Programmer 1v1 Interview Series, Episode 7: What I Thought About During Six Months of Unemployment

Hello everyone, I'm Shuangyue. Author of wangEditor, former senior frontend engineer at Baidu and Didi, elite instructor at Muke.com, PMP, author of Frontend Interview School.

I've been running a “Programmer 1v1 Interview Series” where I chat 1v1 with developers over WeChat voice or text, they share their situation and confusion, and I give advice. Below is the main content from the 7th participant (no personal sensitive information), shared for your reference.

Basic Info

• Gender: Male
• City: Shanghai
• Married: No
• Education: Bachelor's
• Years of experience: 5+
• Company size: Medium
• Employment status: Unemployed for 6 months
• Role: Frontend
• Industry: Internet - local life services

He has now received an offer, going to Hangzhou, with a 15% salary cut, and is in the background check process.

How He Views His 5 Years of Career Development

When he graduated 5-6 years ago, around 2020-2021, the industry was still in a growth phase, before involution set in, and the hiring market was hot. My courses also sold very well; everyone had a strong willingness to pay for learning.

Because he had self-taught programming in college, he was fairly capable as a new graduate, so it was easy to get an offer when he graduated. He later worked at a big company.

But after starting work, he gradually entered a comfort zone and became a bit unmotivated. He stopped following new technologies, like a frog in slowly boiling water, and only realized his shortcomings after being laid off.

Why Was He Laid Off?

First, he didn't keep updating his personal skills and stayed in the company environment's comfort zone for a long time. For example, React 19 had been out for a long time and he hadn't paid attention to it; Vite had been widely adopted for a long time and he hadn't used it...

Second, he wasn't careful enough at work. He caused several online bugs, leaving leaders with an impression of being “unreliable.”

Third, his communication skills were poor. He had trouble communicating with PMs, often offended people, and PMs went to leaders to complain about him.

Fourth, he had no sense of ownership. When a PM came back to him about work he had done before, he was unwilling to continue and told them to ask the leader to arrange it. In fact, he should have proactively taken on areas he was familiar with and gradually built his own business territory.

What He Did During Six Months of Unemployment

He was laid off in April this year. He immediately prepared his resume and started job hunting. He still wanted to enter a big company, and even wanted a salary increase. In May he got some interview opportunities, but he wasn't well prepared for algorithm questions or principle questions, and failed all of them.

So he went back to reviewing algorithm questions, principle questions, and reading framework source code, which took 2 months. During this period he also submitted some resumes, but June and July are the off-season for interviews, and he got almost no interview invitations.

At the end of August he started submitting resumes again, entering the hiring peak season. He received 7-8 interview invitations. After multiple interviews, he finally got 2 offers. He chose one, but was forced to take a 15% pay cut.

Summarizing his six months, he thinks what he did well was:

• During preparation, he submitted applications once a month and tried once, to see feedback.
• He didn't apply to just one city; he applied nationwide. He said Shanghai had very few opportunities, while Hangzhou and Shenzhen had more.

What he thinks he did poorly: he spent too much time preparing algorithm and principle questions, because many times these aren't asked at all, especially at small and medium companies.

He said he should have started practicing interview questions earlier, submitted resumes earlier, and tried to quickly find a job with the same salary, rather than aiming for a big company and a salary increase.

Finally, in the later stage of preparation, he also studied some Agent technology, and will continue to study Agent in the future. He also realized that pure frontend no longer exists; only with full-stack + Agent capabilities can one go further.

Future Career Plans

He is now quite motivated and wants to keep improving his technical skills and continue getting promoted and raises at work — but I have to pour some cold water on this. The current market isn't suitable for such excitement.

He believes that getting promoted and a raise at a company depends on technical ability. For example, as a frontend or full-stack engineer, you should be familiar with all the technologies in the company's internal projects, whether or not they are your responsibility, such as event tracking, CI/CD, monorepo...

So he said that in the future he wants to practice all of these knowledge points, even if he doesn't do them at work, and build them into personal projects and open-source them on GitHub.

But I interrupted him here. In company promotion, personal skills are a secondary factor. The main factors are: 1. The promotion quota of the company and team; 2. Your personal contribution to the team and KPI score; 3. Whether your technical ability is comprehensive.

Technology should still be learned; it's your professional skill. But don't be obsessed with the idea that learning technology alone will bring promotion and a raise. Wrong expectations and wrong direction won't bring the right results.

Summary

This person and I have known each other for a long time. I had previously done resume reviews and interview consulting for him, and he has always been thoughtful. This time, although he had a six-month gap, he finally found a job smoothly and summarized a lot of experience to share with me. It was full of useful content.

If you happen to be unemployed too, you can prepare for your interviews based on his experience and lessons.