#schmutz #techHiring #ramble #houseStuff

Garage Update

In Schmutz 5 I introduced my garage problem. A quick recap: The foundation is cracked and the building looks like it might fall down soon. There is also a large potting shed on the property and the position of these buildings is not ideal. I would like to put the garage where the deck we recently ripped out was.

Anyway, the update is that I called to get an initial ballpark quote from some home construction company and they told me to first call a dedicated garage company, and then maybe an excavator to remove the current buildings if the garage company didn’t do the demolition. It sounded like he would’ve charged more than I was looking to pay, though he did have an interesting idea of turning the potting shed into a garage.

I haven’t had a chance to follow up on those things but I’m hoping I can do this without spending a fortune. Certainly I will need a loan though and given the current market I have been hesitant to do anything until things cool off a bit, but that doesn’t seem likely any time soon.

More Material Updates

In other materialistic news, I bought a fancy couch and I’m pretty excited about it for a two reasons:

1. We currently have an Ikea couch in our “Front room” upstairs. That room is cozy enough but the basement is carpeted and has wiring for surround sound already, so we are gong to turn this into the hangout zone.
2. I currently work at my desk which is in the basement, and I want to move it to where the current couch is now upstairs because there are giant windows and it is always too cold down here. In the summer when the AC is on and it makes it super cold in the basement but fine for the rest of the house, and in the winter because well, it’s Minnesota and it’s cold!

Tech Hiring Is Absolutely Bonkers

I haven’t been in tech for very long but it’s still wild to see how little is changing in the realm of tech hiring. It seems to have gotten a lot worse since all of the layoffs. At $WORK there have been 3 rounds of layoffs in 8 months. Really unreal stuff. I won’t go into detail about $WORK here but I can imagine similar situations at other companies. I have been looking for a new role somewhat seriously since about April. I have never been good at networking or job searching. I feel like I really lucked into my first role and REALLY lucked into my current one. I have this awkward resume where I have about 3 years of experience if I’m starting to count from my bootcamp graduation in August 2020. In that time I have managed to get to the Senior title but that alone is not enough, and recruiters want 5+ years and a bachelors of computer science and you must already know the codebase before you start! Otherwise how will you “hit the ground running”?

This is my problem: Recruiters are expecting many years of experience in X language or technology. Well, most engineers are pretty good at learning new stuff. I am confident that I could start contributing to a codebase in a new language within a reasonable amount of time –I actually just did this at work! I jumped into a PHP codebase and contributed to a WordPress plugin. I am a TypeScript developer thank-you-very-much but I figured it out, because that is the job– but that is not even worth starting a conversation. Even if I check all the technology boxes (I have learned a lot in the last 3 years…) my resume likely pales in comparison to someone with a computer science degree or a few more years in the game. I do have a degree –in music composition. I think about going back to school but whenever I mention that to a coworker they look at me like I’m bonkers.

So I have been learning a bit of Python and most recently Rust because I want to get away from frontend development and all the job descriptions are now requiring 3 languages or somesuch nonsense. I don’t mind writing JavaScript/TypeScript– in fact I started using Deno for some things and I really like not thinking about the tooling– however I feel like the deeper I go one Node/Deno the more frontend things I will be doing.

If you’re reading this and are hiring or know someone who is, I know a lot of great technical writers who are looking for work. I also know a project manager or two, and a junior dev (not me). And also I am looking for something new. I am willing to start at the junior level in a new role, but to be honest I haven’t even found any to apply to! Every job has been senior level requirements or higher. I would love to do something involving cloud or DevOps or API development or anything backend-y. So please reach out if you’re looking for any of the above!