Did you give me an upvote?

I'm never logged in to hn. The few times I post I make a new throwaway (or try to and fail at their captcha).

Thanks. I feel time pressured - I have plenty of savings but I need to GTFO like right now. They're saying the earliest possible we get paid is jan 2nd or 3rd. Which means like february. But they admitted it's not 100% whether we eventually get paid at all.

Had a pretty candid convo with my boss about this yesterday (and also 3 months ago) and basically told him that I was a little scared, I haven't been developing my tech skills in this role, my programming sucks now, and I am too junior to get a management role anywhere else. So I am kind of boned.

He's gonna help me out and I can't get into the details here. But I feel like even in my small network, I could find something pretty quickly. But the thing is, I don't want to get myself into the same situation again where I'm in way over my head and there's little opportunity for me to develop real skills.

Like yea I'm good at vim now and super comfortable with the command line and unix based systems, and even have a little windows cmd.exe magic up my sleeve - but I don't think it'd be enough for an interview.

The problem solving aspect of those challenges is the easiest part. I just literally can't put it into code. I can't explain it. It just takes me ****ing forever.

So what I am doing now - updating resume, getting feedback from some peers. Taking a python 0 to hero course on udemy I found for 10 bucks that I think I can finish quickly. After that I am going to finish an AWS certification course (or try to do both at once if I can). Doing coding challenges throughout the day and at night.

I find hackerrank really nice because it has a huge variety of languages to do the puzzles in and the puzzles are fun and not exasperating (leetcode is kind of bugging me with how strict the output must be). I'm going to do all the easy-medium puzzles in every language I have more than a passing familiarity with - so that would be shell, C, java, and python. Going to try to focus mostly on python because it's a new-ish language to me and really heavily used in devops.

Then after new year latest I start slamming out the resume's to job hits on linkedin premium, and chase a few leads from my contacts. I think that'll give me the best chance to have something promising by late feb/march and worst case scenario is I only go 2-3 months unpaid, which is tolerable (barely).

One small suggestion, I think it's probably better to be deep in a single language than shallower in a broad range of languages. When interviewing I think its pretty common to accept any standard language for interview questions and the more familiar you are with a given language, the better you'll do.

Make sure to file unemployment. If you were not paid you have been functionally laid off.

jmakin,

I have a friend that works here. She loves it, they are hiring devops, and hire remote:

https://www.goboomtown.com/careers-open

Thanks. I dont see any devops roles on linkedin or that site but maybe I didnt look hard enough.

My skills are mostly in linux sysadmin stuff. Still learning aws, gonna have to cram it I think. God what a huge beast that is. The course is like 120 hours and it’s just for the cert.

Sorry, I just checked with her and she said they are approved to hire DevOps but it isn't posted yet.

Get a job in Silicon Valley and supercharge your career!

i have only done the aws tutorials without taking tests but it all seems fairly trivial.

aws does almost everything for you.

It’s certainly less complicated than the things I currently do - but the amount of services offered is very vast

Nevertheless something I must learn if i go devops. I knew devops was for me since last year in my web dev class, we had to deploy our own site and i was only one of like 6 students that was able to get it deployed without help. And i had automated the launch (it was only like a 4 line script) and shared it with other people in the course.

I dont think i’m really good at much in tech but i’m an autodidact and extremely good at reading and writing tech material, which is invaluable when troubleshooting things. So i’m gonna try to go in this direction for now rather than this stupid management bs.

My boss disagrees and thinks my strengths lie in product/management but i just dont have any relevant experience yet.

Dude you've been bellyaching about your product management role for over a year on here. That's a lifetime of relevant experience in the tech world.

Yea but as has been pointed out here ad nauseum my real job has had nothing to do with being an actual project/product manager

Being a product manager is just being detail-oriented. You have plenty of sufficient experience. You need to leave that job and find something that pays better and w/o all the toxic weirdness.

Good luck in the hunt jmakin!

I disagree with the idea that AWS does everything for you. While running a single AWS service is pretty straightforward, tying a few of them together to end up with a functional application isn't trivial.

There's tons of scripting and config involved in spinning up even relatively simple apps. And when you get bigger and need to start dealing with terraform or kubernetes it only gets more complex.

the problem with linkedin premium is that it lets other people know you're the kind of person who subscribes to linkedin premium.

i posted that as a joke but i wonder if they're aware that it's actually a problem.

Wow no activity in this thread in 2 weeks! I suppose it is the time of year most tech employees take 2 weeks off.

Jmakin today (1/2) is the day your shitbox employer promised a paycheck right? Did they make good?

I gather from your thread on the exiled politics forum you are continuing to work for free and haven’t filed unemployment? Why?

I’ve been checking out elixir the last week or so. Cool stuff. Kind of wish all languages had types at this point, but I like a lot of the decisions they make.

My goal this year is to actually release 2 hobby apps for public use. I tend to just tool around so I’ll define success as using some google ads or something to get some users. We’ll see how well I stick to this!

Yeah I'm trying to get a hobby app out the door myself. It's something I've used for myself for years but that I've never had polished enough. I am a really terrible UI designer and I don't really know JS and that doesn't help. But I do have something that mostly works now and I've been having a few people try it.

Probably too niche to be of much interest. It's something you feed printer circuit board gerber files to and it spits out gcode to make them on a CNC. I have a lot of other CNC stuff that already works but not in a polished or usable form at all and I will probably try to add it slowly over time.

Also will probably add some features to essentially let you use a CNC in real time a little more like a traditional mill, since that's something I find myself needing to do a lot. Like... "Drill holes at these coordinates 1/2" deep" or "face the top of this thing flat" or whatever. It's really pointless to get out CAD/CAM software to do something like this and a pain to do it truly manually.

So Goofy got a FAANG job and disappeared, should we be worried?!

I think he posts over at the new politics forum that a bunch of people went to when Mat closed down the one here. They have a programming thread similar to this one with a bunch of peeps from here that post in it.

Aww you guys avoiding me?!

No it's a politics thing. A lot of us still post in both places for the other forum stuff though.

discussion has moved here https://unstuckpolitics.com/t/programming/192