Long time listener Kpovoc is at a cross roads...

Hey Mike and Chris,

Been listening to the show since 2014. This is one of my “can’t miss” podcasts and I’m super happy y’all decided to start it up again.

I’ve got 2 questions for y’all.

I work as a senior software engineer for a large corporation that is a major DOD contractor. Recently, due to the White House mandate, my employer has implemented a policy stating all employees must receive their final vaccination by Nov 24th. Without getting too into the hot button issue of COVID vaccine effectiveness, I’ve yet to decide if I want to follow through with the shot, or try to find employment elsewhere.

Do y’all know of any resources for finding software engineering jobs at employers who are not mandating that all workers be vaccinated?
If he’s willing to talk about it, I’m also curious how Mike’s company is handling it, since they have 1 or 2 government contracts.

My 2nd question is, do y’all have any advice for getting through HR tech buzzword filters?

And example on my end is being turned down a couple of times over the past year by GitLab outright for not have “significant professional experience with Ruby on Rails”. Over the last 5 years I’ve worked with many different web framework backends professionally, including Java Tomcat, Node.JS Express, Python Flask, C# ASP.NET, and Go (network stack is built in). I’ve also played with Java Spring and Python Django on my own at home.

I’ve written full stack applications with all of those, and React.JS with both Redux and Flux. I’ve been the point person on several projects for implementing authentication/authorization and API’s using both REST and Websockets at varying degrees throughout the application (Full REST - full WebSocket and varying degrees between).

I feel fairly certain that none of those qualities even gets reviewed because I don’t have specific experience in rails.

Any advice is appreciated, and may y’all never again find an exit strategy from the show!

- Kpovoc