If Your Tech Job is Comfortable, You're in Danger

[@HealthyDev]

Have you ever let yourself slide too much - and gotten into trouble in your tech career? What consequences did you face? How did you get out of it?

[@fabiolean]

I was in this spot about 6-7 years ago. I was a network engineer at a big MSP when we got bought by private equity and the new owners started gutting the place. I realized I'd been coasting and that I needed something to differentiate myself from all my colleagues who were about to start getting laid off. I started learning programming, automation, and infrastructure-as-code. I finally managed to get poached by another company in an automation role (right after the first round of layoffs that they promised weren't going to happen). I'm not as effortlessly confident in my domain as I used to be, but the sum of my skills are light years beyond what they were. Although I'll never forgive that equity firm for so utterly destroying what used to be an amazing place to work.

[@koerperkontrolle]

Me to myself: "Calm down anxiety, things will be ok, let me just watch some youtube to relax" KZbin:

[@joelazaro461]

Anxiety: You’re 👏 falling 👏 behind! 👏

[@KevinPanko]

KZbin is not Yoga 😅

[@LilSyl05]

For real, I got laid off 2 weeks ago on my 2 years job.. I am intermediate developer and I'm doing my best to read the senior level, but ill be honest.. Im getting tired of the corporate world.

[@jonasbaine3538]

I started trading stocks as a get out plan from the constant tech race. The constant pressure to never settle and keep learning is exhausting. Meanwhile blue collar union job workers easily settle into their comfortable jobs making close to 100k too. Longshoreman…

[@JohnSmith-op7ls]

Still early for you to do a career change. Tech work has gotten way too saturated and only getting worse. Especially for front end work. I know waitresses that make what an average front end dev does.

[@Jollyprez]

Worst thing is to be the BEST at something in your company.

[@jonathanalpart7812]

Why?

[@cassioorsi]

@@jonathanalpart7812 Because you won't have mentors

[@theaccountant666]

​@@jonathanalpart7812 because then you are boxed in and not "eligible" for anything else

[@henson2k]

what if company doesn't care?

[@prajjwal1010]

Being Best at something the company cares about, is being talked here as far I comprehend​@@henson2k

[@desimaangalwa2914]

I was at this place 4 years ago. In small startup moving from attachment to team lead in 2 yrs, i had many crowns and owned a big seat. I burned out & resigned. Took me 7 months to get next role in a more serious scale up, with more senior engineers. It was really hard for me to catch up but i learned a lot leaving as mid-level engineer. Am now a senior frontend in another startup for last 1 month. The job is too easy(though good benefits), manual processes everywhere team is too young and doing my first mistakes. Am really careful and i know what i want and where i want my career to head. Thanks man for this pod. Am awake

[@isomochyn1]

I am currently working through this situation, got complacement and stayed at the same company too long working on old tech and not growing. I decided to leave that job for mental health reasons and quickly found that many skills were outdated and having difficulty finding something else. I am still applying but after a short break back to learning and even starting to enjoy coding again.

[@NoahNobody]

My company is doing everything possible to reassure us that our jobs are safe, while at the same time every now and then lay someone off with the promise that it will never happen again.

[@theaccountant666]

Crowd control

[@b3owu1f]

So 25+ years in the career.. and my area of expertise is APIs.. and I can't find a job to save my life. Part of the problem honestly is the beyond ridiculous expectations of roles now. You have to be expert + many years experience in front, back, db, devops, deployment, security and more.. to be considered. Then you are given multiple leet code tests in interviews.. as if the past 25 years of my career was writing algo style code that I did back in college. It's such a shit way to gauge someone's skills. "You didnt solve this intermediate in 20 minutes with perfect answers.. you cant code". I can code.. my side projects tell me I can. But trying to compete for jobs with 100s of other developers.. forget it. I dont know if my tech job career is over or what, but it's by far much worse than it was in 2008.

[@ChimiChuri-k2o]

These days you have to be a generalist, and I think that I am the perfect candidate for that.

[@JohnSmith-op7ls]

There’s far too many devs now. It’s not just comparing the economy to 2008, you have to take into account the flood of mediocre devs since then who spent lots of time memorizing how to do meaningless code challenges and making lots of rehashes of existing libraries to stuff their GitHub profile. You’re competing with people who have created a persona aimed at getting hired, not a skill set aimed at being productive. Companies are lazy and unable to find managers who know how to tell the difference so they take the easy route and assume some online tests will weed out the best candidates for them. Go do gov work. Less pay but immensely better job security and less demand and stress. The whole Leetcode thing is Xbox Live achievements for coding. Just means you’ve wasted tons of time building up worthless badges, points, and ranks. Maybe not totally worthless if it gets you a job but when that job expects you to get things done or get fired as most do, then what did memorizing a bunch of algos you’ll never use at work do for you.

[@debugmeplease]

3:10 yeah, given the current market situation (at least in EU, Germany) and the fact that companies ghosting applicants - there is 0 security at this point.

[@pointerish]

The thing is that there is never true security. Anything could happen and all of a sudden you're jobless. The only sort of security is to keep learning, keep oneself relevant. That's the only thing you can do. That or start a company and that's very hard and not for everyone.

[@debugmeplease]

@@pointerish Absolutely agree!

[@JohnSmith-op7ls]

Government work is far ahead of private sector for job security. Pays less but factor in being without a job for 6+ months and you’re probably about even unless you’re in the C-Suite or get lucky and go a decade or more without losing your job

[@anicemind3893]

I follow you with great interest. I have been working in software development for over 40 years. Almost 30 of those years as a freelancer. It wasn't always easy, but I was quite independent and self-organized. But because I got involved with the wrong "partners" in the end, I had to go bankrupt. I have now been in permanent employment for 4 years. A regular, good salary, 30 days' vacation, free weekends (Germany), home office. But none of that makes me happy and satisfied. On the contrary, I'm well on the way to depression. That's why I'm doing everything I can to be self-employed, independent and responsible again in my late 50s. Preferably with my own product. Without a partner. I'm prepared to take risks to achieve this. That's still much, much better than this dreary and boring existence as an employee. But of course that's just my personal view and experience.

[@Erik_The_Viking]

Lack of learning is a big deal - if you're note learning you're not growing. Technology changes way too fast. I'm definitely too comfortable in my current role, and exploring other options. I enjoying getting pushed out of my comfort zone.

[@JohnSmith-op7ls]

Yeah but a lot of the change is just nonsense rehashing of the same thing in a new wrapper. Especially in front end work. There’s a 100 frameworks, 15 of them get trendy but almost all the jobs are for the same 3-4 and maybe one of those gets replaced every 6-7 years with a minority share. New language features are almost always just nice to haves and you cans do the same without them. Might get a killer one every 5 years or more. Libraries are mostly the same as frameworks but taken up an order of magnitude. A lot of infrastructure and devops stuff is similar. Reinventing the wheel for supposed gains here while trying to downplay the added costs there. One day everyone won’t shut up about Serverless and the next they’re won’t shut up about how these new alternatives are better because of all the issues with Serverless. Patterns that have been around for decades get too much hype (looking at you Microservices), then it’s years of people trending on how they made a mistake with them. Project management methodologies, same thing. Change management tools, same thing but at a slower pace. The key is to identify what actually is worth learning and keeping an eye on trends and salaries. Go where it looks like the money is going. The tech doesn’t really matter, you’re doing the same old things 99% of the time anyhow.

[@LucasGrecco]

My next move in tech will be to open a small coffee shop and say goodbye to all this BS!

[@SuperWarZoid]

lol it really is a load of BS

[@jinto_reedwine]

This is a question I ask myself once or twice a year as I have worked at the same place over a decade. I have written and supported entire systems from beginning to end and then worked on writing their replacements in new frameworks. A few times in the video you made statements that, to me, made it sound like working at one place too long is just a bad idea. Personally I have always viewed it as a strength since I have written new code but also had the chance to see how those architecture decisions played out over the years. Is it just the case that employers don't care about those kinds of things in the tech world or, in your experience, is staying at one place fine as long as you are keeping things fresh and acquiring new skills?

[@JohnSmith-op7ls]

If you’re ok with the pay, getting decent annual raises, and keeping up with new things that actually matter and not the 100 trendy things that come out a week which aren’t worth your time, there’s nothing wrong with staying at the same place. Odds are you have a lot better job stability and over the next 5 years or so, that’ll be worth far more than making 15-20% more. A decade of making that much more can be wiped out in 6-8 months of unemployment, especially if most of it is in a higher tax bracket.

[@asimplenameichose151]

What if you are behind about half a year's contract salary despite turning out competent work (with overtime), and current payroll is behind over two months, and you're effectively a couple of years into deep burnout with little time (or motivation, other than pure paycheck pressure) to self-improve, a family who continually needs more of your time investment, and the state of the market is such that you get almost no callbacks / email responses to applications at all? What if you have never had an 'easy' tech job, you've cleared bar after bar since the beginning of your career against most of the odds, and all you can dream about is somehow exiting into an 'easier' role with a reliable check but you can't even get seen? As far as I can see, in the current market you're in danger in almost any (tech) position from one side or the other.

[@jonasbaine3538]

You haven’t been paid in 2 months ?

[@JohnSmith-op7ls]

Gov work and streamline your personal life to reduce time demand there.