danwee

I wouldn't. Not because of the fee (I find that just fine) but because I think I can make a better job finding suitable companies. My approach is usually:

- search companies over the web/linkedin

- read their websites/social media

- find out who works there via Linkedin/github/etc and read their profiles

- find out the salary ranges for SE positions in that company. If I can't then I don't apply (unless the company is really something unique)

- find out "coding tests" or "interview questions" on github/glassdoor

- finally apply

I end up knowing pretty well which kind of keywords should I use in my CV or when talking with HR/managers/engineers. Finding out about the people working there also gives me a pretty good picture of how I should talk in the interviews.

The most difficult part is the first one (search companies over the web/linkedin), so this is something I do regularly all the time (even when I do already have a job). The other points could take me 1 or 2 days for 1 company.

I doubt recruiters can do all of the above.

In general, I think the following rule applies to any tech company:

1. Keywords present or CV goes to trash

2. Good intro (2 lines) at the top of CV. Good structure (don't list a "Skills" section just hanging around alone. Put the skills you have used next to the jobs in which you have used them). Don't say "Used Java and K8s and CI/CD to build microservices" but "Built a microservice to handle incoming email requests from a third-party company" (or something better). This is for Engineering Managers who read CVs (not all of them read CVs)

3. Good layout/fonts. If your CV looks like it has been generate with Latex or similar, that leaves a good impression. This is for Engineers who read CVs (not all of them read CVs)

So, in general make sure you know that your CV is going to pass through all the layers tech companies have nowadays (e.g., if your CV is the most strucutured and beautiful latex-generated CV in the world, but it doesn't include any of the keywords HR is expecting -> it goes to trash)

As others said, companies only care about themselves. Nevertheless, it's not impossible to trick the "tech interview process" and get a decent job these days (I'm not talking about FAANG-style companies). IMHO, you could do the following:

1. You may need around 1-2 months of preparation, depending on how much time you are able to put (e.g., if your current administrative tech job doesn't demand too much from you, use your working hours to prepare for the tech interview)

2. What do you need to prepare? Based solely in the description you provided, it seems that you were doing some kind of backend engineering job, right? (Writing queries, code, dealing with deployments). If you have more than 5 years of experience (total) in the IT industry, I would call myself "Senior software engineer" and apply for such jobs. In this case, chances are you'll likely will have to deal with the so-called "design systems interview" (there are many good books out there like [1]. Read a few examples and get used to the way they are solved). If you need to prepare for coding tests, then google "cracking the coding interview". Don't go crazy, just learn the way these exercises are done.

3. Fake it till you make it. Watch a few YouTube videos about demoing tech interviews. Imitate the way people explain things and the like. One needs to gain some extra confidence in oneself when doing interviews.

4. Iterate, but don't go crazy. Find a company, investigate it a little bit (e.g., read their website, blog, social media, linkedin employees). Tailor your CV to what they are asking for in their job ads and apply. I cannot say anything about referrals because I never had one.

5. Relax. You have a job. It would be harder if you were jobless and trying to find a job (like many engineers are right now)

[1]: https://github.com/G33kzD3n/Catalogue/blob/master/System%20D...

We are mother nature and mother nature is us. It's all intertwined. An iPhone is as natural as a banana (earth -> tree -> banana, earth -> human -> iphone). The unnatural would be, by definition, impossible.

> • In-office work (for all employees) is #1

Why for all employees? Why not just for your team? Or your area? Or your department? E.g., if you are an engineer, why do you care that the marketing team has to be in the office as well?

Unless C-level. Then I would understand.

From my perspective (with is not the American one): it feels like for every PTO day you need to convince your team/manager to get that day off. It's like they are making you a favour. Also, I know beforehand that "unlimited" is not unlimited (I think it's kinda obvious), but then how many days can I ask for? Is it 10? Is it 15? Is it 28? Let's say I have already asked 20 days off, and I see around most of my colleagues have only asked 10, that may trigger on me the idea of "damn, I probably shouldn't ask another day off". Or perhaps my manager thinks that I have been taking "too many" days off already.

So, "unlimited" PTO is highly subjective. I prefer to be explicit about it and state the exact number of vacation days I am entitled to.

In order (Western European perspective):

- base salary

- 100% remote

- flexible schedule (I can start to work at 7am/8am/9am/etc.; If I need to do some errands at 2pm, I can just do it)

- culture, product and tech stack. A standard no BS culture would suffice, but every company has its own shenanigans. A good product to work on would be nice, but I accept that the majority of products out there are just not needed at all. Also, I'm not anymore a zealot when it comes to the tech stack; and learning something new at the job is welcomed.

- standard vacation days (as dictated by the law of the country). I see the majority of unlimited PTO as a scam. There's a difference between what it's my right (my official 20-30 vacation days per year as per the law that no-one can take away from me) and what company says should be my vacation days per year (wich is highly dependant on my team/manager).

- at least in Western Europe, the health insurance is more or less the same everywhere, so it's not a perk in itself.

- free lunch/snacks/videogames is not a perk from my perspective if you are over 30. Even less now if we work remotely.

- education reimbursement could be nice, but I don't mind at all. I try to be self-substained when it comes to gathering knowledge that benefits my career

- no on-call rotation. But I accept that this is getting harder and harder to negotiate

As long as schools allow to store books in their buildings...

I keep seeing (in Europe) kids with school bags full of notebooks and books that easily weight 4-5 KG. That's not healthy. The problem I see is that kids have homework that require the books at home, but then teachers use the books at classroom... so, they need to carry them here and there.

> You have to pay for icloud for the rest of your life though.

Isn't that true for all email providers nowadays? I used to have free email inbox with my domain, but not anymore. The cheapest layer for iCloud+ is $1/month.

> Strive for deep technical expertise in technologies used

And that alone occupies most of my (working/free) time. Not sure how I'm supposed to keep up with the rest of the list. To know technologies is one thing, to have deep tech expertise in many technologies is a completely different one.

Mass layoffs: because some companies did not make good use of investor's money. So now they have to recalibrate their expenses (and the easiest way to do so is by firing people).

Labour shortage: some companies did make good use of investor's money. They keep getting money from them, and what do you do with money? Hire more people, of course. But, as you probably should know the "working age" population is shrinking over the years (inverted population pyramid). It may not be so obvious to you, but in a macro-scale that's what first world countries are experimenting right now.

It only lacks support to spin up/down multiple VMs via a simple configuration file (like Vagrant, for instance). If I want to spin up a small lab with N VMs with specific private IPs and the like, UTM is not the most dev-friendly tool. I think there's place for some tool in between UTM and QEMU.

Same here. So far so good, and their Hide my Email feature is very useful.

That's not true anymore (from September on).

This all read to me like the juggling and tricks software developers had to do back then when there was no operating system available (e.g., handle memory manually). Then OS appeared and we could finally spend our time in other more productive tasks. I imagine at some point, something will appear that will let us just deploy an application globally so that it's extremely efficient and scales up/down as needed, without us developers/sysadmins having to deploy so many moving parts.

Step 1: gain confidence talking about containerization. Perhaps come up with a personal project that uses Docker and the public cloud. This should take you around 1-2 months top.

Step 2: Put "Docker, AWS/GCP" in your resume in your "skills" section and in the section that belongs to your current job.

Profit.

If you know about containerization then it doesn't really matter if you have learn it in your side projects or your work. If you pass the interview that means the company is comfortable with your knowledge about containers.

Your CV is whatever you want it to be (with some limitations of course). If HR is expecting to see X in your CV, you can easily put it there if you do your homework. It doesn't really matter if you didn't use X in your last job, just put it there and demonstrate in the interview how well you know X.

Be aware. Gandi is changing that https://www.gandi.net/en/domain/email . It's not free anymore. Right now I own a few domains with Gandi, but I use iCloud+ for emails.

iCloud+ is $0.99/month and you have the possibility to setup custom email domains. I setup my custom email domain (the domain is hosted on Gandi) like a month ago, it was straightforward. Also, the "hide my email" feature is handy.

Haven't noticed any significant change to be honest (Western Europe). I switched jobs a bit over a year ago and now I'm interviewing for another company (mainly because of the salary increase). So far, so good. Let's see how it develops.

> Otherwise, you are mostly just coming for economic reasons, and countries don't need that.

You sure about that? For example, there's nothing better for a country like Germany to have an inmigrant who has:

- got a bacherlo/masters degree in a different country other than Germany

- has a job in a German company and earns well above the average German citizen

- pays tons of taxes

- is relatively young (between 20 and 50 years old), so doesn't get to use the health care as much as others

Besides, European countries are getting old (the 'population pyramid' is getting inverted) so they definitely need young people that work (and it doesn't even really matter if they are skilled people or not; what's needed is people in the age of working and who can spend some of their earnings in the country)

At least from my experience, the biggest issue is finding a decent place to live. With this I mean:

- if you don't speak German, then chances are you want to live in the big cities (Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne,...) where some fraction of the population speak English... but in those cities there's a huge demand for flats and the offer is not up to it. Also, just by not speaking German you cut probably 50% of the flat offers already because they are offered by people who don't speak English

- if you just moved to Germany and you're applying to a flat, chances are they will ask you your last 3 payslips (this is not a law, but if they ask and you don't provide, well goodbye!)

3.4. The Procrastinator 3.5. The Lone Wolf 3.6. The Negative Nancy 3.7. The Over-Promiser 3.8. The Know-It-All 3.9. The Silent Type 3.10. The Perfectionist 3.11. The Unreliable One 3.12. The Conflict Instigator 3.13. The Burned-Out Employee

I have experienced myself being one of each type of "difficult" software engineer during my career. Not every day, not every month, but from time to time. Sometimes because of the environment (e.g., type of company I worked for), sometimes because of internal issues (e.g., family issues), and sometimes because I really felt like that (e.g., when I was in my mid 20s).

I haven't met any engineer who's never shown any traits of the thirteen "personas" listed in the post. If you're looking for an engineer that has zero traits like the ones listed above, you are perhaps looking for a robot.

> Basically, you can reward good perfomance with relaxed WFH policies

So, your less performant engineers would have to go to the office and work with other low performers? Do you think that will improve the situation for them? I bet that would rather make it worse. Also, your best engineers would be afraid of having "low performance seasons" because that would mean return to the office for them. I would definitely not like to work in such an environment.

Must be something else, don't you think? If there's a company in the world who can just "adjust their model to make it bigger" that's Google. But they haven't done so. Perhaps Google doesn't care.

You talk about a "job", a "decent job" and then your "dream job". There's a huge difference among all of them. I don't think I have found my "dream job" yet (and I have being working in the industry over 10 years). To find a normal "job", I think it depends on how many CVs I send (the more I send, the faster I'll get an "accepted"). Now a "decent job" takes both time on your side (investigating companies, their social media, blogs, etc.) and preparation (chances are that "decent jobs" come from "decent companies" and they have some sort of tech interview that's not easy to pass).

> Also, RUMOUR HAS IT that there is a huuuge decrease in demand in the IT sector. Which I personally don't believe (or even if it is, it's not that significant).

There was, and there is a huge demand in the IT sector. What happened during covid (even more demand) or after it (lay-offs) is just a tiny variation. The IT industry has still a huge demand for labor and it will only increase in the future (because of the demand itself, and because first-world countries are not producing people as fast as before (read Population ageing)).

Now if you or your gf is looking for a job at faang, then that's different. Faang doesn't represent the IT sector, so it has its own rules and all.

I'm using ChatGPT... who needs Google for translation? Either you know a little bit the target language and you are able to spot wrong translations (both in Google translate and ChatGPT) or you don't know enough about the target language and you trust the translation that is given to you (and in this case, ChatGPT is probably giving you a better translation)

Who maintains the code written by those remote junior devs? If the answer is: the team that owns the project, then effectively, these remote junior devs are producing legacy code the moment they finish their job. If the answer is: the remote junior devs, then that implies you need to hire them again for that... so what's stopping you then from hiring junior devs full-time at all?

But you do realise that other engineers may do it, right? Ultimately the managers or executives are the ones behind it.

Google engineers or Google managers/business units? I don't think regular engineers have the voice to drive these kind of things. Sure, engineers are the ones implementing it, but at the end of the day it needs the approval of management.

Honest question: does the company one is applying to needs to know our age?

Let's say I'm 45 like you, but I cut my CV to include only the last 13 years (because I like to keep my CV one page only and because what I did 20 years ago is kinda irrelevant by now). On my CV I don't put pictures nor date or birth (this is common in many European countries). So, they interview me: in the video-call they cannot tell if I'm 45 or 35 (I have good genes), so they like me and proceed to send me the contract. They will only notice my age (if any) when they examine my national id or passport. But by then it would be too late for them (besides, they liked me, so I guess my age is irrelevant).

In reality, I'm 37 (but I look like if I'm 27), and I never ever have included my age or date of birth on my CV. I have cut some stuff from my CV that is not relevant to the roles I apply (e.g., graduation dates), and very old roles at the beginning of my career are not included on my CV anymore. So far nobody has ever asked my age.