What do you do when there's no jobs in your area and your developer with a family? That's what we're talking about in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. And you're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to provide you with the information and the insights and to try to answer these really hard questions. Really hard questions rarely have a silver bullet answer. And when I get these questions at developert.gmail.com, which everyone can always email me at that email. But when I get these questions in, it takes me a little while to work through exactly how I want to present an answer. Because most of the time there are multiple answers. Sometimes there is no good answer and really it's just trial and error. And that's the case for today's question. Today's question comes from listener Joel. Joel says, hello, I'm a new dev about a year in and I've moved back to my small hometown for my first real programming job. This is awesome, by the way. I love programming, but I can't stand this job. All of the other programming jobs in the area I've seen are basically the same. It's defense contracting. And I'm not really sure what I want to do. My wife doesn't want to leave for a bigger city since we have a family here to help with our young kids, but I'm afraid my career will stagnate if we stay. How would you recommend proceeding? I think remote is really my only option. Thanks for the encouragement and inspiration almost every other day, Joel. Joel, I think a lot of developers find themselves in similar positions to you. It's one of the reasons I picked your question to answer on the show. I try to pick questions that other people will identify with. And I think a lot of people are going to identify with this situation. You have developed some skills. You have some level of programming skills in your case, Joel. And other developers who are listening this, you may have some front end or some back end skills. You may have even picked up some design skills along the way, but the problem is like millions of other people you live in an area where there's not really a firm or there's not really a startup. And it's very difficult to find a job. And for those firms and startups that exist in your area, it may even be very competitive for the few people who are getting into that field. Part of the reason for this is because of the turmoil in this industry. In other words, there's a lot of energy being poured into computer science in pretty much every college and in the media. This is a huge push. People are picking up the training and the skill set in computer science, in programming and web development and application programming. This is something that people can learn, whether they're in school or whether they're, this is their second career. It's such a field of opportunity that a lot of people see this as a really good next step for them. When they don't really know what they want to do, this is a good next step. However, the grassroots economy or the small town economy hasn't really picked up the same rate. So you aren't going to find an application development firm in the average small town in the middle of the United States because the established firms are usually going to be in bigger cities where they can attract a talent without having to ask them to move. This is a problem that has multiple answers. Some of them really are waiting and seeing. We will eventually see smaller mom and pop application development firms pop up. The truth is we do have some of these, especially in web design, there's small mom and pop shops throughout the country because from 2000 onwards and really from the time that Facebook allowed businesses to be on Facebook onwards, we've seen a steady increase in the demand for digital products, even for very small businesses. The smallest businesses that you know probably have some kind of web presence and it's very strange to find a business that doesn't have at least a Facebook page. Some of these small businesses have created the demand for these basic web services. Typically HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a little bit of Facebook administration knowledge and you have a client. Unfortunately for people who want to make a career out of web development or more specifically, people who want to create a career out of application development, the demand in these small areas isn't enough to create a large company to create a firm. So you're going to find yourself kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, but there are some really good parts of that position and that's what we're going to outline for you today, Joel. But real quick, I want to talk about today's sponsor. Today's sponsor is Rollbar. With Rollbar, you can see what errors lurk in your code. Dealing with errors really is terrible, especially in production, trying to figure out what caused an error in production is incredibly hard. For many reasons, you don't get the same stack trace kind of output. Typically the error page is going to be a generic, something went wrong kind of error page. So you end up having to rely on users and having to rely on them remembering exactly what steps they took to actually get to the error. Then you go and try to dig through the logs and then you have to walk through manually yourself to try to see if you can reproduce the error and very often you can't reproduce the error, especially for seldom occurring errors. So Rollbar helps fix this problem. It works with all major languages and frameworks. You can start tracking production errors in just minutes and you can integrate it with your existing workflow. So you send errors to Slack or to HipChat or you can link your source code and GitHub in Bitbucket and GitLab and you can turn errors into issues with your favorite issue tracker, like JIRA or Pivotal or even Trello. So some of the customers, in case you're worried about the size or the scale of this company, some of their customers include Heroku, Twilio, Kayak, Instacart, Zendesk and Twitch. These are massive, massive companies and you've probably heard of pretty much all those companies. But those companies have been successful with Rollbar, you certainly can as well. So go and check out what Rollbar has to offer to you. You can get up and running in just minutes, head to rollbar.com slash Developer Tea and you'll get the bootstrapped plan for free. That's rollbar.com slash Developer Tea. Thank you again to Rollbar for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So we're talking about being in a small town or a town that doesn't really have any application development firms or software development or web development firms and trying to find a job. And specifically for Joel's case, trying to find a job that isn't in defense contracting. Joel, here's what I want you to do to begin with. First you need to clear your plate of possibilities. In other words, right now you have a few preconceived notions about what types of jobs you are willing to take or what options are available to you. What I want you to do is I want you to totally clear that away and then start from scratch and think about every possibility, every single possibility that you have in front of you. Of course, it's not really practical to think about literally every possibility, but all of the reasonable possibilities. And I can almost guarantee you Joel, if you're like most people, you've limited yourself to two or three simply because they're the most visible possibilities. So I'll give you an example. It's possible that you've decided to limit yourself only to companies that specialize in software or you've decided to limit yourself only to working with other companies in a full-time scenario rather than working as a contractor. It's also possible, Joel, that you've limited yourself to thinking about the next job move as your final job move or as the current job as the only job. Sometimes you may be thinking about the place that you live never changing, never growing, never having a new firm come in or perhaps yourself, never having the ability to start your own firm, your own agency. A very common issue that people have in a situation like yours, Joel, is thinking through this next move or thinking through their situation as if it will last for the next 20 years. And it's very likely that although a decision you make may affect the next 20 years in some way, that it's not going to stay the same for 20 years. It's almost impossible for it to stay the same for 20 years. So let me walk this out. Let me walk out how this actually affects you. Let's say for example that you do decide to work remotely for the next five or even 10 years and then eventually you and your wife decide to move, perhaps when your children are out of the house or maybe when your wife's mind changes a little bit or when a particular opportunity makes itself available to you. This is absolutely possible. You have to remember that the industry is always changing and therefore the world is always changing with it. So that means that for example travel is very likely to get cheaper. So remote work is going to be more in demand because if you do need to do a face to face day or a face to face weekend or even a whole week, that's more easily accessible at a cheaper price in the future than it is today. So strictly from a cost perspective, remote becomes more economically viable in the future for employers. So there may be a company that you want to work for today that is not hiring remote and they may hire remote in the future in the very near future even. It's also very possible that your current job, your outlook on your current job could change drastically. You could start to like your job in the future. This is something that happens all the time, especially as developers become more competent or maybe the people around them change the employees that they're working with change, maybe the project changes. This is also a possibility. So Joel, here's what I want you to do. I want you to do exactly what we've already discussed. Lay out all of these possibilities and actually identify realistic possibilities that you may not be identifying now. Think through in terms of year plans, right? Think through a single option, but instead think through entire five year timeline options. Right? I'm going to try to do this job for another year and during that year, I'm going to look for remote opportunities. That's an option, for example. You may say, okay, I'm going to do this job and I'm going to save up money to start my own firm in three or four years where I'm going to start picking up side jobs and developing a reputation, developing a self brand for myself, and then I can do jobs that are remote or local. If I own my own firm, I can choose the clients that I want to work with and you become the owner of that firm. That may be something you want to do. So once you have all of these possibilities laid out on the table, then I want you to identify the things about your current job that you actually don't like. This is going to be very difficult because you may identify it as, oh, it's kind of boring, right? Or you may identify it as the people who you're working with. What you're probably going to find out is that the things that you identify about your current job could possibly vary. In other words, they could change. So what I don't want you to do in any job, anyone who's listening to this, if you don't like your job today, what I don't want you to do is write it off too early. If you have a job, especially if you have a stable job, then it's partially your responsibility to make that job work for you. Of course, this is not including jobs where you are being taken advantage of or where you're being abused in some way, where you are truly in a scenario that is unhealthy. We're not including that. If it's a job, though, where you don't like the work that you're doing today or you want to practice different practices, you think that your coworkers are just kind of difficult to get along with, then I always encourage people to recognize those specific aspects because it's very possible that they either have some level of influence over those aspects. You have the power to change the world around you. You have the power to change your job. You have the power to even have these discussions with your boss or if you can't change those things, sometimes they'll change on their own. There are definitely jobs that really this subject matter itself just isn't really interesting. It's not motivating to you. I don't want to downplay that. I do think that is an important aspect of finding a career that you can really buy into. This is why I tell you to lay out all of those options and determine which of those options seem like they are really kind of the ideal version of the future for you. You're not going to be able to identify the things that you won't like in those scenarios very easily either. You may not be able to identify that you don't like being shut in at your house, so remote work may be not for you. You may not be able to identify the opportunities that working at a particular firm may afford you. You may not be able to identify your financial needs in the future. Keep that in mind as you're evaluating these options that there are still a lot of things that you can't identify. It's impossible to know the unknown unknowns, but I do have one final piece of advice for you. That is, don't try to make a dramatic exit. Don't leave the company that you're at now until you have a relatively solid plan. A lot of people shoot themselves in the foot by doing this. They leave their job because they think they don't have enough time to spend learning or they leave their job because they're really not enjoying it very much, not because of some some egregious issue where they're being abused at their job, but instead because they just don't like it and they leave their paycheck behind. The problem is very quickly your bills are going to catch up to you, right? Very quickly the reality of your fiscal responsibilities are going to force you into another job faster than maybe you were prepared for. So I'd highly recommend, especially in a defense contracting position, it's very possible that you're well paid right now. I would recommend building up a cushion before you make any drastic moves and try to create a plan for yourself so that you're not putting yourself in a position of unnecessary stress. Now I'm going to predict some very obvious questions or some very common questions and scenarios like this is remote work okay for a junior? Absolutely. Is remote work a viable solution to a problem like this? Absolutely. How do I find a remote job? This is a harder question to answer, but a lot of it just comes down to putting your feet on the ground and doing the work necessary. In other words, doing a lot of googling, sending out a lot of resumes, paying attention to job boards, going to sites like hired, they've been a sponsor of Developer Tea in the past. There are other job sites that aren't coming to mind because quite frankly, I'm not searching for a job right now. So I don't know what all is on the market, but that would be something that you would become an expert in. You start looking and finding things that make sense. Now with this comes the reality that building your portfolio is going to be important. Now every year that you stay at your current job is another year you get to add to the most important piece of your resume. Hopefully you know what this is. The most important piece of your resume is the number of years of experience. The number of years in the field actually doing this job. So even if you don't love your job today, remember that the longer that you stay at that job, the longer that resume or the more powerful your resume becomes. The more money that you can make to pay your bills, the longer your runway for shifting to a different option. So absolutely, and you're hearing a lot of opinions on this episode. I really do believe that finding a stable solution in between jobs is super important because the moment that you get behind on your bills, the moment you go in debt and the moment that your livelihood is threatened, then no longer does it matter whether or not you are enjoying your job. You have to be able to pay your bills. You have to be able to meet that minimum. So you're much more likely to find a job that you enjoy when you have the freedom to say no to jobs that you don't enjoy. In other words, when you are in a position of financial instability, then it's very hard to say no to money. It's very hard to say no to a job that by all accounts is good enough other than you don't really like the thing that you're working on. So keep the job that you have until you find a reasonable solution, a different job that takes its place that you do really look forward to. So a quick recap of your step-by-step actions that you can take, Joel. Number one, clear your options palette. Clear all of the options that you currently have on the table and rebuild them from the perspective of even allowing the crazy options onto the table. You need to be able to see more of what is available. Don't hold yourself into one or two or three options if there are more to you. And part of that is, this is really step two, create that plan with future years in mind. In other words, don't just look at it as if it is one decision that's going to last for the next 10 or 20 years. Look at it as a series of decisions or a pathway. And that opens up the number of options. That opens up tons of flexibility that you probably weren't thinking about previously. The third thing I want you to do is explicitly identify the things that you don't like about your current job. Be as detailed as possible in this. Make sure you're recognizing what things are variable, what things could change, and what things almost certainly won't change. And then the final tip, this isn't really a step, but it's a final tip, keep your current job until you have a solidified plan, a safe plan to move forward. The last thing you need in this kind of position is financial instability. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Develop a Tejol. I hope some of this has been eye opening, inspiring, and giving you hope rather than making you feel constrained or otherwise like you or your options are limited. Really the world is much more flexible than we often feel like it is, especially in situations like this. So Joel, I wish you the best in your search and I would love to hear a follow up from you. Thank you so much for listening to Develop a Tej today. I hope you were inspired and I hope some of you who are in similar situations are given an action plan, a walking away with an action plan from today's episode to solve this difficult scenario for yourself. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Rollbar with Rollbar. You can start finding errors that are lurking in your code. Thank you so much again for listening to today's episode of Develop a Tejol. Until next time, enjoy your tea.