11–20 of 59 posts
And I think most if not all of the larger cities are like this. I have personal experience with Boston, SF, San Diego. In 20 years I've never seen a market that wasn't good for developers.
This transcends geography. Show competency by building something that demonstrates your technical ability. Better yet, build 2 things.
Be able to demo your projects, and talk at length about the technical challenges in building them.
That said, your best best is always going to be small / medium sized companies. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are mostly going to be looking for solid CS fundamentals in their interview. Unless you've taken a Data Structures & Algorithms class recently, you can forget working there.
I don't know how much my not having a degree really mattered after that but my last 4 jobs were in Seattle. I suspect I may have been "leveled" at one of my jobs based on my not having a degree though, but I can't say for sure.
Build something. This transcends geography. Show competency by building something that demonstrates your technical ability. Better yet, build 2 things. Be able to demo your projects, and talk at length about the technical challenges in building them. That said, your best best is always going to be small / medium sized companies. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are mostly going to be looking for solid CS fundamentals…
Build something. This transcends geography. Show competency by building something that demonstrates your technical ability. Better yet, build 2 things. Be able to demo your projects, and talk at length about the technical challenges in building them. That said, your best best is always going to be small / medium sized companies. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are mostly going to be looking for solid CS fundamentals…
Source: Self taught who constantly studies CS stuff.
Build something. This transcends geography. Show competency by building something that demonstrates your technical ability. Better yet, build 2 things. Be able to demo your projects, and talk at length about the technical challenges in building them. That said, your best best is always going to be small / medium sized companies. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are mostly going to be looking for solid CS fundamentals…
Also of note - I have seen a lot of very talented developers leave the financial companies I have worked for because they find the Dev work unexciting and they view their continued learning as stunted or completely nonexistent. They all seem to hate supporting line-of-business applications for whatever reason. That being said, it usually pays pretty well because these are business critical services that support either a large user base or are behind a large amount of money. Case in point - the brother of a friend of mine never went to college but was a self-taught programmer and is extremely talented - he works for a hedge fund running their entire infrastructure and makes more than double what I make.
If the corporate thing isn't your style, there are also a fair amount of startups here in NYC. But I don't have enough knowledge about them to comment on compensation, job stability, work culture, etc.
If you hop on linkedin and search "front end" and filter to Bay Area, posted last 24hrs, you should see ~1000 jobs (maybe not this month). Per Day. Every day there are thousands of jobs opened up that are very open to the idea of a self taught or bootcamp educated person. Basically, this city seems much more of a meritocratic system than Houston or Austin, other cities I'm familiar with. Also, the pay is excellent out here.
I second what others are saying about portfolios. I always say, if I asked you to make pong in your given language, you should be able to do so in a couple of hours from scratch and be able to send it to me to run on my computer/phone. That's the level you want to be at and that's the kind of apps that should be on your portfolio.
I have gone into more detail of my experience at my blog: blog.calebjay.com, and the archive section links to my older blog with some other details about my transition. I'm also happy to speak with anybody here or privately through email (see my profile) that's interested in how they can make this happen for themselves.
I moved from a crap job, a crap life (financially, I'm a happy guy otherwise), and really no future to an engineer. I went from having no future to having a guaranteed career, forever, barring catastrophic global economic collapse. I really can't express the feeling of having the weight of future-worry taken off my shoulders, but I know I want as many people that were where I was at a year ago to feel it, and I will go out of my way to help any way I can.
EDIT: Here, this link may take you directly to a search that demonstrates what I mean https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search?keywords=%28%E2%80%9Cso...
That's the query I used in my job search, it worked quite well. Bay Area also has the highest concentration of startups and smaller companies that are notoriously open to non-traditionally educated developers. Try changing the location to Houston, Denver, Austin, Seattle, the entire state of Wisconsin, DC, etc and notice the difference. Try searching on angel.co in those cities. I think unarguably the Bay Area has the highest concentration of jobs open to self-educated developers, the question is, can you afford to live here for the several months it may take you to get a job?