djellybeans

That's not very good resume material.

And this is the only top level reply. Interesting.

Question for everyone else- how have tech related meetups recovered in your city?

In Chicago I find they're still sparse, still nowhere near the level they used to be since the lockdowns threw everything off.

Some of the oldest web forums (circa '98) I've been to use the nested comment format you see on Reddit or on here. The flat timeline format because much more popular from what I've seen.

Reddit style forums are not great for posts intended to log something in progress (like a computer build) because they require the user to make a new thread multiple times instead of making a new comment that automatically brings the thread back to the first page. But flat list threads are great for that.

They usually try to compromise with comment replies shown in "comment pyramids" but they can get unwieldy quick. It's a reasonable tradeoff for the flat chronological layout.

It's more than a concept. They already exist right now. Amazon has a returnship program for example. "Return to Work" is another name given to them.

I'm interested in how to find them more easily, and from smaller companies. Finding them in general is like a needle in a haystack (as well as discussions about them, apparently)

I stumbled into it by accident as a junior software engineer. They offered me a 3-month contract-to-hire job, but instead it became a 2-year independent contractor job for the company. Most jobs that followed have been cold applying to startup contract jobs from Craigslist or obtaining them from local word-of-mouth. It's very feast or famine, and not everyone can keep the momentum of new clients going. As for myself, I am planning to leave self-employed work for the first time in over a decade, for the relative safety of a full-time job (even with the current market situation).

No detailed plans for retirement. I'd need a new job first, to start saving again and I'll cross the bridge when I get there.

But, it is true that I did not take my career seriously for a long time. I treated it more as just work, with no clear direction, since I didn't understand the fundamental difference between a career and a series of similar jobs. Every new job, I was just hoping for a modest pay raise and learning a new thing or two, and being able to coast when I wanted.

Coasting is probably acceptable once you hit senior level in a well rounded team, but I figured out the hard way it's bad to do as a junior or mid-level.

Am confused by your second paragraph. You refer to "easy times" of 5 years ago, but also say "one of the hottest tech job markets" in the past 18 months. Not sure if this is meant to say that today is as good as it was 5 years ago for jobs.

I just can't see myself improving by learning on my own anymore. As another professional told me, "you're practicing, but with no guidance and nobody to step in and let you know when what you're practicing is the wrong approach." And when a person can spend many hours a week with practice and learning and receive the same result - no job offers - as someone who did little-none, it's entirely reasonable to conclude that learning new things is just a waste of time.

I still code once in a while, just to keep busy. Still haven't gotten a good idea of "exchange rate" for employability with the knowledge I obtained from my personal C and JavaScript projects.

I know that many companies won't train you from the ground up, but there are a couple. So I started looking into WITCH and similar consulting firms with a contract training program.

InfoSys and Deloitte have rejected me for some general SWE positions (not language-specific) but there are other similar places. Don't mind if I have to go to one of these body shops, they seem like my best fit for a software job right now.

Sunken costs.

I've had my resume re-done several times, and took the aforementioned interview prep. Applied to almost a thousand jobs last year alone. It has not made me more employed. And yes, I do want a job handed to me because the lack of progress has made me very desperate.

I don't even trust myself to do the right things anymore. But I now prefer not to learn anything for work unless I am getting paid for it. There's no positive feedback cycle I can find otherwise.