I expect to get downvoted in Stack Overflow with the slightest bit of excuse but it seems that Stack Overflow gets you downvoted in every other forum you dare to mention SO without adhering to SO code of being totally right.
Issues man. Deep unresolved issues.
Anyway - like I said I'm interested in above question myself. If you find a community/forum that cares more to answer than advertising its internal psychological complexes then please share back.
>> A professional’s insecurity is rooted in the inherent intangibility of knowledge work. How do you convince your client that you know something worthwhile and justify the high fees you charge? The insecurity caused by this intangibility is exacerbated by the rigorous “up or out” promotion system perpetuated by elite professional organizations, which turns your colleagues into your competitors. How do you convince your boss that you’re worth more than your closest colleague? There is no chance for a professional to rest on their laurels — or even to rest.
>> The corporate work culture survives on people's fears. If you don't play by the rules of the people in power, how will you make money, how will you feed your family, how will you contribute to society?
>> When people long for the days of the early web, the glorious idiosyncracies of personal sites and forums, they are really longing for a time and a space where people were free to communicate their own values. Now that space is owned and rented to the highest bidder. A site like LinkedIn wraps you up into a tiny, uniform package, sets you in an enormous data warehouse next to millions of other tiny people just like you, and sells the lot of you.
A lot of what he says resonates really strongly. Fact of the matter though is that we are locked in this state of affairs. Specially if you are in a not-exactly-buzzing job market. I don't know if there is a will and a way to revert ourselves back to something more than a commodity. And I don't see a way to move forward to something beyond that.
None in my team. About 3-4 in my open plan (I guess about 100 coworkers in it). Same numbers in Uni.Similar numbers to all the companies I've been so far (best one was about 80-20).
SW Dev seems to be male dominated for as long as I remember myself in it. Made a motto out of it that I hope I'm gonna pass to my kids: "steer away from any environment where the gender stats are skewed beyond 60-40. This is just not normal."
>> I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see meaningful human interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by likes and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it.
For what is worth he's not alone in this. Being "interconnected" the way he thinks he's missing feels actually being less connected than ever. In a way he sees the right picture IMHO but he thinks he misinterprets things. I guess it's his broken ego which puts these kinds of "I-must-be-wrong" filters in front of him but if he ever gets rid of them I think that his vantage point on the current techscape will be unique exactly due to him being absent of it for so long.
>> Is working with recruiters actually makes sense?
Short answer: not really. Job-hunt and apply directly.
Longer answer: Most of them seem to be in the business of collecting CVs (data for sale I presume).
A few really mean work and are the ones that might be worth dealing with. I don't have a good way to tell which is which though until after ghosting.
It tends to be consistent with companies though. E.g. I got that behavior and time waste consistently from Wikimedia, Oracle, Etsy and a few startups. It's also consistent for me (I'm based in Europe) with recruiters that are based in US. I no longer respond to queries related to above companies or recruiters not based in EU but I still get the occasional time waster.
Recruiting seems to be a very unprofessional and inefficient market.
>> I don't know why people keep recommending this as a way to break into software dev
2 reasons IMHO:
1. It is a powerful albeit mostly imaginary image/story. A sort of American dream incarnated in SW. Everything is out there, open and within reach so anyone can do it and make it big.
2. A lot of the HN crowd are actually committers to high profile projects (this is the most popular hacker community after all) so they tend to judge by their own story or stories from their circle. I suspect though that the average dev is quite away from this paradigm.
Having tried a few times to just build kubernetes (by now I honestly believe that you need a server farm to do just that) I have to agree with the point you're making. The sheer magnitude and the speed that this behemoth is growing just makes me loose any incentive after a while. Not to mention that you have to actually antagonize with a lot of other noobs to get to these "good-first-issue" PR first. (Diclosure: I'm quite familiar with kube and an experienced dev).
And then there is the other thing. I'm afraid somewhere along the way we missed the point. OS is (was) about doing what you want with no strings attached. Something inside me is twitching in the thought that it has become a (difficult) way to get a nice job and that it is mostly controlled by big Co (which you are effectively begging to throw its eyes over you and your contributions). Dunno if I want to be part in this grind. I prefer doing my own stuff (and GPL them like the good old days).
The point I think you're making is that "it depends" and I agree with it.
I've seen companies that have no funding issues building products that they know they will need to maintain in coming years and still follow a few or none of the best practices.
But I've also seen people building SW that no one can guarantee that will ever be used (and gets scrapped after a few months) spending days and weeks setting up the perfect agile CICD setup and arguing in endless pedantic discussions in code reviews.
My impression as well. I was thinking getting a career shift into pentesting (rumor has it that it's remote-friendly as well) but after a few job searches I came to see that the job market is tiny.
It's the Cambrian explosion in SW Dev tools. What amazes me though is how undead everything is. It seems that even ancient stuff is still somewhere out there waiting to be maintained. And there's a gazillion more every year adding to the pile.
Same feeling here but I came to understand that it's the enterprise and the design by committee that brings in the complexity.
K8S is developed by a multitude of very large companies. Each with their own agenta/needs. All of them have to be addressed. Thus the complexity. If you think about it they probably manage to keep the complexity to relatively low levels. Maybe because it is pushed to the rest of the ecosystem (see service meshes for example).
Being pushed by the behemoths also explains the popularity. Smaller companies and workers feel that this is a safe investment in terms of money and time familiarizing with the tech stack so they jump on. And the loop goes on.
Main business reason for all that though I think it's the need of Google et all to compete with AWS creating a cloud platform that comes to be a standard and belongs to no-one really. In this sense it is a much better, versatile and open ended openstack attempt.
>> But yeah nobody but the 1%ers are getting jobs in this market
You mean the current and looming crisis or the IT job market in general.
>> Even busted my ass for an AWS cert -- worthless
Thought about that too but then occurred to me that I'd also need to go for a K8S one and perhaps one of the security ones and ... this never ends whilst I might land in a job where I just need to know bash and basic python. (Also these certs seem to offer little basic knowledge and a lot of shopping-list-like details.
No opportunities arose plus office-politics make my stomach turn. Perhaps it is my long stint in a Byzantine multinational that spoiled that path for me.
Issues man. Deep unresolved issues.
Anyway - like I said I'm interested in above question myself. If you find a community/forum that cares more to answer than advertising its internal psychological complexes then please share back.
Thanks.