Combating “Never Ready” Syndrome When Looking for Remote Development Jobs

The “Never Ready” syndrome is a horrible malady that affects software developers and is closely related to “Impostor” syndrome. Basically, it means that for whatever reason developers often feel there is always one more thing they absolutely must do before making their next significant career transition.

In this case, we are talking about transitioning to remote jobs. Developers with a year or more of experience in a brick-and-mortar setting may feel they need to learn some new framework, complete a new GitHub project, or have spoken at a local Meetup before they can feel personally validated enough to start looking for a remote gig.

The baseline standard we use here at Remote Coder for transitioning into remote jobs is either one year of work experience in your chosen programming language or two years of development experience in another language and at least six months of project work/training in the area you’d like to work in remotely.

If you have those basic requirements, you can hem and haw all you’d like about how your background could be better if only you had experience with <fill in random technology or framework here>, but you’re just wasting your time. The truth is that your background will never be perfect!

The fastest way to a remote job is to iterate through a series of first-round interviews. This exercise will do a lot for you. First, it may just land you that remote job you’ve convinced yourself you’re not ready for. Second, it will give you amazing feedback not only on your weaknesses but also perhaps more importantly on your perceived strengths.

When you have feedback on what prospective employers like about your background and what their concerns are, you can hone and fine-tune your approach so that you can be more effective in your next round of interviews.

If you’re worried about running out of interview opportunities, don’t! The remote development field is exploding. If you’re ready to go on that first round of interviews, we can help. For more information, check out the free ebook available from the banner ad in this post.