Have deep experience in 3 different job fields and, in 2 years, learn 5 languages.
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
80 points (97.6% liked)
CSCareerQuestions
983 readers
2 users here now
A community to ask questions about the tech industry!
Rules/Guidelines
- Follow the programming.dev site rules
- Please only post questions here, not articles to avoid the discussion being about the article instead of the question
Related Communities
- !programming@programming.dev - a general programming community
- !no_stupid_questions@programming.dev - general question community
- !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev - for questions targeted towards experienced developers
Credits
Icon base by Skoll under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bullshit rarely passes technical interviews at places with low turnover.
I've done some cloud stuff on AWS and GCP and thought I knew enough to pass interviews, then they started asking me about stuff I hadn't even heard of anywhere I'd worked.
Started a new job 3 months ago, 80% of our stack/frameworks are technologies I've never heard of before. Tekton, Firestore, Cypress, 42Crunch, Conformance, Cloud Functions (I think that's just GCP Lambda), some front end testing frameworks I don't know (more of a backend guy though I know raw JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML, and CSS really well from back in the day), Hoppscotch instead of Postman for some reason... and other stuff I'm forgetting now.
I thought because I'd written applications that ran in a cloud environment and understood Jenkins, I was all set. Nope. 28 years I've been doing this and I still feel like a newbie outside of the Java web services ecosystem. And it doesn't matter how good I am in that arena because the code is shit almost beyond repair. Half of our tools are flat out being lied to. Our endpoints are written to detect our testing frameworks and just respond with 200 and a blank payload. Our Swagger is useless because everything returns Result so you can't see the DTOs because 42Crunch gives like 600+ errors because of how garbage the API is written...
Man, I drifted there. Point is, you need to know enough to get the job in order to bullshit your way into it.
My secret? I'm in a high turnover position in the Midwest market (not competing with the glut of tech workers in major hubs, nor drawing their kind of pay) and the technical interview was pretty laughable. Now I have to try to prove myself and get hired in as a full employee rather than contractor. Then I'll have some job security and maybe a path forward that isn't just keep taking Sr. Dev, Team Lead contracts.
Yeah AWS has so many solutions, when quizzed about a tool I haven't used, I honestly say "can you describe it's use? I've built a lot in AWS/gcp/azure but haven't used that tool. I'll describe how I'd do it with tools I'm familiar with". Normally goes over well.
For example, if they really wanted amplify experience for some reason, and I would instead describe how I'd set things up with ec2 / ecs / fargate, etc.