Episode 403: Massaging the software and career never-never-land

Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m a bootcamp graduate working on a career shift from massage to software development. How much of my previous career should I bring into my résumé? I’ve been building projects in public, and doing open source contribution in a part-time capacity for the past two years, but ultimately have not gotten very many bites on my résumé that resulted in interviews. It’s something like three skill tests and one for roughly 800 applications at the moment? That’s a guess. That’s basically the gist of it.

   Thanks! Curious Coder Tries Tech Transition

2. Listener Joshua says,

   I’ve done a number of things in my career, from Java to web dev on PHP and Angular/Node to low code development on Ignition SCADA and UIPath RPA .

   Because I love learning technologies and I want to go where the money is, I keep hopping to new teams. This usually comes with a decent pay bump, but it’s a lot of rescue operations and self-teaching.

   This doesn’t feel like a career path, and always being the junior team member sucks. I’m often studying for certs trying to meet the requirements for the job I’m already doing or being the senior dev on the team while still a Junior. I get that I’m relatively new to each team, but I’m also punching above my weight consistently.

   It feels like I’m always having to jump through hoops to get the title and pay for the level of responsibility I take on and it feels like my mixed-up background is the reason why.

   How can I pitch a 10 year career of wearing all the hats all the time to get better results? How can I avoid being on teams where all my coworkers think I’m a guru and I’m building all of the architecture, but my manager goes “gee, I don’t know if you have the years of experience to be a Senior”? I’m looking towards Architecture as a long term goal and I’m wondering if there’s a way to spin this skillset towards that goal. Can you get Architect if you aren’t a certified black belt in highly specific tools but rather a demonstrated improviser? What is a jack-of-all-trades supposed to do?

   Thanks, love the show, your advice and the fun relationship you guys bring to the conversation.