone up in the first place. (There, you just eliminated the need for 4,528 "put your phone down" rules.
17. See #14, #15, and #16.
18. See #16. See how easy.
19. Apply #16 to social media. Except Hacker News.
20. If you're older than the author of a listicle, you have automatic permission to build upon it with your own listicle.
OP, thanks for the nice list, and the opportunity to play along with good clean fun. :-)
Gotta disagree with number 4. I've found out that respect is far more important than "love". After multiple relationships I've concluded the only woman to truly love me was my mother.
Number 12 is spot on, people wasting your time should be eliminated very quickly. Money can be gained again, time is lost forever.
7. Yeah the weight gain thing I don't get. Calories in, calories out. Wear a watch that tracks your workouts. Log the shit you eat on an app. Make sure it balances out. It's basically an exact science at this point, I've been doing it for 10 years, I'm 40 years old and I can go up and down the scale at will. Weight loss/gain is only magic till you understand how it works.
Yes. I see it more and more these days, especially among recruiters and HR departments.
I believe there's an inverse correlation between the value one places on green squares and their understanding of what it actually takes to build software...
Exactly. I hate this too. I'd rather keep my github activity private. It's nobody's business to know if I commit 30 times per hour or once per week.
On the other hand I recently encountered a very interesting hiring process. I think this is the first time in 20 years when I'm encountering some "new idea in recruitment" and I actually think it's good for everyone.
I'm talking about coding/other task based challenges you complete on your own. I recently got something like this sent by a recruiter. (2 coding challenges, one - writing a email to a junior colleague telling them how to troubleshoot an imaginary backend issue). I was very pleasantly surprised that web based system had over 20 languages you could choose from to complete the challenges and once I've completed it around midnight my time, by 7am it was already scored (by humans and pretty well).
I much prefer this kind of stuff to traditional "share your screen via video all and code live" or pre-covid, write your code with a pen on a whiteboard...
As for cheating possibility... They openly allow one to use Google etc, but there is barely enough time to complete the task, so someone extensively searching on Google, or trying to use chatgpt for the task would run out of time tweaking the prompt very quickly.
i am not exactly a fan of coding challenges and i do like laive coding, but that challenge to write an email to a junior colleague telling them how to troubleshoot an imaginary backend issue sounds like something i'd really enjoy doing.
I think this is a good hiring process. There is research which suggests that the hiring process which produces the highest performing hires is one that sticks as closely as possible to evaluating the candidate's performance on the specific tasks involved in the job.
In a dev job you're writing code, you have some degree of time constraint, you get to use Google. You're emailing a colleague with advice/suggestions. So yep. That company's test is pretty on the money.
We've used a similar process and it's super interesting to be on the hiring side and compare the results from different candidates when you give them the same problem. There were people who sounded really smart and polished in an interview but then bombed the coding test.
I've been a proponent of the code-to-hire process for at least a decade.
There are for sure some challenges (some legal, some technical) but those replace other challenges that I think are less effective.
Interviews are pretty low value for skill-set - mostly for personality.
GitHub and SocialMedia spying don't reveal much about the Person-at-Work.
So, currently we find a nice candidate, brief interview for personality/communication then code test them. And I pay for the time too - but that value is capped for tax/paperwork reasons.
Was this the Woven-ran 4 question (recommendation system, email junior, invoice, database schema) interview? If so, I think the 4 questions are pretty good. The issue is I've had the exact same interview 3 times now from 3 different companies who use Woven.
At one point, you could backdate commits and push them to GitHub to make art with the red/green squares. I don't know if that still works, but recruiters generally won't be able to tell whether you're faking commit activity.
I remember a HN post where someone used git history to make pictures out of their github tracker. Seems like a silly thing for companies to pay attention to. I'm pretty sure you can make up old history if you want, too -- just turn yourself into a commit rockstar!
Thanks mda, for the great feedback. (The greatness of feedback is not correlated with its positivity or negativity.)
I sort of anticipated this. I wrote the comic below just for times like this. Please stay in touch and let me know if any of this grows on you. I sure hope it does. That's what helped me get through it all.
Personally, I'm partial to path which can do almost anything and tends to be less verbose than other methods.
Long time student, but I see that I still have lots to learn.
I suck so much at drawing and dislike images so much that for ease and performance, I built my entire side project with svg.
After today, it looks like I have quite a bit of refactoring to do. Thank you, OP!
https://eddiots.com/1