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Comment by quicklime | Hacker News Reader

The variety of jobs that the author has had in her career is impressive.

I consider myself lucky in that I'm reasonably marketable on the job market - I'm ok at interviewing and I've worked at a few FAANGs (including Amazon). But I recently got turned down for a job because I "don't have enough AWS experience".

It feels like the only way to change a career is 1) get a job doing exactly what you were doing before (e.g. React dev), 2) at that job, do something tangential for a while (e.g. UX design) and then 3) with that experience, go and find a new job in the new field.

How does someone go from working in elderly care, to a fish factory, to a design agency, etc.?

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When you start to accept salaries that are a fraction of what a software engineer makes, motivation and general skills become more relevant than specialization.

Said differently, if I'm gonna pay you 300k per year, you'd better have the exact skills I search for. For 30k per year, showing up every day ready to lift heavy things for 8 hours is sometimes all you need (certainly not true right now during the COVID crisis).

> you'd better have the exact skills I search for

How often does that work out for you? Because I've gotten lucky a couple of times and found people who were really good matches, but I've never found an exact match.

We look for people with a demonstrated ability to solve problems in the space they'll be working, who can learn as they go, with the soft skills and demeanor to mesh with the team.

We end up settling a lot.

It worked in the sense that when I was part of recruiting software developers, the resumes we received were all people having previously wrote code in their life. A significant part of them had wrote code in a fashion similar to what we're looking for (c# for a java codebase let's say as an example). A small fraction had used some of the technologies we used already.

My brother in law has a painting shop. Right now he want to recruit a sandblaster. He'll literally hire anyone with enough muscles to pick up the tool and ready to show up everyday at 6am for 8 hours of sweating.

What you call "not an exact match" is already matching precise criteria in fact. I bet you have interviews ! You don't need an interview to get a sandblaster job. You just have to show up a morning at my brother in law company and lift the sandblasting tool ^^

So yeah, SW are recruited - even if we don't see it that way - with pretty stricts criteria. Would you hire someone that has never booted a computer in his life ? Never wrote a line of code ? Never learnt an algorithm in any fashion ? Settling for you maybe is sometimes hiring a java dev for a haskell job. Somewhere else it's hiring a former butcher for a painting one (the guy is pretty good apparently!).

It's not just developer jobs.You go into higher level professional jobs and you're usually looking for some fairly specific experience. (Arguably at the highest levels you're looking more for people who can broadly make organizational impact, but stick to individual contributors to keep things simple.)

When I look around my broader group, I'm a bit of an outlier even in a lot of engineers would say we all do "marketing." But there are relatively few other jobs I could hit the ground running with at a senior level. What I do is very different from demand generation, marketing campaigns, etc.

If someone is right out of school who cares. But you're not going to pay me senior level compensation for a job I don't really know at a detailed level.

That is my own experience when I was in a hiring role. I look for the same abilities you mention.

>Said differently, if I'm gonna pay you 300k per year, you'd better have the exact skills I search for.

If only executive salaries with golden parachutes were as discriminating as developer negotiations.

There's not exactly a large labor pool for executives at the tier where they would need a golden parachute.

Actually as you get higher in the pay skills, people often pay the most for rock solid algorithms and cs, not "is an expert in kubernetes"

Front end work is a dead end. The real money is made on the server-side. AWS and others are slowly eating the back-end space with FaaS type offerings, so while it may be a dead end, you might be the only one standing in another decade.

I wouldn't consider React experience from a FAANG any more valuable than any other place. It's the same mission, it's the same code. Infrastructure engineer, on the other hand, yes, very interested in the FAANG experience.

There's no substitute for building fault-tolerant distributed systems. Writing software is one component of that overall job description, and probably not the most important component.

> It feels like the only way to change a career is 1) get a job doing exactly what you were doing before (e.g. React dev), 2) at that job, do something tangential for a while (e.g. UX design) and then 3) with that experience, go and find a new job in the new field.

I've noticed the same and would also be interested in hearing how she transitioned. It might have to do with how in demand employees are at the time of hiring. In a tighter job market employers are more picky.

For elderly care or the fish/transport/non-hi-tech manufacturing jobs you quit, ask if they have positions and live hapilly on or near minimum wage.

Im always shocked by how few have any experience doing any other work, fast food and service industry included.

Having a lot of skills is a liability. Employers only want someone with 6 months of experience repeated 20 times.

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