Did Gayle write this? It’s hard to believe that someone who has published multiple best selling books would be struggling with looking for a job and even with paying rent.
EDIT: It’s probably not her. Gayle has a CS degree from upenn while the author of this article states that s/he is not university trained.
No, it’s a guest post. She added a note about it being a guest post now (it wasn’t there when I first read it)
Note that the Substack owner (Gayle) has an incentive to convince you that tech hiring is broken; She is the author of a famous book about how to master tech interviews. This anecdote about someone quitting a contract job 3 months in, putting a 4-5 month gap on their resume, and then wondering why they’re not immediately getting job offers from the first companies she applies to in the middle of a huge tech recession isn’t really a mystery. It’s presented as if the person is merely being unfairly rejected by bad interview processes. The implicit story is that you’re supposed to buy the Substack owner’s book about coding interviews to overcome this problem, but the anecdote author is going to have to tap her network and apply to a huge number of jobs to overcome her less than ideal resume.
> Note that the Substack owner (Gayle) has an incentive to convince you that tech hiring is broken; She is the author of a famous book about how to master tech interviews. (...) The implicit story is that you’re supposed to buy the Substack owner’s book about coding interviews to overcome this problem
One explanation is that she wants to convince you that interviews are broken and that you need to buy her book (or hire her as a consultant to improve your hiring process).
Another explanation is that thanks to her decades of experience in the field, she honestly believes that she can help you nail these interviews if you know what to learn, so she created the books to help you prepare for the interviews, and get well paid and (potentially) interesting jobs.
In the first, she makes up a problem only to sell you the solution. In the second, she identified the problem, and created products to help you overcome this problem. When both are reasonable explanations, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.
I don't see how it's "less than ideal" to end a contract job when the contract's up; even if it's contract-to-hire.
And I don't see how a 3-month lacuna in your resume makes it "less than ideal". I took four years out when my kids were small. Oh, I worked - I learned new languages, burnished my skills, and made a little money selling some software I had written; but on my resume, it looked like I'd taken a 4-year holiday, which I'd dressed-up badly as some kind of freelance work.
FWIW, I'm not a good programmer either, despite having spent most of my career programming. I'm fine with a block of code, or a module; but beyond a certain level of complexity, I don't seem to be able to produce clear designs.
Were I the author, I wouldn't want for someone to know my name either.
The last thing I would want for a potential employer to know is that I was in a self-confidence crisis or that I might even be right that I wasn't a good developer.
It claims to be a guest post, but it honestly reads very much like a fictional story carefully written to emphasize the importance of her books and services, while also maximizing engagement/outrage. The character doesn't seem super plausible either in terms of the history or in terms of how they respond to failures.
It's confusing. It feels like it's written as a joke to highlight that we shouldn't feel bad to get interviews rejections. But It's missing the punchline.
So is her blog hacked or is this someone impersonating her?
I also generally don't understand her background, and I see this quite a lot with Silicon Valley backgrounds, so it's more of a general commentary on these types of backgrounds. She went from being an engineer for just three years out of school to founding a consulting firm, publishing company, and publishing books on cracking code and project management interviews. How does that jump happen? Where do people like this get the experience and expertise to write books like this and consult despite only ever having one full-time job before jumping into it?
> Where do people like this get the experience and expertise to write books like this and consult despite only ever having one full-time job before jumping into it?
Many of the mid-range successful small SaaS companies sell courses/books/newsletters to other people trying to start their own SaaS companies. It is one of the annoying parts about the current indie dev scene.
The qualifications of the people running these companies is usually questionable.
They might be wealthy and not have needed to spend much time on the traditional career track. Nothing against them for that. I have observed this a few times.
Or they may have support in other ways, friends, family, partners, something, such that it was possible to make the switch.
its more profitable to sell shovels. Hell i wish i had the idea for leetcode.com, the amount of time i invested in doing leetcode, i might actually have a viable business instead of spending hours doing random puzzles.
Yeah, this was a very confusing and unhelpful aspect of the post. It's not clear until too far in that it's not her. She should have prefaced it by saying it was reader-submitted (or however it ended up on her substack).
EDIT: It’s probably not her. Gayle has a CS degree from upenn while the author of this article states that s/he is not university trained.