(Boosts encouraged!)
Hi! 👋
I’m Kat. I’ve been a professional dev for over 15 years. I maintained the NPM CLI for 5 of those. I sat in TC39. I work at Microsoft. I’m self taught w/a film degree and no formal CS edu.
Are you new to tech? What do you wish you could ask some1 like me?
Literally AMA
Hi! 👋
I’m Kat. I’ve been a professional dev for over 15 years. I maintained the NPM CLI for 5 of those. I sat in TC39. I work at Microsoft. I’m self taught w/a film degree and no formal CS edu.
Are you new to tech? What do you wish you could ask some1 like me?
Literally AMA
Reposted from
Kat Marchán
I wonder if early-in-career folks would appreciate folks like me doing little AMAs on here.
Comments
is there actually a (significant) pay difference and is it actually that much harder to land a job with just certificates and no degree
im in a position where i have to decide between taking debt for a degree or shooting for the skies with certs
I get the sense that if you’re in e.g. security or general IT or even ops, certain might matter more
For dev stuff?
I’m the highest paid person on my team. Including my manager. I have a degree in arts and not a single cert. I just like in CA :)
(*where* you live is much more impactful)
I got my first proper coding job because I was super active in the Common Lisp IRC channel and was already known in the community, for example.
The film degree was much more relevant because learning to communicate and also “here’s the result of my hard work, please tear it to shreds with ill-informed opinions” is an arts skill lol
(The bits from the (few!) linguistics courses I took– mostly intro level & Japanese– were interesting from a "how do languages evolve" perspective)
Whether they're good for your project depends on the type of project it is.
IMO your job when it comes to having clients like this is to give realistic, HONEST estimates of how much it might cost them if THIS SPECIFIC PROJECT doesn't have tests/docs/clean code/etc.
They are paying you for quick & dirty. Give them quick and dirty, and make sure you can move fast and shuffle stuff around agilely
Beyond that? It depends on the product. Small internal stuff and CLI tools? comments.
If you don't get customers BECAUSE you don't have good docs? That matters a LOT.
And I had so much fun I ended up deciding to make it a major hobby. But I never wanted to do it professionally
I finally caved and applied to a web shop and they took me in as QA. Everything just went from there.
But yeah.
Honestly I know a lot of really amazing non-CS folks, and our non-CS backgrounds have invariably helped us bring something unique.
And I mean… We’re still technically excellent :)
I would’ve lasted 3 months—I just couldn’t afford it so it took a while to be less depressed and then find a job
Even "I want something more challenging" will just create more questions than answers. Don't bother.
"I'm just really interested in what you're doing", though, is great.
Took a chance, I appreciate your time :)
Then I just moved laterally because I wanted to do something different
It has been incredibly, definitively important to me that I be seen and respected as an extremely competent, capable, and proven TECHNICAL person. Gender is absolutely tied up in this because there's constant pressure for me to do "soft" work.
But it is HARD WORK for people to keep seeing me, a woman, as primarily a REALLY GOOD DEV
So: fight it. Tooth and nail.
Design Patterns are not really a thing you need to learn much about after your first couple of years, imo. There’s only a few, and modern languages have mostly obviated Gang of Four
And the way you learn is by trying new things and messing them up terribly
But also, when I need a bit of guidance, I also grab a book and go through it.
Thinking about it, I think all the things you mentioned are concrete/hard enough skills tbh :)
There’s a lot more tools for this now than when I started (and networks)
hi! I'm a career changer (from physics); 2 years' SWE experience. leveling up recently has been energizing. poking about re what job to do next, less so. (solo parent and can't take a low paying job = fewer options)
I think these unicorns do exist and I think they also strongly look for people who appreciate this stuff about them over other applicants
Product: If you don't want to work on military stuff, don't apply to places that work with the DoD. If you're vegan, don't work at a place that uses animal materials in manufacturing, etc. Easy enough to research.
are companies sometimes more flexible about that than they let on in job postings?
You don’t have a lot of leverage yet.
I have 20 years' experience. early in my career, nearly a decade on medical imaging (computer vision, ML overlap). my 2.5 years' SWE experience is my only strictly "tech" work.
I was going to go for sr jobs req'ing 7+ yrs. wasting my time?
implementations are generally small - the proposal itself says perf differences will be marginal.
it's not necessary for something we can't do in userland - if framework authors wanted a shared package, they could do that. (and version it properly.)
And a bonus because I can't help myself: do you still see a place for us in the industry, and any tips on finding your footing when it's all shaky ground?
I want to be a voice of hope here. Like I mentioned elsewhere, just hang in there. New folks have a very narrow perspective of the industry but this latest genAI thing is probably very scary, but it would be historically unprecedented if it didn’t just… die
This is a grave mistake.
And it’s a lesson they will learn the hard way.
I’m the meantime, trust me when I say there actually is still room RIGHT NOW.
We need you. Terribly.
Look for the sorts of organizations that know they need you too.
you're going to have to bust your chops pretty early on, and you're gonna have to do significantly better than your peers to be treated equally at first
It'll level out after a couple of years, though. Except for some places, degrees are shrug
I recently counted how many programming languages I have actually done some coding in: 34
17 of those, I've done $professionally$
I have not been in the industry for 17 years quite yet
The added context has been massively beneficial, and improved my skills when coding in *anything*
As a Rust nerd, I also think Rust is really fun and you should definitely try it! 🦀
Rust will be extremely good at teaching you where things belong, and to pay closer attention to how data flows through your program.
Most folks used to GC languages could build that muscle, imo
the only reliable way to get your asking rate, or generally increase the amount you get, is to come to the table with another offer *in hand*
also, know your rights: you don't need to give them a number. But a lot of them need to tell YOU!
And because I live in CA, I know they HAVE to tell me. They can't dance around it. They just have to tell me what the upper and lower amounts are.
The "other offers" thing comes in _later_, though.
Not new to tech but since you are at Microsoft doing JS/TS I wonder...
Is dotnet going to get some official integration with Vite and frontend frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, etc?
Being someone from a non-CS background, my cover letter was basically everything
I think when your resume can’t speak for itself and you don’t have a network yet, you need to use your cover letter as your strongest advocate
Also I got really really lucky probably
If you use genAI, you’re basically doing the opposite of humanizing yourself
And tbh my results speak for themselves