My personal objective is to bring outstanding service and technology to any position I can apply it to. I work fast and efficiently to get the job done right, the first time.
First, hats off to you, a long career is a good one!
How did you deal with changing technology and keeping your 'worth' through the years? I'm a 25 year coding vet who knows many things and has done many jobs, but primarily its all been in PHP, Javascript, and whatever frontend stuff was the new black at the time. I've had a rough year. I got laid off with my entire team in July, i was out of work for 30 days. During that time, I used youtube, udemy and treehouse to update my skills and learn some frameworks I was missing, I had actually started this process back in January of 2018, picking up Vue and React and writing my personal site with them. I was happy that I picked up all this stuff with ease, and within 30 days, I got probably 100 calls for PHP jobs. I took a contract and worked for 30 days before i realized my new employer was not going to meet set expectations. I went back to looking for work, but in that short time, the landscape somehow changed. No one wanted a PHP guy. No one was interested in anything but the flavor of the month, React/Vue/Angular. Recruiters would not get me interviews because their clients were looking for 'frontend developers' and they see SQL on my resume and assume I don't have any frontend, even though my resume reflects that there hasn't been a backend I've ever worked on without also working on the frontend. Employers didn't want to hear that. One of them in an interview that lasted 3 hours, ended with "on a second scan of your resume, I don't see the single job title "Frontend Developer" and he passed on me right there, even after me showing him the portfolio I have built over the years, and my brand spanking new at the time Vue website. This persisted for the next 65 days until I started another PHP job 3 weeks ago. Next week my tasks are to mock up new site designs for a Vue app that I will be part of building. I've heard 'you have no production experience in front end' and recruiters have said, 'it doesn't matter if you've learned any of this on your own, no employer wants that unless you've had production experience'. So there's the catch 22. Junior devs learn from the same sources I do, the internet. There is no college course for React. You cant get a job without exp and can't get exp without a job - except for that, you CAN get exp w/o a job because I'm still building react and vue components in my spare time! I'm sure tech has changed like this within your lifetime, as it has changed during mine. How have you (or anyone reading this!) dealt with the changes and maintaining your paycheck as a dev. The last thing I want to do is go from a Senior Dev salary to a Junior salary because new languages keep sprouting up. I know my core fundamentals, its all just diff syntax from there. Looking fwd to any replies!
Started out teaching English at Embry-Riddle.
Graded 10,000 essays.
Lesson learned.
Became a mathematics teacher.
Discovered computing.
Never looked back.
Location
Houston TX
Education
Stetson University: B.A., M.A. in English; M.S. in mathematics
As for your question, "How did you deal with changing technology and keeping your 'worth' through the years?": André Pena asks something similar above.
Oh my. I believe that you were just unlucky and meet very bad and extremely unexperienced recruiters. I would say just contine searching. There can't be all so bad without capacity to recognize what is important to be a great developer. The experience with front-end or any other technology alone makes nobody a good developer. The brain and ability to adopt makes it.
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First, hats off to you, a long career is a good one!
How did you deal with changing technology and keeping your 'worth' through the years? I'm a 25 year coding vet who knows many things and has done many jobs, but primarily its all been in PHP, Javascript, and whatever frontend stuff was the new black at the time. I've had a rough year. I got laid off with my entire team in July, i was out of work for 30 days. During that time, I used youtube, udemy and treehouse to update my skills and learn some frameworks I was missing, I had actually started this process back in January of 2018, picking up Vue and React and writing my personal site with them. I was happy that I picked up all this stuff with ease, and within 30 days, I got probably 100 calls for PHP jobs. I took a contract and worked for 30 days before i realized my new employer was not going to meet set expectations. I went back to looking for work, but in that short time, the landscape somehow changed. No one wanted a PHP guy. No one was interested in anything but the flavor of the month, React/Vue/Angular. Recruiters would not get me interviews because their clients were looking for 'frontend developers' and they see SQL on my resume and assume I don't have any frontend, even though my resume reflects that there hasn't been a backend I've ever worked on without also working on the frontend. Employers didn't want to hear that. One of them in an interview that lasted 3 hours, ended with "on a second scan of your resume, I don't see the single job title "Frontend Developer" and he passed on me right there, even after me showing him the portfolio I have built over the years, and my brand spanking new at the time Vue website. This persisted for the next 65 days until I started another PHP job 3 weeks ago. Next week my tasks are to mock up new site designs for a Vue app that I will be part of building. I've heard 'you have no production experience in front end' and recruiters have said, 'it doesn't matter if you've learned any of this on your own, no employer wants that unless you've had production experience'. So there's the catch 22. Junior devs learn from the same sources I do, the internet. There is no college course for React. You cant get a job without exp and can't get exp without a job - except for that, you CAN get exp w/o a job because I'm still building react and vue components in my spare time! I'm sure tech has changed like this within your lifetime, as it has changed during mine. How have you (or anyone reading this!) dealt with the changes and maintaining your paycheck as a dev. The last thing I want to do is go from a Senior Dev salary to a Junior salary because new languages keep sprouting up. I know my core fundamentals, its all just diff syntax from there. Looking fwd to any replies!
Thanks, O.
As for your question, "How did you deal with changing technology and keeping your 'worth' through the years?": André Pena asks something similar above.
I'm expecting to respond in a new post.
Oh my. I believe that you were just unlucky and meet very bad and extremely unexperienced recruiters. I would say just contine searching. There can't be all so bad without capacity to recognize what is important to be a great developer. The experience with front-end or any other technology alone makes nobody a good developer. The brain and ability to adopt makes it.