I couldn’t figure out what forum this belongs to, but this seemed to be the closest. I am a software developer by training and when I got laid off in 2016, I took a job which I understood had a programming element to it, but it soon became apparent that it did not. I was basically doing glorified tech support for one of the APIs of a major tech firm. You had to be a developer to do it, but beyond tweaking the occasional code example, it required virtually no development. It paid well (about $20k more than I had been making at my previous job), but I really should have left in 2016 or 2017. I really hate interviewing and so stuck around until the entire team got axed last month for being too expensive (and pushing back on returning to the office) and now I find myself seeking out developer role again with what amounts to a 7 year gap in my resume. This is in fact the feedback I keep hearing over and over again (we went with a candidate with more recent experience). I have been hard at work trying to bring myself up to speed. Java and JavaScript are my specialties, so I have been pouring over Spring Boot, Java 8 streams and React, but I am well aware this hardly counts as recent work experience. I have been working with my niece’s husband on a MERN stack project he is putting together as well, but it’s been very slow getting together to actually contribute to the project. I don’t have any ideas for developing my own company and since I had to elect COBRA, my funds are rapidly dwindling.
Any advice on how to get hiring managers to see past this?
IMO you need some job that will get you the requisite experience, even if it is not the seniority, payscale or location you would prefer. Once you’ve been in it for say 18 months you can look to move up.
Some employers will respect an array of freelance consultation gigs, so if you can nail down some short-term single-project arrangements, even if the pay isn’t good, it gets your feet in the proverbial water in ways you can include on your resume. On mine, I have a single line for “Various Consultation” and list companies and individuals and a general boilerplate descrip to encompass the work performed.
Are you getting interviews? if not, my advice (and I’m aware that it may not be popular) in that case is to jazz up the description of your last job. It WAS a developer position technically, even if you didn’t do much developing in reality, and you did touch code. Can you make it sound better on paper without outright lying? Your resume’s only job is to get you the interview. And of course, continue getting yourself up to speed as you have been doing. If you ARE getting interviews and it’s apparent that you are 7 years behind the curve during the course of the interview, that’s a different problem.
It’s going to be pretty tough to walk into a development role after that kind of gap. Companies will have lots of applicants who are active developers, so they would likely pick them over someone who hasn’t programmed for years.
Doing tech support again may be your avenue into development. Find a company like the last one where they have tech support for their software product. But this time, press for moving into a development role after a while rather than staying put in tech support. Moving into test from tech support can also be a viable option.
I think your best bet is to get over the idea that your resume is an entirely factual, dry recounting of what you did at your previous jobs.
It’s basically an advertisement for you in the context of your employment achievements. So make it sexy by essentially portraying yourself as crucial in everything you did - you’ve got a few sentences to make it sound like YOU were the reason it succeeded. They’re not going to call your previous employer and ask pointed questions about whether your 3 sentence blurb is actually accurate, and even if they did, most employers won’t answer those sorts of questions anyway.
Also lean into what you did from 2016 at your last job, and cast it as doing things that improved the API, or how you used your development skill to help customers, etc… Rather than regard it as a seven year gap, show that it wasn’t a gap- that you indeed did do stuff that was development related, or at least development adjacent. I’d also put a line in for your MERN stack project- that’s as good as job experience.
Resumes and interviews are opportunities to control the narrative that YOU are awesome, YOU are indispensable, and they’re LUCKY to have you. That’s what you need to keep in mind- you’re selling yourself, so why not sell big?
For entirely different reasons than the OP I had to re-enter the software dev world back around 2000 with a decade-long gap in relevant work.
The first thing I did was collect all the latest and greatest certifications. And I actually learned a lot along the way. I could at least sound like I knew what I was talking about. Or so I thought; I had no clue how much else I did not know that was assumed to be common knowledge. I also did not understand quite how cockamamie most employers considered most certifications and paid-for trainings.
Then I found a small outfit where the boss was clueless enough about what dev really was that he took a flyer on me. Ref @Bump just above I didn’t lie on my resume but it was all about how forceful and results-oriented I was in my non-dev work and how leading edge I had been in my dev work umpteen years ago. I interviewed the same way: high energy and raring to go at whatever was set in front of me.
Any larger (read “more clueful”) employer had simply laughed at my lack of recent relevant work and thrown my resume / application into the “You gotta be shitting me” pile.
In the end it worked out well for me, but it was a highly uncomfortable process to say the least. And as I later learned from my role in IT management as the business grew, it was far, far less likely to succeed than I had blithely assumed at the time.
Big picture I will also say that any computer techie person of any specialty who stayed 8 years in a job doing the wrong thing Just. Doesn’t. Get. It. 8 months was too long to be in tech support if you really wanted to stay in dev. Even 8 weeks was getting shaky unless you were already interviewing elsewhere.
The modern IT biz is nearly 100% short term gigs while surfing like mad to stay on top of the never-ending tidal wave of latest whizbang tech. If you’re not learning and doing new stuff with new tools every month you’re falling behind and atrophying into a dinosaur. An unemployable dinosaur.
If you’re coming up on Social Security age that might be an understandable / excusable / reasonable thing to do. If younger, it’s a long walk on a short pier towards a non-IT career.
I was lucky enough to have someone clue me in to that early in my career, and haven’t spent any time chasing any certifications, especially vendor ones.
*** unless you transition into the less/non-technical side of things, like business analysis, project management, etc…
Those careers are a LOT longer term than the hardcore technical positions.
Agree completely. As the OP found out when he could fester for 8 years in a stagnant tech support position.
IME (and now 12+ years (!) out of date) Dev is the most surf-the-tidal-wave-on-short-term-gigs of the various specialties. Infrastructure architecture and rollout is next. IT Ops probably 3rd.
Then comes the items you’re talking about, the tech-adjacent roles in management, planning, oversight, QA, and user support.
A washed-up techie from the former spaces can find a life, and a perfectly decent one, in those latter spaces. Going the other way is a LOT harder.
FWIW, I was able to find a gig, albeit with a pretty significant haircut in salary, but at least I get to do actual development again. I am going to try to keep up with the buzzwords this time.
It’s definitely a grind keeping up with the latest. I hope to retire before I have to learn yet another build system. At least version control has reached equilibrium…