Hacker News Reader

Comment by laszlojamf | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. A tangent to this which I’ve found striking when talking to friends in other professions, is how spoiled I’ve been as a developer. I’ve _never_ had to apply for a job. Whenever I’ve been ready to move on I’ve just flipped that “open for suggestions” switch and within a couple of weeks I’ve signed on for a new company. As far as I’ve heard, that doesn’t happen in other industries. People work their asses off _looking_ for work. Even if I also sometimes get annoyed with particularly generic outreaches, I check myself and remind myself how lucky I am to have that problem.

View on HN

> how spoiled I’ve been as a developer. I’ve _never_ had to apply for a job

Well, if that's been your consistent experience, you're spoiled even _for_ a developer - I have 30 years experience and a decent degree in CS, and I've had to go looking for new jobs whenever I've needed one and been turned down for many, but I do agree the process is _way_ easier than any other line of work.

A few years ago I've transitioned from working in my country to working remotely for US companies. Now I'm back in this boat. Most US companies that do remote do not hire outside of the US and those that do get so many CVs that you have to put a lot of hard effort to even get an interview. Getting a job is months of dedicated work.

Absolutely worth it. Pay is multiples of what European companies pay, culture is way better and colleagues are exceptional.

Just get a US graduate degree from a great school that is online like Stanford ($70k), UIUC ($25k), UT ($10k) or GT ($6k) and they'll be all over you regardless of where you are. Alternatively, use TopTal, A-team, Tribe.ai etc. for US gigs.

Our industry does not really care about degrees. The places that do are crappy and you don't want to work there.

I've worked without a degree for 20 years. Recently got one for personal achievement purposes. Totally not worth it from an career investment perspective, IMHO.

Just to give a different perspective on degrees, I did get a BS (Applied Math and Computer Science at an engineering school) and in my late 20's secured a large contract with IBM at Ford. Ford wanted me to do the work (they knew me from a previous contract), but IBM wanted a large contracting company to do the work. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't had a degree, I would have never gotten that contract.

I can't say I learned much of anything useful in college, but I didn't want to be that guy that constantly was passed over for promotions and opportunities because I didn't have a degree and a less-qualified person did.

I assume you are in the US. The original poster was outside US fighting thousands other CVs applying for remote US jobs. One way to distinguish oneself is to have some US symbol on the CV, like a top school, or a top employer.

If you have the connections, knowing someone inside the company (e.g. from an open source project) and asking them to move your CV inside the company for you will be a faster and cheaper way to get in.

When I looked at it, Toptal required a four week unpaid project as part of their "vetting" procedures. I'm still not sure who is actually willing to put themselves through that.

Not sure, I think it's 1 week but doable in 1 day? Anyway, taking those "remote agency" projects can help the poster to get some money while they are searching for a proper US-based arrangement. And they can land jobs that pay $200/h on TopTal as well (uncommon though).

I'd love to hear more about the process. Did you write a blog post about this by any chance?

Same here. Some recruiters might be annoying, but my career owes a lot to recruiters who reached out to me.

Am I really that unique that I'm not on LinkedIn? I can't agree with its conditions, so manual applications it is for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com