Working on finishing his CS degree and going into a PhD program after picking himself up out of addiction. He's astoundingly brilliant but has always struggled with...just about everything else that doesn't involve a computer. But definitely the most talented mind I've ever been around.
I _really_ don't want to and have been dragging my feet, but I think I'll finally research AI-based development tools. If they truly are sticking around, I'd rather not be a luddite, but I'm still not so sure.
This is where I've landed. If my job as a senior engineer is truly automatable, then there isn't much I can do about it other than pull up a lawnchair.
Anything but blind applications. I know that's not useful information for a lot of people, but if you have experience, you _really_ need to lean on ex-coworkers that you had a good relationship with. Any way to not be a random resume is going to exponentially help your chances.
Additionally, depending on how desperate your search is, you need to be honest with yourself about remote work being a requirement. Ideally you shouldn't budge on it, but the reality is that capital owners have the leverage now vs a few years ago, and you have to play the game. But I would only budge on this if you absolutely need a job asap.
I've wavered on whether being a generalist/"full stack" person is good or not 10+ years into my career, but I think at this point I'm convinced 90%+ of work is just tying libraries together across presentation boundaries, and you should be able to solve problems end-to-end. It's not that hard, I (and the vast majority of people I imagine) aren't working on anything particularly complicated; drawing domain boundaries seems silly.
But that's based on the work you've seen, which is generalist work, which is what you're known for, which is what you've worked on; it's a circular definition. If the company has a database on their backend and they've built indexes and scaled it up and denormed it and sharded it and exhausted all the available options, but it's still not fast enough, would they call you to invent a new, faster database with properties X, Y, and Z that's needed for this particular site because everything on the shelf is the wrong shape, or would they pull in a specialist who's resume is exclusively that kind of work, which is why you've not seen more than 10% of that sort of stuff?
Graduated with a CS degree in 2012, worked at various small companies until I got referred to Google. Worked there for ~5 years, got promoted, and turned that into a pay raise in a field I actually care about. I also live in a HCOL in the US, which is sneakily the reason why I probably make what I do. If you are new to the industry, I have no idea; it looks like a warzone out there for junior recs. Work life balance is fine; I refuse to break 45 hours. I'd rather get fired.
I used to (mid-2000s to 2020, basically) live on message boards and listen to sports radio every day; I basically lived and breathed college football. Nowadays it's pretty much just a curated list of sports writers I like on a sports-only twitter account followed by watching most of my teams' games + a handful of interesting games going on that day using YouTube TV. There's something about the pervasive, constant nature of content these days that seems to have taken a lot of the fun out of it for me.
Same, I left in 2014. I left after a couple of years to almost double my pay and not work on a Linux RT USB driver directly out of college for which I had no desire to be a SME, but in hindsight I think the coworkers I had there were smarter than anywhere else I've worked since (including Google). They paid absolutely nothing but seemed to have good culture, at least where I was at the time.
This matches my experience too. I'm a software dev in my 40s, started career at NI out of college, multiple companies since then.
NI had a fantastic college recruiting process. They sent engineers (not HR people or recruiters) to college career fairs all across the country, often back to their own alma mater, to snag the best-and-brightest from good engineering programs. They then organized big interview days where something like 50 or 100 college applicants would be flown in to interview on Thurs/Friday and then be taken out to downtown Austin on Friday night.
Their interview process was technical, rigorous but fair, and avoided the pitfalls of pointless puzzle questions or of favoring elite credentials over abilities. And their managers, product and sales positions all started from that same pool of entry-level engineers, so even if you were interacting with someone who's title was like "Product Marketing Manager" they had a BSc in engineering, comp sci, physics, math, etc.
The end result was that you always had very intelligent and capable coworkers surrounding you every day. I left for the same reason many other posters have mentioned- by mid career, I was getting paid substantially less than I could make elsewhere.
“talk a lot and saying little” is a horrible place to start. Acting like you're superior to people who don't speak like a computer is not a good way to endear yourself to neurotypical people.
