The connections section is both focused entirely on LinkedIn (arguably a worse form of Life Invader than Facebook; I refuse to use either of these or any other such service).
How is someone that values their privacy supposed to get a job or even break in to having a job where they make connections to peers?
> How is someone that values their privacy supposed to get a job or even break in to having a job where they make connections to peers?
You can't really connect and socialize with people online without being a little lenient about privacy.
Still a social network, but Twitter is great. I can ask more "famous" people to retweet a tweet from me asking for jobs or even get them to connect me with someone (if you spent a bit of time meeting them). Also, depending on your community their chat or forum may help. For React, I've gotten interviews and contracts from their chat. For real life, meet ups are good though you gotta be a bit extroverted.
I'm not sure there is another way. But if you are in IT, and don't mind working with recruiters, LinkedIn is an incredibly efficient way to hook up with tons of recruiters willing to find you jobs doing exactly what you're looking (and qualified) for.
We just lost a guy with barely 2 years experience on a lark response to a recruiter on LinkedIn. He made some ridiculous requests and the recruiter hooked him up.
Of course there is. The guy who recruited me for my current position basically took a look at two things: my website / blog and my GitHub profile.
He was able to find far more useful things than he could by simply looking at my LinkedIn profile. He found out about me because he tweeted that he's looking for someone and one common "friend" (friend is a bit of a strong word here since I have never met that person offline at that time) replied to his tweet mentioning me.
This is not how it works. Recruiters generally spam everyone based on an inventory of jobs they have, and half the time, the recruiter is more interested in pumping you for information about where you currently work or where else you've applied.
When recruiters do put you forward for a job, they require you to give up all negotiation power in advance, and generally they are paid bonuses on top of their commission if they can ensure a candidate accepts a low salary. When they say "my commission is based on the salary you get so I'm trying to get you the most that I can" it is, truly, complete bullshit.
When you make ridiculous requests of a recruiter, they don't help you. They just get off the call and figure you're not enough of a shmuck so they won't be able to fool you, and auto-dial the next possible shmuck.
Even if you're a LinkedIn user (and it is very, very dubious whether LinkedIn adds or subtracts value for users), dealing with head hunters is a terrible idea unless you love being jerked around, misled, and having your time wasted.
The cases such as what you describe are so exceedingly rare as to warrant basically being ignored. That guy won the recruiter lottery, but it was still irrational for him to play.
After pouring through your comments throughout this thread I'm kinda left with the following conclusion (take it for what its worth, a random person on the internet): you have a mindset problem, and you're generalizing to the point that you wouldn't be able to accept nearly any job, or be happy in one.
You've determined:
Most companies are bad/wrong/awful/burnout machines
All recruiters are either spambots or leeches
If you have this mindset, you've set the bar way too high. You say you've turned down many positions, and yet are in a big financial struggle now. Take a job that doesn't sound quite as bad as the others, before you're forced to take ANY job. I'll bet this rubs off on anyone who's interviewing you as well. You obviously have the skills and experience necessary to be a good engineer from what you've said, but engineers are in higher demand now than just about ever. If you can't find a job to your liking, the problem is you, not the industry.
I understand where you're coming from, but I also feel there's a serious argument to be made, Moral Mazes / Peopleware style, that most companies are bad/wrong/awful/burnout machines. The fact that open-plan offices are widely used is a perfect example. It's a condition fundamentally at odds with the productivity it is alleged to facilitate. Cost has long been disproven as a favorable factor for choosing open-plan, as the productivity losses quickly destroy any real estate savings. Instead it's about status and affiliation -- accepting non-functional designs in order to seem impressive looking in a superficial way.
And something like open-plan offices are merely the tip of the iceberg. Superficial reasons for big showy tech re-orgs around the latest and greatest trends are very similar. The ambient background of political dysfunction intensified in start-up environments, etc. Huge exposes in major media outlets describing the way e.g. Amazon employees are made to cry frequently at their desks and encouraged to use gossip hotlines to backstab colleagues, followed shortly by their own CEO releasing a statement to shareholders basically saying if you don't like the cutthroat, anti-human environment then just get out. ...
It is a mammoth challenge to find employment that is minimally acceptable for human cognitive health. The way corporations behave, a la Moral Mazes, is just exceptionally maladaptive for human cognitive function. There is real theory behind it.
In my own experience, part of what made my previous employment so disastrous is that it involved an employer doing some substantially illegal things to me -- to the point that I had to hire an expensive employment attorney when leaving that company and go through a bunch of hoops to document things. Maybe you've been lucky to never have been treated this way by a company, but I can tell you it's real, and many, many executives go absolutely unchecked and have incredibly harmful views about how they believe they are allowed to treat people.
You're getting all your news and concepts about how to work from one perspective - your reply confirms to me that your assumptions are killing you. Many many companies allow remote work. I have an open office which I dislike, but I can also work at home 2-3 days a week.
It's true, people don't trust companies like they did in the 50s, for good reason. Many many people though have families and work is not the highest priority in their lives. There are entire industries full of people that respect each other and just work 9-5.
You are being taken in by the anecdotes and horror stories and ignoring the vast majority of people who are paid well, go home to their families on time, rarely have to do overtime, and aren't terribly worried about a layoff but could find another job easily. People in many companies are treated with professional and personal respect. It's not that hard to find one even. But you need to believe they exist or your mindset will just be one of trying to find all these triggers and land mines you've set our before yourself.
I have no college degree or any eminent qualifications, and am not the best coder around. But I have had no problem getting hired into good companies that respect me and I think its because I don't allow myself to get jaded after many setbacks.
I appreciate your reply, but I also feel you are too nonchalantly dismissing something like e.g. Moral Mazes, which is a significant longitudinal study of bureaucracy and management hierarchy, using tools from academic sociology. It's not just some fly-by-night opinion.
In my experience, it is extremely hard to find jobs that provide a combination of paying well, allowing you a personal life, and having reasonable enough hours to avoid excessive fatigue or burnout. I've interviewed with places top to bottom and had four post-graduate jobs, all of which failed in at least two of those categories while having appeared like they would succeed in all of them when I did interviews. All of my friends and colleagues report similar anecdotes, as do many, many commenters here. The anecdotes describing jobs in which you feel you are well paid, have a feasible work/life balance, and freedom to pursue a personal life, are unequivocally in the minority. That's not "my perspective" ... that's just collecting data in the wild.
And though I think I've had it bad, my experiences have been like a dream vacation or something compared to what my mother has lived through in her job as a court reporter in a small town courthouse. Rampant sexism, ageism, uncompensated overtime which is not allowed for her position, bosses (judges) who demean her, yell at her, do illegal things like carry out their private landlord affairs in their judges chambers during work hours and force her to handle the paperwork for it.
Or my brother, a factory worker in the area whose work stories almost cause me to have an aneurysm out of frustration. More uncompensated overtime, overtly insulting and demeaning bosses, sales staff who make jokes about all the catered meetings they get and how they will leave the day-old food out on the factory floor because the floor workers are so desperate for a free meal that they'll eat anything. He earns just barely over the poverty line, has no vacation, commutes around 40 miles each way plus traffic, and every single other job in the region that he could possibly get is no better. All so he can just barely service college loan debt that has been utterly useless for getting employment.
The problem of finding employment that can sustain human cognitive health is massive and hearing you utterly dismiss it like this makes me feel like you reside in an incredible bubble where you've been shielded from what it's really like, and that while I appreciate your advice, it is just not applicable.
Again, I'm just saying you're comparing the perfect vs the better than almost anyone else (by your own admission). Paying well to you might mean 400k a year, I don't know. I think its eminently possible to get 100k-150k/yr as a senior developer and not work over 40 hours a week. Maybe not where you live though, but remote I'd imagine you could easily find something for 80k at 40hrs a week or less.
I do understand the drudgery of work, and how it can hold back cognitive development and just plain be unhealthy at times. I don't understand how you can compare against your mother and brother's experiences and still come out saying you won't take a job. I'm admittedly in a fine place right now, but I remember very clearly when I wasn't.
I'm not talking about mere drudgery. Look, I've got a decent amount of work experience. I know the 40-hour grind. I know how to navigate tricky relationships with colleagues. I know how to deal with and succeed in average-case corporate politics. None of that is what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about abject treatment. Being demeaned, discriminated against, yelled at, spoken to in exceedingly unprofessional ways and having no recourse to defend yourself, and being 'punished' for things that the executives may dislike, but for which it is literally illegal to punish employees (like violations of the NLRA).
That's the big stuff. Smaller stuff would be the ubiquity of unhealthy working conditions, bait-and-switch jobs that require incomprehensibly higher quality work experience than what they plan to give out, severe politics, and overwork (which, seriously, I don't know where you are finding these magical 150k jobs for 40 hrs a week. The experience of literally every single software professional I know is completely at odds with that, and my own experience is as well).
That you glibly throw in things like "but remote I'd imagine you could easily find something for 80k at 40hrs a week or less" is frustrating. For example, in my current rural living situation, I do not even have access to stable high-speed internet. I use 4G tethering through my phone just to browse the internet most of the time, and even that is slow and spotty. There is no way I could work remotely here, and even at that $80k would not be enough for basic cost of living plus support for the on-going family obligations (and would be a drastic pay cut for me anyway). To boot, there really isn't a large supply of remote jobs. I frequently check for them at Stack Overflow Careers, We Work Remotely, and other sites, and there's just nothing. Like most other sources, I have to filter our tons and tons of irrelevant web framework jobs, and for what's left, nothing is remote. Even finding jobs that offer adequate (or any) relocation assistance is incredibly hard. Basically, if you don't already live in a glamorous urban area, you get shit on. That's not just some angsty comment. That's just simply what has happened when I search for a job.
Many of the things you say sound reasonable on a surface layer, but there isn't the substance behind them. The reality of the situation is just not within the bubble you've been able to experience. That's not your fault -- indeed it is near impossible to adequately get someone to understand my situation. Many of my friends are used to spending tons on eating out at expensive urban restaurants, buying expensive subscription services for fashion and entertainment, living with ubiquitous public transit and easily available access to high-speed internet, etc. They can't understand life in poor America when you flip all those things and live hundreds of miles from any region which could even remotely offer a relevant or minimally-well-paying job to support your immediate needs.
If you live in an area like that and don't even have a reliable Internet connection, then no wonder you don't have a job. Blame yourself for where you have chosen to live rather than the evils of corporate greed.
Have you even read any of the rest of the thread? You sound ridiculous.
I had no choice but to move here due to a significant set of family medical and legal circumstances that I am supporting (both financially and by doing full-time care, childcare, and other tasks every day). This is where my immediate family is from (one of them still owns and operates part of some farmland, not here but in North Dakota) -- I didn't choose this, but it's my family's history. I don't prefer living here, but I prefer to make sure my family is OK rather than abandon them for urban entitlement.
The fact that you think people should "blame themselves" for choosing to live here is outrageous to me. At the least the people around here are good-hearted and care about other humans. I'd rather live around here than around people like you, absolutely.
It was analyzed considerably in the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams which even has a chapter entitled "Bring Back the Door." Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Exchange and Fog Creek, is also deeply committed to providing private offices even for workers in Manhattan, and had some SO tech bloggers recently wrote up a little about the cost per square foot and some other financial considerations when searching for new urban office space.
I don't actually consider this to be interesting or controversial. It's been talked about and thought about significantly since at least the 80s when Peopleware was written, and even much further back. Christopher Alexander also talks about the detrimental effects of poor office design in The Timeless Way of Building.
You can Google for dozens of studies about communicable diseases in open plan offices, decreased morale, cognitive health problems related to lack of privacy, fatigue caused by listening to music for too many hours, effects of curtailing workplace conversations and speaking superficially to avoid overstimulation from constant contact and interaction, etc. etc.
I'll put some links at the bottom (you can easily find summaries of Peopleware and it's easy to find the Stack Overflow real estate blog posts). But before I do, I just want to point out that the whole issue is well modeled by what Michael O. Church called "artificial scarcity" -- that executives and corporate management are fully aware of what they are doing and that spending money of gaudy and over-the-top open-plan offices with climbing walls, gourmet cafes, and hideous open-plan sweatshops workspaces, they are perpetuating a hedonic treadmill atmosphere. Getting that coveted private space becomes the carrot they can dangle, basically starting you out by making you work in poor conditions and making you feel like you must sublimate away your human needs to signal loyalty, and if you do that long enough, you might be rewarded with a physical environment that supports basic human needs like privacy and quiet. Many firms just do cargo cult copying of trendy start-ups, and so they do this by accident. But you really do have to put your radar out and be extremely careful not to work for the firms that do it intentionally -- places where, as described in Moral Mazes, there is real, intentional effort placed on social engineering employees and pitting their intrinsic human needs against what the employer demands of them.
I once worked for a company that had offices across the U.S. Their Columbus, Ohio, office mostly housed executives, regional sales, and a large portion of the company's senior HR staff. When a new CTO took over, he was able to rally others in the company to a mandate that "engineers like open-plan spaces" and that they needed to radically alter their current office spaces, moving into artsy neighborhoods of metro areas, loft spaces, creating a cross-country theme of exposed brick and ductwork with fancy kitchens, glass walls, etc. Totally cliche. Douglas Coupland couldn't have scripted it better.
When I did my exit interview with that company, I talked with an HR rep from Columbus about how the distraction and noise of the open-plan layout in Boston was just killing me. As an introvert, it made me feel exhausted and like eyes were constantly on me no matter what (even if people overtly insisted they weren't). And it was just impossible to work. She told me that the exact same thing happened to the Columbus office, and that there was not even an engineering presence there. Most people there had 10+ years of tenure with the company and had always worked with private offices, and in fact really needed them because all of them handled private HR calls and employee personal matters all day every day, things that can't be done in an open-plan area. Now they were constantly crowding each other out of booking the few private conference rooms and making everything exceptionally hard.
Amazingly, the company spent over $12 million on just that Columbus office re-design!! They actually spent money to tear down productivity-enhancing privacy features and replace them with superficially trendy open-plan designs that were overwhelmingly obviously counter-productive, all under a mandate about engineering which did not even take place in that office location!
When people try to tell me it's about saving money, I just laugh. Maybe for some bootstrapped start-up accepting zero outside funding. But for any company with VC backing or any established, revenue-generated business, it's a million percent bullshit.
> "Our results categorically contradict the industry-accepted wisdom that open-plan layout enhances communication between colleagues and improves occupants' overall work environmental satisfaction considering previous researchers' finding that satisfaction with workspace environment is closely related to perceived productivity, job satisfaction and organisational outcomes, the open-plan proponents' argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature."
You do have to be extremely careful about confirmation bias, of course. You can Google a zillion opinion pieces arguing voiciferously for or against open-plan offices. But the real productivity research does not lend any support to them.
Peopleware is already on my mailing list and I've just added Moral Mazes too.
Would you say, then, that corporations who switch to open plan offices are just acting irrationally? They think they're going to get a benefit out of it but actually it's a net negative?
As long as developers continuing agreeing to work for them without transferring the negative externality (degraded productivity, degraded mental health) back on them (by boycotting companies with open-plan seating for example), then we are facilitating the rationality of their actions.
It would be irrational if they really, actually wanted your productivity, but they don't. Mostly they want create in-paper head count with fancy credential and experience, who all look and act like cliche nerd stereotypes to impress shallow investors.
They are hiring you to effectively be an office decoration, not a productive worker. So open-plan eye candy is rational so long as the workers themselves refuse to stand up for being treated in a minimally healthy way and refuse such companies.
They are hiring you to effectively be an office decoration, not a productive worker. So open-plan eye candy is rational so long as the workers themselves refuse to stand up for being treated in a minimally healthy way and refuse such companies.
In theory, sure, but does it hold up in practice? In theory, programmers have leverage right now because there is more need for their expertise than there are programmers to fill that need. In practice, I see businesses who are perfectly willing to leave those positions open for years rather than change their hiring and/or office policies. Boycotting them won't change this because "best practices" in tech are viral and completely irrational. They work more like fashions than they do peer reviewed research. Even if everybody boycotted those startup companies and they had absolutely no engineers, they'd still get funding and they'd still influence tech "fashion". They've gotten really good at it over the years, too, employing propaganda techniques right out of Mao's little red book[0].
Anyway, all of that is to say we the employees don't have the leverage people think we do, even when our work is in demand. We're being manipulated en masse and most of us would rather work and keep ourselves fed and comfortable than take on any kind of risk. After all, if we were able to tolerate risk we would have opted out of this nonsense years ago and started our own company.
I was going to say that this seems like an overly cynical reaction to the parent poster's anecdote. But then I read your story in another comment that described your 14-month unemployment.
I have had good experiences with recruiters from LinkedIn, leading all the way to reasonable offers. To be fair, I have the halo effect of being currently employed. I acknowledge that the software industry has a highly irrational aversion to unemployed developers, much to its detriment.
I do want to add that for new graduates and the currently employed, recruiter messages on LinkedIn aren't strictly a fishing expedition and do lead to offers. n=2 in this comment thread, though.
I sincerely hope you find what you're looking for. As trite and uninformed as it sounds, perhaps temporarily moving back to Boston or another high job-density area would help overcome this. It wasn't clear in your other post if you were willing to relocate.
I'm definitely willing to relocate, but cannot do so unless the company provides relocation. If I can move for a definite job, that's one thing, and I can make arrangement here in the family situation to handle that. But I can't put the family stuff on hold just to move on a whim and maybe find a job. Even when I was already living in Boston, I didn't have much luck there and especially found the start-up working conditions quite poor.
I have been in a similar situation before. At that time I took whatever I could get and downplayed my qualifications which were orthogonal to the work. It was literally a short-term, moderately dangerous laborer job so enthusiasm and talk about my exercise regimen helped me the most when applying. At the time I didn't have to support a family so I was more flexible with income.
I'm sharing my anecdote to illustrate that maybe it's worthwhile to accept some red flags for stable employment for a year or two. I don't know your situation in detail so there are likely many factors I haven't considered. I wish the best of luck to you.
> When recruiters do put you forward for a job, they require you to give up all negotiation power in advance, and generally they are paid bonuses on top of their commission if they can ensure a candidate accepts a low salary. When they say "my commission is based on the salary you get so I'm trying to get you the most that I can" it is, truly, complete bullshit.
You are dealing with some really bad recruiters (the type that spam everyone) if they force you to give up any/all negotiation power. I've found a number of jobs through recruiters and I always got a 10-20% increase total cash compensation and full negotiating power to say no or ask for more before saying yes.
I've dealt with several recruiters each from Huxley, NJF, Selby Jennings, Open System Technologies, Crystal Equation, Workbridge Associates, Jobspring Partners, Cybercoders, and Grady Levkov. And also one from Gina's Tech Jobs, and two freelance recruiters who had been recommended to me by friends.
If, for example, you say you won't reveal your previous salary or your current expectations until after speaking with someone to get a sense of whether you're a good fit for the role, then they will throw every excuse at you to get you to say a number first, and if you still don't, they simply will not work with you. No matter how much I practiced and no matter how politely and professionally I dodged the question, I did not ever encounter a single recruiter who would agree to help me without first having me name a concrete, specific number for my salary.
In a few cases, the recruiter even told me that to submit any applications on my behalf, they needed years of salary history including any equity or bonus payments. In one case when the number of years needed was 7, when I refused, I never heard from her again. That recruiter was actually referred to me by a trusted friend who had used her help to get a job, so it was not some fly-by-night scamster. While my friend, I guess, was OK sharing 7 years of data with some random recruiter, I was not, and so they simply did not contact me further.
On the few occasions that I've opened up about what would actually make me excited about a job (having a quiet, private office is by far #1), they basically just say "yeah right, never going to happen, move on." So if I stick up for what I am seeking (or at least was seeking at that time) they also just discontinue all contact.
Finally I just gave up on this and stopped ever telling recruiters anything at all that I felt they might think would make me 'weird' or 'unusual' or 'quirky' to present as a candidate, but because they all solely cared about getting that concrete salary number in the first conversation, this largely had no impact other than at least making the conversations take less time.
They also often submitted my email/phone/resume to their general recruiters, so then I started getting spam mail and unsolicited phone calls at odd hours about positions that are extremely inappropriate for someone with my particular background.
The time spent patiently explaining my background and current career goals to recruiters has been painfully wasted. If there is some way to locate good recruiters apart from the firms I've contacted and the people referred to me by friends, I certainly do not know how to do it.
How is someone that values their privacy supposed to get a job or even break in to having a job where they make connections to peers?