Silicon Valley isn't for tech professionals with little experience (Fortuna: transfer, community college)

[kyle242]

How many recruiters lie when calling you?

I was expecting a call today for a phone screen from a personal data storage company in Silicon Valley that tries hard to match benefits with Facebook or Google. I did not get call and when I sent email after 10 minutes of not getting a call or email, she emailed saying that she called my Google voice number but it seemed to be out of service and asked to reschedule another DAY! When I test called my number, it worked fine and I believe they had my second number as cell phone in my application or resume. Anyway it is hard to believe it, because if she had a problem, she could email right away within 5 minutes of scheduled time. I had recruiters at other companies do it when they could not keep it due to conference taking longer or other issues.

[kyle242]

Had anyone the experience of switching from full-time job to contract 6+ months or more? How did it work out of you. On last month did you get it extended or found another job?

[aramax666]

I disagree with the OP's assertion. At least from my point of view, I find SV to be a great place to start your career. There are lots of opportunities. And competition is fierce. IMO, the first five years of one's career should be brutal. Full of fierce competition, and fast learning opportunities. You can switch jobs if it does not work out relatively easily. From a professional POV, I think this place is great. For other stuff like work life -balance, thats a different thing.

[aramax666]

As for recruiter misconduct, it is blatant and pretty egregious across all companies. Its very regrettable.

[MediocreButArrogant]

Change "experience" to "skill" in the thread title and it makes a lot more sense.

[PhoenixSomeday]

Originally Posted by MediocreButArrogant

Change "experience" to "skill" in the thread title and it makes a lot more sense.

Problem is, most places seem to not count your skills as skills unless it's from a job, and therefore from experience. At-home stuff doesn't seem to count no matter how brilliant, skilled, interesting, well done, etc. it is.

[kyle242]

Originally Posted by PhoenixSomeday

Problem is, most places seem to not count your skills as skills unless it's from a job, and therefore from experience. At-home stuff doesn't seem to count no matter how brilliant, skilled, interesting, well done, etc. it is.

That is true, when I lost my job in 2013 (and I graduated in 2010, started in stable workforce in 2011), I got call from associate recruiter for some tech support position in Hartonworks which is a big player behind Hadoop adoption. Some of the questions were about experience with SQL, Java and told him I learned in school developing getting hands on code. And this position wasn't primarily on coding, just to be familiar. The guy quickly turned me down saying I won't be a good fit because I did not learn it on the job .

[kyle242]

Originally Posted by aramax666

I disagree with the OP's assertion. At least from my point of view, I find SV to be a great place to start your career. There are lots of opportunities. And competition is fierce. IMO, the first five years of one's career should be brutal. Full of fierce competition, and fast learning opportunities. You can switch jobs if it does not work out relatively easily. From a professional POV, I think this place is great. For other stuff like work life -balance, thats a different thing.

How can you easily switch jobs?

When you apply directly its hit or miss whether you will ever get a phone screen interview. Once you pass, you have to talk to manager first over the phone and if they like you come for face to face more technical.
Most headhunters from staffing firms suck. They often offer me after finding me on the internet totally different roles or same or sometimes worse job role well below my pay grade for 6 months contract.

I am currently trying to bring my skills to speed by taking community college class where I do a lot of simulated work on routers and switches learning internal protocols, that helps me prepare for new CCNA 200-120 (which is compared to old CCNP from 5 years ago). I currently have server+, network+, Bachelor of science degree in IT, 4 years of combined NOC and data center. Yet this all will be barely useful to stand out.

I am hoping that my future interviewers will focus more on technical skills and not look too close at my past work experience and job titles, responsibilities otherwise I am toast. For example, I am looking to get a job as junior network engineer. Most places only look for senior. My last role as data center technician, no matter what title I use will reflect in just sole job responsibilities not enough direct experience for network engineering. My last job is dead end. They make only run the dumbest but hardest (in physical sense) tasks that level 3 technicians feel are beneath them and wont do them. They themselves will not show or allow to do more advanced tasks that require higher responsibility including "lead" because they want to hold on into their jobs and they see younger as threat to their positions. This is why the sooner I get out from there the better.

Furthermore, I have some recruiters asking me about job change every year, which last one was due to loosing my job. You can tell them truth the last job was not a good fit and they will dwell on it why.

I am looking to learn linux and add more skills so that way I have more opportunities open to me in case networking will not work out.

[deadcoder]

Originally Posted by kyle242

How can you easily switch jobs?

When you apply directly its hit or miss whether you will ever get a phone screen interview. Once you pass, you have to talk to manager first over the phone and if they like you come for face to face more technical.
Most headhunters from staffing firms suck. They often offer me after finding me on the internet totally different roles or same or sometimes worse job role well below my pay grade for 6 months contract.

I am currently trying to bring my skills to speed by taking community college class where I do a lot of simulated work on routers and switches learning internal protocols, that helps me prepare for new CCNA 200-120 (which is compared to old CCNP from 5 years ago). I currently have server+, network+, Bachelor of science degree in IT, 4 years of combined NOC and data center. Yet this all will be barely useful to stand out.

I am hoping that my future interviewers will focus more on technical skills and not look too close at my past work experience and job titles, responsibilities otherwise I am toast. For example, I am looking to get a job as junior network engineer. Most places only look for senior. My last role as data center technician, no matter what title I use will reflect in just sole job responsibilities not enough direct experience for network engineering. My last job is dead end. They make only run the dumbest but hardest (in physical sense) tasks that level 3 technicians feel are beneath them and wont do them. They themselves will not show or allow to do more advanced tasks that require higher responsibility including "lead" because they want to hold on into their jobs and they see younger as threat to their positions. This is why the sooner I get out from there the better.

Furthermore, I have some recruiters asking me about job change every year, which last one was due to loosing my job. You can tell them truth the last job was not a good fit and they will dwell on it why.

I am looking to learn linux and add more skills so that way I have more opportunities open to me in case networking will not work out.

I can understand your pain (I hope so) and you are absolutely right on some points. To me, you have a pretty good experience along with relevant educational background, but unfortunately your profile still not stand out during job search. In the job market, there are thousands of other folks who may have same skills. I think that's the problem of IT/software industry. I think only way to stand out during job search is to work on something which is very very new at the same time very demanding (ruby/rail, Hadoop, NoSql, AWS, Azure, etc).

In our company, we get a ton of resumes when we open any IT positions, tech supports, typical software engineers (UI work or some back-end) and those position generally fill-up pretty quickly. At the same time, when we open any position in big data/cloud areas, we rarely get one or two resumes per week and those positions remain open for several weeks or even months. It's even hard to fill-out those positions for mid-size companies.

If you are planning to learn Linux, also plan to learn OpenStack and AWS (specially EC2, S3, VPC). Your profile will look much stronger if you know any one of them.

[systemBuilder]

Ok I have a PhD from a top-10 school in CS and an undergrad from MIT and 25 years of experience and I want to set things straight.

The Bay Area IS a tough place to live, it's not like all the senior people are making out like bandits. We save like hell (40%+ of gross income a year), I've had a 6-figure income for two decades, and we live like paupers, on 25% of our gross income, our newest car is 2001 and our cars average 150k miles on each of them, one was a used Nissan Altima. We eat out once per month. The sunset on our mortgage payments is when I'm 70+ and our latest house purchase is a shambles having been a rental for 20+ years and having never been remodeled in the 60 years since it was built, 1600 square feet, total.

The only way we are able to afford a house is because my wife got lucky with a startup company years ago, and that pile of cash is STILL >50% of the equity that we have in our house. And our house is in one of the cheaper areas of Palo Alto. Our house was being taxed at a valuation of $111,000 when we bought it for $2M, the previous owners paid $1100 a year in taxes. So that's the problem. It's just like 1849. The only people doing really well in the Bay Area are the ones selling the picks and shovels (i.e. the landlords and the company founders). There is no housing turnover because the tax system favors buy-and-hold. Houses over the past 30 years went up 7.8% a year ~ just as fast as the stock market.

So, don't assume that being from an Ivy League school will make you thrive in the Bay Area. Many people are not enjoying the finer things in life here. To have a decent chance at quality of life, you've _got to be DINKs (dual income no kids)_, and a $200k+ household income can help. Hitting a home run at a startup is the key to doing really well in the Bay Area. The chance to live here and possibly work at a grand-slam startup company, draws a ton of people who rent at exhorbitant rates, clog the freeways, and keep praying and living on borrowed time, hoping to strike it rich.

I would not be so dismissive of a job offer in Petaluma. I learned a long ago to measure my salary in after-tax square footage of housing in the locale, per year. Anything less than 125 sq ft. per year is a really bad job offer. I see houses for sale in Petaluma for $250 a square foot, which is about 135 sq. ft. a year in take-home pay ($38.5k net on $50k gross.) So you might find that the Petaluma job offer is the highest job offer you have ever had. When I consulted in Phoenix in 1996, I earned 1 entire house (1800 sq ft) per year, after taxes, every single year. By that measure - the most important measure - it paid far more than any other job that I have ever had ...