Beating the eggs and chicken conundrum of big tech scale work experience
How building open data apps sidesteps the experience catch-22 that blocks developers from big tech roles
Good Monday Morning!
🎙️Heyyyy, what about this job market? Riiight? (taps mic) Too soon? Tough crowd.
It’s quite a bit of reader mail that mentions being in job searching mode, and job applications have been a common task focus the Flow Clubs lately (btw I'm trying out a new Sunday morning flow club session the week after this one, will be really meta because that is often when I write the chronicle).
We're muddling through, but these are tough times.
That said, there is romance in hard periods, that we forget to look at in the moment and only realize in hindsight. Some of the periods in my life that I look back towards fondly were had elements in them that I now miss, but didn’t appreciate at the time.
If you are having a period like that right now, ask yourself what you will likely remember fondly about this period when you look back on it, and try to put on those rose-colored glasses right now, instead of waiting until then.
But today I want to talk about the fact that building open data apps allows us to build and deploy complete and functioning production apps, not play prototypes, but real useful things, as solo developers, from the second they go live, because all the data in the database has already happened, which is way better than your average side-project portfolio play projects.
But before I dooooo.... a word frooooom our sponsor!
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Need work experience to get job, need job to get work experience
From Twisha:
Lately I have been struggling with job hunting and have just been in a memeable situation.
I have always worked in startups and while that has increased the breadth of my knowledge (from WebRTC to blockchain) I haven't had the chance to work at scale. So I quit my job earlier this year and decided to grind Leetcode to get into Big Tech or at least something Big Tech-adjacent.
Last week I got a recruiter call from a Biggie Tech company and after talking about my experience I was rejected with the reason that since I haven't worked with scale already they cannot hire me, they need someone with that experience.
I literally felt like a fresh graduate trapped in the meme below despite having 8+ years of experience writing code and driving projects from zero-to-one 🥲
The Full-Stack Trap
This is a career ceiling trap that us full-stack developers run into when we try to work for bigger companies.
When I say full-stack dev here, I mean one that doesn't have a strong bias towards frontend or backend or devops, knows a bit of all of that, and works as a jack-of-all trades in a small startup.
I myself take great pride in this, I can quite literally build an entire company, from the legal framework up to most digital aspects of it, with only skills I have myself. However, a jack of all trades also means master of none.
I had the great delight of working close to Niklas Gustavsson (or "ngn" - everyone went by nicknames at Spotify more or less), who is nowadays Chief Architect and VP of Engineering at Spotify.
ngn is that kind of dry, funny, grumpy character that isn't negative, but can sometimes come off like that superficially because he acts with great authenticity. Either way, he used to say "a person that uses the term 'full-stack developer' has obviously never actually seen a stack."
Being a full stack developer myself, I must concede that I have no right to be offended because full stack developer is a quite silly term (Why don't you hire a construction builder to build your house instead of all these specialists?).
In a larger company, all the little aspects of an app are broken down to molecular level and specialists grow for the different roles.
At Spotify, not even the frontend was one job - during my time there, all my CSS skills atrophied because that was made to such a large degree by the UI/UX team and we didn't really need to do anything.
So - a sidenote in this is also that you get trapped after a while as a specialist as well, making it hard for you to work at a smaller company - to some degree we have to decide clearly if we are optimizing for big fish / small pond or small pond / big fish in our careers.
Escaping the Trap
When we are moving in the pond we are used to, we generally don't have to prove ourselves very much, but changing ponds can be tricky.
Even if we HAVE the skills necessary to swim in the new pond, proving it becomes difficult. How can you prove, as a full-pond developer, that you know the part of the sub-pond that you are trying to enter?
This differs a lot in difficulty depending on if you are moving full-stack → frontend specialist or if you are moving fullstack → backend specialist.
A developer strong at frontend, but who lacks a track record of proven work experience, can simply resort to building and deploying something that demonstrates their prowess. Hakim El Hattab (hakim.se) is a shining example of this, for instance.
A backend engineer cannot really pull this trick - even if they build and deploy an app, that app doesn't have any customers, and thus not any load, and as such they have not really proven that they have built for scale.
Open Data: The Real-World Laboratory for Scale
But when it comes to DataViz, the conditions are more fruitful.
I have lately started looking into what open datasets are available, and it has been quite a revelation for me how extensive this is.
If you want to prove yourself as a frontend developer, you need to build an app that is customer-less, and if you want to prove yourself as a backend dev, you basically cannot (and have to rely on an employer as a point of authority).
But if you are a data developer (which I here use loosely as the full-stackers of data) there is a plethora of wonderful, very real, data that you can use to show that you can handle data at scale.
If you build a Data Application based on open data, it is essentially the hardcore thing, right out of the gate. Unlike a consumer or business app, an Open Data App operates on data that has already happened, and this is valuable from the second of deployment.
Could Open Data Apps, therefore, be the ultimate app type for solo developers?
At the very least, it seems to me that Data Developers would have a portfolio superpower that other devs do not have.
World Bank Data
There are many cool open data sources out there, but I would like to draw your attention to data.worldbank.org to start with. This is a treasure trove of decades of publicly accessible information.
But more importantly, it is BEGGING for people competent at building data apps. Case in point, one of the sub-projects of the World Bank is energydata.info, and look at the numbers I've circled there:
As of writing, 1011 datasets are collected but only 12 apps built on that. TWELVE! 🤬
The World Bank uses an administrative budget of 3 billion USD and throws out over 100 billion USD per year, and has existed since the second world war. It is an ABSURD amount of data that this org generates, provides for free, and yet we do not leverage it. What is done so far is so ugly and unengaged, compared to what you all could do with it.
Basically, this is an army of well-funded data collection magicians that has managed to collect a data wealth of obscene proportions and made it available for free, but nobody there wants to touch HTML5 Canvas so all that has come of it so far is 12 little apps, of which most are well within the capabilities of most junior React Devs to build.
Please, dear reader, go show them how it's done
If you are struggling to find a job in a space of tech that won't give you access to the data that you need to prove that you can work on their data, can I encourage you to look through some World Bank data (or another interesting open data source, please send it my way if you have a good tip) and see if you find something that speaks to you, and show the world what a real web developer can do with these datasets?
For inspiration, check out:
In loving memory of Hungrybear9562
no filter, no AI on this one👆 a really sweet rainbow that I saw this week Swedish summer evenings are still going strong and magical.
This inspired me to revisiting a golden era of YouTube, and was saddened to learn that Hungrybear9562 is no longer with us, but I was on the other hand happy to learn that he got to visit the Double Rainbow room in his lifetime:
It was such a charming era of the internet. Sometimes we don't know what we have until it is gone.
If you are like me and still have some summer nights left, and have stayed inside working too much this summer, break the pattern tonight, take an evening stroll, and find a good place to see see the sunset this evening.
If you get a good view, send me a pic (as always, you can just reply to this email)
and don't forget to put some 🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓 jam on QAs breakfast toast today.