> But my background kept leading hiring managers to suggest putting me on cloud teams doing orchestration in Go around a database rather than working on the database itself.
This is extremely annoying. This also means if your first job is doing X, it is very difficult to break into Y even if you know quite well about Y, and even have side projects. I have tried attaching cover letters indicating even if my current experience is in X, I am quite familiar with Y, to no luck. (No one reads those stuff).
My entire career was switching from one discipline to another.
For me, the key was twofold:
1) Spend a lot of extracurricular (not work) time, exploring new tech that interests me. This often included purchasing expensive kit, and attending classes, on my own dime (but I could usually use the spend in my tax write-offs).
2) Be willing to accept being paid a lot less than my peers.
My career is a fairly eclectic one. I’m now retired, and spend a lot of time learning stuff, which is fun.
To me it seems like the majority of recruiters barely read past company name and job title.
I switched from Dev to SRE at the same company, and within like one week of remembering to update LinkedIn job title, the random recruiter messages switched from Dev to "oh we are looking for someone like you with lots of SRE experience" (having worked in SRE for <3 months).
So yea, it's difficult to get traction for something that isn't already your job title.
> I also wanted to cover what it's like coming from engineering management and founding companies to going back to being an individual contributor. (Spoiler: incredibly enjoyable.)
I've done the IC to engineering manager back to IC thing and it is indeed a huge relief to learn that it's OK to do that. My favorite piece of writing on that is The Engineer/Manager Pendulum by Charity Majors: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
Charity makes a very convincing case that it's OK to swing from manager to IC and back again several times over the course of your career and that doing so will make you more effective at both of those things.
My experience (as a non-CS person) has been that aside from where there is a very large maths component which might block people without further academic-style study (and I wouldn't necessarily even count ML in that, since the maths needed for much of ML is relatively low level, it's certainly not graduate school level understanding maths), there are relatively few areas of software which have high barriers to entry in actually doing stuff - where the barriers are are people willing to take a risk on letting you have a go. That's usually much much easier once you're in a company than if you're applying for a role from the outside.
Every time I've felt like I didn't understand something and felt overwhelmed at the scale at a task, 3-6 months down the line of throwing myself at the problem and trying to understand it, I've realised it's not as hard and part of the barrier was just the unfamiliar terminology and unfamiliar tools. Sure, there is a degree of needing to learn new stuff - which is true in any job and in life - to do new things. But those barriers are not normally insurmountable. That's been true for me in basically every area. It is also why I'm fairly willing to give people a chance, so long as they are able to demonstrate some knowledge which would be able to transfer.
Watching Eaton's journey online was very inspiring but sadly I have also seen a lot of people doing this to no avail. This is eerily similar to how musicians do busking until they got noticed by a record label.
> I was unhappy with this type-casting so I held out while unemployed and continued to write posts and host virtual hackweeks messing with Postgres and MySQL. I started the first incarnation of the Software Internals Book Club during this time, reading Designing Data Intensive Applications with 5-10 other developers in Bryant Park. During this time I also started the NYC Systems Coffee Club.
I enjoyed reading this. It could be because I'm thinking of doing more of system/network programming (and learning Zig). I've spent the last 6 years in the JavaScript land and bored of yet-another-bundling or SPA-like pattern.
So there's hope that with consistency and patience, one could build expertise in a totally different area
I'm also interested in more low level or systems programming, though I am coming from a mostly backend/system integration background. I feel like a roadblock is that I am self taught, and though I have been doing software engineering professionally for 15 years and software as a job for 20, I still can't call myself an engineer legally. I certainly know I can do the work, but I worry about hiring being wary of a lack of credentials as a legal liability for lower level stuff.
I would love to hear people's stories of interesting jobs they've gotten without a degree in this space.
Depends on the use-case, but if your product is <14 month lifecycle App/shovel-ware, than go JS for the labor compatibility... Yet if you are hitting >40k concurrent users, the options winnow down fairly quickly.
Thanks, it is inspiring, And it seems like I'm on the same way of that transition, Here is my individual expirment database for learning db internals and rust..
On a similar note: I've been listening to various podcasts with Allan Judd for probably more than 10 years now. It's amazing to see someone go from a FreeBSD docs contributor and talented systems administrator to C programmer and ZFS developer.
You have to have serious motivation to not just stay with what you know, but it's a nice kick in the butt to the rest of us to see that it can be done, with you put in the work.
> But my background kept leading hiring managers to suggest putting me on cloud teams doing orchestration in Go around a database rather than working on the database itself.
This is extremely annoying. This also means if your first job is doing X, it is very difficult to break into Y even if you know quite well about Y, and even have side projects. I have tried attaching cover letters indicating even if my current experience is in X, I am quite familiar with Y, to no luck. (No one reads those stuff).
My entire career was switching from one discipline to another.
For me, the key was twofold:
1) Spend a lot of extracurricular (not work) time, exploring new tech that interests me. This often included purchasing expensive kit, and attending classes, on my own dime (but I could usually use the spend in my tax write-offs).
2) Be willing to accept being paid a lot less than my peers.
My career is a fairly eclectic one. I’m now retired, and spend a lot of time learning stuff, which is fun.
To me it seems like the majority of recruiters barely read past company name and job title.
I switched from Dev to SRE at the same company, and within like one week of remembering to update LinkedIn job title, the random recruiter messages switched from Dev to "oh we are looking for someone like you with lots of SRE experience" (having worked in SRE for <3 months).
So yea, it's difficult to get traction for something that isn't already your job title.
Is there a way to work around this?
Lie on LinkedIn, get a foot in the door and explain in the interview
references, apply for a company rich enough to fund various projects ( like crypto company, if your moral compass allows ).
> I also wanted to cover what it's like coming from engineering management and founding companies to going back to being an individual contributor. (Spoiler: incredibly enjoyable.)
I've done the IC to engineering manager back to IC thing and it is indeed a huge relief to learn that it's OK to do that. My favorite piece of writing on that is The Engineer/Manager Pendulum by Charity Majors: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
Charity makes a very convincing case that it's OK to swing from manager to IC and back again several times over the course of your career and that doing so will make you more effective at both of those things.
My experience (as a non-CS person) has been that aside from where there is a very large maths component which might block people without further academic-style study (and I wouldn't necessarily even count ML in that, since the maths needed for much of ML is relatively low level, it's certainly not graduate school level understanding maths), there are relatively few areas of software which have high barriers to entry in actually doing stuff - where the barriers are are people willing to take a risk on letting you have a go. That's usually much much easier once you're in a company than if you're applying for a role from the outside.
Every time I've felt like I didn't understand something and felt overwhelmed at the scale at a task, 3-6 months down the line of throwing myself at the problem and trying to understand it, I've realised it's not as hard and part of the barrier was just the unfamiliar terminology and unfamiliar tools. Sure, there is a degree of needing to learn new stuff - which is true in any job and in life - to do new things. But those barriers are not normally insurmountable. That's been true for me in basically every area. It is also why I'm fairly willing to give people a chance, so long as they are able to demonstrate some knowledge which would be able to transfer.
>I held out while unemployed
Watching Eaton's journey online was very inspiring but sadly I have also seen a lot of people doing this to no avail. This is eerily similar to how musicians do busking until they got noticed by a record label.
> I was unhappy with this type-casting so I held out while unemployed and continued to write posts and host virtual hackweeks messing with Postgres and MySQL. I started the first incarnation of the Software Internals Book Club during this time, reading Designing Data Intensive Applications with 5-10 other developers in Bryant Park. During this time I also started the NYC Systems Coffee Club.
That's the spirit! And it worked.
I enjoyed reading this. It could be because I'm thinking of doing more of system/network programming (and learning Zig). I've spent the last 6 years in the JavaScript land and bored of yet-another-bundling or SPA-like pattern.
So there's hope that with consistency and patience, one could build expertise in a totally different area
I'm also interested in more low level or systems programming, though I am coming from a mostly backend/system integration background. I feel like a roadblock is that I am self taught, and though I have been doing software engineering professionally for 15 years and software as a job for 20, I still can't call myself an engineer legally. I certainly know I can do the work, but I worry about hiring being wary of a lack of credentials as a legal liability for lower level stuff.
I would love to hear people's stories of interesting jobs they've gotten without a degree in this space.
There are JS frameworks that port to most platforms in about 3 minutes (use a Mac for iOS builds):
https://quasar.dev/introduction-to-quasar/
That being said, Erlang/Elixir abstracts most db use-cases with ecto, and has some other incredibly powerful scalable features for sites:
https://www.phoenixframework.org/
* Distributed
* Fault-tolerant
* Highly available
* Hot swapping
Depends on the use-case, but if your product is <14 month lifecycle App/shovel-ware, than go JS for the labor compatibility... Yet if you are hitting >40k concurrent users, the options winnow down fairly quickly.
Have fun =3
Thanks, it is inspiring, And it seems like I'm on the same way of that transition, Here is my individual expirment database for learning db internals and rust..
https://github.com/maxnilz/sboxdb
Now, trying to implement a rocksdb-like LSM based storage in modern C++ and call it from the sboxdb, just for refresh my old C++ memory.
On a similar note: I've been listening to various podcasts with Allan Judd for probably more than 10 years now. It's amazing to see someone go from a FreeBSD docs contributor and talented systems administrator to C programmer and ZFS developer.
You have to have serious motivation to not just stay with what you know, but it's a nice kick in the butt to the rest of us to see that it can be done, with you put in the work.
If you can wrangle CSS, you can probably wrangle SQL pretty well.
Both are declarative ways of traversing graph-like datasets (DOM nodes vs tabular relations).
That is not what "database developer" means in this context.
I would like to have this kind of transition to the Compiler world.
It's a fairly easy transition to do, once your bank account is empty you're halfway there.