[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?
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Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?
I've been tinkering with code since a young age and I like thinking
my way through problems and understanding the way computers work,
but I've never had a programming job. For the longest time, I went
in other directions even though I enjoy it a lot, because I was
told that I shouldn't spend my life in front of a computer. It
turns out that I do that anyway, just not being paid for it.
Without any programming jobs on my CV, what is a good way to
penetrate into the market? I've had job interviews where I did a
bunch of coding challenges (and passed), but didn't get accepted
because of lack of experience. I considered that maybe I need to do
a bootcamp as an initial way to back my skills up.
Author : neontomo
Score : 156 points
Date : 2023-01-01 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
| lizknope wrote:
| What kind of software have you written? Open source projects you
| have worked on that are on github? Microcontrollers you have
| programmed for home automation? What have you done that proves to
| a company you can write software?
|
| A coding challenge for 1 hour is the minimum. It isn't a real
| system that does useful stuff. What can you show them that is
| real?
| hyperific wrote:
| I can't comment about industry jobs, but I was hired at a
| university bio lab with only hobbyist experience in programming
| and my degree was only tangentially related to the position.
| jolux wrote:
| I made friends with a lot of professional programmers so many of
| them were aware of my skills. Eventually one of them helped me
| get my first job despite the fact that I had just dropped out of
| a CS program because of depression. I wish I had a better answer
| for you, but a strong professional network is always going to be
| key to your career prospects.
| BlueDingo wrote:
| It probably won't be feasible due to cost, but my CV was noticed
| instantly once I enrolled in a Computer Science bachelor's degree
| program at a local college. I didn't have the degree and was
| still in my first year but that seemed to help get through the
| first-pass filter. My knowledge and skills were then apparent
| during interview.
|
| If you live somewhere with free or cheap public education then
| this might actually be easy. And even though I never finished the
| program (due to life reasons, not my intention) that first year
| really helped fill in some low-level gaps in my knowledge.
|
| So! Not good advice but it could actually help if you've tried
| everything else.
| profile53 wrote:
| Can confirm this advice. Highly recommended to explore comp sci
| programs at local schools or online; check WGU for example.
| dboreham wrote:
| The secret is: everyone's a hobbyist. I would just persist until
| you find someone willing to hire you. Also work on open source if
| you're not already doing that.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| The solution is "make a job appear on your resume" (not faking
| it). Some ideas: do some freelance work (underpaid, but still
| paid) you would need to find somebody willing to engage business
| with you. Alternatively, non-profit or you can even work at your
| own saas/software: it doesn't need to be successful, but it still
| counts as work (it can make zero money and you could just say
| it's failed startup)
| schipplock wrote:
| Look out for companies that hire people for the sole purpose of
| hiring people :). Then be a good programmer there.
| eamonnsullivan wrote:
| I've had two (main) careers -- I was a journalist for 20 years,
| starting as a sport reporter for a local weekly, and ending as
| the legal affairs editor for Europe for a international news
| service. But I had _also_ been a computer geek for at least as
| long. My Dad worked for IBM and I had one of the first IBM PCs,
| which was utterly useless when the family got one unless you
| could program in BASIC. I took a few CompSci classes in college
| (but got a degree in history) and used those skills often in my
| journalism career, even creating one of the earliest web sites
| (and announcing it on TBL 's email list at CERN).
|
| My second career is as a software engineer. I did it by
| leveraging my domain knowledge and going into R&D -- looking at
| how to design software for journalists to help them be more
| accurate and faster. For example, how to draw the eye toward
| areas where mistakes are commonly made and how to handle mundane
| things automatically. (These kinds of things are important on a
| news wire, where competition is measured in seconds.) Eventually,
| it was evident that I knew as much about programming as the
| programmers and things took off from there. I'm now a Principal
| at the BBC.
|
| (Edit: I've been paid to program now since 2007, so I'm probably
| well on my way to having a second 20-year career before I
| retire.)
|
| So, basically, start where you are, using what you already know.
| That's more valuable than you think. Most programmers know
| relatively little about their users, and one who knows can be
| very valuable.
| hnarn wrote:
| This is great because it highlights something a lot of people
| don't understand about writing software professionally: you are
| a translator of domain knowledge into useful applications. If
| you have a lot of domain knowledge in something, regardless of
| what it is, if you also write software it would be a waste to
| not improve that domain for all of those who are just like you
| but do _not_ write software.
|
| It's not about being a 10x developer, it's about identifying a
| problem and solving it.
| oneplane wrote:
| The same way everyone else does: have a compelling offer (towards
| the people that have the vacancy). Sometimes your offer can only
| be compelling if you pass some gates like having a certification
| or having studied a specific subject etc. If those were the types
| of jobs you'd like to have, then getting hired means getting a
| certification/diploma.
|
| The other way around applies too: if a job simply needs you to
| show them that you can do the work, a portfolio can be enough,
| just like getting a contract job with a supplier can be
| (technically that'd be like a portfolio with internal stuff they
| already know about).
|
| For jobs where you primarily need to be able to do the work:
| - Showing off technical skills in various ways and shapes -
| Showing off interpersonal skills in various ways and shapes
| - Build up experience in non-hiring areas (communities, FOSS,
| contract work)
|
| That last bit can be hard since contract work usually doesn't
| allow you to talk about what you did in detail.
| t43562 wrote:
| I don't know what's a generally good plan but I'm starting to
| know what makes me want to hire people:
|
| * 1 skill I really need - a language or a technology
|
| * Attitude
|
| I like to work with nice people and I don't care how "good" an
| arsehole is. So I'm looking for someone with give and take that
| my team would enjoy going for a beer with (or just a j20 or
| whatever) and someone who is interested in programming and
| computers generally - not doing it just for the money. They must
| have a little flexibility - be able to take some suggestions and
| yet also come up with arguments for what they think is best. You
| have to be able to review code whilst being very nice and not
| insisting that everything should change whilst at the same time
| pointing out the critical things that probably have to change.
| Egos get bruised so social skills help a lot.
|
| I do have a bias towards degrees because I've met experienced
| programmers who do silly things just because they've never heard
| of "Big O" notation and never seen a parser generator in their
| lives so they think they are up for writing parsers manually. Or
| the one that thought he had sped up an MD5 algorithm by
| 1000x....... I just feel safer if I'm dealing with a person who
| groks some of these things but in the end I've accepted people
| without degrees who just gave me a good feeling about their
| openness to learning and general reasonableness and thus far in
| my experience I was not too wrong when I went with that.
|
| I don't care about quickly programing some exercise but I want to
| give them code to write before the interview so that we can talk
| about it like a code review and we can see if they understand the
| ways we might criticise it or suggest improvements themselves. I
| want to see someone writing stuff that I would feel reasonably
| happy about maintaining not something that is so clever that
| everyone is at their limit of understanding when trying to read
| it.
|
| I've met people who make a lot of effort but don't think in terms
| of algorithms very well. Their code is full of logical flaws but
| they are really great at reproducing bugs and doing other
| technical things - they possibly shouldn't be programming but
| maybe QA or something similar.
|
| I've met people who can write algorithms but are very quick to
| give up when they hit a difficulty. They call out for help too
| soon so I ended up helping them all the time. Often the only real
| difference between me and them in some situation was that I felt
| I could not give up because there was no-one after me who could
| do anything for them if I didn't. I like people who struggle a
| bit before asking for help - they end up understanding the
| answers.
|
| I'm not too familiar with bootcamps but I think I value someone
| having experience with debugging - with working out something
| that isn't going as it should or which they don't understand well
| enough to just know the answer but they set out in a logical way
| to try to work out what the answer is. This isn't strictly about
| programming but sort of seeing if they get the idea of divide and
| conquer etc.
|
| I don't want to have to explain why code without tests is useless
| - and that's something that a lot of "experienced" programmers
| don't agree with - a bad attitude to that turns me off instantly
| because I don't want to have to fight the battle to change their
| minds.
| echan00 wrote:
| Side projects you built and can explain in detail
| TrackerFF wrote:
| You apply for jobs, most often jr. positions. Look for ads that
| explicitly state you don't need a formal education.
|
| Companies have become much more accepting when it comes to non-
| traditional hires, in the past 5-10 years.
| neilv wrote:
| You might see whether your local community college has good
| classes that supplement what you already know, and what companies
| hire software interns/co-ops/newgrads from there. (Long ago,
| this, and luck, was how I jumped from self-taught, to a co-op
| student at a first-rate engineering company, and maybe it can
| still work.)
|
| And some colleges/universities have options for students outside
| of a Bachelor's degree program. These might or might not teach
| better than a community college. (But "Harvard Extension School",
| for example, will probably get past more resume screeners than a
| community college.) Both might teach you more than a bootcamp.
| And, again, look for something set up for internships, or with
| relationships with specific employers.
|
| Beware that the field is absolutely flooded by everyone in their
| dog, and it's hard to distinguish yourself. I suppose the upside
| is that there's so much not-so-stellar work being done, that a
| newbie could their foot in the door at a typical place, survive
| while they contribute, and grow from there.
|
| But this flood also means that people hiring will reach for a
| kind of gatekeeping (to narrow down the pool of candidates, and
| to try to cement themselves as a superior in-group), which, at
| the moment, means you probably need to practice for Leetcode
| hazings.
|
| If you have a lot of time, doing open source is an option to
| eventually stand out, but if you do this, pick something in a
| space where people are hiring. ("I wrote a JIT compiler for a
| dynamic dialect of Haskell that targets GPU" wouldn't even get
| you considered for 99% of jobs, and most of the remaining 1%
| would insist you regurgitate Leetcode algorithm as performance
| art so they can "verify that you know algorithms" or so that they
| "can see how you think". "Yes, I looked at your GitHub, and it
| didn't have many stars." :)
|
| Also keep in mind that Copilot-like tools integrated into IDEs
| are going to let a lot of low-skilled developers launder open
| source code, to pass off as their own (justifying it as "I let
| the tool do the boilerplate, so I can focus on the more
| difficult, higher-level problems"). I don't know how the near-
| term evolution of this will play out, but it might be best as a
| force multiplier for low-skilled, low-quality work. You might
| want to be thinking about how to be on a path to eventually stand
| out for high-quality work, for which companies won't trust this
| generation of automation (even if they were willing to gamble
| with a Copilot-induced GPL lawsuit, and VC due diligence doesn't
| start smacking down for this).
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Make some programmer friends, become a reliable team member in
| some hackathons or game jams. One day, you will start getting
| messages about opportunities since they know you and believe in
| you and want you to succeed
| synu wrote:
| I did it by being excited to do jobs others didn't want. At the
| time, it was build/release engineering.
| marcusverus wrote:
| 1) Put your code on GitHub, add the link to LinkedIn and to your
| resume. Hiring managers and internal recruiters are inundated
| with applicants with no experience who expect to learn how to
| code on the job. The way you differentiate yourself from them is
| by making it crystal clear that you can do the job on day 1. (If
| you can't do the job on day 1, work on that before proceeding)
|
| 2) Ignore experience requirements, apply for everything (within
| reason). Some folks seem to have the idea that job descriptions
| are carefully hand-crafted by the hiring manager to present an
| exacting description of their needs--but this is rarely the case.
| Don't be deterred by the ubiquitous requirement for 3 years of
| experience. That said, don't waste your time applying for senior
| positions, either.
|
| 3) Seriously, apply for everything. Many (if not most) of your
| applications will never be seen for a human being--particularly
| when applying for entry-level jobs, which see the highest number
| of applicants. Even when I'm fully qualified for a job, I assume
| that I'll get a call back on ~20% of applications. In your
| situation, the percentage will be _much_ lower, probably less
| than 5%. Spam accordingly.
|
| 4) Track your applications in a spreadsheet, and follow up with a
| call to HR for the most promising ones. Tell the HR person that
| you know you're the right person for the job, and politely ask
| them to give your resume to the hiring manager. If you can find
| the hiring manager on LinkedIn, shoot them a (brief!) message
| saying that you've applied, why you think you can do the job, and
| include a GitHub link. Touchpoints like this elevate you from
| "just a name on a resume" to "actual human being" in the mind of
| the hiring manager, which is invaluable.
|
| 5) In the immortal words of Barney Stinson, "Ambition is the
| enemy of success." For your first job, just get a job. It will be
| infinitely easier to find _the right job_ after you 've got some
| experience on your resume.
|
| 6) If you get an interview and don't get the job, hit up the
| hiring manager on LinkedIn and ask if you can take him to lunch.
| At lunch, tell them that you've gotten a few interviews, but
| haven't been able to land a job. Ask for feedback, and make it
| clear that you aren't asking for politeness but for brutal
| honesty.
| wturner wrote:
| If you can pass employer coding challenges as easily as you say,
| the rest is low hanging fruit. It's hard for me to imagine what
| the problem is on your end. I have the complete inverse problem.
|
| Here's what I would do:
|
| Make up a name for your own personal company and get a matching
| domain. Make a basic website with your domain. Under the
| resume/CV entry for this make-believe-company write that you
| perform contract work and list projects you've done.Frame the
| entry to implicitly infer they were paid gigs. Don't lie about
| them being personal projects but don't say they were for free
| either! In the date entry for the job type a value that spans a
| time value of your choice, say 3 years.
|
| Congrats you've now been writing code professionally for three
| years. With your new contracting company you have the scaffolding
| to get new paid projects to boot.
|
| Welcome to professional programming.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| It's easy to see right through this little charade. If you
| label yourself as "CEO" or some related nonsense, any competent
| HM will throw your application directly into the garbage.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| At least in the U.K. one-person contracting companies are
| reasonably common. Though I do find the GP suggestion weird.
| Beefin wrote:
| this. i did the same :)
| culi wrote:
| For a junior it's not usually the coding challenges that are
| the biggest hurdle. It's getting an interview in the first
| place. Let alone having your resume looked at if you don't have
| prior industry experience
| the_only_law wrote:
| > It's hard for me to imagine what the problem is on your end.
|
| I imagine there are plenty candidates who can also pass the
| screens, but have a more substantial resume, among other
| things.
| lrvick wrote:
| I founded a community called #! 20 years ago where anyone can
| show up and start hacking on community projects and get some
| mentorship.
|
| We sometimes put bounties on things we wish to see done for the
| community, but in general we are a non-profit digital
| hackerspace and do not pay ourselves or anyone else. We
| encourage anyone that contributes that is unemployed to put it
| on their resume and we are happy to be referrals for them.
|
| Helped a ton of people get jobs in tech over the years.
| ensemblehq wrote:
| This is a great idea! Would be curious how you got started.
| I'd love to start something similar in our local community.
| culi wrote:
| Plug for exercism.org (I'm not affiliated). They have
| "learning paths" for a large number of different programming
| languages and volunteer experts that will do code reviews for
| you. The community is fantastic
| watchdogtimer wrote:
| Do you have a link to this organization?
| lrvick wrote:
| https://hashbang.sh
|
| Not much on the website. You will find us at the end of the
| rabbit hole.
| pizza234 wrote:
| Not sure this is an effective strategy (but who knows, it may
| work in some cases).
|
| As a dev who's been on the hiring side, it's very easy to spot
| people who adopt this strategy (where devs even define
| themselves as CEOs/CTOs... of fictitious companies), and for me
| it's a yellow flag.
|
| I personally prefer somebody who's very explicit (that is,
| looking for a junior position), but has considerable projects
| to showcase.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Job experience is a cheap proxy for _the ability to get things
| done_ : if you've had multiple programming jobs, then you've
| probably been able to get things done and so hiring you is a safe
| choice. The absence of programming job experience doesn't mean
| you can't get things done, it just means you need to demonstrate
| to employers that you can get things done in other ways.
|
| You don't need to do a bootcamp (and I'd argue it would not help
| at all) rather you need to ship something and then layer that
| with previous non-programming job experience to demonstrate that
| you can deliver things as part of a team. My greatest value (as a
| software engineer) is in the non-code value I bring to my team.
| Given the choice between 2 candidates, 1 with only experience as
| a software engineer, and 1 with experience of non-programming
| jobs, I'd be giving strong consideration to the person with a
| broader range of experience. Leverage your non-programming work
| experience to show that you can deliver value.
|
| Regarding passing coding challenges: coding challenges are a very
| lazy method that companies use to filter out candidates. Passing
| a coding challenge is easy and doesn't mean much (they're also
| just as easy to fail) so don't focus on them at all. Your focus
| should be almost exclusively on interviews, and you should work
| towards giving the interviewer as much confidence as possible
| that you'll be a valuable member of their team.
|
| Also, don't assume that levels (junior, mid, senior) correspond
| to the amount of programming job experience you have. If you can
| ship code yourself, you're already mid or senior level at most
| companies.
| roland35 wrote:
| We may think coding challenges are easy - but after
| interviewing many "senior" engineers I've found that it's very
| helpful to have _some_ sort of coding as part of the interview.
| Algorithm and Data Structures based questions are not really
| popular, but they are at least a known quantity and can be
| studied for as a candidate.
|
| I prefer more realistic scenario type coding interviews (ie
| implement a new feature, fix a buggy function, etc), but in any
| case it is impossible to actually verify what a candidate
| actually coded in their previous jobs.
| andrew_ wrote:
| imo falling back on those kinds of code challenges indicate a
| lack of imagination and creativity on the part of the hiring
| personnel. the industry has grown so much and there are so
| many new tools available, people work in so many new and
| creative ways, that there's no reason to use methods that
| predate when most candidates these days were born.
| josephg wrote:
| I don't agree at all. If it's so cut and dry for you, what
| other forms of assessment would you recommend instead?
|
| I think technical assessment needs to assess lots of
| skills, but obviously one of the skills to test is how good
| someone is at programming.
|
| There's a few ways to do that - my personal favourite is to
| have a few hundred lines of buggy code with failing tests
| and ask the candidate to debug it for you. But from the
| data I've seen, asking someone to code something from
| scratch also provides a lot of signal even if you also get
| them to debug something. (If you were going to pick one
| test, coding from scratch is a better assessment for
| juniors and debugging is better to assess seniors).
|
| But I think some form of practical programming assessment
| is necessary. You won't learn if someone can program well
| by talking to them. And take home programming tasks are too
| easily gamed.
|
| I do think you should make the programming challenge
| relevant to the job though. If you're hiring a frontend
| dev, get them to make a webpage. A backend dev? Get them to
| make a set of rest endpoints wrapping a simple database.
| Algorithm challenges make sense for systems programming, or
| when you're hiring generalists at FAANG and such.
|
| (Source: I've interviewed over 400 people and worked with
| data scientists who looked at the per question results.)
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I don't see how expecting candidates to know algorithms by
| heart or solving complex algorithms is useful.
|
| Whenever I encounter that at work I research the topic
| extensively and learn or re-learn whatever it is I need.
|
| I completely agree on testing on real tasks, given some
| candidates who perform terribly on those manage to squeeze by
| (even thanks to them passing leetcode bs interview without
| having real world experience).
| josephg wrote:
| I think I broadly agree for most programming jobs.
|
| Algorithm problems are based on the philosophy that if you
| can implement a binary tree in 20 minutes, you're smart
| enough to figure out just about anything else that comes
| up. They were popularised by Google, who hire with the goal
| of never hiring incompetent people even if it means missing
| out on some good people.
|
| There's two problems with algorithm problem interviews:
|
| 1. All the people who do great at this stuff can make
| $300k+ at cashed up companies. There are not many people
| like this who want to work for you.
|
| 2. There are plenty of people who will do a great job
| fixing issues and adding feature to your web app who don't
| know what a B-Tree is. You probably still want to hire
| them.
|
| So yeah, I agree generally with the advice. Most
| programming problems given in interviews should be relevant
| to the actual job on the ground.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > Passing a coding challenge is easy
|
| Something must be wrong with me then because I've been
| programming for decades in multiple areas productively, but
| successfully completing three leetcode medium/hard within 45
| minutes while also talking through my thought process is not
| something I'd call easy.
|
| > so don't focus on them at all
|
| I'd suggest most people aren't going to get past the first
| level if they follow this advice.
|
| As for the OP though, since they already passed coding
| challenges, the advice might be appropriate for them. I'm
| actually surprised that there was no offer on any of the
| interviews where "a bunch" of coding challenges were passed.
|
| > If you can ship code yourself, you're already mid or senior
| level at most companies.
|
| I'd go with this idea. Make it clear that you can ship. If you
| can complete coding challenges, then you should be able to make
| a small game. And a decent website. And a SaaS project. And so
| on. Get a portfolio going.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| There is a difference between leetcode in fang and normal
| code challenges in normal companies
|
| Leetcode has zero correlation to your practical working life,
| code challenges are what you would do in a normal day at
| work.
|
| I never prepared for code challenges; if I had to prepare for
| leetcode I'd need a few months to have any hope.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Might it be fair to say that Leetcode as a proxy for much
| real world programming is like using heavy duty mental
| arithmetic to judge one's quality as a research
| mathematician?
|
| I think doing some Leetcode type challenges are important at
| some point - they open a door in your brain around problem
| solving, but that door tends to stay open thus grinding those
| challenges to me offers diminishing returns - if people get
| more out of them and enjoy them that is great, but I think
| anyone who has had the thrill of solving hard problems to
| contribute to a high quality project with real application
| has a unenthusiastic feeling towards Leetcode type challenges
| and the hollow achievement from finishing them relative to
| real work.
| andrew_ wrote:
| leetcode is a horrible proxy for evaluating critical
| thinking ability - it's simply performative measure of
| "preparation" and the ability to regurgitate on-demand. at
| least that's my take after a few decades in the game.
| phphphphp wrote:
| Regarding coding challenges, I meant to say that they're just
| as easy to pass as they are to fail, meaning you can fail one
| test and pass another and it mean nothing about your ability
| or value as a software engineer. I've failed some
| embarrassingly easy coding challenges and completed others in
| the best manner the hirer has ever seen. They're meaningless.
| You should not consider them as a reflection on your value or
| prospects.
|
| If you're consistently failing coding challenges, you have a
| couple of options.
|
| 1. Find companies that don't use them. 2. Push back against
| any coding challenges and instead offer to complete a small
| project for them that you believe will represent the way you
| work in totality -- advocate for the pointlessness of coding
| challenges and encourage the company to change their
| practices. 3. Cheat (and in the unlikely situation in which
| you're caught, just say "I solve problems by googling, like
| any good software engineer") 4. The worst option is to waste
| your time grinding through leetcode etc. and become good at
| passing these dumb coding challenges. I can see why that
| option appeals to us (it feels like a video game, like we
| _just_ need to practice more to level up) but it has nothing
| to do with software engineering.
|
| The fact that no offers were received by the OP after passing
| coding challenges should show how little they're thought of
| by hirers: they're a lazy half-baked way to exclude a bunch
| of applicants and feel like it was helpful / fair /
| meritocratic. A company using coding challenges may as well
| just randomly select 20% of applicants to go through to
| interview.
|
| Imagine you work at a company that uses coding challenges as
| part of their interview screen. Imagine they need to hire
| someone for your team. Imagine you worked with someone in a
| previous job who is an amazing software engineer and you know
| they would provide incredible value to your team. Imagine
| that person fails the coding challenge. Would that person get
| the job or not? In any rational company, you would just
| discard the coding challenge result, because you have a much
| stronger signal: one of your team is vouching for them. Any
| company willing to disregard a candidate because they failed
| a coding challenge is a company that is falling far short in
| their ability to hire the best people. For some companies,
| they don't care about hiring the best, they just need a bunch
| of people who can meet the bare minimum coding challenge
| requirement, but that's not a company worth working at.
| josephg wrote:
| > Regarding coding challenges, I meant to say that ...
| They're meaningless.
|
| They're not meaningless. I worked as a technical screener
| for a recruiting company a few years ago. We interviewed
| thousands of people and had good data on this stuff.
| Programming challenges had high signal - doing well at ours
| was positively correlated with all the other parts of our
| quantitative assessment (knowledge, software anrchitecture,
| etc) and ultimately with getting hired.
|
| There's a reason they're popular. It's not all cargo
| culting.
| [deleted]
| tonmoy wrote:
| If you know how to study and practice passing programming
| challenges are definitely significantly easier than
| programming for decades in multiple areas productively
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I think three in 45 mins is a bit hyperbole. Interviewing at
| Google I got 45 mins for each. At Amazon I got an hour for
| each. (Both mediums)
| spacemadness wrote:
| Yes, most places it'll be one question with follow ons
| related to it if you do well.
| turdprincess wrote:
| Reportedly Facebook asks two mediums in 45 minutes.
| tejohnso wrote:
| Not hyperbole. Direct quote and confirmation from FAANG
| recruiter. Maybe even after confirmation they were
| misinformed. Or maybe that was the suggested practice goal
| rather than what would actually happen in the interview.
| kfk wrote:
| mid to senior with no work experience seems quite
| unrealistic... work experience is not only a proxy for shipping
| code, but also for working well in a team, communicating well,
| being dependable and... so much more.
| timwaagh wrote:
| Being able to ship code yourself is a requirement for getting
| to junior level at most places. It's much easier than working
| on an existing codebase as part of a team
| franciscop wrote:
| I'd argue that part of "the ability to get things done" is
| exactly what OP is likely missing as a hobbyist: the ability to
| work with peers and superiors effectively. Doing a bootcamp is
| IMHO a good way to help on the ability to work with peers;
| while it's not the focus and you _might_ get bored on the
| coding side of things, that 's also good because it gives you
| time to think and act on how to collaborate more effectively
| (but only if the money you pay is something you can happily
| spend; don't go into trouble otherwise IMHO).
|
| Then you also need to be able to get your boss, stakeholders,
| etc. tasks and needs into account to build something for them.
| As advice here, you could probably try freelancing to get more
| knowledge. As a hobby, now you get an idea and have self-
| learned how to implement it. With clients or bosses, you need
| to get them to explain the idea, and go back and forth enough
| to understand it well enough without becoming annoying/more
| trouble than it's worth. Some clients will delegate more and
| give you more creative freedom, some will delegate less, and
| both might have different abilities to express their thoughts.
| It's your task to make sure you understand it all and are able
| to execute on their idea, complementing it with your creativity
| when needed.
|
| If you are in a good enough position, I'd start trying
| freelancing for family and friends small business at a
| discount, then try to get more and more real-ish clients. Once
| you have become good enough at freelancing that you are ready
| to find a job, you might even be able to convert some of those
| freelancer jobs into part or fulltime jobs, or at the very
| least showcase your work so far. I did that with a couple of
| internships and then a bit of freelancing.
|
| Note: this advice won't get you in Google, but IMHO it's a good
| path to get in the industry.
| robocat wrote:
| > I'd argue that part of "the ability to get things done" is
| exactly what OP is likely missing as a hobbyist: the ability
| to work with peers and superiors effectively
|
| Completely disagree: in plenty of other jobs people learn to
| get things done, and how to work with peers/bosses/reports.
| There is not much signal about the OPs soft skill level so
| you are making an assumption.
|
| Interpersonal skills tend to be strongest in people that are
| always working with others (particularly clients and peers)
| rather than sitting in front of a computer. I would rather
| work with a cook/hairdresser/etc that became a software
| programmer than developers completely lacking in motivation
| or lacking interpersonal skills (I have had the distinct
| displeasure of working with plenty of low-EQ developers in my
| past).
|
| There are specific interactions in software that are somewhat
| specialised. However the generalised interpersonal skills are
| what it is difficult to be good at, and the specialised
| software soft skills are learnable. (Edited: clarity)
| franciscop wrote:
| Agreed, I've made an assumption and I explicitly added
| adjectives to note so, like "likely", "IMHO", etc. It's not
| a crazy assumption though, OP seems pretty lost career-
| wise, no previous dev experience, unable to land a job in a
| world hungry for devs, and I'd argue they don't seem to
| have enough people-skills to figure these questions without
| resorting to the internet, all of which suggest to be
| either a student or pretty early in their career. Could be
| mistaken of course, just saying assuming it's someone early
| in their career to base my answer on something tangible
| doesn't seem crazy.
| ptero wrote:
| I also feel that broad experience with general technical
| exposure is very valuable. But it can be hard to sell it to the
| management.
|
| In my previous job I was highly respected, both technically and
| as a technology PM, but I still failed to sell many candidates
| without a good paper background.
|
| "Her degree is in _music_? That 's not great.", even though it
| was science focused, she had several acoustics and waveform
| analysis projects, strong math background and would fit well in
| our signal processing group.
| mediascreen wrote:
| I think it depends on what kind of programming job you want.
|
| In my experience hiring practices wary a lot between different
| types of companies. Getting a job at a FAANG type of company
| varies from getting hired by a local web agency, a consultancy,
| startup or just being hired to run the company website.
|
| HN tends to focus a lot on FAANG and well financed startups, but
| there are a lot of very different programming jobs out there.
| rubberband wrote:
| Late to the party, but maybe I can help. I've helped in the
| hiring of many developers.
|
| (grain of salt, just my opinion, etc...)
|
| * Don't do bootcamps. It's a red flag for me. This can be said
| for any 100% online college. (again, I'm just being honest).
| Community colleges are fine.
|
| * You having a Github that you've committed stuff to often-ish
| will most interest me. I don't give a crud if you contribute to
| open source. But just the fact that you're coding is what I care
| about. Yes, I will snoop around and see how good it is. No, I
| won't care if your code sucks. (side note: if your code is
| actually good, than that's better than a four-year degree at a
| college I've heard of imo)
|
| * Don't get discouraged. I remember I searched for a programming
| job for two years before I got hired. The 70-ish times I was told
| "no" didn't matter after the one "yes".
|
| * Be honest about where you are at (not programming
| professionally). I've always been open to hiring people outside
| the industry for entry-level programming jobs.
|
| * Coding challenges are beyond useless to me. I will concede that
| they are valuable to some.
|
| Hope that helped some. 80% of the advice given here is helpful as
| well.
|
| Good luck. Please don't get discouraged <3.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| Interesting. I've hired At least 100 developers in my career
| And have never seen coding challenges or boot camps as Red
| flags, rather I see them as someone going out and trying to
| learn and improve. On the contrary certain universities and
| employers certainly are( too much indoctrination(and ego in
| some cases) to undo). I know a number of boot camp graduates
| working in FANG level companies.
|
| Coding challenges are very important, leetcode questions come
| up a lot in interviewing loops at most big companies and I
| think their use is expanding. As much as I hate LC, it's still
| a good skill to have if wanting to become a software engineer.
|
| I've never once looked at a candidates GitHub. There is no
| proof they wrote anything there. Plus I've usually worked in
| domains that always required tools and knowledge you most
| likely wouldn't have anyways, no point in testing, so I hire
| based on if your a good person with the propensity to learn,
| grow, and do good things.
| jcpst wrote:
| I don't have hiring authority, but I was on a lot of
| technical interviews at my company for a while.
|
| When people put their GH handle on their resume, I definitely
| checked it out. Sometimes I would even see if I could get it
| running on the first try. This has been an indicator of some
| of practices they have.
|
| But it's only ever a small piece of the picture. Some people
| push their code to github when they are very junior, and it
| doesn't represent where their skills are currently at.
|
| There is the issue of forgery, but I lump it in the same
| category as lying on a resume- the deception is equally as
| serious.
| 88913527 wrote:
| Contributing to open source can be a valuable sign. It shows
| the candidate could navigate a large repository, communicate
| with the maintainers, and successfully merge something-- the
| ancillary soft skills needed when developing software in a team
| environment.
| [deleted]
| rubberband wrote:
| Ah crap, I messed up here, and I'm quite sorry.
|
| I was wrong when I said that bootcamps were red flags.
|
| When I stated "Don't do bootcamps. It's a red flag for me"... I
| should have said "Don't have bootcamps be nearly your only
| source of experience." Like, if a person rolls up with either a
| super-expensive boot camp, or a side project that they've kept
| up with for two years... It's no contest. I certainly won't be
| _mad_ at you taking the bootcamp. The criticism in the replies
| is valid.
|
| Again, sorry. I'll continue to work on that whole "maybe you
| should type what you mean." thing.
|
| As an aside: I forgot to mention how much I care about
| attitude. I'll take someone with two years of experience and a
| genuine hunger to learn over a guy with four years' experience
| who has an attitude. /shrug.
| culi wrote:
| Long time hobby programmer. I wasn't able to get into college
| programs for comp sci because I had transferred under a
| different major. I decided to do a bootcamp just to get
| connections
|
| It ended up working pretty much exactly as planned. Made some
| lifelong friends, one of whom seems to know someone in every
| city in the country. She got me an interview and I'm now making
| more than many people I know who went through a full 4-year CS
| degree at my very expensive university
| warent wrote:
| I've been a hiring manager for a couple of years now, and have
| nearly 10 yrs professional dev experience in the industry.
|
| Bootcamps are a red flag for you? What? Do you have any
| rationale for that? Makes zero sense to me. If someone has done
| a bootcamp, that's a big plus. Online college is neutral.
|
| The rest I agree with.
| tinco wrote:
| I've hired from bootcamps multiple times, it's a great source
| of junior developers. It is however a show of the absolute
| minimum amount of skill a person could possibly have before
| you take them on as a developer.
|
| If this person says that they've been coding for years, then
| that puts them at a way higher level than a recent bootcamp
| grad.
|
| Instead of doing a bootcamp, spend a week or two building
| simple apps in whatever category you want to work in. If you
| want to be a web dev, a little node.js backend with a react
| frontend perhaps, or similar with Django or Rails.
|
| Plonk it on your github, make sure you put on your resume
| that you're a junior that's been coding for years but never
| put anything in production, and you'll definitely be ahead of
| the bootcamp grads in my book.
| foreverCarlos wrote:
| That still doesn't make bootcamps a red flag. Also, there
| are many self-taught programmers who complete a bootcamp
| just to gain confidence, make connections, etc.
| champagnepapi wrote:
| Agreed
| bavila wrote:
| I know someone who took a bootcamp after completing a
| college CS degree because he felt that the CS curriculum
| didn't actually give him enough practical programming
| experience. Some CS programs are terrible, so I'm not
| surprised he found the bootcamp to be a benefit.
| chaps wrote:
| I think it's a red flag when it's also attached to a
| certain kind of confidence that their bootcamp experience
| was on-par with years of experience or education. As in,
| the kind of attitude where that they feel that because
| they went through the exhausting bootcamp stage,
| everything next is just an application of what came from
| the bootcamp. It's something I've only seen with
| programmers from bootcamps.
| foreverCarlos wrote:
| Honestly, never encountered that. In my experience
| bootcampers are usually self-conscious about their
| background. Maybe they behave differently at small
| companies/startups (my experience is at a big tech co)?
| chaps wrote:
| That could be it. I work outside of "tech" these days at
| smaller orgs that naturally attract people with
| significantly different personal motivations to those in
| the tech world.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| His red flag for bootcampers is a red flag for his managerial
| skills
| drdaeman wrote:
| Yea, this is weird. Bootcamps can be useful or useless
| (depending on a course, instructors and a person), but surely
| they don't do any harm?
|
| Not everyone goes there to get technical skills, there are
| people going there for soft skills (practicing working on
| assignments, especially group assignments, etc.) and
| networking (at least some bootcamps advertise they have some
| relationship with recruiting agencies).
| kace91 wrote:
| I've been training juniors and taking part in technical
| interviews for a few years now, and I can say that bootcamp
| hires were generally the best performant.
|
| Particularly those in late twenties/early thirties who were
| coming from an entirely different field - we had tons of
| applications from former architects and biologists for some
| reason - tend to outshine younger software engineers fresh out
| of school in just a few months.
|
| I could understand this opinion to be controversial, but
| considering bootcamps a red flag vs just a hobbyist programmer
| with no education? Sounds ridiculous to me.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I think it's because boot camp graduates often have no
| experience prior to the boot camp, so they'll often only have
| 3 months coding experience total. Whereas most other
| applicants will have much more experience than that even if
| they have no professional experience.
| Scarblac wrote:
| But in those few months, they were often trained
| intensively on exactly the tech stack you're looking for,
| and they built some things, in a team, that look a lot like
| what's actually done day to day in many businesses. In an
| up to date way. That helps!
|
| We have only one boot camp graduate, who came from a
| completely different career. He's been productive from day
| 1, has carefully listened to all advice he's got since and
| is always working on figuring out better ways to do things,
| and he's just very good after two years.
| josephg wrote:
| There are knowledge holes a mile wide with bootcamp
| curriculums though. The programs I've seen don't teach:
|
| - Information security
|
| - Anything lower level than Python/Ruby
|
| - Unix (streams, files, processes and threads, syscalls,
| etc)
|
| - Debugging. (Except incedentally)
|
| Not knowing these things can be fine in a feature factory
| workplace. But having an engineer on your team who has no
| idea about infosec is an active danger. "I make a sql
| query from this string builder" / "we save the passwords
| in this database table" / "the AWS credential is here in
| the javascript code in the repository" / etc.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > he's just very good after two years
|
| Right, but a self-taught developer might well have years
| of non-commercial experience and be good in two months or
| even from the get-go.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Bootcamps are a form of training designed for you to pass a
| job interview and use a scripting language to solve problems
| within a very well-defined problem space.
|
| Their deliverables require supervision because they don't
| have the technical depth to identify common non-functional
| requirements.
|
| Occasionally, troubleshooting the technologies you use is
| necessary, but this scenario is also beyond bootcamp
| training.
|
| But if you work in a startup that's making a functional
| prototype for some web application, where things don't really
| have to truly work or scale, you can waive the supervision
| and they may even be "the best performant".
|
| I've worked with bootcamp graduates and I've seen scenarios
| where they are unqualified to contribute.
|
| But to do them some justice, some universities are worse than
| bootcamps. And, these days, there's an abundance of material
| you can learn from... but it takes time, initiative and
| sometimes, mentoring to know what to prioritize.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| Most likely the difference in performance is due to
| differences in expectations. The two greatest common failures
| I see repeated among software developers is:
|
| 1) The inability to consider diverse perspectives
|
| 2) The inability to differentiate writing instructions from
| building something larger
|
| For example many developers cannot imagine the career
| requirements associated with other careers. That could be due
| to lack of experience diversity, poor empathy, or weak
| imagination.
|
| Likewise, many developers cannot write original software. The
| very idea is frequently both horrifying and disgusting. The
| alternative is just a little help from a tool or framework,
| because they write instructions not applications. The
| interesting part of that is how people respond when
| confronted about it.
| saurik wrote:
| I am having a difficult time inferring your meaning for
| "writing instructions".
| Jarwain wrote:
| I think there's a difference between a professional using a
| boot camp to switch fields, and someone using a boot camp to
| avoid going to college or something
| gatewaytonarnia wrote:
| In my experience it's not too hard to get an entry level role at
| consulting companies like Accenture, Deloitte, etc, there are
| also hundreds of smaller consulting companies. Create a resume
| that shows,
|
| 1. You can answer basic coding questions 2. You're able to work
| on a team 3. You have some soft skills to work with customers to
| learn about what they want, so you can build it for them
|
| The first step is to get that interview with the above resume.
| Then when you interview be sure to be transparent about your
| experience and interests and your desire to continue learning. If
| you're working with _good_ hiring managers this is the most
| important thing to them.
| [deleted]
| rhapsodic wrote:
| [dead]
| jeltz wrote:
| Do you have any friends who work with software who could put in a
| reference?
| yojo wrote:
| I had essentially the same background as you, and made the leap
| 10 years ago. Here's what I did:
|
| 1) With a friend, I worked through a bunch of tutorials of the
| current startup web framework (at the time, Rails).
|
| 2) At my non-programming job, I looked for opportunities to code
| things. I made some internal websites, utility tools, stuff like
| that.
|
| 3) I worked my way through Cracking the Coding Interview. This
| was pre-leetcode.
|
| 4) I applied to early stage startups that were desperate to get
| talent in the door. I tried two, and got two offers.
|
| 5) I learned an incredible amount getting thrown in. It was
| brutal at first and I get like I was constantly failing. But I
| had good co-workers who helped me over the hump. I learned an
| incredible amount. From there I was able to move up the ladder to
| the FAANG level pay.
|
| YMMV, 2023 job market is not the 2012 job market, but if your
| problem is "lack of experience", the easiest fix is to find a way
| to get experience at your current job. Most employers do not
| consider Bootcamps as equivalent to real experience either.
| jeltz wrote:
| Leet code interviews have existed for at least 15 years,
| probably 20. And they were much more popular back then.
| rwmj wrote:
| I would hire a hobby programmer (if they can pass the interview).
| In fact my policy when interviewing is to never look at CVs at
| all.
|
| But ... be prepared at least initially to take a junior position.
| This is because we may need to train you for working in a larger
| group and you may have a bunch of bad habits. Like not writing
| understandable code, not writing good (or any) commit messages
| for other members of the team (or even not using version control
| at all).
|
| The flip side to this is that junior developers where I work
| _can_ be promoted very quickly. One recent hire went from a
| junior software engineer to principal (2 steps and a substantial
| pay increase) within a year.
|
| Also while you're waiting to interview, please consider
| contributing to open source projects!
| SamPatt wrote:
| Good question, I'm in the same boat.
|
| Working on some simple AI projects to add to my portfolio as a
| start. OpenAI APIs are pretty easy to use.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| The main thing with college degrees is simply to get your foot in
| the door, as one responder said, if you've got something from a
| community college that'll be good enough to get you into the
| queue in most places.
|
| Next up, is being able to describe situations where you worked on
| a team doing software development, and how you handled things
| like unclear specifications, irascible colleagues or constantly
| changing priorities. Software development is a team game, we need
| to see how you fit into that team.
|
| Lastly then is your technical abilities, and this might be
| assessed at more of a system level than a coding level. If you've
| got this, but miss the other areas then you'll find it harder to
| progress to an offer. Just my two cents from sitting in on plenty
| of interviews over the years.
| jconley wrote:
| Ship stuff.
|
| Build something, anything, and put it in the wild. Make it open
| source. Repeat.
|
| Startups will hire you.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think two things. Networking and practicing. In the end, it's
| highly beneficial to just know the right people and to be good
| enough by the time opportunity arises. One way to do both is just
| take crap jobs along the way. Join clubs and do other social
| hacky stuff though too.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Put your projects under work experience. Projects have the same
| stuff like working with other team members, working with
| customers, collecting payment for your product. It's literally
| just a start up so you may as well put it like one in your
| resume.
| listofthings wrote:
| I was in a similar situation. I got a programming adjacent job to
| break into the market - I applied as a developer advocate since I
| was comfortable enough talking about code, and writing code that
| wasn't necessarily up to par for a full time job but enough to be
| able to write dummy code for other developers to follow. While in
| that role I started working with engineers at the company to
| improve my skills, and also started contributing to code that
| wasn't part of my responsibilities. 2 years after joining as a
| developer advocate I transitioned to a developer role. Feel free
| to DM if you have any questions.
| hosh wrote:
| Look for contract work and agencies. Keep an eye open to local
| businesses that might need some help. I don't know if the market
| supports this, but you can also find early stage startups to help
| out. Attend local tech meetups (esp if they are in person, and
| just talk shop with folks), and find out about any Hackerthons
| that might be going on. Make presentations; if you got completed
| projects, people are likely interested. Sign into local slack /
| discord communities
|
| You can also participate in open source projects. If you have
| projects from your tinkering that you don't mind open sourcing,
| getting that out on github with some documentation explaining
| what you were trying to accomplish helps. You can spend a little
| bit of a time answering questions on Stack Overflow.
|
| If you are using more niche languages (such as Elixir), spend a
| little time answering questions there as well.
|
| Get links for that all on the CV.
| khaledh wrote:
| > because I was told that I shouldn't spend my life in front of a
| computer
|
| What a shame. I hope whoever told you that keeps their advise to
| themselves.
| topkai22 wrote:
| I've spent a fair amount of time conducting interview loops at a
| major tech company. Here are the things I'd be looking for from a
| candidate like you:
|
| 1) Have you delivered something with business or monetary value?
| Can you explain it?
|
| Hobby programming is great, but I'd hope someone coming from
| another industry had been able to identify a problem and used
| their programming skills to solve it.
|
| 2) Are you familiar with the larger software engineering toolset
| and mentality, or just programming.
|
| Planning, estimating, architecture, design, testing, continuous
| integration, continuous deployment, logging, monitoring,
| infrastructure, etc... A lot of this falls under DevOps or
| application lifecycle management these days.
|
| I wouldn't expect a entry level engineer to have expertise in
| everything, but I would expect them to be know the basics of most
| or all of them and why they are valuable. Being able to talk to
| why CI and automated deployments made your life easier or how a
| good logging framework and implementation let you figure out an
| error are good signs you are really into the whole of the
| profession and not just the fun problem solving parts.
|
| 3) Convince me you are interested in the boring parts. In my
| experience most of being professional software engineer isn't
| nearly as fun as hobby projects. Do you really want to do this
| when you are implementing a mildly customized data grid for the
| 100th time to enable someone to approve or deny travel requests?
| Or mapping 150 fields from one data source to another, each of
| which's column names are just different enough to need it's org
| definition. Because ultimately, we are solving problems with
| business value for customers/partners and often the best way to
| answer those problems is... boring.
|
| 4) Most importantly, show me you aren't a "hobbyist developer
| trying to become a professional developer". I want to know you
| are a professional developer that hasn't had that title yet. If
| you can solve problems with software/programming at your current
| job, do that and tell me about it. Build a product someone,
| anyone else uses.
|
| If you can, move into a programming adjacent role (product
| owner/PM/analyst/etc) in your current industry.
|
| Others have knocked bootcamps as a bad option. I'd say it
| depends. My company runs a training program for military veterans
| and it is wildly successful, but it also focuses HEAVILY on job
| placement. I also know a local boot camp in my (small) city that
| seems to have a darn near 100% placement rate due to an excellent
| network with local companies. If you find a boot camp with a
| strong reputation and evidence for high placement rates, it might
| be worth it. It's worth noting the the veteran program is free
| and the local boot camp was cheap as they are programs looking to
| produce qualified employees for their sponsors rather than money
| making enterprises themselves.
|
| Network (the interpersonal kind) heavily with other professional
| developers. Go to meetups. This isn't so much to find a job
| directly from one you developing network (although that happens!)
| but to become familiar with the culture, learn what is being
| talked about, and learn about opportunities.
|
| Finally, I'll echo others and say you can go the route of getting
| a CS degree or similar. If you are going to work in the industry
| long term I think it's useful- not only does it fill in a lot of
| gaps that often only become apparent years later, it also helps
| with "checkbox" resume screening, gets you access to a career
| services center and is a nice shortcut to large professional
| network. Let me put it this way- I've never not responded to a
| student or alumni from my university that has reached out to me.
| It's a big commitment though- ideally find a program that caters
| to working professionals but is affiliated with a large / strong
| alumni network.
|
| Good luck!
| yshrestha wrote:
| - Start a personal blog about software engineering principles
|
| - Have some good code on GitHub
|
| - Work for a startup, they are more likely to take chances on you
|
| - Prefer working on-site if you can. Working remote is great once
| you have learned how to learn
|
| Good luck with your search.
| notthedr wrote:
| Get a contract gig job doing something small that you can deliver
| quality work on. I started in 2001 with a 15/hr job making a
| static website for a college professor's group ( had no
| connections just saw an online Craigslist ad and responded ).
| That job led to more static websites, which led to some database
| work, which led to a larger contract developing software to help
| manage a large event, which led to (many) more php/MySQL
| applications, which eventually led to interviewing and getting a
| full time job ( still there after almost two decades but
| different role ). Over the course of all this, interviewing for
| each next gig/job got progressively easier.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| See if you can build some stuff friends who have a company and
| list that work as a contractor on your resume.
|
| Or otherwise build your own product open source or commercially
| for experience and who knows it might take a life on its own.
| weakfortress wrote:
| [dead]
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Apply to smaller companies, show them your skills, learn how to
| firefight, learn how to navigate "small bosses", spend some time
| learning the skills that aren't just programming - a lot is not
| just "can you do x"
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Friend did boot camp, couple community college programs.
|
| 100 resumes out, 2 interviews, no callbacks.
|
| Dont' let anybody tell you its all roses out there.
| dhosek wrote:
| I took a few years off mid-career to try teaching mathematics,
| but couldn't make it work.
|
| How I got back on the dev track:
|
| 1. I picked up any gigs I could from craigslist, just to be able
| to get a recent job from someone who would give me a reference.
|
| 2. Then I took any contracting job I could get, again, focusing
| on getting experience.
|
| 3. From there I was able to get a full time job and leverage
| myself over a couple job hops back to where I would have been had
| I not left programming for a few years. I think that something
| similar would work for bootstrapping a programming career out of
| being a hobby programmer.
| kept3k wrote:
| I think working on an side project that would showcase your
| skills would be more than enough.
|
| Any project that is data-driven, includes authentication &
| authorization, and a clean UI.
|
| All with minimal frameworks, and in public eye like GitHub so
| they can see code quality.
|
| I think that paired with a good personality would be a home run
| getting a job.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Make side projects or freelance work you can show off. If you
| know any programmers who are willing to look at your code and
| make suggestions, even better. You want to build things that
| challenge you.
|
| I can't tell you whether a bootcamp is a good idea without
| understanding what you know and what you're looking to learn.
|
| The organizations that tend to have an open mind towards people
| like you are the ones that can't afford not to. Small companies,
| non-profits, agencies, underfunded startups. Your advantage is
| your cheap and you to dive in and learn new things.
|
| It gets _much_ easier after that first job.
| satya71 wrote:
| I'll leave a different answer. You can keep your day job and do a
| side project as SaaS/product. Do you know a problem in your day
| job that people would pay for? May be a Chrome extension or an
| enterprise app plugin. Something that has easy distribution and
| no up front costs or huge marketing required.
|
| You can then parlay that into a software engineering job or even
| a more ambitious SaaS.
| fma wrote:
| If you got an initial interview and passed the coding challenge
| then it's the hiring manager (not recruiter) who said no. Lots of
| comments here about ways to improve your resume...but if you got
| past the first stage it's not your resume.
|
| Maybe your behavioral interview didn't go well. Maybe you're
| asking for too much money and a manager can hire someone with
| years of experience for the same pay as you.
|
| If you got interviews and passed coding challenges, I wouldn't
| focus on the resume because a resume just gets you in the door. I
| would not take it at face value that you weren't hired because of
| lack of experience. Rarely do you get an honest answer and that
| could just be a cop out for "he's too hard headed" or some other
| reason that can get a manager in trouble.
| endymi0n wrote:
| Here's how I did it (pretty much accidentally), but found out
| it's a great platform to start from: I stumbled into an ill-
| defined semi-technical role in a growing company with a great
| boss. I was a technical ad creative support specialist, and the
| role was ripe for automation. Within a year I had automated my
| frustratingly boring job away completely and was promoted to
| engineering as the guy with the ability to ,,make stuff happen".
| The road was very much uphill from there, just picked up the
| skills as needed on the way, showed up, took additional
| responsibility when nobody else did.
|
| I'm CTO of a Series C stage scale-up by now.
|
| There are literally hundreds of such jobs out there you can't
| really train for with obscure names, just go browse some listings
| from companies with a good culture and a way up. Show up with a
| technical enough mindset and an attitude of making things happen
| and you'll get that job.
|
| If you just go a bit above and beyond of what's expected and ask
| smart people smart questions, you'll kill it in no time.
|
| Good luck!
| newaccforyou wrote:
| [dead]
| cloudedcordial wrote:
| I'd say expand your network. You need to see how your skills
| could be impactful for others. Something could be a big deal for
| you but not for others. In addition, you may discover some trends
| or knowledge that you may not know. You are taking a great step
| by asking here.
|
| Armed with the knowledge, you can build a portfolio that is
| relevant to the employers. Prepare to have some stories to tell
| how you overcome the obstacles: Just like what others point out,
| you need some evidence of get things done.
| phillypham wrote:
| Aim for big tech companies. They regularly hire engineers that
| can pass coding challenges but otherwise have no experience or CS
| degree. I was hired at Google this way and many of my colleagues
| have similar backgrounds. It's a bit harder in this environment
| with hiring freezes, admittedly.
|
| If you're more interested in startups that seem to require more
| practical experience, you'll probably need to do some personal
| projects or contribute to open source.
| zulban wrote:
| There's a huge industry of bootcamps and certificates clammering
| for your money. Don't.
|
| Unless a specific job you want needs a specific certificate,
| don't pay for them. Your employer probably should pay anyway.
|
| Make a nice portfolio of projects, or contribute to open source
| projects. That's your resume.
|
| You'll always have trouble getting hired in government or big
| companies without a degree, tho.
| barefeg wrote:
| I have a similar experience to yours; programmed from a young
| age, did several personal and freelance projects, etc.
|
| It was hard for people to even consider my CV until I shifted
| focus towards those projects and freelance jobs. Still, the job
| search wasn't successful until one person decided to "just give
| me a chance". His point of view, which I completely agree with,
| was that even with a lot of programming experience, he can't be
| sure that I'd like working in the software industry. Fortunately
| I didn't mind the process and the rest is history.
|
| If I had to do it over again I would first figure out how
| software engineers really do work, that is learn the different
| team configurations, how engineers collaborate with each other
| and product people, the different frameworks used (like agile,
| XP, plan-build-release, etc.). Then if you decide you still like
| it, either try to connect your past work experience with this way
| of working, or try to acquire such experience as others have
| recommended (contractor work, open source contributor,
| consultancy work, etc.).
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| I faced the same problem breaking into the job market right after
| the early 2000's .COM bust. I didn't get any calls back for full-
| time opportunities. Even entry level ones.
|
| What I did find was available were freelance gigs. I found these
| on job boards and started to build out my experience with
| individual projects. I also went to networking events and ended
| up getting a few jobs this way as well. I also did some free work
| for non-profits to round out my experience. I did this freelance
| work while I was in school and for about a year and a half after
| I graduated.
|
| It took hundreds and hundreds of hours and hundreds of inquiries
| to get my first few jobs. It's a numbers game, but you still need
| to be competent and confident. After my first few freelance gigs
| I was "experienced" and was able to fill up my resume with the
| projects I worked on. I did good work so my clients introduced me
| to their friends, customers and clients and I got more work. One
| of my clients extended a full time offer to me, so that was my
| first FT job out of school.
|
| Putting on my hiring manager hat for a moment, I really don't
| want to hire someone with no experience unless they are
| exceptional. Contributing to an open-source project would count
| as experience, but I would prefer experience in a business
| setting. Personally, I don't care as much about a degree.
|
| To land your first freelance gig, I 2nd the advice about
| contributing to an open-source project, setting up a website
| portfolio and having business cards printed. You're trying to
| show your competency.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I initially broke into the field having done some freelance work
| for some people when I was lucky enough to have connections to
| help funnel in work. A little embellishment + application spam
| got me into the industry, though it didn't set me up for success.
| The first few years of my career were stuck in subpar jobs and to
| an extent that's a legacy that still follows me.
|
| If I had to go back, and had the time/money, I think I would take
| some time to get involved in opens source and try to build up at
| least a bit of reputation in some project. That's about the
| closest thing to experience I can think of and I've actually
| still consider doing that a few times to break into new domains.
| Ofc that's a _lot_ of involved.
| lapcat wrote:
| Contribute reliably to an open source project. That's how I got
| my first programming job.
|
| Having said that, the job market wasn't as rough back then as it
| is now.
| [deleted]
| Buffout wrote:
| Hobby programmer or programmer at job.
|
| Pick one.
|
| Too much screen time if you do both.
| slater- wrote:
| i can relate to this.
|
| love your username btw.
| zafka wrote:
| What kind of coding do you like. Most of the folks here are Web
| and App centric. If you like embedded programming, a lot of the
| same concepts apply- Make cool little toys for yourself, and tell
| the world about it.
| georgyo wrote:
| There is a lot of comments, but no one took a moment to look at
| your profile and visit your website.
|
| Pointed advice, specifically for you.
|
| 1. There is no links to any of your code. If you are actually in
| front of a computer so much, surely you have somethings you can
| share.
|
| 2. Your writing is pretty good, but you don't write about any
| tech stuff. Since your writing is good, write about some of your
| programming projects.
|
| 2b. The Linux post for example is pretty bare. You talk about
| weeks of customization, but you never explain what
| customizations. Just that everything works now. This is a boring
| and uninteresting read, and doesn't inform me at all about your
| ability.
|
| 3. The blog also has sone questionable material, which is fine,
| however the most recent post where you talk about events that
| lost your job or nearly lost your job are pretty big red flags.
|
| 4. I see ~22yrs in the service industry. This is also fine, but
| all the above is amplified. People are innately more
| understanding of an 18 year old not having anything to showcase,
| but someone in their 30s and 40s is less likely to be hired just
| for their eagerness to learn. As a result, you need to really
| have some visable passion.
|
| 5. All new hires, and especially new juniors, on a team are
| initially a productive drain on a team. Your teammates spend time
| and effort bringing you up to speed and mentoring you. There is
| risk and effort involved for them beyond it just not working out.
| This makes it tricky for new devs. All of the above is so you
| have something to prove you are worth the effort.
| carapace wrote:
| What worked for me was developing an interesting project and
| presenting it at a small programmers' convention. That was enough
| to get the attention of a company that decided to hire me.
|
| The number one thing you should do is network: get out there and
| meet people (in person, not just over the Internet.) Here is an
| ancient secret of success, handed down to me from my father, that
| I now give to you neontomo: STP *)(*
|
| What does it mean?
|
| "See Twenty People, Belly to Belly"
|
| (Normally you draw the belly buttons closer to the belly curves,
| like on a napkin or something, the dots are belly buttons, yeah?
| Anyway...)
|
| See twenty people belly-to-belly every day. Every day. You'll
| have a job in no time. :)
| leke wrote:
| From hobbyist I went and did a bachelors in business information
| technology. I also did some coding for a charity and made some
| online apps for the organisers. On the degree program, I did work
| experience, and then afterwards applied for jobs.
|
| I guess you can skip education, but where I come from, it's hard
| to get employed without previously working some place else, which
| is why most people do related work training (usually unpaid or
| poorly subsidised by the employment office). Educational
| institutions usually tightly knit into the industry with some
| companies running on a revolving door of students.
|
| One other thing. Having a good github presence goes a long way.
| Make pull requests, interact professionally. People interviewing
| you will be reading all that.
| indigochill wrote:
| I majored in journalism and worked in tech support for a while,
| but I got into engineering by seeing manual procedures that I
| could write software to speed up, so I did that. Management saw
| the value in it (I helped by pitching this as a force multiplier)
| and gave me an ever-increasing allotment of my schedule to work
| on that instead of customer support until it became 100%.
|
| They did try to route me into QA first, but I ignored that and
| none of them were technical enough to know the difference.
| codingdave wrote:
| I did the same - admittedly, this was decades ago, but when I
| had no coding experience, I took a tech support job and
| learned. As I learned, I started doing small projects for my
| department, and as those succeeded, it took up more and more of
| my job until I got promoted to be a coder.
|
| I've had people on HN tell me that this path is the most
| horrible path to recommend to people, yet at the same time --
| it works. And you make a living while getting your skills up.
| User23 wrote:
| Have code samples and be persistent. Being able to demonstrate
| ability is a superpower. I got my first job based on an object
| oriented MUD I wrote in C (using the struct casting trick and
| some tagging). It showed I could write reasonably structured code
| and that I could follow simple instructions to write a correct
| multiplexer (from Stevens's book). It also demonstrated that I
| understood the basics of event handling[1]. That was my passion
| at the time. Follow your passion and write something cool.
| Demonstrate an ability to follow instructions! I've interviewed
| hundreds of supposedly senior engineers and most have trouble
| coding something as simple as a RPN calculator. Trust me, if you
| can show that you can listen, think, and write programs you will
| find a job.
|
| [1] Which is something supposedly senior engineers fail at all
| the time in interviews. Even though the elevator design problem
| is literally a cliche now I still see supposedly senior engineers
| completely blow it because they can't think about the internal
| and external elevator controls in terms of events.
| ido wrote:
| How old are you? If you're young (teen/early 20s) the traditional
| answer is to attend a decent public university and get a CS
| degree. If you're already an ok programmer you should find it
| relatively easy (the math parts are mostly only dominant in the
| 2-3 semesters - calculus, algebra, probability, etc).
|
| Another option is to figure out an area that interests you and
| build something interesting (even if simple) and release it
| online. It's ok if it's released for free with no way to monetize
| it, your goal is to show you can program something non-trivial
| from 0 to 1.0 (both in terms of skill and wherewithal).
| bluedino wrote:
| I found a local placing hiring Ruby developers, and applied. They
| had a take home project, so I went to Borders and bought Hartl's
| Rails book and ended up getting hired.
|
| I had used a few other languages before but hadn't done much in
| the way of web stuff (this was almost 15 years ago)
|
| I'd say try to find places that are looking for people that know
| things that you've been playing around with. Bring code to show
| them and be prepared to demonstrate what you know but don't
| pretend to know anything you don't.
|
| Good luck!
| irjustin wrote:
| There's a lot of good advice here, but to add - this is a very
| tough job market and probably will be for the next year.
|
| Freelancing is another entry point and it'll teach you a lot
| about shipping features/products. Take small jobs initially and
| scale outwards. Obviously you can't charge top dollar but I
| recommend listing your hourly rate at slightly below market and
| then during the negotiation giving a discount to try and seal the
| deal.
|
| If you find yourself being forced to do very low priced/almost-
| free work, keep the projects really small to limit being
| exploited but still being able to build your initial resume.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| As a domain expert in something else who brings extra value.
| ykonstant wrote:
| That makes me wonder, what kind of value a Hyundai protagonist
| can bring to a project !_!
| WalterBright wrote:
| Contribute to open source projects. Many folks in the D community
| leveraged their contributions to D into lucrative jobs.
| thesnide wrote:
| I'd suggest to participate in a gamedev jam.
|
| It has 2 benefits:
|
| - it shows that you can code something
|
| - it shows that you can _finish_ something useful
|
| As most of the time a gamedev is only 20% fun and 80% debugging
| or struggling with the concept...
|
| And the ability to _ship something_ is one of the best skill to
| me. The rest, can be learned.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I personally wouldn't do a bootcamp. You probably already have
| the technical skills a bootcamp would teach (or could learn them
| more effectively outside a bootcamp setting).
|
| I think you have a few possible paths (many mentioned in sibling
| comments):
|
| Ship something at least slightly novel of your own. Could be a
| web site, a web game, a mobile app/game, or something open-source
| that you've kept at for 6+ months. This will both sharpen your
| own skills and give an interviewer something concrete to talk
| about.
|
| Complete Advent of Code. This isn't quite as impressive as the
| previous, but if someone has completed all of an AoC, that's a
| pretty positive sign for me. (Note that it's quite possible to
| cheat at AoC, making this not as strong a signal.)
|
| People hate to hear it, but grind leetcode. Get to the point
| where 95% of leetcode easy problems are truly easy for you and
| where medium ones are 50/50 within your grasp. Not only will this
| sharpen your skills, but it (like AoC) will force you to work
| through some problems that are initially difficult for you. Just
| like lifting heavier weights, this exercise will make you
| stronger as a programmer.
|
| Find an open-source project that has some beginner-friendly
| tasks. See if you can complete any of those. This will both give
| you confidence, but also give you a sense of "do I really want to
| do this as a job?" (A lot of programming is, IMO, the best job in
| the world. A lot of is...not...)
|
| Keep at the applications. Ask for feedback from failed
| interviews. Sometimes the true answer is just "we had only one
| spot and the person we hired interviewed more strongly"; OK, only
| sensible thing you can do is keep interviewing. Other times, you
| might get a piece of feedback that really helps.
|
| You could consider pursuing some (charged) AWS certifications.
| These aren't a major positive signal for a lot of employers, but
| they're a modestly positive signal for some and for a career-
| changer, they're probably a better signal of seriousness than a
| more traditional candidate.
|
| If you find none of that lands you a role, depending on your
| location, age, and life circumstances, see if any companies near
| you have internship programs and if one would consider hiring you
| into their internship program.
|
| I would only do the QA-first route if that was the very last
| option for you. (It's probably better than a bootcamp, but it's
| close.) Companies that hire you into QA won't want to quickly
| lose you from QA into coding. I have a few devs on my team who
| have gone through that route in our company, so it's definitely
| possible (and they're good), but I think it's on average a longer
| road than waiting and coming in the front door to software.
| andrew_ wrote:
| I was in school in 2002 and wrote a freeware app as a hobby. The
| app got the attention of a company that produced a paid version
| of the same kind of app, as it was apparently cutting into sales
| and they liked what I'd done. I was offered a job and left school
| early to take it. 20 years later my career is still cooking - all
| because of a hobby/passion project.
|
| I have to think that human nature is still somewhat the same and
| that kind of opportunity still exists. Probably a low percentage
| play, but wanted to share none the less.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Two ways in I have witnessed:
|
| 1) Ship something. "App Stores" make that easy. Interviewer can
| easily download your app(s) and have plenty of material to ask
| you about during the interview.
|
| 2) Get hired into "QA" -- preferably for a position that allows
| you to write (code) tests. Many of our "testers" where I worked
| moved into engineering when they were seen as willing and able to
| make the move.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Interviewer can easily download your app(s) and have plenty
| of material to ask you about during the interview._
|
| In my experience, this never happened.
|
| I strongly suspect that was because they had already decided
| they weren't going to hire me (I was 55, when I was
| interviewing), and didn't want to waste the time.
| andrew_ wrote:
| refusal to take a good look at GitHub, a shipped product, or
| portfolio is a red flag that indicates bad org health, and to
| avoid.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I can't argue with your experience but will simply add that I
| _did_ download apps from the two candidates I interviewed
| that did have apps on the AppStore.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I had one chap refuse to check my portfolio, because "I
| probably faked it."
|
| Here's my GH ID: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY
|
| You can easily see that I faked over a decade of checkin
| history, dozens of repos, in multiple organizations, over
| 20 shipped apps, lots of blog posts, tutorials, class
| modules, etc.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >I had one chap refuse to check my portfolio, because "I
| probably faked it."
|
| I don't know the context of how that came up, but I'd
| probably let the recruiter know of their unprofessional
| behavior if that happened to me.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That is a "gray area." There's another thread, going on,
| about "illegal questions," and most applicants won't
| confront their tormenters, because it's an easy way to
| get blackballed (labeled a "troublemaker").
|
| In my case, since I had been experiencing veiled insults
| and condescension from almost every interviewer (and
| being "ghosted" by recruiters, when they find out my
| age), I just said "Bugger this for a lark," and decided
| to retire early.
|
| I doubt anyone misses me, but I am pretty sure that I
| could have helped at least one of the companies from
| going titsup.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Sounds like your interviewer just a a grudge against you
| or something.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Gray hair has resulted in a _lot_ of grudges. I 've even
| had a couple of folks just come out and say it.
|
| I know that my generation (and the one before) have
| caused many issues, but I'm not your typical "OK boomer."
| wccrawford wrote:
| Or against something in his profile. People have
| ridiculous preconceptions of the world.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| I downloaded apps by the person we most recently hired. Why
| wouldn't you?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I would have _killed_ for a portfolio like mine. I never
| had that chance, when I was a hiring manager. My portfolio
| was designed for people like I was, when I was a manager.
|
| However, I gave the opportunity to a few, and they ignored
| it. In at least one case, their ignoring it was a fairly
| blatant move to get me to give up. It worked.
| xwdv wrote:
| You need the instant credibility that a CS degree provides. A
| hobbyist will always have to end up proving themselves in each
| new job and you have to just get lucky on someone willing to take
| a chance.
|
| Other than that, you could try building out a successful product
| or freelancing for some time.
| andrew_ wrote:
| This is an antiqued take for nearly all of the IT industry.
| Most of my peers are industry veterans without a degree. Some
| only completed high school.
| wccrawford wrote:
| No, they only need to prove themselves for the first job,
| unless that job doesn't last long. Work experience trumps a
| degree every time.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I know a lot of people who make more than me and never went
| to a college or university. They were just good, got a job,
| continued being awesome, and got another job. I think a
| degree can help accelerate promotions, but even that isn't a
| guarantee. There is no real alternative to job performance,
| and getting that first job is the most difficult part.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Is it urgent? If not, just keep programming things you like. I
| wrote a video game and published it. That got me a job in the
| USA. Sounds like you enjoy programming so find something you want
| to build and build it.
| pryelluw wrote:
| This was me years ago. The short answer is: contract work.
| Consulting or freelance. This is the way to get experience
| without having to struggle with finding a salaried position.
|
| How do you find opportunities?
|
| Go to LinkedIn, search for staffing companies, and message their
| recruiters letting them know you are available. They will ask for
| a resume. However, a contractors/consultant resume is different
| than a salaried resume. You are open to include projects you've
| worked on in detail without them being part of a "job".
|
| Do you have a portfolio? If not, a small simple one works.
|
| Bootcamps won't help.
|
| Feel free to email me. Happy to support you through the process.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| It's perhaps not a terrible idea to host a simple "blog-type"
| site that goes through your journey and documents some things
| about your experience expertise, maybe a blurb/portfolio and
| things of that nature.
|
| Many developer-types seem to have personal sites these days
| that cover that kind of stuff.
|
| I'm not a hiring manager, but I've led lots of interviews and
| this, IMO/E demonstrates competency in a few areas (this varies
| depending on how the site was deployed):
|
| - basic comprehension of "web stuff" - what "hosting" means in
| practice (registering a domain + setting up DNS, some sort of
| service/server to host your assets) - some means of deploying
| it
|
| It's often a good conversation starter too--you mention
| experience (maybe something on your "blog"), interviewer asks
| about it, conversation pivots to how you set the site up in the
| manner you did:
|
| "I chose $FRAMEWORK/simple static assets and hosted on $SERVICE
| as I felt this was a straightforward way to host a site, and I
| like how $OBJECTSTORE makes hosting easy opposed to setting up
| a server to just serve static assets."
|
| Personally, I like talking about that stuff so it's always a
| good talk when that comes up during a candidate interview.
|
| There's a lot of potential in those conversations, especially
| given a large portion of software-type jobs are web-related
| today.
|
| Also, regarding the comment above, this is likely helpful if
| you're a consultant where you can advertise your services more
| explicitly.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Is it easy to find the right freelance? I think there are stuff
| that I can do well, however I don't even know if a freelance
| job would be too difficult for me or not. There are bunch of
| web development jobs but it is an area that I'm not good at
| intelVISA wrote:
| Genuine question: how is he expected to
| contract/consult/freelance as a hobbyist with 0 YOE? Outside of
| race to the bottom Fiver gigs that you probably don't want a
| lot of good contract work is more "getting shit done" than
| salary roles; which usually requires selling yourself with a
| track record/network.
|
| Personally I'd just ship some crapware on the app store of your
| choice and spin it as a 'venture'. As others have noted always
| nice when they can play with your skinner box rather than glaze
| over when they see a Makefile.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I started doing exactly this ~20 years ago, namely
| getafreelancer.com, fighting with developers at 20$ an hour.
|
| Over time I kept some good contacts from there and supplanted
| the low paid jobs with better clients.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Same. I started at 15 GBP / hr 13 years ago on
| peopleperhour, doing cheap jobs and building up trust. This
| slowly evolved into a network, enough experience to launch
| my own startup, and now I've been CTO of two startups and I
| run my own consulting company, at 20-50x the rate I started
| at.
| bsuvc wrote:
| Have you considered contribution to an open source project on
| GitHub? Then in your interview, when your lack of experience
| comes up, you can point to your open source experience.
|
| Next, consider getting a certification or two. For someone with
| no experience or formal education in development, it can help.
|
| Finally, if you're losing out to more experienced candidates,
| then maybe consider applying to true entry-level jobs to get your
| foot in the door, where experience is not required.
| codethief wrote:
| The IT consulting[0] firm I work for (~700 people, Germany-based
| + a few satellite branches in other European countries but
| unfortunately not in Sweden (yet) -- which is where I take it you
| are located) hires people with zero professional SWE experience -
| often straight out of university (though not exclusively so) and
| frequently it's people who didn't even study computer science
| (though in that case it tends to be math/physics and they usually
| learned a bit of coding as part of their degree or thesis or
| something). In our interviews we do some coding exercises but
| what we're mainly interested in seeing are logical reasoning
| capabilities, communication skills, culture fit and a genuine
| interest in software engineering. Our stance is that you can and
| will learn everything else - either in the trainings you attend
| when you start or later on the job, with some guidance by our
| colleagues.
|
| Long story short: You would very likely have a decent shot at an
| offer.
|
| Now as I mentioned we don't have a branch in Sweden (and EU law
| would require one if you were to work for us remotely from
| Sweden), so I'm not here to advertize our firm. But maybe you can
| find similar companies? I know of at least a handful in Germany,
| so I assume there must be some in Scandinavia, too.
|
| [0]: "Consulting" as in "We tell you how to do it and then we do
| it for/with you".
| jdowner wrote:
| In your situation, my concerns would relate to evaluating your
| (1) ability to write professional software and (2) what are the
| gaps in your knowledge.
|
| To address these concerns, consider contributing to an open
| source project.
|
| Many of the hurdles a candidate has to clear to get a job as a
| software engineer are intended to determine whether you can
| actually program. Ignoring the effectiveness of these hurdles,
| the point is that you need to demonstrate the claims on your
| resume/CV. If you contribute to an open source project you are
| putting your work out there for everyone to see, including how
| you actually work with other engineers and how you deal with
| critical feedback about your work.
|
| There is a lot of software engineering that is not interesting or
| attention getting but it has to be done. Often, this involves
| learning about things that you would not have bothered with if
| you are a hobbyist. By contributing to a successful open source
| project, you will be exposed to ideas that you might not
| otherwise have encountered.
| throwitfaar wrote:
| I am also a hobby programmer who would like to find a job as a
| software engineer. But lately I feel finding such a job is too
| difficult. Fortunately I have a stable job with a decent pay.
| Perhaps luck is a way of penetrating into the job market. Anyway,
| I am open to job proposals.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Go to college and get a Computing Science degree.
| issa wrote:
| I would hesitate to call this really bad advice, because it
| would be correct for some people at a certain age or point in
| their life. But, based on the OP, it doesn't sound like what is
| called for. It really depends what kind of job you want.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Find a friend at a company you want to join and have them refer
| you to the company. Have them coach you on the process and for
| what to prepare for and what to expect. Have them advocate for
| you.
|
| On your end get into interviewing shape -- aka --
| algos/datastructures and all that leet coding/whiteboard
| nonsense.
|
| Honestly, one's network is the surest fire way to get hired
| anywhere in my opinion.
| masukomi wrote:
| > Without any programming jobs on my CV, what is a good way to
| penetrate into the market?
|
| freelance work.
|
| Sign up on Upwork.com (or similar). Do a bunch of contracts. Put
| them on your resume.
|
| I did freelance work for years before deciding i was sick of
| constantly hustling for clients. Then I applied for jobs and said
| "here's all the things I've done" and they were like "cool.
| interview. yup. you're hired"
|
| Also, pro-tip: make contributions to big name open source
| projects. Not only will it be great to be able to honestly say
| "yeah, I'm a Rails contributor" (or whatever) BUT it is also
| great experience for working with others. The large projects tend
| to have high standards and require good code and unit tests.
| You'll frequently get a code review and need to make some tweaks
| before it gets merged. Good experience.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| I'd like to add that freelance on Upwork can lead to long term
| relationships with clients, which have kick-started many
| people's careers as software engineers, including mine.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Don't you have to sign contracts forbidding you from working
| with them except through the platforms?
| alexdowad wrote:
| This is what I did. Started with one small contract job on
| Upwork at a modest hourly rate. Then I raised my rate a bit for
| the 2nd contract, raised it a bit more for the 3rd contract,
| and so forth. In the process of doing these contract jobs, I
| got to know people, they introduced me to other people, and
| soon I had all the work I needed at a rate I was happy with.
| greggarious wrote:
| Did you have issues getting paid on upwork?
| tingletech wrote:
| Lots of good advice here.
|
| One thing I'll add, having sit in many hiring committees over the
| years -- in addition to open source projects; I've seen some
| interesting work that was done by candidates as a volunteer at a
| non-profit.
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