Another Frontend Developer or How to Waste Three Years and Not Be Able to Find a Job

Chingachkuk was missing for three years. Actually, he was not a stranger to IT. He worked as an engineer for six years and knew a thing or two.

He was in no hurry to find a job as a programmer, because programming is a difficult craft, he thought. He wanted to write code that he wouldn’t be ashamed of. He had money and other work, he worked hard and waited for the realization to come that he could write something worthwhile. One day it came.

2024 began, and he found a client – a printing company that had a mess with accounting in the warehouse, and it was a pity to spend money on implementing 1C. Continuous production and now another material is needed to launch a batch, and it seems to be there, but it is not in the warehouse, and production was stopped. They signed a contract with Chingachkuk, together hoping to fix a childhood illness. Chingachkuk quit his job and a few months later gave birth to an application that tracked life in the warehouse: who, when and how much was taken or brought to the warehouse, advised when it was necessary to buy something and drew statistics.

Then there was another food ordering app. Adaptive, authentication, personal account, storing profiles, shopping carts, order history on the backend. He really liked it himself.

At the end of June, he decided it was time to look for a job in the company. The stack was standard – TS/JS, ReactHe also worked with Redux, React-Query, React-hook-forms, Styled-ComponentsIn the first three weeks he responded to 450 vacancies that he matched in terms of skills and one year of experience. He was called to two interviews.

First interview – a small product company. Technical interview, did great, then need to do a test at home. He did, sent and received a response that we plan to search for another 3 weeks, and then we will decide who to take. A month later, that vacancy was still open on HH.

Second interview – the outstaffing agency wanted to sell him to a Sber project. HR added two additional years of experience to his resume (I adjusted it a little, as she said). First, an internal tech interview, then an interview with Sber. Chingachkuk was incomparable in everything except TypeScript, he honestly said that he uses types and interfaces, and knows generics and overloads more in theory. The Sber programmer replied that Chingachkuk was great, but they typify everything that comes to hand and if they find a powerful typifier, they will hire him. And such a person was found.

Chingachkuk decided it was a sign and sat down to study TypeScript more deeply. Then he started looking for a job again.

But this time, luck turned against him. Two weeks of responses – and silence, 150 Once he sent cover letters and received rejections everywhere.

Then Chingachkuk decided to experiment with his resume, using forbidden methods. Following the example of the HR manager, he added two years of experience and increased his salary to get into a different weight category, responded for a week, but luck did not return, there were no invitations, and he returned the salary to its previous place, then cut half of the black experience, then further reduced the salary and finally deleted the ill-fated inflated experience, thinking that a curse was embedded in it, but he was never invited to interviews.

And then Chingachkuk became sad. The colored letters and numbers on a black background no longer attracted him with such force, for he lost motivation, since he did not see a reward for his work and did not see a successful outcome. He wandered around the apartment thoughtful and silent, and then opened the second resume – the manager's resume.

What Chingachkuk understood:

1. The competition is colossal. An army of people willing to work for free stands at the door of everyone who posts a vacancy for a front-end developer. He saw a thousand responses to a position in Moscow where, with two years of experience, you have to sit in an office for 70 thousand rubles.

2. Experience on a resume doesn't matter. Chingachkuk hoped that, having gained experience, it would be easy to move forward. But he saw that even three years of commercial experience did not guarantee success. In the end, chance would decide everything.

3. Juniors are not needed, at least middles are needed – everyone knows this. But did everyone think that if you start as a middle, then the demand is the same as from a middle, and there is no right to ask questions of a junior, no right to work at the speed of a junior, as well as no right to make mistakes of a junior.

The last time I saw Chingachkuk was last week, and we were talking about finding work again. I could see that he was disappointed. The craft that had attracted him for so long and the sparkle in his eyes were beginning to fade and dim. He no longer talked about what projects he wanted to paint. But the warm wind still blew through his unruly black curls, and the sun continued to playfully reflect in the muddy puddles left by the morning rain.