I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.

As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.

In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.

There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.

I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.

The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.

And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.

Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.

And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!

The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!

It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.

I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.

Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.

Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.

This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.

Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!

In Italy (Milan)🇮🇹, job hunting is a fucking hell for misfits like me:
• Young(26)
• 1 year(working) experience + continuous learning/improvement at home
• Skillful and adaptable full-stack
• Willing to do greater things with software without being payed like a monkey

This is the last week working at my current company (from which I rejected the renewal of the contract for 26K€/13 months) and almost every time at a new interview everyone tries to down sell me by default or because of the fucking little time that I've been inside companies without even looking at my skills/capabilities.

Also many little companies made by the CEO and a technical manager that are looking for someone from which being provided food 😒(metaphorically).

(On another side, in one month, me and my gf need to move to a new apartment, the renting process sucks, and she has issues to find a non-slavering job because she is a foreigner(with good knowledge of English and Chinese) with very basic understanding of Italian and I see her crying often in my arms because it's hard and stressful for her to become economically independent as she would like to be)

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

!rant
Today I bought my first (non school-required) programming book! ☺

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

*me quering a knowledge system for a pose and quaternion*
System: here is the quaternion in w x y z format
me: but for using it I need it in x y z w
System: not my problem
me: ok, fine. here is a function that flips this, np.

*months later*
me: wtf why does grasping don't work anymore? The poses look reasonable.
*after hours of trying to debug it*
*remembers hearing someone say something about finally using one standard for quaternions across the systems*
me: wait... could this be... *comments out flip function*
me: yep... that's it.
...
Overall, this is an improvement. But I lost several nerves and hours yesterday night wondering why my grasping doesn't work anymore. Feeling embarrassed, that I didn't finish my stuff in time because of this bug.
*sigh*
goddammit

Guys I am facing a dilemma and i want to hear your opinions.

The background story:
I am completely self taught, currently i am learning something totally unrelated to programming at the uni. Maybe one day when i've finished that shit I will apply somwhere for a job as a developer. Until that the self education continues.

I've recently finished a big sideproject. I've rewritten my father's old shitty joomla company website from scratch with complete cms and integrated stockkeeping and billing features. After some minor fixes it is working perfectly and honestly I am kind of proud of myself. Now that I have some free time available i need something to work on again.

TL;DR - Here comes the question:
Should I broaden my knowledge in webdev even more (there is much room for improvement and i am starting to get the grasp of it) or start digging into game developement (which is my dream for ages although i didn't have the courage to dive into it until now)?

I have project ideas for both but simply can't decide. :/

I am appreciate your time for reading && telling your opinion on this.

An OSS library made me learn a new language and I am so happy it did!

I came across a well implemented System Verilog parser written in Rust. It was so good to see someone putting in the effort to write that library, I wanted to contribute to it. I had zero knowledge in Rust but I thought, what the heck, let me learn it.

And man it was a steep learning curve. After a 2 weeks or so, now I have very basic understanding of the language. What better way to learn something than just diving into an actual project?

So, today I raised an issue to the developer for a possible improvement to the library. I hope he accepts it

How do I help a software engineer student be better at developing software?

Background: I have this friend that started university with my young brother, two-or-so years ago my brother finished the career and got his degree while she is still there trying to finish the same career (!), we were looking the chance of changing careers but due to her low grades this is not possible and according to her U's counselor is better that she just finishes the career and gets her degree.

We scheduled a Zoom meeting for Sunday next week, to talk about her pain-points and see what improvement we can chase; issue is that I've never mentored anyone ever in my professional life (my brother from time to time drops a question to me or so, but that's different).

My plan is to either see if she suffers from lack of practice (meaning: she does not write software more often in order to improve her skills) or if it's hard for her to think in abstracts, either way, I believe that the latter improves if you do the former (just correct me if I'm wrong), thus the plan would be to assign her a bunch of programming exercises and have meetings at least once a week during her vacations.

My plan would be for her to actually learn game development with Godot, since the final result is always a game my hope is that having something to show encourages her to do the thing, but, who knows.

Have you ever done something like this for someone with the same issues? What was your experience and what nuggets of knowledge can you lend me?

P.S.: We don't live in the States but in Costa Rica, she does not have to deal with crippling student loans.

As I started learning React, I found the allure of declarative style of programming appealing. I try to avoid maintaining multiple state variables for data that can be derived from the base state itself that's stored in the redux store. It works wonders when I have to change something; as I just need to make changes to one function in the utils folder and that change is implemented across the whole app, rather than change the instances everywhere as was the case when I initially started working on this project after the previous dev left.

But I see myself redefining a lot of computed values everywhere, and if I just try to define them in the root component, I'll end up with a huge list of props being passed to a couple of components. Shifting it to the utils folder helps a bit, but then I find myself defining even the simplest of array filtering methods to the utils folder.

Is this need to define computed values everywhere a trade-off that you need to accept when you write declarative code, or is there a workaround/solution I am missing? As of now, the code-base is much better than how it used to be when they had a literal Java dev work on React with their knowledge of Java patterns being used in a framework that is the polar opposite of OOP, but I still feel like there's room for improvement in this duplication of computed values.

One year ago I graduated from university college,
Thought I had a stack overflowing with knowledge.
How wrong can one man be?
Very wrong, apparently...
Even though I only had a bachelor degree,
I landed a job at a nearby company.

Today I'm maintaining the code I wrote back then,
Seriously wondering if I could just write it all again.
The code I wrote I would consider a crime,
But it's good to see improvement over such a short time.
I still dread coming back to this code in another year,
Thinking yet again; "What the hell went wrong here?".