Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 403: Massaging the software and career never-never-land

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a bootcamp graduate working on a career shift from massage to software development. How much of my previous career should I bring into my résumé? I’ve been building projects in public, and doing open source contribution in a part-time capacity for the past two years, but ultimately have not gotten very many bites on my résumé that resulted in interviews. It’s something like three skill tests and one for roughly 800 applications at the moment? That’s a guess. That’s basically the gist of it. Thanks! Curious Coder Tries Tech Transition Listener Joshua says, I’ve done a number of things in my career, from Java to web dev on PHP and Angular/Node to low code development on Ignition SCADA and UIPath RPA . Because I love learning technologies and I want to go where the money is, I keep hopping to new teams. This usually comes with a decent pay bump, but it’s a lot of rescue operations and self-teaching. This doesn’t feel like a career path, and always being the junior team member sucks. I’m often studying for certs trying to meet the requirements for the job I’m already doing or being the senior dev on the team while still a Junior. I get that I’m relatively new to each team, but I’m also punching above my weight consistently. It feels like I’m always having to jump through hoops to get the title and pay for the level of responsibility I take on and it feels like my mixed-up background is the reason why. How can I pitch a 10 year career of wearing all the hats all the time to get better results? How can I avoid being on teams where all my coworkers think I’m a guru and I’m building all of the architecture, but my manager goes “gee, I don’t know if you have the years of experience to be a Senior”? I’m looking towards Architecture as a long term goal and I’m wondering if there’s a way to spin this skillset towards that goal. Can you get Architect if you aren’t a certified black belt in highly specific tools but rather a demonstrated improviser? What is a jack-of-all-trades supposed to do? Thanks, love the show, your advice and the fun relationship you guys bring to the conversation.

it takes more than testing your llm app with another llm that was tested with another llm to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 403 oh man you don't have permission to say the name of this one actually it's forbidden the forbidden episode i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a forbidden podcast for engineers who like to breach error messages. And I don't know what to say else about that 403 forbidden, but I couldn't miss the opportunity to call it out. They ignore them. They're renegades. They color outside the lines. My API has actually returned 403s on success. Yeah. Just try and forbid me. You can't. I am indefatigable. Persisting tirelessly. Yes,

like fatigue. I can't be defatigued. I'm in-de-fatigued. In-de-fatig-able. That is a weird word. In-de-fatig-able. All right. Let's get out of here. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS, which is the best way to add single sign-on to your app. You can hear more about them later. Okay. I want to share some feedback from a listener named Eric who wrote in to say, happy birthday dave well thank you eric and hi jameson i've been listening to your podcast since the early days and i've learned and laughed a lot i am a staff engineer now and really appreciate all the entertainment over the years here's to 400 more thank you eric much appreciated thank you thank you i want to thank our patrons thank you to e4 e5 king e2 king e7 which we

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you know what they are i don't want to even say it there's some this adjective group uh you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon where any amount will get you an invite to our slack team and enough amount will get you a shout out one time weekly or always in our hearts and if you contribute enough i will give you a 403 like a physical one or well what you'll have to choose either a either a wood carved 403 or i will create a url just for you that you can click on and it'll give you a 403 back it'll be a handcrafted artisanal url yeah you choose made with love by dave i'm just thinking about that idea i would like to buy a url from you dave yeah can you make me a url yeah but i only do 403s so if you're okay with that okay sure dave

do you want to read our first question yeah this comes from a listener named trillium yes you can use my name on the show okay if that's not explicit consent i don't know what it is trillium says i am a boot camp graduate working on a career shift from massage to software development how much of my previous career should i bring into my resume i've been building projects in public doing open source contribution in a part-time capacity for the past two years, but ultimately have not gotten very many bites on my resume that resulted in interviews. It's something like three skills tests and one for roughly 800 applicants at the moment. That's a guess. That's basically the gist of it. Thanks, Curious Coder Tries Tech Transition. I like the Dear Abby names that are coming in

these days. Wasn't it Dear Abby where people would write in kind of pun-filled wordplay names? I think that's just a trope for advice shows or columns in general now. I wonder where that started. I don't know if Dear Abby, yeah, maybe she was the innovator. All right. How much of my previous career? I mean, you could give massages in the interview. Yes.

That is a great idea. Fusion. Yeah. Building projects in public. Oh, it is a tough time to break into the industry right now as a junior developer, especially coming from a non-traditional background yes it very much is and um good news though you have a lot of relevant experience uh in your massage career because you can directly translate massaging the human body to massaging the data in your data pipelines or massaging the

variable names to be better yeah there's got to be a few other applications of massage and software development yeah loosening the knots kind of refactoring the muscles yep hmm yeah i i think i would mention it but it's not going to be something that will get you the job at all i think you could mention it at least to show you you have worked at stuff before and general transferable be a professional person skills yeah you've kind of got those but i think it would be it feels neutral i don't think anyone would hold it against you because they're going to know you don't have unless you're just straight up making stuff up you're not going to have a lot of software experience on there yeah but i think it's fine to say like here's what i did before

i think that answers the question people have which is what were you doing before right exactly And I think some people have this belief that, well, if I can make my resume look just right, then I'll start getting job offers or interviews. And the fact is that for boot camp graduates today, it's harder than ever to break into that first job. And so it almost doesn't matter what's on your resume once the interviewer gets the sense that this is your first software development job. It's going to be like, oh, that's hard. And that's because you're competing with a bunch of people that were laid off from Google last week with 10 years of experience. that's not not entirely true but it is kind of an example in the limit of what's going on right now i wonder how much of how much of it is perception and how much of it is reality the the state of

the software job market because my perception is it's pretty rough to be looking for jobs and and folks are having a lot harder time finding things and getting hired but i don't know any numbers and i know i hear these large percentage or or uh people numbers of layoffs across companies i don't know what fraction that is of the industry as a whole is this like a single digit percentage change where we just talk about it a lot because it's kind of the first overall downward dip in in a decade or more nearly two decades really yeah i guess yeah two decades for tech really yeah that's fair yeah the the magnitude isn't that high or is it really is pretty bad. I think even with a small percentage shift in number of available

jobs and number of candidates on the job market, it makes a big difference for the individual looking for a new job. Because I don't know, when you think about maybe prior to the downturn of a couple of years ago, maybe there was 10,000 software development jobs open and maybe 8,000 applicants. That makes a huge difference because the supply of applicants is 20% lower than the demand compared to if there are now, say, 15,000 applicants for 5,000 jobs, half the jobs and twice the applicants or something like that. It's like, whoa, as a percentage of the total number of people doing software development, those are tiny, tiny moves. But compared to each other, they're big and quite plausible. I think that those kinds of numbers could actually be

happening. Maybe add a zero to both sides of that equation, because I just don't know the total magnitude. But I don't know. That's what I sense is happening. And the reason I sense that is because anecdotally, several of my friends who have decided to go look for new jobs in the last, say, six months, people who are very, very skilled, people who I've worked with at multiple companies and had great success with, who I know interview well, have not gotten offers. In fact, one of my close coworkers who I've worked with for almost 10 years at two different companies interviewed at six different companies and got zero offers. In fact, couldn't even really get through the interview process, like only kind of halfway

through, didn't even really get to the end where an offer would have come. And man, I mean, I don't know. I think it's really painful. And another factor here is a lot of the recruiters got laid off, you know, so these systems and processes are all a mess. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, I have seen that in recruiting for sure, where they cut very deeply in recruiting and less deeply in other places because if you're not growing a ton, if you're not hiring

a ton, you don't need them. And then suddenly you want to hire somebody and no one knows how to do it. Hmm. Well, I think we're kind of, I mean, we answered the original question, but the real question is how do I do it? How do I get this job as a junior developer? Yeah. And I'll say, go ahead.

Oh, go ahead. No, I was going to... You go ahead. I forgot what I was going to say. Actually, nope. It was on purpose. I decided, I predicted the future and knew what you were going to say is so much more important that I yield the floor.

I was going to say that, well, of course, that is the actual question here, which is how do I get that first job? I do want to say just a few more things about the resume, which is that while it is probably the case that there's very little you can do on a resume when you have no professional experience to suddenly convince someone that because of your resume, you should be interviewed or hired. However, there are some things you can do that can really actively harm your chances. And one thing is that if you do have extensive experience, you can fill the content of your resume with that experience. Maybe like 80% of your work history is showing up there as massage therapy. And I,

as a hiring manager will look at that and be like, oh, this resume got into the wrong stack. This is clearly a massage therapist, you know, who, and I'm hiring software engineers. So I'm going to kick this back over to HR. Maybe we have a massage therapy position open somewhere else, you know? And so you've got to be careful not to confuse the reader that way. And so I would actually only have maybe one or two bullets at most about your pre-software development experience. And I would have those bullets call out, Jameson, exactly what you said a few minutes ago, which is try to convey the narrative that while I don't have software development experience, I do have professional experience. I work well in a team. I know how to treat people. I was an

entrepreneur because I ran my own practice. Things like that that would be like, oh, very good. This person can work with us. Yeah. I think that makes sense. I think a core problem you have as someone trying to get that first software job is demonstrating you can do it, where once you've got a few years under your belt, you have at least something that shows, yes, someone else paid me money is a not perfect, but decent proxy for you know how to build software. But in the absence of that, you either need to find someone willing to take a big chance, maybe they know you well, maybe they're desperate, maybe the job sucks, and they can't get anyone else to do it. or you need to demonstrate and kind of de-risk that enough for them to take some kind of chance

on you by producing other artifacts. You said building in public, open source in a part-time capacity. I think that's great. And you could try doing more of that. I mean, writing videos, yeah. Creating things that people can look at to judge, does this person seem like they would be good at the job can help you a little bit. I mean, nothing guarantees success. There is still some good fortune involved in it, I think. Yeah, for sure. But it is hard. And I think this person's probably doing everything they should be doing, building projects in public, open source contributions. These are the only things you can really do aside from kind of building your own little company or successful project that actually gets real usage, you know, which will definitely

help a lot, but it is just so, so hard. In fact, I was telling bootcamp graduates two, three years ago in the absolutely most frenzied period of hiring for software developers that I've ever seen, meaning the most amount of jobs, the highest wage growth that I've ever seen in 20 years. And even then these bootcamp graduates were struggling for the first year or two to find work. Yeah. Well, best of luck. Yes. Good luck and good luck with your resume and good luck massaging your resume to make it look good to hiring managers. Yes. Yes, indeed. Jameson, I can count on zero hands the number of times I've been glad that my dev team rolled their own SSO system. Yeah, it's one of those things that seems straightforward. And then you start hearing more

acronyms and more concepts and OAuth and OIDC and SAML and SCIM and a bunch of other stuff. And then you find out about new acronyms when stuff's on fire. exactly this is where work os comes in work os makes it easy for developers to add sso to their app rather than building it from scratch yourselves like i have mistakenly done work os has excellent inspiring levels of good documentation they have their own login ui they've created called off kit which looks really beautiful and frankly i wish my company website looked that good and they have they have example apps in nine different languages including node.js python php and even go So WorkOS is a drop-in replacement for Auth0, and it gives you great pricing.

You get a million monthly active users for free. Also, I have personal experience with WorkOS. I actually use them at my current job. I know some of the folks over there. And the stuff Dave said is true. Really easy to use. Great docs. Excellent support.

No complaints about them. I don't know. I don't know if that's a strong enough endorsement. They're all right. No complaints. No, WorkOS is great. I like them. I liked them before they sponsored us.

Great. Listen, don't punish your future self by building a homegrown SSO system or locking into a multi-year contract with some legacy vendor with opaque pricing and low usage caps. Join the growing list of companies that are using WorkOS today like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. Check it out at workos.com slash softskills. That is workos.com slash softskills. Dave, should I read our next question? Yes, please. A listener named Joshua says, I've done a number of things in my career from Java to

web dev on php and angular node to low-code development on ignition scada and ui path rpa i don't know what some of that stuff even is because i love learning technologies and i want to go where the money is i keep hopping to new teams this usually comes with a decent pay bump but it's a lot of rescue operations and self-teaching it doesn't feel like a career path and always being the junior member sucks i'm often studying for certs trying to meet the requirements for the job i'm already doing or being the senior dev on the team while still a junior in title I get that i'm relatively new to each team, but i'm also punching above my weight consistently It feels like i'm always having to jump through hoops to get the title and pay for the level of

Responsibility I take on and it feels like my mixed up background is the reason why How can I pitch a 10-year career of wearing all the hats all the time to get better results? How can I avoid being on a team where all my co-workers think i'm a guru and i'm building all the architecture But my manager goes gee, I don't know if you have the years of experience to be a senior I'm looking towards architecture as a long-term goal, and I'm wondering if there's a way to spin this skill set toward that goal. Can you get an architect role if you aren't a certified black belt in highly specific tools, but rather a demonstrated improviser? What is a jack-of-all-trades supposed to do? Thanks. Love the show, your advice, and the fun relationship you guys bring to the

conversation. All right. Thank you. Oh, tough one. So this is interesting because I think there's really two ways you can get this same outcome where you find yourself not being valued on the team or not getting paid what you want or not getting the title you want. One of these ways is that you are kind of just jack of all trades where you just have a little bit of experience in a lot of areas, which you come up to speed quickly in each area, but then you move on and you're starting over from scratch every couple of years. The other way is that you invest your whole career into one of these technologies and then that technology dies and suddenly you're a junior engineer again yeah um and this person has found one of the two ways to achieve that

what is i'm googling scada what is sc scada supervisory control and data acquisition control system architecture for it's like manufacturing stuff maybe huh i also don't know what uipath rpa is robotic process automation oh this might yeah this is this is sounding very manufacturing business automation platform you know this okay these last two technologies you mentioned that they're kind of industrial in nature gives me a little bit of a clue as to the kinds of companies this person may have worked for which might be contributing to the challenge here and that is that there's a category of companies for whom software is an incidental part of their operations it's not the primary thing the company is selling to their customer

it's how they get something else done and if they could outsource it or do it without you they would love to you know and i do believe that software developers are generally valued less in those companies than they are in the companies where the software is the primary revenue producing product that's being sold a robotic process automation okay this isn't actual physical robotics this is another name for just like software automation stuff but the metaphor is You have a software robot to do things that a human might do, like type, I don't know, navigate UIs, I don't know. But it is like software integration stuff.

Okay, so not manufacturing? I don't think so. I don't think this one is. Not if I'm reading it correctly. Ideal for automating workflows that involve legacy systems that lack APIs, virtual desktop interfaces, or database access. Yeah, always learning new things. If this is in chronological order and you've moved from Node and Angular and Java, PHP, Angular, Node, low-code development, I think you are moving the wrong direction if you want to get seniority and pay increases.

Because part of the promise of low-code is you can get less senior, experienced, expensive people to build stuff unless you're building the low-code platform. so that could be part of it maybe they are in going in reverse chronological order though they started with their most recent stuff yeah can you get architect if you want to serve yeah and also this this discussion of architect as like a capital a like title and role does feel a little more old school i know uh it's still definitely a thing in some parts of the industry but it is less of a thing in general to have a specific architect role yeah so maybe the answer is is uh pick a better company for your for your next landing spot like pick somewhere that is a a technology company building a technology product that engineering software engineering is is like

a core part of what makes the company survive and make money yes exactly what i'm saying and exactly what i'm thinking don't you don't want to be someone who they're trying to constantly find a way to replace because you're just not that important or your job's like man if i could do this without having an employee i would you know but it's really hard to say that about your core product you're selling you know it'd be like well i i bake cakes and boy if i could just get rid of all these bakers you know it's like but they bake the cakes you sell like oh okay maybe maybe those are valuable people to keep around yeah yeah i sort of the cost center versus profit center thing as well where if you are at a manufacturing company doing business process

automation stuff for them you are a cost center maybe your your your role is to make things more efficient so hopefully you're saving costs but you're not bringing in revenue you're not making them any money directly you're they're paying you money to hopefully save money overall but like you said if you're baking the cakes you're you're a profit center you're making the thing that they sell you're the one that brings money in the front door yes instead of being the one that takes money out the back door yes what about this uh i'm trying to put my finger on a feeling i get from reading this question i hop from team to team i'm always the junior member on the team i'm being i'm acting like a senior dev i'm carrying the load i find it hard to believe that

it if if over and over again you switch teams or jobs you end up on a new team you do senior level work and and you are not recognized by the company as doing senior level work that feels unlikely that that always happens and is not somehow your fault does that make sense like Yeah. Like the common denominator. If every team you join, you feel like, boy, I'm doing way more than I'm being recognized for. Yeah. I don't think it's the team. I think it's you. It could be. I mean, yeah. I mean, you've heard the silly phrase that the common denominator in

all your dysfunctional relationships is you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like maybe you're doing a whole bunch of really high value stuff and maybe it's kind of the less visible glue stuff that really keeps these teams functioning and you're making major contributions, but you're not telling anybody about it and your boss doesn't know about it. And so they're always looking for ways to get rid of you or keep your title low or your pay low because they just don't know. I can kind of understand the kind of flat title if you're switching into a brand new tech stack. But I think at some point you gather enough experience to say, I have enough transferable skills that I am capital S senior. And yeah, I can go learn a

new tech stack and I don't know how to write Clojure or whatever it is, but I still know how to broadly build systems and learn new technical tools so I can still be effective and I'll learn the tech specific thing. Yeah, I think you're right. You shouldn't have to start over completely at every technology change. I suspect that what's happening here is that... I lost my train of thought. Give me a minute. Let me restate that, edit that out. One of the things I've noticed is that promotions, recognition, and pay tend to go to people who do high impact things at companies, high impact and high visibility. In fact, visibility is kind of a prerequisite. It's like you can't, no one rewards what they can't see or don't know about. It's just kind of a

given definition. But here, I wonder if you've done a lot of keep the lights on work, where you're like, I think this is really valuable. The company definitely needs it, but the company just doesn't recognize keep the lights on. Companies recognize big, impactful, business-changing results that turn into really the only currency that companies, like the language of companies, which is dollars, money. And so if you have made lots of little helpful things along the way, keeping teams together, doing little things that help your teammates, being really good, it just might not actually add up to being senior in anyone's eyes. And well, clearly it hasn't in the eyes of the people you've talked to. You really do need to make big impactful changes,

like actually actual contribute. Sorry, I'm struggling for words. Make big contributions that people can clearly see are big and impactful. Some of that is tenure related as well. If you if you switch jobs every year or two that's that's the rough time scale it can take to get a promotion if you're performing well yeah so maybe maybe you're not sticking around long enough in one place um sometimes you can switch jobs and and get a title change at the next job but maybe that's harder if you're switching if you're at a more junior title and you're switching to a tech stack or area that you are brand new to. So I think my advice is

if you want to be paid like a senior software engineer, then you need to either get a new job as a senior software engineer or stick around at one place long enough that you can demonstrate the impact needed to do it and get the promotion.

But it seems like the hopping approach has not worked well for you, even though it brings you the satisfaction of learning new things so you might have to balance those two desires this desire of like constantly being exposed to new things on the one hand versus the kind of like recognition of expertise and and depth of of ability that comes with a promotion or title change maybe you just need to decide okay i'm going to make a trade-off for a while i'm going to stick around longer i'm going to deepen my experience in in this one thing that i still like, not going to be miserable, but I'll deliberately say I'm here to make senior or

whatever your goal is. And then if you want to, you can go back to hopping around a little bit more. I'm trying to think back on times when I've been in a leadership role and I had a team member who felt that they were more deserving of a bigger title or bigger pay than I thought. And what were some of the things that made us view the situation differently? And one thing I can think of is that when you count your years of experience, you might be counting years, in this case, 10. The question asker says, I had 10 years of wearing lots of hats and doing this job. But your bosses might look at specific segments of your 10-year experience and say, those years don't count, or those years count at a discounted rate. For example, if I

hired a software engineer to come work on a team that's building a SaaS product that we're selling to customers, and I'm interviewing someone who has been doing internal software development, like little tools and scripts that are used by like, let's say like a customer support team or by, you know, someone in marketing to do marketing automation or something like that. It's like a totally different category of software development. So if you've been doing that for five years, and then you come interview with me to work on my team, building a SaaS product that's customer facing and kind of, you know, world, I don't want to toot my own horn to say world class, but you know, like kind of like a globally sellable product. It's a very different world

than building internal tools for, you know, a half a dozen coworkers. You know, we have to launch a product that's available to hundreds and thousands of users at the same time. And you got all kinds of different scalability problems. We have lots more data than this person probably dealt with. And anyway, long story short, the experience is not the same. So five years of doing internal tooling development does not equal five years of product development that you're actually selling. And so it could very well be that your managers are saying, yeah, you don't have the tenure. You don't have the years of experience to be a senior engineer because they're discounting the 10 years that you do have, probably due to technologies or

the nature of the jobs you were doing. I view you more as a two-year engineer, not a 10-year engineer. Yeah. It'd be good to ask. I think if someone asked me that question, I would uncomfortably answer it for them. If they said, hey, Dave, I've been doing internal script development in marketing automation for the last five years. What do you consider that to be in, in dog years, you know, like for lack of a better word, um, in years on like a product development team. And I, and I would probably say somewhere around one, you know, and that, that might sound kind of rude and dismissive, but look, it's not that these people aren't doing valuable stuff. It's just different stuff. You know, it's like, it's like saying, Hey,

I'm a painter. I do interior painting. And I say, well, we're, we're painting commercial office building exteriors now. And it's like, I've been, I've been doing interior painting for 10 years. And I'm like, okay, great. That's probably like equivalent of one year of exterior commercial office building painting because it's just a different job. Yeah. They both use paint, but it's like, we're doing it 60 feet off the ground now. You know, it's like very different. Like have you ever harnessed up? And anyway, so the point I'm trying to make is that not all software development experience is transferable and you might be on the bad end of that transfer. Yeah. Hmm. Well, have we answered the question?

Maybe poorly, but yes, we can check the box. That's all we care about. That's the high standard to which we hold ourselves. I think we earned a 403. Yes. Like squarely in the 403 camp. I give this about 403 out of... How high did the error codes go?

Pretty high. Well, I mean... There aren't 6XXs, right? No, there's nothing over 600. And the fives don't go very high. so 403 out of 504 i don't know that's the highest one i can think of off the top of my head 511 is what wikipedia said okay network authentication required all right boy yeah you've got dozens of these horrible http status code jokes to look forward to it's gonna be

amazing seriously buckle up the next 108 episodes every one of them is just gonna have a gem i am so excited for the teapot episode we must invent new status codes for all the missing numbers yes tune in in 15 weeks and you're gonna have a treat what can people do if they want their own questions answered go over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form and as as we say every week thank you from the bottom of our forbidden hearts thank you for filling out that form and giving us questions to read. We love reading your questions. We actually get a lot more than we have time for each week, but we promise that because of the way math works in

the limit, we will answer all of them. We plan on outliving all of you, by the way. So at some point, the rate of questions will slow and we will just keep going. Once we turn off that form, you'll know that we have enough questions to fill the rest of our life expectancy yeah that's true that's a morbid sign and right now we're just not there yeah we're feeling good i mean right now we've all right we've only got a few years worth of questions i just did the math i think we have eight years of questions in the backlog yeah i shouldn't have said that out loud please keep the questions coming we love them thank you we will catch you next week

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