I’m netting < $10 an hour doing part-time full stack dev at an ultra-small organization for a few years post-BSCS.
Fear of resume gaps and the current job market have me afraid to renegotiate. In fact, they’re going to cut my hours soon, which makes it seem like they can only afford ~$150 a week.
I’m getting worse at programming and there’s no one to learn from.
What do you think I should do?
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Start applying. Apply everywhere, experienced full stack devs are still in demand. Don’t negotiate with a tiny company that can’t even give you full time hours.
Either just leave and find another job altogether, or see if you can find a bunch of ultra small organizations and go into business for yourself doing a bit of work for a bunch of companies.
If you have other work then it becomes easier to negotiate, but there may just not be any more money in the company in which case it’s time to do a capitalism and find more money yourself.
I’ve done a lot of low rate or entirely volunteer work for small, often non-profit organizations in the past, and don’t fall into the trap. It can be thankless and it can be soul sucking.
However, obviously if you want to eat and if this is your only income right now you’ll have to stick it out a bit. So I hope we are talking like you are virtually working no hours for that rate, leaving you time to expand your resume on your own.
I have often been asked in the past by friends or acquaintances how you get a good career in programming, and the answer typically is either luck, or a lot of your own hard work.
I don’t know what the job market is like these days, but historically your papers mean very little to getting a job. A link to your Github goes a long way to demonstrate your abilities and provides a much higher degree of confidence you know what you are doing because they can actually look at your work, and if you are contributing to other projects, that you are a team player. As one speaker said at a Google Q&A I watched when asked if a PhD would increase their chance of getting hired: “well, we won’t hold having a PhD against you”.
There is also a lot of free course material out there to various degrees of difficulty.
Programming is becoming more and more competitive, and the ones that succeed have made it their passion, which does mean a lot of unpaid work. So either find projects you are happy to provide your time to to sharpen your skill, or start your own project that you can get satisfaction in building. Actually programming something is always the fastest way to improve your skill.
Yeah I totally agree, I have mixed feelings about the competition part (which is obviously true especially when looking into the valley). Being passionate really counts (in the form of (not just) trying to achieve high quality open source software).
But if it’s just about getting a good pay-check I think it’s not too difficult to get a relatively well-paid job if it’s not in the “hot” zone (i.e. boring jobs are ok).
No idea on the current market myself. You should absolutely start looking at the rate you are being paid right now though. Just don’t get discouraged about the resume gap, it’s a rare field where you can make your own backfill for those gaps.
Start applying! You say your hours may be cut, be applying to places in the hours you would’ve been working. Even if you’re not try to apply to at least one place per day after work. LinkedIn is a good place to get recruiters come to you. I think you should be making quite a bit more with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. It sounds like you’re being taken advantage of or you don’t know your worth.
Either start applying, it’s not that seniors aren’t in demand.
Or (additionally) what I personally have found interest in, is just diving more and more into open source. I think this actually improves my abilities (and fun/interest) most (writing and exploring open source). I kinda “feel” that in my workplace as often my opinion is asked and I have something new/innovative to offer (that I’ve learned from a good open source codebase), that ends up being adapted.
I wouldn’t worry about resume gaps. I’ve found that as long as I’m working on some kind of non-trivial personal project (in my case, usually something I have on Github so employers can see it), I can put it on my resume to fill that gap and it’s not a problem.
Also, since you still have a job, it’s actually the best time to start applying since you can just keep applying and interviewing until you find something while still having a job and receiving a salary. You are clearly unhappy there and are not growing, so there’s no reason not to start the process.
Obviously since you’re still there you can’t just post to LinkedIn saying you’re looking (which is how I found my last job, after a more than 6 month gap btw–though I was working on a personal project during that time as mentioned), but you can start reaching out directly to companies.
Even if it takes 6 months to find something, the sooner you start the better.
That’s encouraging, thanks!
When does a project cross into resume territory? Do you put them in the “experience” section with your jobs?
The last time I updated my resume, I took a bit of a different approach to formatting it that I think worked really well. Instead of the standard sections, I wrote it in prose where I basically list each job and wrote a couple of short paragraphs describing what I worked on and things like if/when I was promoted (as in some companies I had multiple titles as I was promoted up). Having been on the hiring-people side more often than the getting-hired side, I find it much easier to read than a big list of bullet points and a (IMO useless) “list of technologies I know” section.
To answer your question of where I put it, yes I put it as another “job” in my experience section. So after my startup folded, I was working on one of my personal projects (an iOS app that’s in the App Store that I previously worked on as my job as an indie developer and had picked back up). In this case I modernized it to properly support the latest iOS versions and devices and started porting it from Objective-C to Swift.
This worked out great as I had essentially no gap in my resume since I started working on it again right after I stopped working on the startup. So even though I wasn’t getting paid, it showed I was working on something at least (and in this case, something on the appropriate level since I was rearchitecting the code).
Here’s a part of that section as a reference:
I approached the project as a senior engineer cleaning up and modernizing code written years ago by a junior — who happened to be me. Within a few weeks I was able to fix all of the core issues preventing its use on iOS 14, modernize the UI, and remove all deprecated APIs (some going all the way back to iOS 3).
In addition, I’ve been working on a major re-engineering of the data model, porting the entire app from outdated Objective-C to modern Swift 5, and beginning to add new user facing features allowed by the new data model.
I also linked to the GitHub page so they could see the work I did.
As for your question about when a project crosses into resume territory, I would argue any non-trivial project is fine. Even if it’s a new project you start from scratch, I think as long as it’s the type of work your would be doing if you were hired (in my case I was doing architecture work, etc) or even if say I had started a non-trivial project in a new language I didn’t know just to learn it (let’s say I started a non-trivial Rust project or something) I think it would also be fine. And I don’t think it matters if you’ve finished it, in progress work is fine as long as it’s on Github so they can review it. It’s really up to you, but I think the point is just to show you continued to work at your “level” and/or continued to learn it’s fine.
This is all just my opinion both from having used it successfully in my own resume and from having been part of the hiring process of many developers, but I can at least say I didn’t get any negative feedback about it and I did get the job. This was with a full 6 month “gap” after ending my last position.
My Github username is the same as this username so you can see my projects there if you want (the one I’m referencing here is called iSub), and I’m happy to DM you my resume if you want to see it as it contains personal information I’d rather not share publicly like my phone number (though I guess I could redact it and just post a link, this profile isn’t exactly meant to be private or I would have used a different username).
Hope that helps!
I think the answer is obvious. Start looking for another job NOW. Work is out there, if you can code.
