Ask HN: Frequent job hopper? How do you build a good reputation?
I have a career that's filled with many contract and/or part-time jobs. I started out with two part time developer jobs in college. Since then, it's been mostly contract jobs.
Most of my contracts aren't the kind that pay you well for some highly specialized knowledge. They're the kind of contracts that pay low because the companies don't want to pay employer taxes, or they simply don't have available work to justify a FT hire. Being hired as a contractor, I'm not expected to grow within the company, and these are small companies so it's difficult to build a good network. I don't stay longer than 18 months at any given place.
My last four years were also fully remote jobs. On one hand, it feels better to have companies trust you well enough with more autonomy. But being less visible also lessens the chance for promotions, contacts, or career growth.
My network isn't really that great, and I have a small circle of friends, none whom can provide good leads in the industry I work in.
Recruiters contact me a lot about FT jobs but any interviews I get through them never turn into offers. All my jobs offers have started out with cold applying, shotgunning resumes. All these rejections for FT jobs make me feel uneasy, and I'm tired of the rat race. I have a non-STEM degree and don't know if it also matters or not.
So I am at a standstill on how to build up my reputation after wasting so much time not building it.
I've set aside these two options:
1. Return to college to properly get a related degree, leverage that channel to get an internship and/or a full time non-contractor position upon graduation.
2. Keep applying to larger companies for FT jobs, and interview prep. I don't know of any good reliable sources for interview practice, but I did have one good mock interview with a local developer. He's just too busy to follow up with.
I am open to other options, if you have any suggestions on my first course of action. On your resume, list your time as a contractor as a single position (“software developer, contract” or better, “software developer and principal, $my_llc_name”). Then describe it the way you would a full-time employee position. Just list your big-name contract employers as clients in a single bullet point. It won’t help build your network but will make you look a bit less like a job hopper on your resume. I have two columns on my resume. One for f/t employee jobs and one for freelance/contract jobs. I even call it "Select freelance/contract jobs". It gives me the freedom to list the gigs where I did something worth showing off and/or where the contact would make a good reference. It illustrates that I'm a contract worker, and I've never had anyone ask me "why do your contracts turn over so fast?" It's the nature of the work. That's an interesting idea for a resume layout, although the columns will probably look very unbalanced with my set of jobs. I've only had two FT developer jobs, both of which are too old or too short to have made any meaningful impact or progress. 1. Pick a very narrow topic that will let you get mastery quickly but is impressive to potential coworkers 2. Do it in public (start by speaking about it at meetups and lightning talks) 3. Use the people you impress to help you get jobs (rather than going through HR) Job hopping every few months as a contractor doesn't seem to be an issue. At least it isn't for me - recruiters and clients reach out to me despite that and nobody ever questioned it. > I am at a standstill on how to build up my reputation after wasting so much time not building it. Not sure about reputation, but you can at least build a decent network on LinkedIn to guarantee a steady supply of contracts by engaging with recruiters. Exactly what kind of developer jobs have you been doing? Web development jobs. Ranging from CMS-based websites using WordPress and Magento, and built in frameworks in stacks, LAMP-based to Ruby on Rails to using React. These jobs all are underpaid, 1099 jobs. Made anywhere from $15/hr to $35/hr in a medium COL American city. I need work that is more stable and doesn't have me hopping around, and not having to live paycheck to paycheck. All of these jobs are for small business clients, with usually me as the only developer. It sometimes feels more like consulting work, but I want more experience working in a dev team. I don't know how to pass interviews for FT jobs working in larger groups. Definitely don't go back to college to get a CS degree. At this point in your career the only thing employers want to know about is your previous job experience. I have a bachelors degree in computer science and have never once been asked about it in a job interview. > Recruiters contact me a lot about FT jobs but any interviews I get through them never turn into offers. You mention this almost as a side note but I think its pretty clear thats your problem and not the "job-hopping". If job-hopping was the problem then you wouldn't even be getting interviews because they can already see that from your CV when you apply. Whats going wrong in the interviews? Do you ever get feedback from the companies that reject you? Are there questions they ask you that you stumble on? This is what you need to be focusing on. A CS degree won't help you one bit with that problem. It sounds like you have been working on fairly run-of-mill CRUD based applications that don't require that much thought. Can you be more picky about what jobs you take? Try getting jobs which will build up your experience rather than simply pay the bills. That way when you go to an interview you might sound more enthusiastic about your past experience - this will come across well to an employer. Also try and pick a field and specialise in it. You mention LAMP, Ruby on Rails, React - all of those are good platforms to work in with good employment opportunities but maybe you should specialise in frontend or backend. Also I would ditch the wordpress & magento stuff. >Whats going wrong in the interviews? Do you ever get feedback from the companies that reject you? Are there questions they ask you that you stumble on? Several problems were spotted through mock interviews I took, as well as real ones that gave feedback. With the mock interview, I dragged on too much explaining my past experience because of all the disparate jobs. With Triplebyte, I was told that I show breadth in talking about different topics but not much depth in any of them. And very little knowledge on large system design (which I want to get a beginner job at). >It sounds like you have been working on fairly run-of-mill CRUD based applications that don't require that much thought. Can you be more picky about what jobs you take? That is true, about 90% of the work I've done is CRUD web dev. The most in-depth project I worked on is for an indie game written on a C# .NET framework. This was a one-off opportunity that I got browsing job requests on Reddit, and I was given the offer based on some personal projects I had. But it didn't lead to more substantial game dev jobs. I suck at getting the ball rolling. I have to just fall back on applying blindly as my networking game isn't very strong. Whenever a contract ends, I come off as too transactional when I speak to people about seeking work and that turns people off. Even though Ruby on Rails has started to be past its peak popularity I like using it, and also want to use React and Vue more. I'm definitely not going back to CMS work. A colleague once forwarded me a Magento job because he became an expert in it, but had no interest in going back to that.