danjac

And suppose you have a spouse with a career that isn't so mobile? Language barriers? Work visas? Elderly parents?

Tons of reasons people can't just up and migrate at the drop of a hat.

Having lived through a recession or two, this is probably the first time I'm seriously thinking about a change of career (to do what else, of course, is the question).

There's lots of people here whistling in the dark, but honestly the past year has felt more like a sea change in the industry than a temporary downturn. We can blame AI hype or interest rate changes, but probably it's more people taking a serious look at tech for once (whether big corps like Google or little startups) and seeing how much is just not that profitable or ever likely to be. Lots of naked swimmers in the tech industry.

Browser native date pickers are usually good enough and meet accessibility requirements these days.

Unless you have fussy designers or PMs who insist on artisanal NIH components for everything just because.

I must have hallucinated the past year when 10,000s of engineers lost their jobs while CEOs got nice share bonuses...

It's not so much the war and politics - I don't see so much of that luckily - but all the "thought leaders", influencers and other grifters filling up the feed with their drivel.

Job postings are mostly just fraudulent, out-of-date, or oddly over-specific and generally a waste of time for applicants who don't have an insider track through their network or a recruiter.

Yes I hear "apply anyway, nobody meets 100% of the requirements!" but unless there happens to be a developer shortage in that area we all know this is horseshit. Unless you have the insider track you are more likely than not to just end up in the reject pile. It doesn't matter how skilled you think you are, your resume won't even get looked at. Plus, if everyone just applies for everything, it compounds the problem: a company has hundreds or thousands of applicants without any means to know which are genuine or not.

Perhaps we should collectively give up on job postings and treat them with the contempt they deserve. Maybe a better approach - other than using your network, assuming you have one - is to put your resume up on your own site or blog and use some SEO for visibility, or maybe we should pool resources to create a simple "hire me" site that recruiters can quickly find people (something better than the awfulness of Linkedin anyway).

Sure, but if you are planning to go from SME to enterprise you need to think strategically for the long term. You'll probably need to have more developers to deal with the complexities and hand-holding you've touched on (auth is just one of the issues and not even the most complex) and probably non-technical roles for all the compliance and so on.

The danger of landing just one or two "whales" is that you bend your product backwards for these clients, but without thinking through the TCO it can cost you more in the long run and put your business in more jeopardy than when you rely on a few hundred SMEs.

Perhaps. But then it's important to look at the total cost of ownership: was it worth building a complex feature for one client that adds to the technical debt of a code base and tied up developer resources that could have been better employed elsewhere? Could we have pushed back on this feature or was it really a deal-breaker?

In other words, perhaps landing this one client was important to that salesperson, and perhaps in the short term to the company, but in the long term it may have been better to have lost that one deal. Very often these decisions are made with little calculus about the TCO.

It's particularly common with big whale enterprise clients, where the salesperson is trying to close a very long sales process or the client has you by the short hairs in the contract. I remember one case where we had to implement a very complex and time-consuming custom SAML integration to a platform where we just had one client asking for it, because that client was too big to ignore. Once we integrated SAML, the number of end users actually using the SAML login option was in the single digits. It was just a checklist item for some purchasing officer flunky.

It's apples to oranges comparing different companies with different needs. Some companies may require more non-technical staff for things like legal compliance, or have complex technical requirements that are hidden beneath a simple UI.

With B2B sales in an industry niche it's not about SEO. You need to talk to people in that industry and you know, sell to them.

Unless your product depends on eyeballs, SEO is just another vanity metric.

Sure, if your aim is to build something for fun or learning or your portfolio, those are valid goals.

The OP however considered their effort a failure, because they aimed at making something that would be a successful business venture (they are not clear about this, but one can read between the lines).

"Build it and they will come" is almost never a winning strategy. Of course sometimes it works, you build the right thing at the right time and it goes viral, but most of the time you get crickets even if it gets to the top of Product Hunt or Hacker News (neither of which are of any importance outside of tech circles).

The right way is to talk to prospective customers first in a given niche, listen carefully to their problems, and figure out which problems are worth solving, i.e. you have the skills and resources to solve them and people will pay you to solve them. This is difficult if you don't have a network or experience in specific industries so tech people just wait around for a business person to tell them what to build instead.

Russian is a heavily inflected language, so the order of words matters less. For example, in English you can say "the cat ate the bird", but if you reversed "cat" and "bird" this would be a different sentence entirely. In Russian "cat" would have the nominative case and "bird" accusative, so you can swap the words around and it would mean the same, though perhaps with different emphasis.

French doesn't do this; as with English only the pronouns have vestigial accusative, and in any case most inflections are lost in speech because French drops consonants from the end of words. So you have to depend on strict word order to preserve meaning.

I did some pro-bono development work for a nonprofit some time ago. I don't think I have encountered such unpleasant or entitled clients anywhere, whether as an employee or freelancer.

Discovery is still a problem.

First you say that I don't understand "social mobility", now you are saying people don't care about social mobility...I mean, at least pick a lane.

The US has seen decreasing social mobility in past decades. So this isn't just the US vs European countries, it's the US vs itself.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

Despite these factors, the US has actually less social mobility than many European nations e.g.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/these-are-the-10-coun...

When wealth is inceasingly locked up in dynastic families, they will try and control the legislature and economic system to maintain their privilege and stifle innovation from upstarts. This is the problem Europe traditionally has struggled with, and it is saddening to the the US fall into this trap.

So while Europe has a lot to learn, the US is not exactly trending in the right direction. Perhaps this is why much of the current generation of VC is hype-driven, pump-and-dump schemes and attempts to create monopolies rather than genuine, long-term innovation.

"Once talking" is the problem. You have to get your resume picked out of the pile so you get to talk to a real person.

"Companies look for talented software developers"

While that may be true, and it's what they all say, ultimately they just filter on keywords.

Of course, if you have a network then that's less of a problem. You are talking to a real person who can evaluate you.

If you don't it doesn't matter how good you think you are, you are at the mercy of the filters. It's not about your ability to change stacks, or your ability in general, it's about how companies select people.

That is your company moving you to another role internally. I am talking about job applications.

I suspect people with a good network are saying "yeah it's fine, getting offers, things have never been better", while those without a good network, who rely on going through the grind of the job application process, are saying things are terrible.

So have to bear that in mind when people tell you how well things are going.

The problem is you can't "stack shift".

I mean, of course you can, we know that if you know some programming languages you can pick up another language, if you know an HTTP router you can learn another, a MySQL expert can learn PostgreSQL, if you know React you can learn Vue and so on.

But you won't get through the HR filters unless you have the magic n years' experience. Once you learn that stack in your junior years, you are stuck on that path for the rest of your career.

Of course it wasn't always thus, but like so much of the industry, common sense went out the window some time ago.

Yes, there are jobs in Europe but very few good jobs (as in a fair salary for experience) left.

Right, I'm not going to apply for office jobs anyway (I don't live near a tech hub, for personal reasons I can't move, there are almost no tech jobs locally, and I'm not going to spend hours commuting just to do Zoom calls from the office) and nor will I accept another pay cut -I had to take a lower-paying job earlier in the year because there were no other options.

I don't know if your company genuinely needs be office-only or you just have management who thinks they need to be office-only, but it sounds like there are applicants you are leaving on the table.

So yes, there are jobs, but not ones that I would apply for. Not being picky, but just for practical reasons. Even so, taking that into account, the job market is pretty terrible this year.

From my perspective (working in Europe) this year has been exceptionally tough. I'm working rn but I always keep options open, e.g. staying in contact with recruiters and looking at job postings. I'll apply for a job if it's a good fit.

Overall far fewer opportunities and salaries are down, and more stringent requirements across the board. Whereas before I would get a good response for an application - at least to the technical test or interview stage - now I just get rejections or crickets. I suspect many jobs are fake or they already have the candidate lined up. I'm not desperate so I haven't been trying especially hard, but I can imagine it's not a good time to be looking for work in a hurry.

Another viewpoint here:

https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jez...

Advertisers don't like "controversial" content to appear next to their ads. Which I can understand from their point of view, but it means that only the blandest, middle-of-the-road content has a future in an ad-driven business model.

Back in the day of print magazines companies wouldn't necessarily have an issue with placing ads in, say, Playboy, if the ad was appropriate to the readership (e.g. cigars or whiskey to an adult audience). Maybe with everything so centralized these days and every corporation is on a hair-trigger for getting called out in social media for accidentally backing this or that cause because their ad appeared in the wrong place, that targeted approach is no longer possible.

So if your site is "controversial" in any way, the only model that makes sense is subscription.

Sure but for these companies "did some Elixir in a weekend project" doesn't count as experience.