Anyone else here starting a business because they can't get hired at most places anymore?
For me, that's the basis of my story. Let me say flat out, I have really sucked at interviews in the past couple of years. Despite having several years of software programming experience, I'm currently considered unfit to get any full-time offers or pass job interviews. Not even after catching up on web technologies. Basically I might do well at an interview but someone else always ends up doing better. My experience has depreciated a lot, it seems.
So maybe I'm not good at doing interviews (for the time being), and I've been to many, trying out different things. And side hustle work, temp work, Uber, etc. is not very motivating to me.
The need to put food on the table is now the primary motivation for me to try other ways to make money, and as I become jaded from job interviews I also want to distance myself from them.
At 36 I'm too old to just keep working for startups. But I'm also too inadequate to be accepted at larger companies. And with only about $250 in my bank account also not at a good spot to just relocate or put a money into retirement funds. I have to start small. So in recent months, I've taken a few freelance programming jobs to keep me going, just to make ends meet and use whatever extra I have to slowly build up my business.
For anyone else who started a business because of a similar problem (can't get hired at any company due to your past experience) how did you start? Where are you at now?
Thank you, thank you, thank you for posting this topic. It's not my exact situation but I always wanted to discuss it here (but I wasn't sure that there would be a positive reception).
In my case, I get some jobs but I don't see any future in any of them, really, even the ones that I don't get. The money doesn't hold any appeal; the work seems transient and circular; almost all my co-workers seem limited, dull and gray. When I work for myself, I feel a sense of continuity and progression that I don't get from a job. I feel that I'm building a legacy that will last. My code has become my rock; it anchors me and gives me meaning and worth. The code that I write for other people feels like sand.
I have savings (and an unhealthy dose of nothing to lose, don't care, spartanism and nihilism) so I seem to be transitioning from an always-employed to a 1-year-on-1-year-off employment cycle. I've stopped caring about the far future and have a pretty unorthodox view of the near future.
This isn't your same situation but it seems related.
This.
You are not alone. I have a music degree, so not a strong classical CS background, and I blew through jobs for the first 10 years of my career like they were Pez. The truth is, I hated having a boss, and working on things I didn't care about. But I wasn't honest with myself until it was too late, and now despite my loads of experience and solid Javascript chops, I stopped getting called back for interviews sometime during last year.
And so I did exactly what you have started to do. Freelance to pay the bills (and develop relationships) while cranking on my own projects.
For me, freelance jobs come from referrals from previous co-workers who also jumped ship and went to a new company that just desperately needs some overflow help on some project - never be afraid to reach out to anyone who you got along with at past jobs. Or they come from job boards like codementor.io's. I have gotten a few gigs off of there that have turned into great relationships for future potential work. Plus, be a mentor on there. It helps you get gigs from the job board (I think), makes you feel good because you are helping others, and you can augment your income while exposing yourself to more potential clients.
In summary, you don't have to be a bad programmer or person to get pushed out of this industry.. Just let it leave a chip on your shoulder and go kick some ass for yourself :)
Thanks for your reply. I have a similar artistic background, coming in from the creative side but then discovering I like to create software more than videos or drawings. I have a degree in Art & Design, with a concentration in Electronic Media. This was taken back in the early-late 2000s when digital media was still a very new medium for art and the curriculum was kind of rushed in how it was structured. In fact they don't even offer it as a concentration anymore.
It was similar to coding bootcamps of today, in that the classes focus on superficial knowledge on the tools and technology, with an emphasis on creative ideas, but fall very short on teaching fundamentals of the technical parts. So we learn how to use for-loops, or what certain OpenGL commands do, but don't know what goes behind the for-loop or how OpenGL's rendering pipeline actually works.
So on the side I took some CS classes (including data structures), although not enough to major or minor in them. So describing this background on my resume, it's not as straightforward as saying you have a BS or a minor in CS.
And codementor.io, first time I've heard of it. Not a lot of gigs yet it seems, but I'm gonna keep checking back for more.
What would you say is the downside of going freelance only? I'm thinking of doing exactly this to be honest. Unfortunately I have no leads so far.
The downside is that it can be more difficult. Getting your own health insurance, maintaining a steady supply of work.. Sometimes it feels like running your business is mostly un-billable. But usually it feels better than that :)
I'm in this boat. When my son was born 3.5 years ago, I left my job as a front-end (angular) developer. Now there's Babel, Webpack, React, JSX, async/await, and all kinds of crazy shit.
So... I'm still a stay-at-home Dad.
Would you like to work on something together?
I'd like to organize a community to work on a single project. A project that could hopefully become something awesome.
I'm interested on the project, though it depends on a few factors related to time and money. You can email me for details.
Not OP but definitely interested
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Hi ccdev, have you gotten any feedback on how to improve interview skills? Interviews are not always a great way to select good engineers and can have false positive and false negative.
If you're interested, we can do a one hour mock interview and I can give you some feedback. I've done quite a bit of interviews in my several years of software engineering.
Yeah, that's true about feedback. Some of it is technical, and TripleByte told me I need to be more T-shaped. I know that the industry keeps moving the goalposts but I can't ever seem to catch up.
So right now I'm trying to play by my strengths. While I can't fix my weaknesses overnight, I want to know how to avoid drawing attention to them. Since you seem more experienced would be open to a mock interview with you. Just contact me via email on my profile. Mocks with friends and family are inadequate as they lack the right professional experience and context.
Looks like interviews that net false results is also a business problem worth solving and I would be curious to know if anyone out there running a company to help fix those problems. Not only to eliminate false positives but also avoid false negatives too. A hiring process where there are no false results as the goal.
But the part about improving a company's process might be better discussed more in depth in its own topic :)
Hey, nice post. Let me give you my 2 cents, even though I am not in the same position as you. My vision goes against that of most people in this thread, but here it goes anyway:
Disclaimer: I do have some side projects (just look at my profile), I do invest my time on businesses that will most likely fail, and I do love the communities I have just mentioned above. What I am trying to say is that I also have a "day job" that pays my bills and allow me to toy around with other things. My point is that I am against starting a business if you can't afford to put food on the table.
Sorry for the double reply but I had an update.... someone contacted me today about my side project and he's willing to get involved in co-marketing it with me, and/or help with distribution. This person is well-respected in the niche he and I have our products in, and has more experience with the promotion side of his own business. So things might work out great for me!
Well that's much more promising indeed. Congratulations! Don't give up, even if the general tone of my message is not necessarily optimistic. Just be self-critical and always weight the pros/cons of each endeavor. Good luck!
My shorter term plan is indeed looking for some other freelance jobs. I finished my last in February but funds for that ran out as it was only a two week job.
For Solidity/blockchain work, if I ever was to get into that, there's not a lot of entry level jobs for that, and I think you'd have to be a fanatic in terms of devotion to a blockchain based project to be considered for a dev job in that area. I've also explored Upwork and Toptal before. I haven't had much luck with Upwork, and Toptal's selection process is steep, too much like being selected for a regular full-time job.
The way I've netted my recent freelance jobs was from contacting individuals on Reddit that were seeking to pay someone for programming work. We discussed the job and negotiated on the phone, then after showing my past work I was able to get the job. No gauntlet of interviewing rounds, no tests. It was was clean and simple.
I am in a similar situation but somewhat radically different circumstances. I have over 40 years in the computer industry as both a programmer and technical support analyst. I am too old to be hired by a large or medium sized business. Plus, my programming and technical support experience, although very long in the tooth, is not up to date. Sorry to say, I haven't found a solution yet, but I continue to apply for any and all jobs that even remotely seem to fit my qualifications while at the same time constantly looking for independent projects. I try freelancers.com, guru.com, virtual vocations, and many more without much success. The only suggestion I can make to you is perhaps you could become retrained in another or more specialized field that is in demand, while continuing the side projects to stay fed! Good luck to both of us!
Great topic! I hate the interview process. I find the obscure coding questions/problem sets they ask you to solve ridiculous and impractical. I’m tired of being judged by others on my coding skills. Generally, people who only code are only good at coding. I’m glad I discovered about myself that I’m good enough at coding and doing all the other things it takes to run a business. Plus it’s much more motivating and enjoyable. I’m the decider!
This is how I felt 5 years back when I had gotten fired from a job for reasons I wont go into, and felt like I was not fit to be hired anywhere. Later I got the firing converted to a layoff but my confidence was shot. Looking back I dont think that I was actually unhireable, but it sure did feel like it.
Anyways I decided to move to Pakistan to start a web/mobile development agency.
5 years later I am never going to look back. It was one of the better decisions of my life and though the company is far from being a runaway success, I have a 35 man strong family of various types of software dev's and clients all over the world. Its been a struggle throughout but at the end of the day I am doing what I love and thats what keeps me happy and satisfied.
I always had that imposter syndrome when working for others, thinking I wasn't good enough, but never once I took the reigns myself and lead my own team.
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I dunno... I essentially entered the profession at a few weeks from 35 and worked almost exclusively at startups. I look younger than my age, though.
You might need both more interviewing practice and more interviews. I learned that the unicorn-sized startup I worked at only had an 11% hiring rate from onsite interviews, which means an immense number of phone screens and interviews that went nowhere.
I look young for my age as well. I only mention my age to illustrate how long I've been going through startups and still seeking my own island of stability.
After three years of job searching and interviewing, it's safe to say I have tried a lot of things. And I've applied to about 1000-1500 jobs and been to about 50 interviews in total (this counts phone interviews). I don't have a sizable network to use for referrals, so 99% of the time I apply to jobs cold.
Sadly, at the last two startups where I worked, less than one in 50 phone screens turned into an engineering hire. Worse still, they were absurdly credentialist in culling the hiring pipeline for those without referrals.
The hiring market is deeply broken for tech jobs and wasting an absurd amount of time on the part of all parties.
I came to the same realization about the hiring market for tech jobs. Maybe there are a few businesses looking to solve that problem the hiring being broken, but for now I am not looking to fight it. If it's broken for the reasons you state, you can't readily apply logic to do the right things for getting hired.
The market was/is broken, but I try to be a high agency individual. knowing how it was broken, I applied to 20 jobs daily, went to 2-3 tech meetups per week and scheduled a full week of 3-4 phone screens per day. It was harrowing, but I did get phone screens and I started getting much better at solving problems I'd never encountered on the fly. In the end I had 4 onsites scheduled in the same week and just knowing that made me far less stressed and put me in a better negotiating position when I did get concurrent offers.
It sucked, especially that first recognizable company name on my resume. It was broken and my response to it probably just put more pressure on recruiters to filter applications even harder, but it was the best path I had at that time. It's also not an accident that what I'm doing now (making dozens of hours of coding screencasts and building an audience) will make it easier to bypass all of that if I do need to hit the job market again.
If I were you, I'd focus on those freelance jobs as if life depended on them and work on employable job skills + (a small amount of time into) audience building in the mean time. I'm sure you can make it doing something indie, but it will take too long if you're almost out of money.
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This comment was deleted 8 years ago
I kind of did that because I had a lot of trouble being hired in my home town of Perth, Western Australia. However, immodestly, my programming skills are probably better than yours. The difficulty I had getting hired was more due to work profile and lack of corporate experience (.Net or Java web stuff) plus weird local attitudes.
Things changed when, about 6 months into my startup, I lost my co-founder and due to an agreement with my wife had to go get a job to help fund the startup. I ended up working remotely for Realm's Copenhagen team for 21 months before leaving to focus on the startup again.
I was 52 when I got the job at Realm.
It wasn't easy - they hire less than 3% of applicants.
They normally don't hire remote workers but I have a long history of working remotely or freelancing for remote clients.
My top recommendation to both improve your skills and to build up a profile that will get you hired is to contribute to open-source projects. In particular, show you are someone who can debug and cleanup. That demonstrates team skills.
I appreciate you writing this. I'm 29f and haven't been able to land a non-temp dev job since being laid off from my startup role - Much less experience than people far younger than me.
It's really hard mentally, and at times, physically. Hang in there!! The right thing will come your way soon, my friend.
Nope:
It’s related to your mindset, not your age.
If you can demonstrate that you know your $#!% , there always will be startups that will value your knowledge, skills, and abilities.
Plus, startups can be less selective when compared to FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) because they have a much smaller level of talent supply.
Also, startups’ interview process can vary: So chances are that you might not need to be a walking scientific calculator and excel at balancing a AVL tree to get into a startup: You only have to convince the team and prove your merit.
I mean, “if” you are into that kind of a thing.
Yeah I'm in a similar situation. The company I'm with is basically a services company that is going nowhere and led by non tech managers so naturally it becomes a shit working environment. The pay is awful for my level (I'm 39) . Additionally I'm pretty good at C++ (or so I'm told by stackoverflow since it says I'm in the top 5%) but can't land a decent C++ role since there are none where I am in Melbourne Australia. Also most of the work out there is in web tech (Ruby, Javascript) and kids with 5 years experience in ruby are senior engineers now. Wtf.
So the solutions to my problem as far as I can tell are 1) start my own business or 2) get hired by amazon/google/facebook. I think 1) is the way to go since it would be easier than getting through an interview at one of these tier 1 companies.
G'day from WA @sashang
If you're that good at C++ have you considered working remotely?
I do see occasional C++ jobs but mostly in Perth it's boom and bust stuff with technical work and the majority of them involve things like industrial control.
You can configure searches on SO to be remote-only, although you have to read the ads to see that many are remote within Eu or USA.
https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?r=true&tl=c%2B%2B&cd=Crossover%3B+&ss=1&sort=p
(I'm only in the top 10% for C++ on SO, need to find time to answer a few more questions!)
Yes I have my profile configured to send me alerts for remote jobs and I'm also willing to relocate. Being in the top 5% (https://stackoverflow.com/users/story/366817) on SO for C++ isn't that great - it seems like people only want the top 1%. I see some advertised in Sydney in HFT and I applied but didn't get a response.
Dude! Reading your story I swear I would have thought you were like 50 years old! 36? Man, you've got a bright future dude and plenty of time.
I'm in the same boat with you.
i have dealt with the rejection and termination and that's so terrible. but that's not one of my reason to run my business. i think it's like a call for me. a few days ago i worked with a startup company as a freelance customer service. my vision is to improve that CS Division, but they really need more CS role no matter it should be a freelancer. In my first day, i think i no longer intend to work based on command. And my gut feeling keeps telling to not quit chase my dream. So I told that employer that I can't stay any longer there. I will leave that job as soonest since I only focus on freelance job and intend to work for myself but I will not leave it all the way, I will get done all my vision and what they wish for, after that I'm gone.
I have met some people who failed run their startup business and decided to become full-time employee again. I just think that's just their lack of ambition. Once I step up to become self-employed, I feel lost myself if I should step back to become an employee anymore.
Currently, my business hasn't run yet but I won't and can't stop it now. However, I still open to help any startup companies to improve their management as I can.
I was in a similar position; albeit quite a long time ago and slightly different circumstances. I live in Thailand where it is extremely hard for a westerner to land a proper job. Especially since I dropped out of Uni and had zero interest in a "bottom of the barrel" teaching job for the rest of my live. I did have a job when I first arrived, however once I left that job it was pretty clear to me I would not be finding a new one.
So I quickly realized I'd need to start hustling on my own to make ends meet. Started doing freelancing and consulting and gradually moved into doing products instead. The fact I did not have a ton of other options was definitely a great motivator.
I started out on my own about a decade ago and things turned out very good for me. My current business, Pagestead, which officially launched a year ago is doing very well and the future is looking bright!