[conspire] Getting a programming job in 2020

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2020, at 5:49 PM, paulz at ieee.org wrote:
> 
> There is definitely a generational change in the tech work force. Those of us who entered Silicon Valley long ago were fortunate that many companies were looking for trained workers. In my case, I thought it was fun to mess around with Amateur Radio and related stuff. When I graduated from college, I was fortunate to get a job offer from HP. That was then.

When I started (1975), my community college had three classes in CS: one each in Basic programming, Fortran, and Assembly (I took all three). You could also take the business classes in Cobol, which I declined to do.

> For someone currently looking for a software position, the questions are 
>  1. What languages and applications are currently in demand? dice.com has a number of articles about languages and wages and who is hiring. 
>  2. Which of those languages / applications do you know and can put on your resume?

I'd argue against DICE in the current era. I don't believe they give an accurate picture of the market any more. I have seen the same job listed by at least six companies and it's *clearly* the same job because of some of the specifics. I think this gives an inflated sense of how many jobs are in X. I also think that there are a lot of agencies where they are trying to undercut locals and get bids and then blow them out of the water. So.

I haven't gotten a phone call from a DICE prospect that was worth the bits it was written in since at least 2008. Maybe longer.

> One company screens potential applicants by sending a "challenge" software problem. You are given a limited time to send in your solution. Someone I know was potentially a good fit, but he blew his chance. He didn't see the email until 2 days later. Then he discovered that he didn't have a compiler installed on his computer. The clock ran out before he got started.

Always have a compiler (even if you're a web developer, srsly). Always have it current. Always have your build chain current. Always have a project you can run unit and functional tests against.

Always have your major languages current, even the ones that may not be your primary (for me, that's python as I consider ruby my primary scripting language). Keep all your packages up to date.

Get on github (or equivalent). Learn how to fork (seriously, people will not take offense, or should not) and do a pull request. 

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-pull-request-on-github

Read the currently open issues. If there are untagged issues, see if that's something you can help with if you're so inclined. If there's a project you're interested in, see if there are "help-wanted" tags or "starter-bugs" kind of tags.

Those kinds of projects show that *you know how to collaborate with other engineers in the modern era.* That is far, far, far more useful than DICE for a hiring *manager* (but not a recruiter).

Deirdre
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/attachments/20200214/6e118241/attachment.html>