A great guide to job hopping for programmers

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May 2015 is already halfway through, and the job-hunting peak in March and April has passed. Have you changed jobs?

What we want to talk about this time is the issue of programmers changing jobs. I plan to talk about it from three aspects:

When should you change jobs?

What you need to do before changing jobs

Where to find job-hopping opportunities

When should you change jobs?

In the article "Self-discovery, Finding the Right Position for You", I provided the "weekend visit method" to let everyone analyze their feelings about their current job. This method is very simple, you only need to do the following:

On Sunday night, thinking about going to work tomorrow, I recorded my thoughts and feelings at the moment.

OK. That's it. If you detect feelings of hesitation, panic, nervousness, worry, resistance, etc., it is likely that you need to seriously consider changing jobs.

Weekend exploration of inner feelings is a universal practice, and everyone may find some specific situations that lead to a job change when using it. Here are some situations I have encountered and thought of, listed for mutual verification:

The product has no future and is doomed in every way.

Often, companies make mistakes when launching a product, and then they feel that the product is going in the wrong direction and has no future: either they missed the right opportunity, or they did not meet the rigid demand, or they did not have the marketing and operation capabilities and capital required for the product... In short, seeing that it is difficult to succeed, continuing to do it is just a consolation. As a programmer, you need to make promising products in a promising industry, so that you can have hope.

The company is poorly managed and faces the risk of bankruptcy

In the Internet age, companies can rise or fall very quickly. If you are not careful, a company's accumulation over the years may collapse, funds cannot keep up, losses may occur, and eventually it may face bankruptcy. These are all visible, rumors are spreading, and people around you are already distracted and ready to change jobs. What do you think?

Not valued and severely marginalized

Sometimes you feel you have talent and ability, but you are always assigned to be a helper. You feel deeply unappreciated and have a feeling of being a hero without a place to use your talents. At this time, it is necessary to consider changing to a place where you can play your strengths. A scholar will die for his friend, and a thousand-mile horse needs a good horse trainer. It is difficult to do the right thing and grow up by following the wrong people in the wrong place. Of course, you have to be really talented. Because, having talent is like being pregnant. Only when you are pregnant enough can others see it, and you can enjoy the corresponding attention and special treatment. Often we feel that we have ambitions but it is difficult to realize them, but our talents are still small and have not been seen by others.

Not respected

The company doesn't respect people, the leaders don't respect people, they look down on their subordinates, they look down on them, they order you around with a cold eye, they even treat you like an animal, they put a black cloth over your head and want you to pull the millstone for the rest of your life. They just treat you like a small stone, they pick it up when they need it, and kick it away when they don't. It's better not to stay in such an environment that seriously lacks basic respect.

No room for growth

There are no experts in the team, not even anyone to learn from, how lonely it is. There is no one who can solve the problem, how helpless.

All you have to do is complete the tasks assigned by your superiors. No one has ever talked to you about how your technical path will develop, how you will be promoted in the company's position and level... and no one really cares about you.

Sometimes when a company and its products reach a certain stage, there are few new things, many old things, and many things that need to be maintained. You have reached the top of the technology and cannot go any further. You see that there is no chance to challenge again. Technology is like sailing against the current. If you don't move forward, you will fall behind. If you don't have the opportunity to exercise and challenge, it is difficult to make further progress.

Of course, you may not be a technician, but a manager. But everyone has their own job, and if the person above you doesn't leave, you won't have a chance. The person above you is still young, and he won't retire or leave in the short term, and he is doing a good job. As for you, I'm afraid you won't see any hope in the short term.

With all these things, no matter what you do, you can't see where your room for growth is...

Significant changes in living environment

The life path of ordinary people will face problems such as dating, buying a house, getting married, and having children at a certain period of time. Once you reach this age, various pressures and expenses will come one after another. It is very likely that your original income is no longer enough to maintain your life. Looking at your unit and work at this time, there is no hope of promotion and salary increase in the short term. Under the pressure of life, will you choose to change to a job with better income?

The relationship with the boss is tense and irreconcilable

If you have conflicts with your boss or superior, such as frequent serious disagreements on certain matters, which cannot be reconciled despite efforts, it is likely to bring you greater pressure and discomfort, making you feel unfair, aggrieved, tired, desperate, and feel that you can no longer stay...

The people around me in the company are just messing around

"Meng Mu chose her neighbors carefully." This is actually about the impact of the external environment on a person's growth. The same is true at work. If the people around you are muddle-headed and unmotivated, it will be difficult for you to stand out and turn the tide. This kind of environment is like a basin of dirty water. You are a drop of Kunlun Mountain mineral water. You will be assimilated quickly after dropping into it. The best thing to do is to leave as soon as possible.

Loss of passion, unable to commit

When your heart is no longer in what you are doing, you cannot maintain your passion, you cannot devote yourself to it, you are lazy all day long, and you don’t care whether you do a good job or not, then you should say goodbye to your current job. Therefore, in this state, you are wasting your life.

Compared with the same industry, the salary difference is too big

Most people need to compare themselves with the people around them to balance themselves. When you find that your peers in the same industry and with the same experience earn much more than you, it is difficult for you to remain calm. Although some people say that "the pursuit of wealth is not as good as the pursuit of satisfaction, satisfaction is the greatest wealth", your value also needs to be reflected through income. When income is seriously out of line with your own value, I am afraid that it will be difficult to have a sense of satisfaction and belonging.

Salary inversion

Some companies and some leaders are very weird. They would rather spend more money to hire new people than increase the salary of old employees. As a result, with the same work experience, the newcomers actually have much higher salaries than old employees. How can the hard-working and conscientious programmers feel?

Can't stand overtime

This is also possible. For example, your company always requires you to work overtime day and night, and if you leave at 10 o'clock at night, people will roll their eyes at you, and your wife is pregnant with a baby, how can you bear this...

Whatever the exact reason you find your current job unbearable, be sure to identify the specific factors, list them, and write them down so that you can avoid some pitfalls when looking for a new job.

Things to prepare before changing jobs

Once you decide to leave your job, (unless it happens suddenly, such as due to family changes) you must make adequate preparations. So, what preparations should we make before changing jobs?

I think there are three big things:

Analyze Yourself

Analyze target industries and companies

Write your resume

Analyze Yourself

It is important for a person to know himself, and he who knows himself is wise. This is an old saying, cliché, okay, I admit it, but it makes sense.

Once you decide to change jobs, you need to analyze yourself.

To know what I have:

Working for several years

What influence did the company you worked for have and what are the characteristics of its products?

What technologies have you mastered and to what extent?

Compared with the people around me, what are my strengths?

How fast are you in learning new things? Give me an example

What is your problem-solving ability? Give some examples

How are your communication and collaboration skills?

How is your leadership? Are there any examples of influencing others to make the project successful?

How motivated are you? Are there any instances where you can get things done without any pressure?

To know what I want:

Stronger technical capabilities

Higher salary

Better benefits (housing fund, commercial medical insurance, etc.)

Sense of accomplishment

Recognized

Build a successful product from scratch

The experience of big companies in gold plating

Develop rapidly following possible opportunities

Easy, no overtime, can take care of family

Opportunities to improve management skills

Equity

It is also very important to know what I can do, and I must understand the boundaries of my abilities. For example:

Able to solve technical problems

Have leadership and can influence and drive the team

Able to grasp technology, sensitive to technology, and good at controlling the direction of technology

Fast, high-quality encoding

Lead a team

Be a pioneer

Architecture Design

Write decent code

Will liven up the team atmosphere

Able to write good copy

Understand the product

Can lead people and be a mentor

A very important point is what I am willing to do. Yes, that's it. Because when you leave a place, there must be something you cannot accept in that place. So when you look for a new job, you must consider what you are willing to do. If you don't have this consideration, then the possibility of getting out of the tiger's den and into the wolf's den is very high.

Finally, we have to think about what we can lose. Don't underestimate this point. It is very important. There is no perfect job in the world. No company, position, or product is tailor-made for you. Even if you are lucky enough to encounter such an opportunity, as time goes by and the surrounding environment changes, what you once thought was very comfortable will gradually become uncomfortable. Therefore, no matter when, pain and happiness go hand in hand, you must consider the trade-offs. This is especially true when looking for a job. You can't have your cake and eat it too. This must be understood.

Here are some simple examples:

If your wife is pregnant and needs care, you may want to find an easy job without overtime, and the salary requirement is not so important at this time.

If your health suddenly deteriorates, such as lumbar disc herniation, cervical spondylosis, kidney deficiency, or diabetes, then you should definitely go to a place that is more relaxing.

If you want a chance to soar to the sky, you may have to give up stability; if you want stability, you may have to endure someone around you suddenly soaring to the sky one day.

If you want equity, your salary may be lower.

If you want to get the treatment and benefits of a manager, you have to be able to withstand the pressure that a manager has to bear.

If you want to work in a foreign company but your English is not good, you have to spend money on training to improve your English skills.

If your family is in Xi'an and you live in Shanghai, and you want to be closer to home one day, you have to accept the income gap between the two places.

There are too many similar things. In short, we need to understand what is most important to us, and then we can give up some of the less important things when necessary.

Analyze target industries and companies

When we are looking for a job, we need to combine our current situation with specific industries and companies to prepare. Going online and applying for every position we see is definitely not the best method.

For example, if you have been working on medical software before and you still want to do this, then when you are looking for a job, you need to analyze the distribution of companies that make medical software in your area and the situation of each company. After the analysis, lock in the target and then see which company is recruiting opportunities.

So how do you know which companies are making similar software? If you stay in an industry, you must understand the current situation of the industry, what the prospects are, who are the competitors, what are the advantages of competitive products... Although you are a technician, you must also understand these, otherwise you will be in a hurry and encounter various situations when you change jobs. If you don’t get in touch with them in your daily work, you can also learn about them from colleagues in other positions in the company (such as marketing, sales, products, etc.). If you are willing, you will definitely know. This is closely related to your work, and it is absolutely necessary to understand it.

Once you have locked on to an industry and company, you won't be so casual, hasty or panic when looking for a job.

Write your resume

After analyzing yourself and the company, the next step is to write your resume. There are many articles on the Internet about how to write a resume. You can search and find a template for reference. First, write a basic resume based on your work experience, and write down your previous analysis of yourself, project experience, etc.

With a basic resume, the next step is a very important one: targeted revisions.

It is very important to prepare a resume for every position in every company. Therefore, I will only talk about how to modify your resume according to the recruitment information of the target company.

The following is a job posting from CSDN JOB - "C++/Qt Engineer":

The job description and job requirements on CSDN JOB are very detailed. There is also company information, which I removed when I took the screenshot. Of course, there are other information. If you look carefully, you will find that the one I picked out also has important information such as monthly salary range, work area, required work experience, etc. This information plus the job description, combined with your previous analysis of yourself, can basically determine whether this company and this position is worth further investigation.

If you have confirmed that this company is worth submitting your resume, you need to carefully analyze the job description and job requirements. The job description will explain what you are going to do in this position, but many companies fill it out in a very vague way, full of industry jargon, and not much useful information. So our focus is on the job requirements.

I’ve highlighted a few points on the graph that you can use to optimize your resume:

Qt first

Candidates with experience in Android/iOS platform development are preferred

Strong learning ability

If it were my resume, I would write "author of Qt on Android Core Programming" and "Qt Quick Core Programming" in the skills and evaluation column of my resume to see that "knowledge of Qt is a priority", which would definitely add points. You can write something else, the higher the match, the better.

For example, regarding the point “Experience in Android/iOS platform development is preferred”, it would be good if you could list in your resume the apps you have launched and the things you were responsible for in them.

Some requirements seem vague, such as "strong learning ability", and we may find it difficult to modify our resumes based on them at first. In fact, if the technology used in a product you worked on is your first time to use (this will definitely happen, unless you are a natural master of all kinds of technologies), you can use this experience as an example and add your contribution to the product. For example: "Completed the learning of Scala+Play in two weeks and successfully took over a project with 100,000 lines of code."

Every targeted resume is worth thinking about again and again. If you optimize it well, you will have a great chance of passing the resume screening. Once you pass the resume screening, you will have the opportunity to learn more about the company, such as asking about the products to be made, the size of the team, etc. in the interview notification call to prepare for the interview.

I also captured another job posting from CSDN JOB, you can use it to practice how to optimize your resume in a targeted manner. The picture is below:

I've made some annotations in the picture above for reference.

Where to find job-hopping opportunities

Now let’s talk about where to find opportunities.

Recruitment Website

In fact, there are many recruitment websites now, and the following ones are the ones I think are pretty good:

CSDN JOB

Recruitment

Hook

Zhilian

These websites are where I have either submitted my resume or posted job information. Let me briefly explain the reasons for the recommendation.

CSDN JOB relies on the CSDN community and has deep accumulation in IT, which is quite attractive to IT practitioners. IT and Internet companies also recognize this and will post targeted positions here. Our company previously posted a backend Scala-related position here, and the job location was Xi'an. As a result, a friend who knows Scala soon found us.

Liepin is a relatively high-end platform that does quite well. There are many active headhunters on it. Once you post your resume on it and it looks attractive, you are likely to receive a call from a headhunter.

Lagou focuses on Internet career opportunities, which is also good. Our company received a lot of resumes after posting a position on it.

Zhilian is a relatively old recruitment website. I looked for a job on it a few years ago.

Internal recommendation

I mentioned internal recommendations in the series of talks about programmers: The Evil-Breaking Sword Manual for job hunting, and this is also a method that is very worth trying.

Many companies believe this, thinking that their employees will not recommend unreliable people. In the company I worked for, if the person you recommended was hired and successfully passed the probation period, you would receive a bonus of one thousand dollars. My wife's company also has a similar mechanism. So, if you can find an employee of the target company to recommend you, then you have taken a step towards success.

According to the theory of six degrees of separation, if you want, you can always find someone to recommend you.

Headhunter

Headhunters still play a big role in human resources. They have good relationships with companies, and many companies will entrust headhunters to recruit high-end positions. So, if you have the opportunity to meet a headhunter, be sure to leave their contact information and keep in touch. This will help you when you want to change jobs. Headhunters also hope to find the right candidate as soon as possible after getting a position, so they are happy to keep in touch with you.