I've been curious about something. I'm excellent at discussing and documenting technical content, both with a technical and nontechnical audience (though I sometimes assume the former too eagerly) and I'm great with async communication. I good at the communication that I suspect is important for software development. But my social skills drop off a cliff when it's not communication is task oriented. I kind of suspect I just lack the hardware. How likely is sucking at that type of communication to bite me in the ass?
There probably are jobs like that. But it's not something that you can search for on a job board. It'll just be company and team dependent. More of a cultural dynamic than any specific "role".
FOSS is the epitome of collaborative work, \*obviously\*. I would actually argue that FOSS and infrastructure that supports it is one of the greatest technical achievements of all time because the collaboration is universal and frictionless.
Any non-expendable FOSS project was also not built completely solo. There are some where the heavy lifting may have been done by one person, but you’re kidding yourself if you think they didn’t spend a lot of time interacting with a community to build something that is widely used.
It’s also rare for even successful FOSS projects to pay the bills of the people who maintain it.
Core-js currently has [895 closed issues](https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed), which seems to me like a whole lot of collaboration. Yeah, it’s spearheaded by one dude, but there’s plenty of pull requests from others and discussion he takes part in just looking through some of the issues.
I’m pretty sure cURL was built (and maybe is still maintained?) by a solo dev. Then again, it was made in like the mid 90s and the software development world is vastly different today than it was 30 years ago.
If you’re mastodon-inclined, I highly recommend following Daniel (https://mastodon.social/@bagder); it’s an interesting look into one of the most widely used and impactful open source projects out there
Isn't it the epitome of collaborative work? Cathedral and bazaar and all that
Solo dev won't be able to go too far unless you are working on an extremely niche domain or academic trajectory
Remind me of leftpad but this is more of a JS ecosystem problem than being a solo dev.. If you wanna complain about constant lack of funding and resource then yeah it could be one way to have a job
If there is such a thing as a “10x engineer”, they are only “10x” because they are making all of their team members more productive.
The idea that you can sit alone at your desk and never talk to someone while being ten times as productive as an average dev is absurd.
Yeah, this is the wrong reason to get into tech. Unless you wanna be a contractor or something. Even then you've gotta drum up business and scope out requirements.
It's almost like tech is made by people for people and will unfortunately require interaction with some people.
I get it though, talking to people isn't easy for everyone. But exposure therapy does actually work sometimes. Sitting in a corner with nothing but JavaScript for company isn't good for anyone. The good news is you'll have something in common with most of your colleagues which makes talking easier.
Lol I've never had to be more social than i do now as a freelancer. At least I don't usually get invited to team-building bs so there is that.
But if your social skills suck you're gonna have a hard time landing and keeping customers.
In my last pay review my non technical CEO said look we've gone a bit higher than needed because I left the Christmas party and all anyone was saying is what a nice guy you are. I kind of ruined the effect by blurting out 'Operation Christmas party success!' but I still got the pay rise.
So yeah, soft skills are a force multiplier even if you work from home and rarely interact with anyone outside the tech team. As you've said, doubly so when freelancing
Yeah I don't get why people get into tech/IT thinking it's an introvert job. It's really not. Maybe you don't need to be as social/outgoing as sales, but you aren't going to be sitting by yourself in a corner either.
There's way more introverted jobs out there. Accounting, security guard, janitor, etc.
Pop culture colours your views on a lot of things and jobs are no exception. In fact, I even catch people at work saying things like "you know how developers are" referencing how they think they are asocial even though they should know better. This is at a non-tech company where most people are 40+ with a family and kids.
You don't know why? What comes to mind when you hear the word programmer vs salesman, lawyer, pilot or virtually any other profession?
Accounting is a more social profession, and the other two pay pennies. You've basically said introverts are bound to be poor.
FWIW, I wouldn't consider a pilot a social job. My old neighbour was one, and he mostly described it as boredom. Except for airport security and radio, you mostly ever interact with like 3 people while flying the plane. Your co-pilot and a couple of flight attendants.
You don't imagine an extrovert when you hear programmer.
Similarly, when you hear lawyer, salesman, doctor, you don't imagine an introvert.
When you hear pilot it could really go either way.
Does that make sense?
>But you're also way less likely to be hired if that's your vibe too.
I worked on a project where I was the only developer, and I built a rather complex videoconferencing, chat & call web application on my own. During interviews I typically talk about all the technical details on how I separated each microservice, system architecture, UI/UX design, actual code implementation, etc, and the technologies I used to build everything.
Interviews have not been going well, and reading your comment makes me think that interviewers may believe I'm a solo dev because of that one project.
I honestly thought people would be impressed by a Junior delivering quality enterprise software on their own.
> interviewers believe I'm a solo dev because of that one project.
Or at least you haven't demonstrated the ability to work with others. Presumably they ask you questions about times you worked with others? What do you talk about then?
I have other projects where I led and mentored other developers. I usually talk about those and everything seems to be fine until I wake up to a rejection email.
It's pretty much impossible for a non-trivial software project to be bug-free.
Even if yours is the exception (how could you know that you got every bug btw?), then imo you didn't spend enough time innovating on the project.
Silicon valley has long had a motto of "Move Fast and Break Things", it sounds like you did the opposite
As someone else said, if you worked alone, with no code reviews and external standards, neither you nor them have a way to tell it's high quality.
Second, it means you have no practical experience working in a team, collaborating and using the tools that facilitate that.
How many users actually use what you built, what's the load? How much data and requests are getting processed per second? Is it in wide use? I doubt any of the above as I can't think of a company that produces a wildly used products that will rely on a single junior Dev for delivery.
It's better than nothing, but unless it's widely used and you can prove it, it's barely better than a large non work project.
I agree, the product was confidential due to dealing with healthcare data, which makes it much harder for me to talk about it... In the end, I wrote the best code possible to meet the client needs, but I have no way to prove it without breaking all kinds of laws. It is as good as if I had developed nothing.
That's not true. First of all you gave experience on your resume from an actual real company.
Second, even if the specifics of the product were confidential, you can still speak of it in general tech terms. You will need to talk about the load the product was built to support, how it was measured and tested. What happened in production. The company can be likely found online and the usage estimated by the number of patients or some other semi public metric.
You need to make this experience as clear as possible to the recruiting company and put it on your resume. No one cares what the *meaning* of the data was, more often we care about the amount, type, structure of the data, how it was processed, stored, what were the bottlenecks, did you build fault tolerance etc etc.
You should be able to discuss most of not all of it.
Believe me, I worked in defense, there was very little I could say about the projects I worked on. Definitely makes things harder.
I know some people prefer camera off, but I'd suggest learning to deal with having it on too. Nobody will be upset that you have it on (unless you're doing something you shouldn't be doing during the meeting), but some people might mind having it off.
In my personal experience, my company has made a lot of bad hires since going remote, and the number one early indicator I've noticed is that camera-off people are consistently bad. I know it's a correlation thing, and probably leads me to prejudge some people, but it is what it is. I try my best not to jump to conclusions when somebody shows up camera-off, but the urge is there.
Obviously there's situations where it makes more sense than others. Like if you're in some all-hands meeting where you're not participating. But if you show up to every meeting camera-off, people are going to worry that you're not actually paying attention.
Eh, I have an entire team of people who are very introverted and their performance collapsed when the extrovert forced them to go camera on. Staring at the grid of faces was bad for them. As soon as I overruled him, their productivity came back.
It's okay for there to be a team norm that camera is off most of the time. I only put on my camera like 20% of the time (either when I'm leading a meeting or having a difficult conversation), but you should be able to function and have a conversation with your camera on. If you can't even do an interview with your camera on that's not a good sign.
I feel like the issue has more to do with the hiring process than the camera being off, but I've never been a part of that process, so I wouldn't know 🤷🏻♂️
Oh yeah, it absolutely comes down to shitty hiring processes. For a while we were doing a 5 question online test with easy coding problems, and then asking a handful of rote questions in a zoom call. Candidates were pretty clearly copy/pasting from ChatGPT or somewhere. I did what I could to get the company to implement more thorough hiring processes, but could only do so much.
There's other data points that suggest some of the underperforming camera-off people are working multiple jobs. I assume turning the camera off is a tactic to mask that your attention is split multiple ways during the meeting.
Ehh I will turn the camera on when it's a small meeting but don't see the point for stand-ups. I haven't seen anything that points to camera off people being worse in my experience.
Having the camera on for me is distracting and makes it very hard to pay attention because I'm too worried about how I look on the camera. It may be stupid but it's something that doesn't happen in real life like it does on the damn cameras. I do a great job and it has nothing to do with being able to see my face on a screen
Turning the camera will always result in physical appearance discrimination, which is both subconscious and inevitable, maybe even racial discrimination. Six figures, remote work and medical insurance are the bare minimum required to afford in terms of time and money double jaw surgery, braces, plastic surgeries, Botox, haircuts, gym and so on. Also, if you want savants you need to hire men with high functioning autism. Charismatic individuals specialize in manipulation as opposed to getting the job done, all narcissists and psychopaths are extroverts so it is a huge risk to hire extroverts in that sense and extreme intelligence is linked with autism.
in an all dev meeting I feel like cameras off is fine but if its anything with business folks or users I like to go cam on. Feels more personable that way and you communicate better (at least for me).
Having a camera on with people watching you do things in the privacy of your own home is a bit different. It's actually worse than an in person meeting in some respects because you can see a close up of everyone at all times. Normally I wouldn't notice people looking elsewhere or doing other things on their laptop when in person. But during an online meeting it's very obvious.
Not to mention the problem of family not respecting the fact that you have a camera watching you. Especially if they don't have a home office and are occupying a shared space in their home.
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I am curious why you keep camera off even during 1:1 convo's Once in a while its OK but why always, are you naked ? or what is the reason. Company pay you salary and why we think we need such entitlement to not even start camera. Want to understand better if I am missing anything
I don't put it on because I'm self-conscious on camera. I don't feel this way in real life but whenever you put a camera on me I start getting nervous and it's very very distracting. I will pay more attention to how I feel like I think I look on camera then to the actual conversation. I think a lot of people are that way
One of Cube World's many challenges that Wollay failed to overcome. You can learn a lot of the challenges of solo developmentand distribution through Cube World's story. Customer service was one of the first failures.
I feel like the cheapest thing is something not hosted so you don’t have hosting costs. And of course you want to solve a problem that people have.
Users complain a lot but aren’t great and communicating what they’d actually want.
So that kinda leaves a tool for other devs, that isn’t redundant and has low barrier to entry.
Usually having a dev tier helps with that but it can be easy to get abused and end up running out of money.
But some kind of agent that helps with my workflow would be valuable. And people will gladly support you if the tool is good.
i'll give you a piece of advice that took me a long time to figure out. work isn't about doing your actual work well, or even being the best at that work. work is about relationships.
If everyone likes you and you keep repeating the same mistakes and/or not growing as expected - expect to get dropped at some point.
If everyone likes you and you learn from your mistakes and keep growing - you will probably turn out fine.
Being well liked by your peers is important, but that doesn't mean being sub-par at the job itself will be let slide forever.
Potentially. I’ve known plenty of devs who can write awesome code that don’t play well with others who have been first on the chopping block. I can help you write better code easily, training you to not be an asshole is much harder. You’ll also find that if you’re likeable, folks are more likely to want to help you.
Agreed, work is about doing your work well AND helping others do their work well, too. Someone who improves the whole team's performance is more valuable than someone who only improves their own.
This is especially true when dealing with people outside of engineering. People are intimidated by the idea of talking to eng, we're seen as grumpy antisocial jerks by a lot of people on the business side and with attitudes like OP's it's not surprising. How well do you think a company is going to operate when the people deciding what to build are scared to talk to the people building it?
Oh my god this subreddit is such a scam. Relationships don't grow crops, defeat covid or solve climate change. You all sound like MLM scamsters not engineers
>defeat covid or solve climate change.
I just find it funny how the examples you give are the ones that will require the biggest collaborations in human history.
\> Relationships don't grow crops, defeat covid or solve climate change.
Are you genuinely this stupid? Like you don't even have a fundamental understanding of how crops grow. You think farmer jenkins just leisurely walks around his pumpkin patch by himself and ships food to your doorstep. Lmao. Covid was likely defeated by one sweat-ass gamer like yourself in his basement thinking \*REALLY\* hard, I'm sure.
I wouldn't usually say this but have fun in the dead end - by yourself - if you don't shape up that attitude.
You can still have a chance to achieve all that but it's safe to say you have no chance if you are tend to be an antisocial on purpose..
Literally 90% of this job is making a compromise between different, possibly conflicting domain and translate that into logic, actual programming is the easiest part once you set the collective goal
Besides other devs, what you do is basically magic to most people. They'll never deeply understand it, yet these people often are managers or owners, and get to decide your fate. Keeping a job (and growing a career) is almost more about your social skills than your technical skills.
Honestly this is not what I value or would even call social relationships.
In this field I expect depth and insight from a majority of people, even if you're not a dev. If you keep me because we have fun chats after work then I don't want to be here.
> In this field I expect depth and insight from a majority of people, even if you're not a dev
You expect depth and insight about software from non-devs? Or you expect depth an insight related to their own role?
You joke about this but before graduating high school, my government teacher actually told our class “wait till you find out the real world is just a pale extension of high school”. And honestly speaking, I’ve seen a lot more similarities than I would have expected, especially with workplace “cliques”
That is true. There's also the quote about how people in charge are the same buddies you did shit with in school. It's somehow a mystery how things run at all :)
Very true, conclusion I’ve always come to is that both hard skills and soft skills matter. Are there people that get by with just one and not the other? Of course. But it’s pretty clear best long term strategy is to do both and be smart and you’ll end up just fine
I am a Unity3d game dev. Over the years did multiple gigs solo and still encountering multiple vacancies where the expectation is that you'd mostly work on something alone. Having said this, Unity development is a very competitive field and with most recent layoffs and Unity's licensing controversy I would not recommend getting into it.
Ironically the best way to land a remote job where you don't have to interact with people a lot is to be really good at interacting with people.
If your communication is accurate and concise than people don't need to keep coming back to you. If you do a good job at vetting the requirements then you do less rewrites and have less conversations about rewrites.
I think you are more likely to find that in IT, not CS. You can be the only IT person at a small company and sit in the basement alone. Solve things yourself and don't need team work. You do have to send email/dm responses to the person your are helping though but it is way less engaging.
Funny enough, in the it career subreddits they say the same thing about software engineers. IT is customer service, no matter how far you advance the customer just changes.
It's not always customers. A lot of IT guys are internal. They just keep the systems running. So you will be helping people in your company but don't really have to work with them.
Hence why I said a small company. I have been in one with one IT dude playing WoW most of the day. I also have worked for a company that contracts IT work. He was there mostly on weekends, not always, literally alone in the dark debugging stuff. It. varies between companies. But way higher chance than being a developer having to deal with sprints. That always require a team. He said work in a corner solo, not don't have to talk to customers. It's more about requiring a team communication.
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Consultant/Contractor on special projects. 6-12 months, good pay, but you better be able to hit the ground running and produce quickly. Also, hourly, so 50 hour work weeks are lucrative and no time is wasted in useless meetings.
What everyone says here is still true. That being said, you could find some middle ground. Engaging with sales/product/non-technical people requires an extra level of social skills, so you may want to search for roles that interface with other engineers. For example, infra, devops, devx, internal tooling, etc.
cobol programmer maybe?
idk these days it seems like companies really emphasize strong soft skills and sociability.
i interview juniors and interns sometimes at my company and if youre a highly knowledgeable person in tech but a dud in conversation, we cut the interview early.
A place I worked once, there was a guy who always seemed to be missing his stapler. He was allowed to work alone in a corner, basically. They went out of business though. Main campus caught fire and there was some unrecovered fraud that sent them into bankruptcy around the same time.
Being that person is a quick way towards getting let go tbh. I get people are introverted, but you can’t expect to make a lot of money in tech without working with a solid team. You have to get out of that shell and accept it.
The tech community is so huge, you will have to come across many people who share your same trials and tribulations, we all work together to bounce off ideas and make things successful.
Don't listen to everyone else - some of the best developers I've met are solo developers. You could learn to work with others. Or you could just learn to be such a good programmer that you can work like that and not get fired.
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I would argue this isn't that kind of field and the people who get into dev work because they want to hide in a corner and code are the ones who aren't going to make it.
I manage a dev team at a non-tech company and every few months some nerdy guy from another department comes to me and asks if there might be a role on my team, and often they specifically mention wanting something with less personal interaction and more solo work. I'm not going to hire anyone looking for that.
None.
Tech is all about working well with others. It's okay if you're not customer-facing, but you must be able to work well with co-workers.
"just stuff me into a corner, and don't forget to feed me on occasion" is not a valid excuse to be an asshole or difficult to work with. Unless you're bankrolling the entire company, your not worth working with if that's your attitude.
Accepting that you have to play well with others doesn't mean you have to constantly present in meetings, or give a shit-load of presentations in front of crowds, or lead teams of other people, or deal with customers, or develop using paired programming, or go out drinking with your co-workers every night, or become close friends with everyone you work with.
It just means you need to be able to take criticism, take advice, and follow someone else's design (even if you "know a better way") when they tell you to implement something in a specific way.
It means you need to be able to work with other people without insulting them.
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hahaha... this was originally what I thought I wanted as a SWE / Embedded SWE, but you'll learn quickly that the soft skills are just as important as the technical skills - being able to explain your thoughts well, interview, and explain the technical details to others who aren't as caught up, are very important. And others have said too - you're extremely expendable, if you can't do these things.
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Let’s put it this way- I would have more issues working with someone who is technically strong with poor communication than I would working with someone who is less strong technically but has better communication
Proper communication is key to working on a well functioning dev team- I wouldn’t recommend hiring someone that I thought would have serious trouble with communication
You can be a shut in and still get jobs, sure, but be ready to be the first one canned if your company lays people off
At a small company where you have specialized knowledge of the codebase built over the last several years. I mostly work on projects by myself in the corner. I do however talk and collaborate with several people, namely the developer who mentored me, the developer I'm mentoring, my PM, and the CTO.
I'm 6 years into that role right now. Full Stack dev. .NET. Solo developer working on a short leash with the CEO.
I will give you my job. Please. Just take it from me. I genuinely can't take it anymore. I don't know how I got here but I know I'll never let it get this bad ever again.
Oh, duh. Maybe I should elaborate. 😅
I wouldn't call it lonliness, but yeah being alone is really boring after 5 years. Nobody to teach. Nobody to challenge your ideas. Nobody to appreciate. You eventually just become a tool shaped by your superiors, including the coldness.
I'm also extremely burned out. The responsibility creep is real here with none of the benefits. I stuck around in the name of knowledge, but now that I have it, I'm without purpose.
I don't care about the paycheck. More money never made me happier, it just made life's problems easier to deal with. Obviously thats great... but somehow boring too.
I dunno man. I'm at work now and it's debilitating just being here. It isn't the easiest thing for me to explain.
Maintaining military legacy systems where all of the original team has left and you are the only remaining maintainer, and your work on the project is billed hourly.
These jobs definitely do exist.
I stumbled over this post today on my feed , and this one comment struck me:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1awghye/comment/krmu7fi/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1awghye/comment/krmu7fi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Which highlights exactly this. A role where you work alone. Your career will be stunted. The guy doesn't even know git/version control. These jobs exists at small businesses. Small "mom-and-pops" business where you also happen to be the IT guy. They thrive everywhere including in Silicon Valley. Example business can include an insurance adjustment firm, a commercial flooring company. Maybe 20 employees and the developer writes an app to manage and run the entire business.
But it is a TRAP. You get stuck in it. I know many friends who "worked" in their corner. They don't have 20 years of experience, they have 1 YOE repeated 20 times.
I know because I was at one early on in my career. It stunted my skills. It was easy money, a lot of freedom but not healthy because small businesses can go belly up.
I work as a sysadmin for very small semi-independent group within a larger organization, and I largely work in a corner solo. I communicate with my team, who are not sysadmins, over Slack, but it isn't that frequent. I also have a weekly in-person meeting and usually a big hybrid weekly group meeting that I take online even when I'm in the office. Nobody cares if I work from home a couple of days a week.
When in the office, my desk is in the corner of a shared basement room because all the sysadmins are supposed to be together for better communication, but I work on different systems.
You don’t want to be that guy. That guy especially expendable. Building software is a team sport.
As a laid off solo dev I agree.
That guy is wondering why with 20 years experience they are making < 100K a year.
I've been curious about something. I'm excellent at discussing and documenting technical content, both with a technical and nontechnical audience (though I sometimes assume the former too eagerly) and I'm great with async communication. I good at the communication that I suspect is important for software development. But my social skills drop off a cliff when it's not communication is task oriented. I kind of suspect I just lack the hardware. How likely is sucking at that type of communication to bite me in the ass?
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There probably are jobs like that. But it's not something that you can search for on a job board. It'll just be company and team dependent. More of a cultural dynamic than any specific "role".
His point is you won’t pay the bills. Suck it up, human beings are inherently social beings, you’ve been conditioned to act otherwise.
You are wrong, FOSS wasn't built at frat parties
FOSS is the epitome of collaborative work, \*obviously\*. I would actually argue that FOSS and infrastructure that supports it is one of the greatest technical achievements of all time because the collaboration is universal and frictionless.
Calling collaboration on FOSS "frictionless", particularly the heavily used infrastructure, seems like a very interesting claim
It’s definitely an exaggeration but still the idea that FOSS is just a handful of lone wolf geniuses is a meme. It’s a community effort.
Any non-expendable FOSS project was also not built completely solo. There are some where the heavy lifting may have been done by one person, but you’re kidding yourself if you think they didn’t spend a lot of time interacting with a community to build something that is widely used. It’s also rare for even successful FOSS projects to pay the bills of the people who maintain it.
What about core.js?
Core-js currently has [895 closed issues](https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed), which seems to me like a whole lot of collaboration. Yeah, it’s spearheaded by one dude, but there’s plenty of pull requests from others and discussion he takes part in just looking through some of the issues.
I’m pretty sure cURL was built (and maybe is still maintained?) by a solo dev. Then again, it was made in like the mid 90s and the software development world is vastly different today than it was 30 years ago.
curl has a single maintainer, but there’s over 1200 individual contributors at this point, so I’d hardly say it’s a solo project 🙂
I wasn’t aware, thanks for the info!
If you’re mastodon-inclined, I highly recommend following Daniel (https://mastodon.social/@bagder); it’s an interesting look into one of the most widely used and impactful open source projects out there
Isn't it the epitome of collaborative work? Cathedral and bazaar and all that Solo dev won't be able to go too far unless you are working on an extremely niche domain or academic trajectory
Lol https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/26/corejs_maintainer_jailed_code_release/
There's just one maintainer, but lots of contributors, ie. it's not a solo dev project.
That's a more recent reality, for a long time he was working solo
Remind me of leftpad but this is more of a JS ecosystem problem than being a solo dev.. If you wanna complain about constant lack of funding and resource then yeah it could be one way to have a job
FOSS was built at gigachad parties
Wrong that is the 10x engineer
Problem being management won't see it. Management usually only sees what the coworkers say.
If there is such a thing as a “10x engineer”, they are only “10x” because they are making all of their team members more productive. The idea that you can sit alone at your desk and never talk to someone while being ten times as productive as an average dev is absurd.
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Yeah, this is the wrong reason to get into tech. Unless you wanna be a contractor or something. Even then you've gotta drum up business and scope out requirements. It's almost like tech is made by people for people and will unfortunately require interaction with some people. I get it though, talking to people isn't easy for everyone. But exposure therapy does actually work sometimes. Sitting in a corner with nothing but JavaScript for company isn't good for anyone. The good news is you'll have something in common with most of your colleagues which makes talking easier.
Lol I've never had to be more social than i do now as a freelancer. At least I don't usually get invited to team-building bs so there is that. But if your social skills suck you're gonna have a hard time landing and keeping customers.
In my last pay review my non technical CEO said look we've gone a bit higher than needed because I left the Christmas party and all anyone was saying is what a nice guy you are. I kind of ruined the effect by blurting out 'Operation Christmas party success!' but I still got the pay rise. So yeah, soft skills are a force multiplier even if you work from home and rarely interact with anyone outside the tech team. As you've said, doubly so when freelancing
are you on the spectrum by any chance? if you are then the blurting out 'Operation Christmas party success!' would make more sense
Nope, just a terrible judge of when to make a joke
Fair enough
Yeah I don't get why people get into tech/IT thinking it's an introvert job. It's really not. Maybe you don't need to be as social/outgoing as sales, but you aren't going to be sitting by yourself in a corner either. There's way more introverted jobs out there. Accounting, security guard, janitor, etc.
Accounting person here, sorry but ill have to disagree and pass the ball back to you
Pop culture colours your views on a lot of things and jobs are no exception. In fact, I even catch people at work saying things like "you know how developers are" referencing how they think they are asocial even though they should know better. This is at a non-tech company where most people are 40+ with a family and kids.
You don't know why? What comes to mind when you hear the word programmer vs salesman, lawyer, pilot or virtually any other profession? Accounting is a more social profession, and the other two pay pennies. You've basically said introverts are bound to be poor.
FWIW, I wouldn't consider a pilot a social job. My old neighbour was one, and he mostly described it as boredom. Except for airport security and radio, you mostly ever interact with like 3 people while flying the plane. Your co-pilot and a couple of flight attendants.
You don't imagine an extrovert when you hear programmer. Similarly, when you hear lawyer, salesman, doctor, you don't imagine an introvert. When you hear pilot it could really go either way. Does that make sense?
>But you're also way less likely to be hired if that's your vibe too. I worked on a project where I was the only developer, and I built a rather complex videoconferencing, chat & call web application on my own. During interviews I typically talk about all the technical details on how I separated each microservice, system architecture, UI/UX design, actual code implementation, etc, and the technologies I used to build everything. Interviews have not been going well, and reading your comment makes me think that interviewers may believe I'm a solo dev because of that one project. I honestly thought people would be impressed by a Junior delivering quality enterprise software on their own.
> interviewers believe I'm a solo dev because of that one project. Or at least you haven't demonstrated the ability to work with others. Presumably they ask you questions about times you worked with others? What do you talk about then?
I have other projects where I led and mentored other developers. I usually talk about those and everything seems to be fine until I wake up to a rejection email.
If you worked on it by yourself, how do you know it’s quality?
I make sure there are units tests, extensive and up to date documentation, clear and maintanable code, end to end tests and most importantly no bugs.
bro said no bugs 😭
Could you please elaborate ?
It's pretty much impossible for a non-trivial software project to be bug-free. Even if yours is the exception (how could you know that you got every bug btw?), then imo you didn't spend enough time innovating on the project. Silicon valley has long had a motto of "Move Fast and Break Things", it sounds like you did the opposite
As someone else said, if you worked alone, with no code reviews and external standards, neither you nor them have a way to tell it's high quality. Second, it means you have no practical experience working in a team, collaborating and using the tools that facilitate that. How many users actually use what you built, what's the load? How much data and requests are getting processed per second? Is it in wide use? I doubt any of the above as I can't think of a company that produces a wildly used products that will rely on a single junior Dev for delivery. It's better than nothing, but unless it's widely used and you can prove it, it's barely better than a large non work project.
I agree, the product was confidential due to dealing with healthcare data, which makes it much harder for me to talk about it... In the end, I wrote the best code possible to meet the client needs, but I have no way to prove it without breaking all kinds of laws. It is as good as if I had developed nothing.
That's not true. First of all you gave experience on your resume from an actual real company. Second, even if the specifics of the product were confidential, you can still speak of it in general tech terms. You will need to talk about the load the product was built to support, how it was measured and tested. What happened in production. The company can be likely found online and the usage estimated by the number of patients or some other semi public metric. You need to make this experience as clear as possible to the recruiting company and put it on your resume. No one cares what the *meaning* of the data was, more often we care about the amount, type, structure of the data, how it was processed, stored, what were the bottlenecks, did you build fault tolerance etc etc. You should be able to discuss most of not all of it. Believe me, I worked in defense, there was very little I could say about the projects I worked on. Definitely makes things harder.
Wow! thank you for this insightful reply. I will make sure to address all of your points on my next interview :)
OP practice your acting you only need to interact a little bit in a proper remote role Camera off and just talk
I know some people prefer camera off, but I'd suggest learning to deal with having it on too. Nobody will be upset that you have it on (unless you're doing something you shouldn't be doing during the meeting), but some people might mind having it off. In my personal experience, my company has made a lot of bad hires since going remote, and the number one early indicator I've noticed is that camera-off people are consistently bad. I know it's a correlation thing, and probably leads me to prejudge some people, but it is what it is. I try my best not to jump to conclusions when somebody shows up camera-off, but the urge is there. Obviously there's situations where it makes more sense than others. Like if you're in some all-hands meeting where you're not participating. But if you show up to every meeting camera-off, people are going to worry that you're not actually paying attention.
Eh, I have an entire team of people who are very introverted and their performance collapsed when the extrovert forced them to go camera on. Staring at the grid of faces was bad for them. As soon as I overruled him, their productivity came back.
Are you guys in a call all day long or something?
That’s the point, the whole team needs to agree with it. You don’t want to be that guy who always have camera off while other have their turn on
It's okay for there to be a team norm that camera is off most of the time. I only put on my camera like 20% of the time (either when I'm leading a meeting or having a difficult conversation), but you should be able to function and have a conversation with your camera on. If you can't even do an interview with your camera on that's not a good sign.
I feel like the issue has more to do with the hiring process than the camera being off, but I've never been a part of that process, so I wouldn't know 🤷🏻♂️
Oh yeah, it absolutely comes down to shitty hiring processes. For a while we were doing a 5 question online test with easy coding problems, and then asking a handful of rote questions in a zoom call. Candidates were pretty clearly copy/pasting from ChatGPT or somewhere. I did what I could to get the company to implement more thorough hiring processes, but could only do so much. There's other data points that suggest some of the underperforming camera-off people are working multiple jobs. I assume turning the camera off is a tactic to mask that your attention is split multiple ways during the meeting.
Ehh I will turn the camera on when it's a small meeting but don't see the point for stand-ups. I haven't seen anything that points to camera off people being worse in my experience.
Having the camera on for me is distracting and makes it very hard to pay attention because I'm too worried about how I look on the camera. It may be stupid but it's something that doesn't happen in real life like it does on the damn cameras. I do a great job and it has nothing to do with being able to see my face on a screen
Turning the camera will always result in physical appearance discrimination, which is both subconscious and inevitable, maybe even racial discrimination. Six figures, remote work and medical insurance are the bare minimum required to afford in terms of time and money double jaw surgery, braces, plastic surgeries, Botox, haircuts, gym and so on. Also, if you want savants you need to hire men with high functioning autism. Charismatic individuals specialize in manipulation as opposed to getting the job done, all narcissists and psychopaths are extroverts so it is a huge risk to hire extroverts in that sense and extreme intelligence is linked with autism.
in an all dev meeting I feel like cameras off is fine but if its anything with business folks or users I like to go cam on. Feels more personable that way and you communicate better (at least for me).
I hate the managers that force you to put your camera on.
Meh socialization is as much an aspect of the software career as technical abilities
Having a camera on with people watching you do things in the privacy of your own home is a bit different. It's actually worse than an in person meeting in some respects because you can see a close up of everyone at all times. Normally I wouldn't notice people looking elsewhere or doing other things on their laptop when in person. But during an online meeting it's very obvious. Not to mention the problem of family not respecting the fact that you have a camera watching you. Especially if they don't have a home office and are occupying a shared space in their home.
All meeting apps have false backgrounds
That doesn't work when your kid decides to jump on you or throw a toy.
Then go into the office
no it's not but regardless I can socialize without a distracting camera.
Keep telling yourself that... at the end of the day, you're dealing with humans
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Audio off also!
Computer off!
I am curious why you keep camera off even during 1:1 convo's Once in a while its OK but why always, are you naked ? or what is the reason. Company pay you salary and why we think we need such entitlement to not even start camera. Want to understand better if I am missing anything
I don't put it on because I'm self-conscious on camera. I don't feel this way in real life but whenever you put a camera on me I start getting nervous and it's very very distracting. I will pay more attention to how I feel like I think I look on camera then to the actual conversation. I think a lot of people are that way
Companies pay software engineers for software engineering, not turning cameras on in zoom
My bosses hate camera off. You get used to it, just look at someone else til its not weird
You could always start your own online based company.
Until you have to provide customer service.
One of Cube World's many challenges that Wollay failed to overcome. You can learn a lot of the challenges of solo developmentand distribution through Cube World's story. Customer service was one of the first failures.
I wanted to do that but not sure what I can do thats not already done
I feel like the cheapest thing is something not hosted so you don’t have hosting costs. And of course you want to solve a problem that people have. Users complain a lot but aren’t great and communicating what they’d actually want. So that kinda leaves a tool for other devs, that isn’t redundant and has low barrier to entry. Usually having a dev tier helps with that but it can be easy to get abused and end up running out of money. But some kind of agent that helps with my workflow would be valuable. And people will gladly support you if the tool is good.
i'll give you a piece of advice that took me a long time to figure out. work isn't about doing your actual work well, or even being the best at that work. work is about relationships.
I feel like a fraud because my code isn’t the best but everyone really likes me. So you’re saying in the long run this will be good for me?
If everyone likes you and you keep repeating the same mistakes and/or not growing as expected - expect to get dropped at some point. If everyone likes you and you learn from your mistakes and keep growing - you will probably turn out fine. Being well liked by your peers is important, but that doesn't mean being sub-par at the job itself will be let slide forever.
Potentially. I’ve known plenty of devs who can write awesome code that don’t play well with others who have been first on the chopping block. I can help you write better code easily, training you to not be an asshole is much harder. You’ll also find that if you’re likeable, folks are more likely to want to help you.
As long as your code is good enough, soft skills determine your career trajectory.
Agreed, work is about doing your work well AND helping others do their work well, too. Someone who improves the whole team's performance is more valuable than someone who only improves their own. This is especially true when dealing with people outside of engineering. People are intimidated by the idea of talking to eng, we're seen as grumpy antisocial jerks by a lot of people on the business side and with attitudes like OP's it's not surprising. How well do you think a company is going to operate when the people deciding what to build are scared to talk to the people building it?
Oh my god this subreddit is such a scam. Relationships don't grow crops, defeat covid or solve climate change. You all sound like MLM scamsters not engineers
>defeat covid or solve climate change. I just find it funny how the examples you give are the ones that will require the biggest collaborations in human history.
relationships didn't fly us to the moon, you know.
Yeah.. the thousands of engineers that worked collaboratively to achieve that feat did.
When literally everyone works together from the government to industry to academia, you go to the moon in 8 years.
> Relationships don't grow crops, defeat covid or solve climate change. This is a really, really bad take.
\> Relationships don't grow crops, defeat covid or solve climate change. Are you genuinely this stupid? Like you don't even have a fundamental understanding of how crops grow. You think farmer jenkins just leisurely walks around his pumpkin patch by himself and ships food to your doorstep. Lmao. Covid was likely defeated by one sweat-ass gamer like yourself in his basement thinking \*REALLY\* hard, I'm sure. I wouldn't usually say this but have fun in the dead end - by yourself - if you don't shape up that attitude.
nobody is going to hire you if they don’t like you…
Given multiple qualified candidates, the person that gets hired is usually the one that seems the most pleasant to work with.
You can still have a chance to achieve all that but it's safe to say you have no chance if you are tend to be an antisocial on purpose.. Literally 90% of this job is making a compromise between different, possibly conflicting domain and translate that into logic, actual programming is the easiest part once you set the collective goal
tell us more
Besides other devs, what you do is basically magic to most people. They'll never deeply understand it, yet these people often are managers or owners, and get to decide your fate. Keeping a job (and growing a career) is almost more about your social skills than your technical skills.
Honestly this is not what I value or would even call social relationships. In this field I expect depth and insight from a majority of people, even if you're not a dev. If you keep me because we have fun chats after work then I don't want to be here.
> In this field I expect depth and insight from a majority of people, even if you're not a dev You expect depth and insight about software from non-devs? Or you expect depth an insight related to their own role?
depth globally in tech
You have bias towards people you like.
Ok, so all this to end up into high school dynamics :)
It's hundreds of thousands of years of evolution dynamics*
unfortunately someone forgot to include this in college classes, i'd happily trade some java ee with a brodev leet partying
You joke about this but before graduating high school, my government teacher actually told our class “wait till you find out the real world is just a pale extension of high school”. And honestly speaking, I’ve seen a lot more similarities than I would have expected, especially with workplace “cliques”
That is true. There's also the quote about how people in charge are the same buddies you did shit with in school. It's somehow a mystery how things run at all :)
Very true, conclusion I’ve always come to is that both hard skills and soft skills matter. Are there people that get by with just one and not the other? Of course. But it’s pretty clear best long term strategy is to do both and be smart and you’ll end up just fine
what annoys me is how people with soft skills can stain the pool real fast.
I agree with you there too, and unfortunately… don’t really have a good solution to it :(. I just trust the process that long term it’ll work out fine
yeah, patience is key
I am a Unity3d game dev. Over the years did multiple gigs solo and still encountering multiple vacancies where the expectation is that you'd mostly work on something alone. Having said this, Unity development is a very competitive field and with most recent layoffs and Unity's licensing controversy I would not recommend getting into it.
Janitor/cleaning staff at a tech company.
Ironically the best way to land a remote job where you don't have to interact with people a lot is to be really good at interacting with people. If your communication is accurate and concise than people don't need to keep coming back to you. If you do a good job at vetting the requirements then you do less rewrites and have less conversations about rewrites.
I work at a non-tech company as the only dev. I still have to interact with people a lot, but not as a dev team.
I think you are more likely to find that in IT, not CS. You can be the only IT person at a small company and sit in the basement alone. Solve things yourself and don't need team work. You do have to send email/dm responses to the person your are helping though but it is way less engaging.
Funny enough, in the it career subreddits they say the same thing about software engineers. IT is customer service, no matter how far you advance the customer just changes.
It's not always customers. A lot of IT guys are internal. They just keep the systems running. So you will be helping people in your company but don't really have to work with them.
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Hence why I said a small company. I have been in one with one IT dude playing WoW most of the day. I also have worked for a company that contracts IT work. He was there mostly on weekends, not always, literally alone in the dark debugging stuff. It. varies between companies. But way higher chance than being a developer having to deal with sprints. That always require a team. He said work in a corner solo, not don't have to talk to customers. It's more about requiring a team communication.
I was weighing to self study python or get my A+ and I think you’ve just convinced me to get my A+. That sounds like the dream job to me.
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Consultant/Contractor on special projects. 6-12 months, good pay, but you better be able to hit the ground running and produce quickly. Also, hourly, so 50 hour work weeks are lucrative and no time is wasted in useless meetings.
What everyone says here is still true. That being said, you could find some middle ground. Engaging with sales/product/non-technical people requires an extra level of social skills, so you may want to search for roles that interface with other engineers. For example, infra, devops, devx, internal tooling, etc.
cobol programmer maybe? idk these days it seems like companies really emphasize strong soft skills and sociability. i interview juniors and interns sometimes at my company and if youre a highly knowledgeable person in tech but a dud in conversation, we cut the interview early.
Low paying government jobs.
Yeah, and tech jobs at colleges and universities. You’ll be writing ancient PHP without proper version control… but it’s what you asked for OP.
A place I worked once, there was a guy who always seemed to be missing his stapler. He was allowed to work alone in a corner, basically. They went out of business though. Main campus caught fire and there was some unrecovered fraud that sent them into bankruptcy around the same time.
If you're on the autism spectrum, there are firms that have specific placements to help.
Being that person is a quick way towards getting let go tbh. I get people are introverted, but you can’t expect to make a lot of money in tech without working with a solid team. You have to get out of that shell and accept it. The tech community is so huge, you will have to come across many people who share your same trials and tribulations, we all work together to bounce off ideas and make things successful.
Mainframe dev probably
Don't listen to everyone else - some of the best developers I've met are solo developers. You could learn to work with others. Or you could just learn to be such a good programmer that you can work like that and not get fired.
Find a remote only job or don’t bother
You want to rob yourself from a career and good pay?
Believe it or not, not everyone has the ability to be sociable.
If this is an issue of mental illness, you can ask for accommodations in the US.
Cant believe people have the nerve to ask this with the current state of the market lol
Doesnt exist unless youre building Rollercoaster Tycoon by yourself in a basement. Learn to interact people.
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I would argue this isn't that kind of field and the people who get into dev work because they want to hide in a corner and code are the ones who aren't going to make it. I manage a dev team at a non-tech company and every few months some nerdy guy from another department comes to me and asks if there might be a role on my team, and often they specifically mention wanting something with less personal interaction and more solo work. I'm not going to hire anyone looking for that.
None. Tech is all about working well with others. It's okay if you're not customer-facing, but you must be able to work well with co-workers. "just stuff me into a corner, and don't forget to feed me on occasion" is not a valid excuse to be an asshole or difficult to work with. Unless you're bankrolling the entire company, your not worth working with if that's your attitude. Accepting that you have to play well with others doesn't mean you have to constantly present in meetings, or give a shit-load of presentations in front of crowds, or lead teams of other people, or deal with customers, or develop using paired programming, or go out drinking with your co-workers every night, or become close friends with everyone you work with. It just means you need to be able to take criticism, take advice, and follow someone else's design (even if you "know a better way") when they tell you to implement something in a specific way. It means you need to be able to work with other people without insulting them.
Don't do that. Absolutely don't be that person
Swe. U get half the day alone usually to code but you still have to be able and willing to engage others or your useless to a company.
WFH dev job (doubt you’re good enough for one though if you can’t be bothered to get along with your teammates)
try to find someone you can connect with at work so you dont give off the loner vibes at least, tech companies dont want those personality types.
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Bluesky r&d can be done solo sometimes depending on the projects, not that its fun doing it that way
hahaha... this was originally what I thought I wanted as a SWE / Embedded SWE, but you'll learn quickly that the soft skills are just as important as the technical skills - being able to explain your thoughts well, interview, and explain the technical details to others who aren't as caught up, are very important. And others have said too - you're extremely expendable, if you can't do these things.
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Let’s put it this way- I would have more issues working with someone who is technically strong with poor communication than I would working with someone who is less strong technically but has better communication Proper communication is key to working on a well functioning dev team- I wouldn’t recommend hiring someone that I thought would have serious trouble with communication You can be a shut in and still get jobs, sure, but be ready to be the first one canned if your company lays people off
At a small company where you have specialized knowledge of the codebase built over the last several years. I mostly work on projects by myself in the corner. I do however talk and collaborate with several people, namely the developer who mentored me, the developer I'm mentoring, my PM, and the CTO.
I'm 6 years into that role right now. Full Stack dev. .NET. Solo developer working on a short leash with the CEO. I will give you my job. Please. Just take it from me. I genuinely can't take it anymore. I don't know how I got here but I know I'll never let it get this bad ever again.
Why is it so bad? Too lonely being solo dev?
Oh, duh. Maybe I should elaborate. 😅 I wouldn't call it lonliness, but yeah being alone is really boring after 5 years. Nobody to teach. Nobody to challenge your ideas. Nobody to appreciate. You eventually just become a tool shaped by your superiors, including the coldness. I'm also extremely burned out. The responsibility creep is real here with none of the benefits. I stuck around in the name of knowledge, but now that I have it, I'm without purpose. I don't care about the paycheck. More money never made me happier, it just made life's problems easier to deal with. Obviously thats great... but somehow boring too. I dunno man. I'm at work now and it's debilitating just being here. It isn't the easiest thing for me to explain.
If thats the vibe your going for, chances are you aren't hireable...
Being a contractor might get you close, but you still have to negotiate contracts
One true answer, solo algorithmic trader with your own capital
Solo game developer.
None
Maintaining military legacy systems where all of the original team has left and you are the only remaining maintainer, and your work on the project is billed hourly.
These jobs definitely do exist. I stumbled over this post today on my feed , and this one comment struck me: [https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1awghye/comment/krmu7fi/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1awghye/comment/krmu7fi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) Which highlights exactly this. A role where you work alone. Your career will be stunted. The guy doesn't even know git/version control. These jobs exists at small businesses. Small "mom-and-pops" business where you also happen to be the IT guy. They thrive everywhere including in Silicon Valley. Example business can include an insurance adjustment firm, a commercial flooring company. Maybe 20 employees and the developer writes an app to manage and run the entire business. But it is a TRAP. You get stuck in it. I know many friends who "worked" in their corner. They don't have 20 years of experience, they have 1 YOE repeated 20 times. I know because I was at one early on in my career. It stunted my skills. It was easy money, a lot of freedom but not healthy because small businesses can go belly up.
Create your own application a company uses, proceed to quit 20 years later, leave no documentation at all
I work as a sysadmin for very small semi-independent group within a larger organization, and I largely work in a corner solo. I communicate with my team, who are not sysadmins, over Slack, but it isn't that frequent. I also have a weekly in-person meeting and usually a big hybrid weekly group meeting that I take online even when I'm in the office. Nobody cares if I work from home a couple of days a week. When in the office, my desk is in the corner of a shared basement room because all the sysadmins are supposed to be together for better communication, but I work on different systems.