I’m a self taught developer with no experience in a real dev shop. Recruiters tell me I look amazing on paper, but the few screen-interviews I’ve had the interviewer appeared unimpressed or offered me less than I currently make.
Should I learn some new skill? Build out an open-source demo project? I feel so overwhelmed with what all I could be doing that I’m doing nothing.
Let me know if any other info would help.
Thanks.
And as cliched as it sounds, as a fairly targeted, short-term thing, you might consider jumping on leetcode and grind through some of the exercises there. How useful that would be depends a lot on the nature of the company(s) you wind up interviewing with, of course. Some companies are really big on these kinds of exercises, others less so.
Also, depending on what language(s) you currently know and work with, you might find value in spending some time learning another "trendy" language. Given the next 3 months to work on it, you could probably make real progress on learning a given language to a usable level. For example, if you don't use Go today, maybe spend some time learning it, since it's very popular and seen as "modern" and "trendy".
Or if not a whole new language, maybe just a "trendy" library/framework (for example, React if you're a Javascript person, but don't currently do React).
(Note: Go and React are just examples I picked to make a point. Please don't take this as saying specifically "learn Go" or "learn React".)
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming...
As much as anything though just do more interviews. It can be really hard in those situations not to take it personally. If you can, at some point in your career try to get involved in the interviewing and hiring process just so you can see for yourself how absurd and full of superstition it is at most companies.
Congrats on the severance by the way. That's quite a nice going away.
If you're looking for general content to improve your skills as a developer I've had this site bookmarked for sometime and I see stuff from it reccomended all over the place.
Best of luck!
Do you think the employer will pay?
I mean do you trust the employer?
To put it another way, if the employer is paying you $108k to stay, they should be paying you now. If they are unwilling to pay it now, they are not actually paying it. Not actually paying it is a behavior that is unlikely to change when there is nothing in it for them.
Between now and the end of the year, that's around $33k a month. That's an equitable way to distribute it.
Good luck.
Interview everywhere that looks like you may want to work there
Check places like https://wfh.io for remote jobs which you might even be able to start (part time or on a different schedule) while your current job winds down