If someone has a good portfolio and good referrals, you can easily tell if they're competent. But there are plenty of talented people who don't.
To extend the analogy, there are plenty of jugglers who are capable of juggling 3 chainsaws, but find that they can only get paid to juggle 2 plastic balls over and over again. Variation in their craft is punished, not rewarded. If you only look at whether they've juggled chainsaws before, you'll miss out on a lot of great talent.
I've seen many, many people who are much better than their portfolio or past accomplishments indicated-especially people in their 20s who've just happened to work at crappy companies and end up on bad projects.
Someone who's never juggled before may not be capable of juggling three chainsaws at first, but you can look at their athletic record in other areas, examine their flexibility, coordination, and willingness to practice, and use these to predict whether that person will be able to learn how to juggle chainsaws. How do you figure out which of these areas matters? By asking existing expert jugglers.
> I've seen many, many people who are much better than their portfolio or past accomplishments indicated-especially people in their 20s who've just happened to work at crappy companies and end up on bad projects.
This hits too close to home. I am trying to figure out what to do about it.
This happened to me. I had a streak of bad luck that left me with an unimpressive resume and made it incredibly difficult for me to get hired, even though objectively I was/am very good at making companies money.
In my case it came down to the realization that the standards people use to judge your skills are very arbitrary. Once I went out and got a few certificates I started getting job offers. Nobody cared about the fact that I was smart enough to learn SAS in two weeks or make my previous employers large sums of money, they only cared about the fact that I had the certificate. C'est la vie.
In every industry there's some sort of bar past which people start treating you like a real person. Getting past this bar often has little to do with merit-think having a degree from a "prestigious" college or having exceedingly specific previous experience. Try to figure out what that bar is in the field you want to work in and how you can show that you've cleared it. Programming is a diverse field but a few bars I've seen people use (not saying I agree with these) are "has experience in Ruby/Python/Functional Programming/my favorite language", "has contributed significantly to open source", "recommended by someone I know who is competent", and so on.
The last one is IMO the most valuable bar to clear. The more you can get out and know people, and show them that you're competent, the easier it is to get better jobs and better projects in the long run.
I'm in the same boat. Just out of college and I wound up in a position that's not even close to what was advertised.
Hired to be a programmer. Showed up and they decided I was going to be a business analyst. I've got significant experience in .Net, Scala and NLP but I can't even get companies to reply to my applications. I despise my job but I can't quit yet and I can't find another job. I'm working on side projects to build up my portfolio but I right now I just really hate waking up and going to work each day.
That sucks. What part of the country do you live in?
My advice: keep learning cool stuff, go to networking events (e.g. meetups, especially related to NLP, machine learning, and Scala) get some job leads there. Cold-emailing your resume rarely gets you anything, especially when you're in a career sand trap. But you have a skillset that, if you're strong in what you've cited, is desirable.
You will eventually get a feel for how much investment you need to put into your day job to keep it, and you can use the remainder of your time (which may be 20-35 hours of your work week) to keep current with the skills you want. If you're writing code on company time, be careful and make sure not to use it for any closed-source purpose, because you don't want your employer asserting ownership.
You can get out of the sandtrap but you'll have to break the rules to do it. Stealing an education from a boss feels dirty when you're young and naive, but it's a necessary survival skill and, in a world where bait-and-switch hiring is common as dirt, not at all unethical.
I'm in Houston which is not a great city for that skillset.
I do extremely little for my job, so little I honestly started to wonder if I was missing something. Then I slowly realized my coworkers are morons. A few weeks ago, I was asked to create a directory structure for a bunch of incoming data files, a few hundred directories all told. Another person was tasked to do the same on a different server.
I spent about ten minutes on it because I wrote a shell script. He did it by hand and spent all day. Which, of course, is what I told my boss it took me as well. I just happened to use the rest of my time to read Akka in Action.
I've got something simmering for solving this problem. Can you do web design sort of stuff? I've never been so good with the HTML bits but need a nice front-end. Shoot me an email via my profile here!
I can't promise equity in a company, because this idea was looking more towards being a lifestyle business. Revenue/profits of operation would thus be the thing at stake.
To extend the analogy, there are plenty of jugglers who are capable of juggling 3 chainsaws, but find that they can only get paid to juggle 2 plastic balls over and over again. Variation in their craft is punished, not rewarded. If you only look at whether they've juggled chainsaws before, you'll miss out on a lot of great talent.
I've seen many, many people who are much better than their portfolio or past accomplishments indicated-especially people in their 20s who've just happened to work at crappy companies and end up on bad projects.
Someone who's never juggled before may not be capable of juggling three chainsaws at first, but you can look at their athletic record in other areas, examine their flexibility, coordination, and willingness to practice, and use these to predict whether that person will be able to learn how to juggle chainsaws. How do you figure out which of these areas matters? By asking existing expert jugglers.