I spent 8 years doing Java development, layoffs are coming soon (my second time this year! 😊), I know how hard it is to get a job out there, and I’m tired of Java. So I was wondering if anyone had any advice for pointing my career in a new direction. I’d like there to be some technical aspect to it still, which is why I am posting here instead of elsewhere.
Right now I’m really into Lua, Vue.js, and am considering picking up CompTIA and AWS certifications just to make myself more marketable.
I have good people skills too, so if a career involves talking more than coding I’ll be okay with that. I spent part of this year teaching programming and loved it (but due to the state of the industry many academic businesses are closing down).
Or you know, should I sell my home and just go live in the woods until I die of malnutrition because at this rate we’ll all end up there anyways?
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I have good people skills too
Future manager detected. Or your self-assessment is wildly wrong and you only think you’re good with people, in which case: future senior manager detected.
No I don’t want to be in management. I just enjoy talking to people and making genuine connections instead lip service fueled networking. This isn’t a self assessment either, its something I’ve been told enough to believe it.
I can certainly symphatise. I’ve been pushed to temporarily take management roles, either client-facing or reporting directly to a C-level. Been encouraged by the team to take on the roles permanently.
What they don’t see is how mentally exhausting it is to actually shield the team from the BS on the other side, when you genuinely care about the people in your team. Yeah, I could use the money, but I don’t trust myself to not act on the homicidal thoughts that pop up once in a while during those times…
Not necessarily the direction you had in mind - for whatever it may be worth; I’m studying to become a HVAC technician.
I’m nearly 30 years into my tech career. After 3 months of the rigmarole of trying to get a new role post layoff, I’ve decided to throw in the hat. Love tech and comp sci, cannot face another asinine call about “non-regrettable attrition”, “more with less”, “right way to do scrum” — nor solve a pangram, design a parking garage or other leet code challenges just to get 2 hours into a 9 hour interview cycle. I’m so dammed tired. And apparently needed a little rant. Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide to do next!
I’ll definitely keep this in my back pocket, I live in a hot area so I’m sure I could find an HVAC job, thanks for the input
Just to add to the “completely change fields” thing in light of your “move to the woods” option:
I did the move to the woods thing (technically, bald prairie…) and found that there were enough other people out there to still find work. And where I moved to, they were desperate enough for good workers that most employers were willing to train, including picking up the tab for short courses. Some of the jobs were pretty shitty (sometimes literally: I spent a few years cleaning out clogged sewer lines), but, for me, the rest of the lifestyle more than made up for it (we found a place on the shore of a lake).
Although my objective was to just ditch tech, once word of my past got around, I had to beat them off with a stick.
I was probably in a bit of a different place, too. My main objective was to bridge the decade between “I just don’t want to work anymore” and my actual retirement.
Also, my wife might have gained more from the move than I did!
If you explore this route, I recommend looking into service organizations to join in the area. Joining one rapidly turns you from outsider to insider. Mine was volunteer fire and rescue.
If you’re tired of Java you can always do Kotlin, it’s a lot less wearing on your soul. And there’s tons of job opportunities.
Oddly enough I had more recruiters talk to me about Kotlin recently than Java, are there any certs you would recommend, if they even exist?
Certs are a waste of time tbh. If you have 8 years of experience, you should have more than enough to fill out a resume already.
An AWS cert is almost certainly even more useless for you specifically unless you wanted to get into devops/sre and do systems design. I have been in sre for a very long time and have never even heard of anyone writing tooling in Java. That section of the industry is entirely dominated by go, python, and (more often than anything else) bash for really quick automation.
To be honest, I’ve been an engineer for roughly 15 years, and I don’t have any language or framework certs beyond my EECS degree. My languages and frameworks come and go depending what I am working on at the moment, but it’s generally not that hard to refresh my knowledge if I need to pull some stuff back up for use again.
are there any certs you would recommend, if they even exist?
honestly… if I see certs on a resume I immediately get suspicious. In general certs are worth absolutely nothing and if there are too many of them they will actually make me less likely to recommend someone for a position. Experience is way more valuable than certifications and open source work is even more valuable than that.
Of those options, VueJs over Lia but your Java skills should transfer over to C# if you can educate yourself in that and dot Net.
Is the C# industry in a better state than Java?
Last time I looked into it, it was split geographically in the US. The west coast is Java, east coast is .NET. Of course if you’re working remote, that doesn’t matter.
Not an expert on Java world, and I think that’s a hard question to answer definitively. Generally, I do perceive .NET/c# as slowly growing and Java as slowly shrinking.
Thank you for the insight!
I dunno where you live, but maybe remote jobs are an opportunity? 8 years of java ain’t nothing to sneeze at and if your people skills are good, that’s probably always sought after.
Maybe a position as technical director or technical lead could be interesting?
Between Lua and VueJS, probably VueJS is the most likely to get you a job as a front-end developer. From VueJS to React isn’t a big step. If you don’t enjoy frontend (however you said you enjoy vuejs so…), you can look at stuff like Flutter and React Native to write smartphone apps. Every stinking business out there seems to want one of those, so if you’re interested, that’s where you can go.
As for lua, my first thought (as a web developer) is NGINX scripting. Probably LUA has way more uses (probably used for modding games too?), so just searching for LUA job openings might get you something?
Not sure what exactly you do, so a step from static typing to dynamic typing with LUA to another dynamically typed language isn’t big. Python is quite popular, but if you aren’t a data engineer or something similar, the most likely use will be backend web development with Django, Flask, or FastAPI.
In most cases though, I think you can expect a salary hit unless you pick up AWS certs (or are willing to after being hired) and move in to Site Reliability Engineering - basically devops with heavy cloud focus. Frontenders are paid less than python backenders who are paid less than java devs. Last I read C++ devs make a killing (no wonder, it’s an arcane language full of gotchas and you have to pretend segfaults are never your fault). I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you want money…
Thank you for taking the time to write all of this, I definitely needed such a perspective.
Trowing in my 2 cents. I am currently an AWS cloud “engineer”. I put it in quotes because the market is wild. In one place you actually design a landing zone for the company to use. In others you are a glorified support plus ops, but still get paid decently because the title is in demand and you passed a few multiple choice quizes from Amazon.
My current workplace has 99% in python. But this can also vary between companies.
Of course, this varies per region. I am in the Netherlands and our department has perpetually 3 job offers open.
I wish I had more advice, but I’m in a similar boat, just got laid off earlier this month after being with the same company from Series A in 2018 all the way until today. I’m sending job applications and trying to get interviews, but it’s hard to get past the resume screening stage, even with 8+ years of experience.
I’ve mainly been working in DevOps/SRE/Platform Infrastructure, but I am also an accomplished developer with a pretty thick portfolio of widely used open source projects, though it doesn’t seem to matter.
There are so many applicants for every single job now that it feels hopeless, and of course every single opening wants you to waste your time on multiple asinine LeetCode gotcha questions.
If I lived somewhere with a public health system I’d love to take what money I have saved up and open a traditional middle eastern bakery, but I need to do something that will bring health coverage for myself and my family. Who knows, I might just end up working at Trader Joe’s. 🤷♀
Wow, I’m so sorry for what you’re going through, yeah we’re pretty similar, when the industry was doing ok I’d be drowning in interviews, now it feels like I’m not even being seen. It is rather weird. I’m hoping for the best for you and your family!
CompTIA certs are basically worthless in the IT field unless you’re trying to get your foot in the door on an IT Helpdesk. Getting vendor specific certs is usually the way to go.
Government jobs love them though, Security+ is required for a lot of DoD jobs.
I vote malnutrition
If you have both people and technical skills you’d be a good Sales/Customer Engineer. Basically you talk to the customers so the engineers don’t have to, either before or after sales. You give demos, assist with support issues, and generally keep them happy. Some companies even let these folks give training classes. And a lot of the jobs are remote.
Is “customer engineer” another way of saying “business analyst”? I was always super grateful for the guys that spoke both normie and geek. “Hey so I talked to the unwashed masses yesterday and bla bla bla entity framework bla bla sql server bla bla rolling average 14-day lookback foreign key yada yada yada.” “Ah! Makes sense now.”
Naw. I always think of customer engineer as having a large overlap with the person who quotes you a price for some project (building, car repair, etc).
They look at what you need and try to figure out how to use their companies software to make it happen. But the critical difference is they don’t really build anything other than a demo or proof of concept. They might spec out something and give you a cost estimate. Or they might work with you to architect some piece (as in “hey you could use s3 here and dynamodb there and make sure that you don’t have a single region point of failure”.
At the end of the day it is sales. It’s just trying to show people they can use your companies tools to do what they want.
Also I work for one of the cloud companies. I spent most of my career as a software engineer but the most common skill I use is really more devops stuff. Customers aren’t asking me to design their business logic, they are often asking me to design their multi region high availability story.
Sales engineers work on the pre-sales side and there’s a bit of sales in it. But, at least at companies I’ve worked at, customer engineer are more about solving problems and getting the most out of whatever they bought.
I always tried to be honest, to the point where I would tell customers if they don’t need something or if something else would be a better fit, much to the chagrin of the sales people.
Interesting, I’ll definitely keep this in mind thank you!
I am in servicenow. The bigger aspect of the job is talking to people to figure out what they actually want and design the implementation with all the best practices in this overly complex environment. The technical implementation that follows is a nice change of pace. I like the mix in both, talking and configuring. (You can’t really call it developing, the dev aspect is rather small)
I fully work from home, travel to the office four times a year for the team events.
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getting a 404 from that link
appears its better to just put it as text. anyway its just stan ridgeways “I want to be the boss”. it has a great lead in about a dead end job.
This is wonderful, thank you for sharing it!
Getting laid off is a good opportunity to consider contracting. Maybe you’d find Java inspiring again if you were working for yourself?
How is contracting nowadays? You’ve definitely got a point here.
Ask around. I don’t know sorry, it was a suggestion.
