This makes no sense. Insofar as tech people are bad at networking, that tilts the odds even more in that direction, as that's where the most low-hanging fruit is.

Well if we use any kind of strict economic definition, clearly lol no there's no shortage. But if you set that aside, there's no working definition of shortage or anything to fall back on. So I want to assume here in good faith that you're trying to describe something meaningful. So what do you mean by "shortage" here and how does it apply to this situation? I'm not arguing that there's no shortage by your definition because I don't know what your definition is.

That's where the problem is going to be, there are a ton of "developers" out there who don't fit the definition the idiots doing the hiring are looking for but are totally capable of filling a developer role.

As you go up the ranks this starts to appear more and more as if there is a shortage where it is really a shortage of vision not bodies.

Most people who follow that advice (and many others like it) already have the networking thing figured out and don't need our rudimentary help on this, nor are they going to find yourself in a situation where you have to spam-apply for jobs. I'm not saying it doesn't work, just that it assumes that you're a specific type of person (generally not found among engineers in tech). Also, I'll add that this is less effective for tech jobs (for which you have to go through technical screens of arbitrary difficulty) at decent places because every tech person gets so much spam along these lines. Even when it works, you often just get referred to the same recruiting funnel.

Part of the reason why networking is effective is that when you do this well, the other person realizes that you do it well and understand that it makes you a potentially valuable contact. People in tech don't know what good networking looks like, are weary of being spammed by recruiters/salespeople and don't really care even if you are good at networking, so they are far more likely to ignore you.

This is sort of what I'm getting at - I feel like I see a surplus of developers (not in a strict economic sense) and lots of developers are either having a hard time finding jobs they want (even though they are qualified) and end up being underemployed and doing things that are too easy for them. Meanwhile, from the other side - I've hired people directly, helped companies with their hiring process and interviewed candidates for other hiring managers - there are tons of talented people that we had to pass on because of some minor thing, ultimately because there are always tons and tons of candidates and false negatives are acceptable.

So one way to think about this is putting developers on one side and jobs on the other and see real world matches and see, in an ideal world, who could do better. I think the developers win this one fairly easily - it's far more common to see developers who are overqualified for the work they do and are unchallenged in their normal day-to-day work than to see developers in jobs that they are unqualified to perform. If there was a shortage of talent (again, colloquially speaking), this would be reversed. On average, developers would be forced to do things that are too hard for them, rather than too easy.

You're making a bunch of sweeping and self-limiting generalizations about tech people and the nature of networking in general. IIRC you've mentioned before that you aren't entirely happy with your own career trajectory / pay level? You're clearly a smart guy with strong technical skills, so I think reconsidering the assumptions you're making and devoting some time to improving your networking skills would pay off in a big way.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28...-a-programmer/

People in tech understand that, and value that, just like any other industry.

I mean it's always been a laughably first world problem and after a couple of years of hard work, I'm back on track. Thanks for asking! In any case, we're talking about advice for new grads trying to find their first job. They aren't going to have much of a network. They aren't going to be particularly effective at networking if they tried. They have no idea which jobs they would enjoy. There are hundreds if not thousands of tech startups in the bay area (and I'm sure in many other tech hubs) that aren't really all that different from one another. If the first job doesn't work out for some reason, finding the next job is going to be much easier.

My advice is about the situation at hand and little to do with me - I'm an older guy with a track record and connections and I have never been in a situation where I had to spam resumes to random companies. Networking is more important for me, though again, in tech it's more about the small (people you worked with that can vouch for you) or the large (people you can reach) and only rarely about the medium (people you know but not that well). I saw someone trying this spam-applying everywhere approach and sharing results on this forum and I merely thought it was a relatively effective approach in a job-dense area if you're a desperate new grad (bootcamp or school). It makes perfect sense given the way I know tech companies hire and I don't think there's that much you can do to improve upon it. Tech recruiters and hiring managers generally don't give a **** about your cover letters - they care whether your resume looks like you can code and pass tech interviews. By all means, if there are just three local employers and those are the only places you care about, don't do this and put in more effort per opportunity.

This is good stuff for certain types of people but it's not applicable for most new grads - new CS grads or bootcamp grads don't have much offer to businesses beside their coding skills and the vast majority of opportunities they can get through whatever network they have will be vastly inferior to what's available at good tech companies. I guess Patrick's stuff is useful if you're a decent mid-career programmer who's not quite good enough technically to get a cushy job with their technical skills alone and interested in business/sales/etc enough to try to make it as a one-man consulting shop but for a new grad, it can be dangerous and misleading - you can't even fake it till you make it if it's transparent to everyone you're a nobody.

Furthermore, tech is eating the world right now and the kinds of places where this works are generally worse places for technical people to be (non-tech companies) than the kinds of places where this doesn't work. Also I don't think Patrick himself ever did all that well for himself following his own advice until after becoming semi-famous writing about it. He seemed to have pivoted more towards selling himself as a marketer for businesses run by technical people rather than a technical solutions guy for businesses run by non-technical people. Either way, he's a good writer and writes a lot of insightful stuff but his core skill set is becoming internet-famous.

Also, personally speaking, I'd say my career was hurt by trying to straddle between being an engineer and being a business guy involved in sales, marketing, finance, product and in a way following my own version of a Patrick-lite career - I would have been much better off if I focused a standard engineering career from the beginning. I guess one day some of the skills and experience may come handy when I start my own company but the most important lesson is that you can't be good at everything. Before I was at a real tech company, my outlook was very similar to Patrick's but after seeing how tech companies are run, I definitely feel now that this is a road to mediocrity.

I miss programming. I missed it when I was at my job and I really miss it now. I'm excited to finish my trip, but also to get back to work solving problems some day.

Not including HR phone screens..

12 company coding challenges

• Vmware
• Google
• Tower Research
• Optiver
• GoDaddy
• Twitter
• Akuna Capital
• Belvedere Trading LLC
• Pure Storage
• Fidessa
• Small shipping startup
• Amazon

Only passed 4 of them...

I failed a lot of coding challenges in the beginning since I didn't practice seriously enough. . But now I do them for fun.

6 company coding phone screens:

• Google(Did 4 ****ing phone screens!)
• Apple (Had one and was about to schedule a 2nd)
• My Company
• TubiTv
• Small SF Startup
• Pure Storage

Passed 2.5 out of those 6

4 onsites

• Optiver
• Google
• My Company
• SF Startup that decided to cancel onsite and do a 5 hour skype "onsite"

I did bail out of 2 interview processes since I already accepted an offer.

In regards to networking, I reached out to two people I knew and asked for referrals. One of them was Uber and got rejected a few months after. Another from Meraki and I only got an HR phone screen then was ghosted.

I did however had some success stalking a linkedIn recruiter. After completing a hackerrank challenge, I didn't hear anything from the company that was supposed to reach out to me. LinkedIn stalked the recruiters at the company and after a few tries I was able to guess their email which led to a phone screen in which I failed lol.

That article would be a lot better without the tryhard nerd-cred references

What kind of d100 has a zero on it?

He must be mistaking the 00 for 0 instead of 100...

Hmm, I'm misremembering. I thought we rolled 2 d20's for percentiles and had to call which one was the 10's first, so 100 would be two 10/20. But there are percentile dice that are d10's numbered from 10 to 00 as well. I dug out my dice and have these percentile dice. Weird.

D100 do come with 100, source: https://www.thediceshoponline.com/cat/41/sides/21/d100

Looks like I will try the resume spam strat

There's more discussion of resume spam vs targeted applications here starting around post 345.

NERD

Great find - that is where I first heard of the resume spam strategy though it's not quite as I remembered. I don't think we agree on things but I think it was a good discussion regardless. Anyone know if penguin found a programming job?

Edit: nevermind, looks like he did! So it worked!

When are you back? Also, do you know what you'll be doing once you're back?

Maybe not until the end of the year. No no idea.

Are you traveling for a year or something? I must have missed the memo.

Nevermind I see it now. Get a job you bum! :P

I have a side project at work where I'm creating data visualizations using d3.js and holy **** is this fun.

I'm using React so translating between d3 and react is pretty interesting and there's no better feeling than seeing your rotating globe render with clickable countries, then overlaying a bunch of data on it.

I've always loved maps and being able to create them and do cool visualizations on top of them is elite.

There's obviously a shortage of programmers. You can tell by the salaries. The difference between the median programmer salary and the median salary for the whole population is the size of the shortage.

I can't tell if this is like satire or what

my personal view, not backed by anything at all, is that the market for programmers is becoming saturated.

i go to a good CS school, and the graduating class is like ~1000 people or something. 5-10 years ago i think it was maybe less than a 10th of that.

https://cra.org/data/generation-cs/p...rs-since-2006/

This is on top of non-CS grads (of all ages) moving into software development - increasingly software development is becoming a standard career option for all STEM grads, not just CS grads. I do worry that a lot of people are lured by the few jobs that do pay extremely well, without considering whether it's representative of the industry as a whole.

Btw, are you graduating this summer?

Yes I graduate in june