I applied for close to 500 jobs and learned some things along the way. — This post was originally published at https://www.peterfraedrich.com/i-applied-for-483-jobs/ I was laid off from my position in June 2022 and suddenly found myself back in the job hunt with the rest of the 250,000 people who also got laid off around that time. I did a short stint back at a previous…

More like a half-truth. — As someone who has been actively job-seeking for the past few months (thanks layoffs!), and having been involved in hiring and recruting tech talent for long before that, there’s been a trend emerging in the job market that is actively hurting job seekers and benefitting companies in ways that may…

Not always, at least — There seems to be some confusion these days when it comes to the idea of tech debt and what it means for an organization. You can find a dozen articles and whitepapers on any given day that espouse working down tech debt at all costs, and they just so happen…

You can do everything else right, but if your DEI initiative doesn’t also address this one thing…well, you’re doing it wrong. — Spend any time job hunting and you’re likely to see one requirement pop up over and over again, mocking you like the dog from Duck Hunt. Sometimes its pinned to the top of the job description, sometimes it’s buried at the bottom in the small text, but it’s usually there…

This is going to be short, but it’s something that I have been seeing in increasing frequency and I’m sick and tired of it. — We all benefit from free and open source (FOSS) software. The backbone of the internet is built on it, services and apps you use on a daily basis are built on it; no one is going to argue that FOSS isn’t valuable or not an integral part of today’s technology…

A few points from my experience hiring engineers and how to interview for these specific traits — For the past five years or so I’ve been directly involved with finding, interviewing, and hiring DevOps engineers for various organizations, both large and small. In that time I’ve read too many resumes and LinkedIn profiles to count, but from that vast ocean of data, a few trends have emerged…

What is the blockchain and how it can be used for good — At its heart, a blockchain is a linked list. Each item in the list — called a block — contains three pieces of information: a timestamp, the data you’re trying to store in the block, and a hash of the previous item on the list. This links each block together…