They may be hiring, but they're not getting back to me. I've applied to yahoo, google, twitter, mozilla, facebook as well as 30 smaller companies. Some aren't hiring people unless they have many years behind a specific skill set (Twitter), others haven't gotten back to me or rejected my application for different reasons (Didn't go to prestigious enough school, haven't worked anywhere with 1 million users, they wanted to hire a friend instead, etc etc.)
I think there's this veneer of can do optimism that pervades the valley. I honestly wouldn't be here if I didn't buy into it. But I kind of want to buy out of it at this point.
I see perfectionism as a behavior driven by two motivations:
A) The desire to go from competent developer to an expert one.
B) The desire to avoid the shame of failure.
In the case of A, I think its often good for the developer / bad for the product. By single-mindedly erasing imperfections, the developer learns the nuances needed to move from competence to expertise. I don't think the product is likely to benefit at the same rate, though.
I'll put some more work in those directions and send out some more resumes. Whichever way it goes, thanks for taking the time to give me some pointers.
Best jobs: Lets say a "good job" is 75k starting, not more than 50 hours a week average workload. Theres a lot of other things I care about more, but keeping it highly quantifiable might make the discussion easier.
Experience: 4 years as a php software developer with good recommendations, but no where with with a huge number of users.
Applying to about 30 places, the reasons I've been turned down have been:
- Other candidates worked at bigger companies.
- Didn't go to an impressive undergrad school.
- Failed 1 technical screen out of 10 taken.