Sell ​​yourself

From translator

Recently, the first and second parts of the story about the creation of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, written by Patrick Wyatt, appeared on Habré . Patrick's blog contains not only memories of past days, and now your attention is invited to become what you need to do in order to always be able to find work in the field of software development. Although Patrick talks about the US market, almost everything applies to our modern realities.

Many readers ask questions about the career of a programmer, how to get into game-dev, and how to stay in demand in the development market as a whole. I started by answering the reader JM about age discrimination, but this resulted in a full post on how to get a good job.
Here is the JM question:
How do you manage to stay in this business for 22 years? I’ve been programming for 30 years, and when I try to find a new interesting job, they either tell me that I’m too skilled or vice versa, I don’t have basic skills in Java and Hibernate.
Age discrimination is an urgent problem for technical workers. Some employers prefer to choose young candidates who can get for less money, despite the fact that they can work less productively than their more experienced (and, therefore, older) colleagues. Without taking into account the legal aspects of age discrimination, one of the reasons for this behavior is the inability of the employer to assess whether the candidate is a good programmer, which results in another criterion - “cheapness”.

Good companies need you

Due to the demographic lack of personnel, a sufficient number of companies really need programmers. Stanford University lecturers shared information that the number of applicants entering the Computer Science specialty dropped sharply after the dot-com crash in 2000, and only recently this number began to grow again, very sharply. It turns out that for 10 years there were not so many engineers, and the society continued to become more and more dependent on their number.
Add to this the trend of fresh graduates to strive to work “for themselves” - a trend that has become popular thanks to start-up incubators YCombinator, Tech Stars, etc. As a result, the most ambitious developers are absent from the labor market by definition.
Finally, thanks to such giants as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, vacuumed the market, offering high salaries, we have a “perfect storm” for companies trying to find personnel.
In my previous job, it was so difficult to find a web developer that we had to “steal” a person from the automation department (although we needed people there), plus several people moved to us from Florida and eastern Washington state.
You may ask, if all this is really true, why can not I find a job that matches my skills and experience?
Based on personal experience, I believe that there are several general reasons why programmers (of any level of training) have difficulty finding work.

You are not looking for a job in the “right” companies.

If you want to find a great job, look for a company in which the development team is a star. Companies creating their products or developing services are what you need. Why? Therefore, for such companies, developers earn money, and, as a result, they are treated better there.
If you work in a company where you develop tools or services for internal use, then your team is a cost center, and the company will have completely different goals for you.
Joel Spolsky wrote about it, but this guy is so fruitful that I can't find an article to give a link, it is definitely somewhere among those 1108 .
')

You do not acquire new skills

For the computer industry is characterized by change. I have a huge store of knowledge about DOS, DBase III +, Real Mode, EMS, XMS, 68000/65816/8086/80386 assemblers, FORTRAN, and more about a bunch of all sorts of things that I probably will never use again. For more than 10 years I was mostly a Windows programmer, but over the past few years I have learned something about Erlang, metaprogramming in Ruby, Rails, Linux, vi, Racket, D and OCaml, and most recently I completed work on my first C # - project: IPC using named pipes . All this allows you to remain competitive as a programmer, although programming is just a part of my professional skills.
When I interview candidates, I often see people in front of me who have stopped learning and are satisfied with the skills already acquired.
As soon as you stop learning, you immediately lose points in the market, continue to learn new things.
I want to clarify that this does not mean that you should immediately rush to learn something terribly bad. Spend time getting to know a lot of technology, choose what you like and learn so much that you can use it professionally.
Here are a few industries that, in my opinion, will grow in the foreseeable future: network and server programming, web UI programming, DevOps , business intelligence and security.

You don't sell yourself

Steve Jegge, the smartest guy who inspires me to blogging, because he writes long posts (like this, only 10 times longer and much wittier), says that the most important skill of a programmer is the ability to sell himself . Ask yourself: “What am I doing for this?” Summary - this is important, of course. But do you have a technical blog ? Projects on github ? LinkedIn profile ? Do you make presentations at technical conferences ? Do you attend technical gatherings in your city?
You can get a good job, but for this you have to flaunt yourself. Work itself will find you.