Comment by james_s_tayler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by james_s_tayler | Hacker News Reader

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That's awesome.

What has been your strategy to "keep up"?

I ask this because I recently left a job I started in 2014 where the people were great but the technology was old, not modern at all.

In the time I was working there Docker, React, Vue, Serverless, GraphQL, Kubernetes, gRPC have all become a thing.

I didn't have a chance in my work life to use any of them and it was my first job, so I couldn't easily change (it's different now I suppose).

In my experience it takes between 300 ~ 500 hours of solving new problems and challenges before you're really proficient with a technology and have gained a certain mastery over it.

It also seems to be the case that a technology lasts about 5 years (roughly speaking).

So this then presents me with a scenario that I need to spend 40 hours working a job where the tech stack will most probably not contain all the new hotness. Then after family duties at home it's now 9pm and I'm free. If I were to get 8 hours sleep I want to sleep between 11pm and midnight. This leaves me a window of 2~hours a day. If I need to spend 300 ~ 500 hours to gain proficiency in a technology that's then I need to spend my two hours from 9pm to 11pm either learning two technologies to a reasonable level or one technology really deeply.

Surely that just isn't sustainable?

Now, obviously that's the brute Force strategy and it can be improved a great deal.

I'm very, very interested to hear what your strategies have been!

I want to able to do this without killing myself. I love tech, I aspire to be in a similar position as you. Good stable work, working with stuff that's fresh and being a high value, high level, hands on contributor.

Some optimizations that come to mind (and chime in with your thoughts on these, so I know if I'm on the right track!) are that I should choose my working environment carefully to optimize for working with the technologies that are going to matter so I can do a good deal of learning on the job. Second I should pick what I'm going to say no to and drop the mental load of having to care about those things. Three I could work 30 hours a week and study for 10 giving me a great balance of doing what I love by contributing to a team but also doing what I love by exploratory learning.

Anyway, very keen to hear your reply.

A few things.

- you nailed it. Pick jobs where you are learning new technology. Usually you can get a job where you can get your foot in the door based on the “must haves” that also have “nice to have” requirements. I’ll learn just enough about the nice to have technology once I get my foot in the door, and then volunteer for small items using the new to me technology and usually end up putting twice the amount of work in that someone who knew what they were doing.

- once you’ve been in technology long enough, there is nothing new under the sun. You don’t have to be an expert at everything just good enough to get through the door and you can usually figure things out.

- when I start talking about my professional experience and going for “architect” level positions, I can usually avoid the techno trivia type of interviews. I’m asked to speak about higher level architecture.

Once I start telling people that “first and foremost I am a life long geek. No matter what my titles were in companies. I started programming in 6th grade in assembly language and I’ve been interested in technology ever since”.

Even though I say ageism is not a big deal. Why would I take the chance? I remove the year graduated reference from my resume, I wear a bald head anyway so no one sees gray hair and before an interview I’m clean shaven.

My former manager said he thought I was no older than early thirties. (His words not mine). “That’s one thing Black guys have going for you. If you cut all your hair off it’s hard for us to tell how old you are”. Yeah it wasn’t PC but we had that kind of blunt conversation. I thought it was funny.

>Once I start telling people that “first and foremost I am a life long geek. No matter what my titles were in companies. I started programming in 6th grade in assembly language and I’ve been interested in technology ever since”.

Did you forget to finish this thought or can you expand on it? I'm guessing it softens people's view towards you?

>Usually you can get a job where you can get your foot in the door based on the “must haves” that also have “nice to have” requirements.

Sometimes those "nice to haves" feel like "must haves". I try and get projects out to demonstrate competency with a tool/platform/framework, but as the parent suggests it's an absolute time and effort sink (lately I've been trying to wrap my head around a specific k8s configuration I want on AWS). On occasion I'll mention what I'm learning in my first email if its relevant for their interests but I've never felt it mattered and it never gets brought up.

>I’ll learn just enough about the nice to have technology once I get my foot in the door

In this case is your foot in the door first getting into talks with the employer (so you're prepared to talk about it during e.g., negotiations) or is it landing the position? It sounds like the latter, but just making sure.

Thanks for all your posts in this thread. I've been trying to start my career and appreciate you sharing your experience.

Did you forget to finish this thought or can you expand on it? I'm guessing it softens people's view towards you?

Some people maybe weary of hiring an older dev because they think that either we really want to be managers and are just accepting a dev role or that we are old and stuck in our ways and not willing to learn the latest technology.

I try to come off as someone who is just computer nerd who isn’t trying to move up to management or who doesn’t think these “kids” are dumb.

On occasion I'll mention what I'm learning in my first email if its relevant for their interests but I've never felt it mattered and it never gets brought up.

I don’t send out blind emails or submit resumes blindly. I have a network of local recruiters I’ve cultivated over the years. They usually put my resume at the top of the pile and push for me. I’ve done so many interviews on both the hiring side and the employment side and have usually been successful, the recruiters think of me as easy money. The recruiters also know salary ranges, the interview process, what you need to focus on etc and they can tell you what other people interviewing struggled with.

In this case is your foot in the door first getting into talks with the employer (so you're prepared to talk about it during e.g., negotiations) or is it landing the position? It sounds like the latter, but just making sure.

My first job out of college was a computer operator based on an internship I did the year before. I got in, got lucky that they needed a fairly complicated data entry system written and I was the only one who could program. It was C.

Next job was through a recruiter based on my knowledge of C. I knew the C standard in an out, spent a lot of time on comp.lang.c (Usenet).

The next company I went to almost a decade later wanted my VB6 experience of all things and they were transistioning to C# (where I wanted to be).

Next job wanted a backend c# developer who had experience with c# and Windows Mobile (the “must have”) and front end Jquery experience and MVC, Entity Framewo and unit testing (“the nice to have”)

Next job wanted someone all of those skills and the nice to haves were Bootstrap and Angular.

I didn’t have any of the “nice to have skills” at any of the jobs when I started.

Finally, I got a job as a first time dev lead based on the accumulated experience and a lot of reading (Clean Code, Domain Driven Design, Enterprise Architect Patterns, Gang of Four Design Patterns, anything by Martin Fowler).

That’s where I discover AWS and that helped me get my next job. I knew .Net, had some knowledge about AWS but hadn’t used it extensively.

So now I’m starting down the road of being an “AWS Consultant” more focused on the software/Devops side than the networking side (they are a dime a dozen) and at the same time I have a chance to fill in some other gaps like being at least a competent front end developer and Linux.

Thanks for all your posts in this thread. I've been trying to start my career and appreciate you sharing your experience. No problem,

I try to bring a non SV viewpoint to software development. But one thing I don’t have any experience with is being a “junior developer”. My first job was designing a system that was used by an entire new line of business for a company.

Now I do have experience with being an “expert beginner”.

https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

Wow. It's almost freaky what you describe as the path you have taken for your overall career... because I went and did a startup to scratch an itch and that didn't pan out so now I'm back to looking for work and in the process of zooming out and strategizing about how to get where I want to go I feel like the plan I've come up with is essentially a compressed version of that.

I really appreciate the responses here. Some very useful insights indeed!

Last piece of advise. Yeah make sure you “compress it”. Don’t make the mistake of getting comfortable like I did for a decade and not keeping up with technology. It’s really hard to get caught up once you do. Be aggressive about keeping up with technology.

I would like to think that if it ever came to it, I would always choose technology over money. Every month that you keep using older technology you’re accumulating technical debt in your own career.

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