I was a senior dev at a big tech and got laid off in November. I have applied to hundreds of places. Not a lot of responses. I have been doing interview preps the whole time. It has been very demoralizing and I am thinking of switching careers to something else. I have been considering skilled trades. I like carpentry in particular.
"Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)"
I had a colleague leave to become a carpenter, then return after a few years when they realised that it's hard physical work that can be bad for your lungs.
I mean, I have a collection of very old engineering books, including one on Petroleum Refinery Engineering and a Reinforced Concrete Design Handbook printed when text books where $2. But I had no idea this was a "thing" among developers.
Apparently. I went into the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, found that manual, and... had to have it. Didn't understand why. Mentioned that to the clerk, who said: "You're a software developer, aren't you? A lot of you have that reaction."
I enjoy woodworking because it's something I can do with my hands that has a definite beginning and end, unlike most software which is often never really done. I find the completion of these whole projects very cathartic.
I like the fact that it produces something tangible and (hopefully) long lasting. None of the systems I've set up between 2000-2015 are still alive; so much time and effort lost.
From what I heard back during the dot com bust bartending was somewhat similar. Perhaps these days it'd be mixology, or attempting to become a sommelier.
Might be an age thing. I started doing it in my 30s, and we have a diy channel in slack that's pretty active with wood workers. And I know of at least one famous YT wood worker that used to be a developer.
It intersects well with 3d printing and CNC stuff.
Funny story - a good friend who was doing high-end cabinetry lost a finger to a table saw, so he boned up on his coding skills and got a great job in the film FX business.
I worked with one developer who became a master electrician. He was experienced and intelligent but obviously burnt out on software. And he sure seemed happier when I ran into him a couple years after making that career transition.
My uncle who had a nice very senior eng job ago dipped out and walked into a plumber shop saw the help wanted sign in the window and they hired him on the spot. He then did that for 25 years until he retired. He said it was nice that the jobs were short and the outcome was usually very predictable but gross on many occasions.
If you aren't a homeowner the facilities are the hard part. Need a large space where you can have a glass furnace and concrete floors that won't get damaged by molten glass. Lampworking is easier to get started in, but still need a place to run a torch (ideally with a vent hood) and store oxygen/propane cylinders.
Definitely go to a glassblowing camp if you are interested. If you have prior experience trying to control a fluid medium, like pottery for example, then that may help. In order to set up your own shop you'll want to be somewhere with low fuel costs.
As a hobbyist? Not hard at all! If you're in a medium/large city, there's almost certainly one or two glassblowing studios around that have classes. As a career? That's a whole lot harder.
I moved to France at 60. For more than 20 years, I have developed software in vb and SQL, don't laugh. Two years ago, I found a job as a freelancer. It seems that my client is happy, month after month the contract is renewed. The daily rate is not among the highest but let me have a good life in France. I don't know how long this will last. The only problem is that I don't have time for my passion, woodworking with manual tools. Conclusion, there, there must be a solution for you as well.
Bear in mind that if you are declaring yourself as an independent contractor but working full time for a single customer for a long time, the tax authorities may consider you are in effect an employee and ask both you and the customer to reimburse employment contributions
As someone with more carpentry experience (paid) than dev experience, but strong interests in both worlds, I’m curious how you would reconcile taking an approximate 50% reduction in comp. Don’t know the numbers for your area but knowing Bay Area salaries, senior devs make 2-2.5x journeyman carpenters.
As someone who has no carpentry experience but has spent a lot of time on woodworking as a hobby, I absolutely don't look forward to a carpentry job, even if the tech job market goes further south. Jobs take the fun out of your hobby sooner or later, and I have learned that lesson with software development.
I had that early in my software career. I've enjoyed programming since I was a kid, but after getting my first fulltime job I started questioning if I even enjoyed it.
Turned out I was just getting burned out from the feature factory work I was doing. I took a little break and did some fun hobby projects, and I instantly fell in love with programming again. I think making a programming career sustainable requires that we do work we actually enjoy.
A few decades later, I know what I do and don't want in a workplace. For me that means: No corporate gigs, no java, no barnacle coworkers and no jira. Yes to smart coworkers, projects I care about, technically interesting work, small teams, and a culture of responsibility taking and ownership.
I did that to work for a non-profit in a field I was a bit interested in. It's okay in the beginning but I soon started to regret the huge paycut. Wouldn't recommend.
Save 50% of your software income and get to a point where you’ll be set for retirement without saving another penny and then you can do what you want as long as you cover your expenses.
Is the implication “if you did, and you’re having problems passing those tests now, that’s karmic retribution”?
If so, please keep in mind that interviewers at big tech generally have to follow the HR script for interviewing. I have very little leeway as an interviewer in how to conduct the interview. I can select from a narrow group of problems, and I ask each candidate a couple of “soft skills” questions to gauge their level of experience, but the bulk of the interview still relies on their performance on the technical assessment.
I've been doing this stuff for decades. It has become an unbearable career. It's too late for me in life to change it as there are other circumstances that have made certain paths impossible for me to do. I'm screwed. Meanwhile, the uppers keep getting paid more and more while I get tossed. I honestly believe this is my final year on this planet.
>> I honestly believe this is my final year on this planet.
You are obviously an intelligent person who is entertaining some unhealthy thoughts. Many people have felt the way you feel-- it happens. But you need to seek therapy or the council of someone you trust to put your problems in perspective. Your life is precious even if it doesn't feel that way right now.
I don't think you need "therapy", as in professional mental health sessions.
Do share what's up, though. Unhappiness isn't that uncommon. I am not very happy and have been oscillating between "I should quit first thing tomorrow" and "but I have to do the grind while I still can"
I've been slowly remodeling my tiny condo. Drywall, plumbing, simple electrical, windows, painting, flooring, etc. Teaching myself most of the stuff just off YouTube. It is a lot of manual labor work which is exhausting and gives me a lot of respect for the trade crafts, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit and slowly accumulating all the tools as well. None of this is rocket science.
In the back of my mind, I think of flipping houses as something to do if I ever get laid off from my tech job. I look at places coming up for sale on Zillow that were obvious flips and they all look like the parts all came straight out of Ikea / HomeDepot (and usually the most ugly stuff to choose from).
Flipping can work but it can be much harder to be reasonably profitable without insane appreciation.
Your best bet is fixers - houses with obvious major issues that everyone is scared of but you know you can fix reasonably cheaply. This can mean buying a $500k house with major foundation damage for $100k because everyone is scared - but you know a whole foundation replacement will only run you $200k.
Well your own link states how fixers are not really a good idea, but you want "disasters" and trasform them in "fixers".
And it is not like you can find such disasters easily, nor that you can easily be able to make them into fixers, without years of previous experience.
The whole approach, "everyone is scared but you know ..." is based on the assumption that you know more than anyone else (possibly including many people dealing with this kind of stuff for decades), I doubt that anyone can learn what is needed in this field overnight, by reading a book, and should it be possible, everyone would do it, not just you.
Yeah, that's the whole problem with "make money in real estate" - either it requires (somewhat specialized) knowledge and risk-taking, or you're just gambling on insane appreciation and leveraging that.
Anything that "anyone can do" is going to explode at some point.
Let's put aside for the moment the risk-taking aspect.
The "somewhat specialized" knowledge can be explicited as four main things:
1) years (and I mean years) of experience in the field (to be able to quickly assess the non-evident potentialities of a building)
2) knowing a few good, tested, reliable technicians such as architects/engineers (to be able to get a valid project leveraging on these potentialities)
3) knowing (more than) a few good tested, reliable, capable firms (masons/carpenters/plumbers/electricians/painters/etc.) to actually execute the restoration
4) time to be dedicated to managing the project
If you think that - even if you actually happen to find a "gem" - that you can make money hiring people you find on the internet or on the yellow pages, or that the people involved will manage to do a good work at a fair price by themselves, you won't go very far.
The problem I see is that you need to find the fixer gem, but location matters. Certainly, you can buy a fixer in the middle of Ohio, but who wants to live there? There is just too much surrounding inventory with low desirability.
The thing that works in my eyes is to buy in areas that are extremely desirable, even pay a bit more for it, but very low inventory. That's where the insane appreciation comes in. Popular beach towns are a good example because they are land locked and can also be turned into short term rental properties relatively easy, which increases their perceived value.
It isn't easy to find such places and often requires paying in cash, but it is possible.
Yeah, no. Lived in Cleveland for several years, moved overseas to Taiwan and never looked back. I could do a quick canvassing of a dozen of my friends on the top 10 desirable states to live in and Ohio wouldn't even appear a single time.
And? You're taking something personally and proving my point with that statement.
The millions of people who live there, already live there. That doesn't increase demand. It is a large state, so there is plenty of space to build. Density is centered around three locations and the largeness of the state means that people can expand out to the suburbs.
What you want is somewhere with a high density, inability to add more property and desirable for vacations (like a beach with views). San Francisco was kind of a good example of this for a very long time, until it wasn't. There are other cities on coastlines that fit this model though.
Buy a condo that has dual use (STR), refurb it, flip it.
If it's that bad you need a construction loan, and that is a wholly different line of business, the bank will want to see proof that you have experience and a financial buffer to pull off the project. But if you have both, good on you!
Keep your head up; as you can imagine places that are actively recruiting are being inundated with resumes, many of which have Amazon, MSFT, Google, etc on them.
There's plenty of code already written today that will still be in use long after we're dead. (Well, assuming gpt10 doesn't rewrite it all).
If ephemeral codebases bother you, work on projects that will last longer. Things I expect will outlive us: Chrome, PostgreSQL, SQLite, LLVM, Linux/Windows/MacOS, Unity, Nodejs, Nginx.
I have a few small contributions in chromium and nodejs. There's something really delightful about looking at a strangers' laptop and knowing some of my code is in their machine.
I majored in classical music, released 40 records, played to hundreds of thousands of people, produced national US radio shows, recorded bands, tended bars, washed cars, been a cook, built generative music systems and much more.
It is precisely due to my varied experience that I can point this out: the vast majority of startups and tech is dust in the wind.
Have you considered working with any third-party recruiters? It seems that going through one is the only way to get the attention of most companies, these days. I would advise not taking the lack of responses personally, because cold applications are, generally coldly, disposed of (a human never passes judgement on them).
FWIW, I found my last two jobs through third party recruiters, and still count them as friends. It's an industry with an oddly-poor reputation, but there are some real gems of people to be found in it.
March it heats up. Check your resume over. If I can get a job without any big tech you will be fine. Make your resume focus on numbers and maybe have someone review it for free.
- Wrote feature that saved the company $X millions of dollars.
- Automated manual process that saved the company X hours each time they do this process.
- Built a website that served X00,000 customers over the span of Y months.
- Managed X number of people on this project.
Instead of:
- Was responsible for making this software, filling out forms, talking to client, etc.
- I built a website with a database.
- I used X, Y, and Z technologies on this project.
Focus on bullets that show real numbers in metrics that companies care about (saving time, money, gaining customers, number of reports), wherever possible.
The others can be useful too, but shouldn't be what you highlight (list of tech doesn't hurt for hitting buzzwords, though).
I am getting all sorts of confused by some of the responses here. Does woodworking mean building pretty furniture? Whereas carpentry means building big sturdy structures?
Honestly it's not a bad option if you except the work will suck. I did it for a while after getting severance from a tech job. I did a first year carpentry program. We built a house from the ground up for Habitat for Humanity.
After the program I worked in the industry for a while. When you are starting in carpentry it's a lot of grunt work. People won't care if you have any training. After a full day of vacuuming drywall dust I had enough. Quit and landed a programming job.
I still think it was a valuable experience. It shows you value of hard work. If there is time to lean there is time to clean is a very real thing. I was in the best shape of my life. I now have the skills to do most of my own Renos.
