CSCareerQuestions

applied internally to a role thatd be a nice pay pump. its a data role with a strong emphasis on python and sql skills. i studied my ass off on data concepts anticipating questions like "how would you start solving xyz problem" or "how would you find business insights on zyx" and the first question is "whats the difference between a dict and a list in python?" or hell, even a leetcode-like question. i like to think im decent at USING python and sql, but not having used them in a current role in ~2 years, these google-search-esque questions threw me off guard. i fumbled making up answers for a few but some i straight up had to say i have no fkn clue. so todays been a bit of a demeaning experience! has anyone else ever had an interview where they asked questions like that?

edit: thanks to yall for being supportive, this is the kindest comment section ive had. im still recovering from the embarrassment of these guys thinking I probably lied about having these skills lol. part of my difficulty is that ive been on a rotation program at work and have spent almost the last year on a cyber analyst position and it didnt hit me how much I forgot to code! so now I'm applying to some cyber roles too, wish me luck!!

Hello all! I've been a Software Developer for almost 15 years now, and after staying at my last few companies for only 2 years each, I'm starting to think about the possibility of becoming a freelancer/contractor. I'm looking for more flexibility in my work and getting out of parts of the corporate culture that I have grown to dislike.

I'm in a good place financially, and so I'm looking to see if it's a possibility. I speak English and German fluently, and have primarily a background in webservice and FE development, though I can also do quite a bit of Rust and have dabbled in Android apps a bit. I also have some experience with medical software. I think my biggest issues right now are business model development / pricing and finding customers.

Does anyone know of any good resources? I find quite a bit online, but a lot seems geared towards being self-employed generally, and not to the software industry itself. I'd be looking for either good websites or books, or general starting points for research.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice!

I have been a software engineer of off highway farm equipment for most of my life. I have like 15 years of it. I have just lost the ability to care about it anymore.

I have explored all the things that interest me and now it seems like everything is just turning the crank to completion. A very boring/slow turning with deadline pressure. I am doing less development and more code reviews because I have become a more senor developer.

My position in the company is pretty good and I could probably ride it out until I die or the company picks up on the fact that my output has dropped due to the lack of caring. But that eats at my soul and it isn't fair to my coworkers.

If money wasn't an issue, I would jump to game development but I hear that doesn't pay well or treat their employees well either. I suppose I could start my own company...

I have a wife and we plan to have one kid if that is possible for us.

Burnout is a possibility, but if that is what this is, I am not sure what to do about it.

So here is what I think my options are. I am open to other suggestions:

1. Stay where I am.
2. Pivot hard to management where I am.
3. Try to find a new job within Embedded Systems
4. Try to do Game Development.
5. Drop everything, become a philosopher like Diogenes of Sinope

Thanks for your consideration.

So I'm getting my associates this semester, technically under compsci. Can't really do much with an associates though, and I need a job in the mean time, so I've been studying CompTIA certs (A+, NET+, and soon I'll be taking a course for Sec+).

Except, I don't really know where to go from there. Like, sure I get my associates, then these certificates, and start my bachelor's, except I'm lost in the sauce about anything after that. If I'm honest, I don't even really know what I could do or what options are available to me with a CS degree. My relevant skills so far are basically none; I mean I grew up around computers and I've installed Linux mint on my daily laptop, but it's not like I know how to do much other than surface level or just above surface level stuff. I don't even really know how to code.

I guess, I'm just kinda lost. I don't really know what to do and I'd like some answers but don't even know where to start looking for them. Does anyone have any advice?

I know this is a really vague question, I'm hoping for some open discussion

For some background, I currently have 2.5 years of professional work experience, and I work for a large defense contractor doing devops.

My approach to ethicality so far was basically, I need to start somewhere before I can be picky. I got hired at a large defense contractor out of college, and now that I've hit the 2 year mark for work experience, I have some flexibility in my next job when I decide to do that.

If money wasn't a problem, I'd love to use my degree to do good for the world, or at least work for an industry I don't think is evil. And truthfully, even the lower end of CS jobs still pay better than the higher end of many other degrees.

But right now I'm looking at job offers, and it seems like if I move to a tech, medical, or financial company, I could likely see a salary increase of 30-50%, which would be huge for me as I'm young and have debts to pay off (though much less than others, I'm pretty privileged).

At the same time, if I took a tech job working for my city, I found a position that I am perfectly qualified for but it's a 10% cut from my current salary which I already believe to be a bit too low.

Just curious to see how everyone else has made these decisions. It's very tempting to follow the money and take the highest paying job, but I'd love to work somewhere I'm genuinely proud of.

Im kinda broke and I want to make some money but just can't find any ways. I live in a remote area so there are no jobs. I don't mean making thousands of dollars but a few just to buy a new Cod or some Nikes. I ain't doing any gay shit or sending my pictures!

Have deep experience in 3 different job fields and, in 2 years, learn 5 languages.

I'm a software developer (desktop/enterprise) working full-time. I made a lateral move to this position without a CS degree. The tech stack in the workplace is niche, down to the language, consequently limiting my marketability. Here and there I picked up some experience with some industry-standard languages on the job (Java, Python, C++, SQL), but in very limited scope. It's been several years, I'm in my late 30s and in a spot.

I did not expect to be rejected in competitions for years, at 2nd and 3rd interviews, but here we are. Now the market is tougher, and employers have their pickings of candidates experienced with popular technologies. I may be completely screwed, but now racing to save my career.

I have a choice to make. From best to worst, as I imagine:

a) focus on accruing more FOSS contribution experience, highlight this everywhere (including blog/homepage), then network aggressively. How much, I have no idea. Banking on the idea that demonstrated experience trumps everything, and that dinky personal projects like CS graduates do won't impress, particularly not from an intermediate developer.

b) develop a "big" project e.g. saas, idk. This could require way more time than I'd like, and I don't want to do it. I still would.

c-1) Pivot to IT. I could grind out certs in the former case in a few months time. Less ideal than coding. Were the market as competitive as it is for software, I'd be placing myself in the same situation, making it a waste of time.

c-2) do this for devops instead (Docker, Kubernetes certs). As I understand it, these are usually senior positions (internal promotions?), so coming in as an outsider without the tech stack exp may not fly.

d) write often, share it, pivot to what may value communication skills like technical sales.

Some wisdom and an extra pair of eyes would be much appreciated. Am I missing something? I'm trying to check boxes to appear like an obvious asset. Maybe broadcasting more will boost trustworthiness, I don't have a good read on what tracks the most outside of worksplace experience.

I also picked up an AWS cert, for what little that's worth.

Thanks

I'm still in my learning phase and I make many small projects as I learn. Is putting all of them on Github a good idea, if I want to put it on my resume in the future, or would having too many repositories on Github a bad thing?

I have a degree in information systems which was a mix between business and IT. While I in my initial job search was really close on heading in the direction of becoming a developer, I instead landed a role as a business systems analyst as well as working with digital transformation. So basically I'm in the land between IT and the business. I do some super light programming for the platform I'm responsible for but I feel like it's the kind of stuff you could learn in a day. I know some basic Java, Python and C# but not really enough that I'd see me landing a job that isn't a trainee developer position or a job for newly-grads where the company doesn't expect you to know anything at first.

While I don't mind the social and more business-oriented aspects of the job, I'm kinda lamenting the fact that I didn't enter into some trainee/junior dev job to sharpen up my programming skills and become a fully-fledged developer. I'd love to work fully remote and to be more flexible, e.g., not as bound to meetings and stuff which I currently am, or become a freelancer. Has anyone made a similar transition from digital transformation/adjacent areas to becoming a developer? Or am I just thinking too narrowly on what my options in this field are? Maybe there are many opportunities for fully-remote work in digital transformation, business system analysis and what not that I'm not seeing...?

As stated in the title. I've worked in IT for over 15 years despite having no related degree.

I've been closing tickets nonstop at my current company for almost 10 years. After several restructurings and shuffling of higher posts, it has become clear to me that while this employer isn't the worst out there, I will never be internally promoted or have my job duties changed if I don't leave.

Worse, ever since Covid I've started falling out of love with IT and computers in general. I used to be stoked to learn about all the new developments in tech, nowadays, not so much - the only "innovation" I've seen in the last 10 years was companies trying to make absolutely everything a fucking subscription model. Now I honestly don't know nor care what's in the newest tech stack, how security has evolved,... I just want my shit to work and not having to worry about everything under the hood.

So getting another helpdesk- or related job seems out of the question for mental health reasons.

What would be another niche or industry where someone with an analytical mind and a greatly developed loathing for corporate mooching could find their spot in the coming two decades or so?

I've long since accepted that I'll never be able to climb any ladders anywhere since I never had the right contacts or stayed long enough, so it would likewise have to be something I could mentally and physically endure being in the bottom rungs of for the aforementioned duration.

A lot of new CS grads have been noting that is really hard to get a job. I’ve personally been contacted by a couple people, including outside of Twitter, about the difficulty of finding a job. I’m sure if you’re reading this that you’ve heard some stories, too.

Here I will attempt to provide some insights as to what is going on. Basically, a massive confluence of factors has contributed to it being harder to get a job in tech, both on the demand and supply side of the market. I will cover all of these factors below.

...

It’s not just computer science majors either, but related majors have also surged in popularity. Basically, computer science majors have peaked in total and have near-peaked in proportion; when including CS-adjacent majors they are at an all-time peak in both totals and proportions; and humanities majors are at all-time proportional lows.

...

It should be clear when we talk about why getting a tech job is harder, we are not talking about there being some sort of tech recession; the numbers do not back that narrative up. When we talk about getting a tech job being harder, we’re talking about a higher difficulty of finding tech jobs specifically for new CS grads, which is not something that can be observed in the BLS employment data. (Anecdotally, the market still seems good for experienced software developers.)

...

People talk about AI in hiring like it is replacing engineers’ jobs. That is not happening right now, it simply is not and anyone saying that is bullshitting you. I also think it probably won’t happen for an incredibly long time (probably well after you retire, if ever), and I’ll explain why later.

Please mention the number of people in the startup, as it experiences probably vastly differ based on size

I currently work as a Junior Web Developer at a medium-sized company and enjoy my job. However, after taking a Distributed Systems course at university, I developed a growing interest in the infrastructure side of technology.

In my search for infrastructure roles, I’ve noticed that cloud-related positions dominate the listings, especially for someone at my experience level. I’m considering a switch to this field but need some clarity to ensure it’s the right decision.

First, regarding certifications, I’m aware there are many options for different experience levels. However, I find the preparation for these certifications to be a hassle. I prefer learning by building projects at my own pace rather than through lengthy theory texts or video courses. Additionally, exams tend to cause me a lot of anxiety. How essential are certifications in this field? Can I pursue a career without them or with only a few to kick-start my early career?

Second, as I said before, I'm very interested in the infrastructure part and... I don't know if I want to stay my whole life working on Cloud, I'm afraid that if I enter this field I'll get stuck with only a few ecosystems (like AWS or Azure), ideally I'd like to work with actual computers rather than with cloud, so would it be possible to make a switch from Cloud to on-prem infrastructure in the future?

Curious to see as it seems to be a trend lately

I'm a fullstack web dev with 7 years of experience, and been casually searching for the past year or so, but most applications don't go anywhere, when I've had no problems with resumes in the past.

How have your experiences been, anyone having any better luck?

For the last few years I've been working as an hourly part time full stack software engineer remotely, but now that school is done, I'm switching to a full time role. What are some things to keep in mind?

When I was hourly, I knew when to start and stop working because I'd simply clock in and out, but with a salary, it feels less clearly defined. There's also "unlimited" PTO, but when is it acceptable to use it?

The most famous example is probably Gitlab (https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/asynchronous/)

Since their IPO the work environment seems to have deteriorated though (https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/152o4bb/what_the_hell_is_going_on_at_gitlab/)

Curious to see if other people have any experience of real asynchronous work culture?

Hey all,

Firstly, not sure if this is the best place to ask this question, but here it goes anyways.

I've been a Systems Engineer for about 6 years now, and it's fairly enjoyable. I get to program, play with hardware from time to time, but something is missing.

In my free time, I like to spin up projects on my home lab, write and host new open source projects, maintain a fairly complex network, etc.

A couple years ago, our company got hacked, and honestly, the aftermath was some of the most fun I've ever had at a job. I got to discover new tools to help my team (like Ansible to help us perform bulk actions across our tester fleet), I got to come up with clever ways to upgrade our fleet of machines to meet the new IT regulations and deploy them at scale once we got the green light to return to the labs and I got to think of new security strategies to help better protect us (my small team within the larger company) going forward.

After the dust settled, it was back to basically only programming, but I do miss when I was able to use my infra/ security/ networking knowledge for that short time.

If I were to change from Sys Engi to something else, what should I be looking for?

I'm a software dev/sysadmin mix, ~8 years' experience, looking for work again after some time off. (Based in a capital city in Australia if that's relevant)

I have no idea how to characterise the projects that I've enjoyed the most or would like to do in the future.

The projects that I've found the most enjoyable are not the ones that you see advertised by recruiters and companies; Kubernetes, cutting-edge, greenfield projects, massive cloud accounts... meh.

Some fun stuff I've done or would like to do:

• Upgrading that weird service everyone is accidentally relying on but afraid to touch
• While money pours into LLMs in healthcare, fax machines were still used every day
• Working out the "low-level" part of the system colleagues put off for 2 years because nobody wanted to read through the boring 400-page ISO spec
• Maintaining that abandoned 500K line Java system with most errors being RuntimeException with a null description
• Working in small teams, max 8-10 people

Any tips to characterise this kind of work to focus my job search? I know it's different from working at a software company pumping out features.

Tight deadlines and shoestring resources don't bother me (as long as I get my salary!). Having people who don't take it all super seriously along the way is super important.

How do I look for this? Trial & error? I feel like there must be... consultancies? ... working on these kinds of projcets. Perhaps there's some name or buzzwords that I need to use? Or would I need to talk with one of those mega big consultancies like Accenture?

Of course very open to the possibility that I'm being totally unrealistic and way too picky in a down market.

My bread and butter is working in Go, Python, backend and OS stuff. Networking, Linux, BSDs, that kinda thing.

Thanks all!

I am privacy conscious so I would like to use my proton.me account, but I wanted some advice. Should I use my gmail account for career related purposes or should a proton.me address be fine?