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Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

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Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#11

Post by ai_ia »

neverminder wrote: post #8

I got my first job in a company that was desperate, because their only other developer was leaving in days. Got my second job under similar circumstances. And a third one. I did well at all of those companies and left on my own accord. I should also mention that none of those companies were even on a map as far as serious software development is concerned. Reality is that companies that are not desperate will be pick…

Maybe there should be job boards for desperate company?

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#12

Post by l-p »

Despite having completed much more interesting and impressive projects, my first CTO took me based on a few Ti-BASIC programs I wrote because I was bored in high-school.

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/authors/107/10786.html

Landed me a job in a small game studio. I'll never understand.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#13

Post by xcubic »

singingfish wrote: post #3

I spent several years working in research support roles at uni, and used code to automate the very boring parts of my job. Then thanks to open source activity I got into as part of that, I wrote a book. This was a bit under 10 years ago, I'm not sure there's the market in book writing these days.

What book did you write?

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#14

Post by peteretep »

I had some shitty CGI code that would extract search terms from HTTP referrer fields, back before everyone only used Google. Someone emailed me asking me for help with it, and as it turned out, I was 16 and needed a week of work experience. Circa 1998.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#15

Post by danesparza »

I was 20. The year was 1994. I landed a job as an internal maintenance dev with a simple Visual Basic project on diskette. I was happy because it was a salaried position with benefits.

I quickly moved up to consultant (since I was with a consulting firm) within a year and ended up getting some real experience on my resume. :-)

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#16

Post by neverminder »

CrystalLangUser wrote: post #10
neverminder wrote: post #8

I got my first job in a company that was desperate, because their only other developer was leaving in days. Got my second job under similar circumstances. And a third one. I did well at all of those companies and left on my own accord. I should also mention that none of those companies were even on a map as far as serious software development is concerned. Reality is that companies that are not desperate will be pick…

And how do you consistently find said companies?

I'm afraid I have no good recipe for that, I would suggest to "brute force" it - cast a wide net and filter approach. In my case it was mostly dumb luck really. You will now a desperate one when you see it - normally they will try to close the deal ASAP instead of jerking you around.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#17

Post by photonios »

None. I applied for internship at a local tech company, I mentioned on my CV that I was working on a WhatsApp desktop client (which didn't exist at the time) by reverse engineering the Android app. That caught their interest. I got the internship. After 6 months they offered me a permanent contract.

The next job I just applied and did exceptionally well on the interview. The one after that was through a friend that I worked with before, he was starting a company and hired me.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#18

Post by Grustaf »

I had an idea for a simple iOS game I wanted to make so followed the Stanford course and then rented a desk at a startup with too much space. After a month or so they felt they needed more developers and since they saw me there with xcode every day they figured they'd hire me.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#19

Post by nathan_f77 »

I learned web development while volunteering at a charity, where I did a lot of work on open source software. I worked on some Rails apps called FatFreeCRM [1] and Errbit [2]. I got my first contract with a YC startup that was providing hosting for open source apps, including FatFreeCRM (unfortunately they shut down.) My open source contributions were also included in my O1 visa application, so that I could come to the US and work for a startup.

[1] https://github.com/fatfreecrm/fat_free_crm

[2] https://github.com/errbit/errbit

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#20

Post by uruk »

CrystalLangUser wrote: post #10
neverminder wrote: post #8

I got my first job in a company that was desperate, because their only other developer was leaving in days. Got my second job under similar circumstances. And a third one. I did well at all of those companies and left on my own accord. I should also mention that none of those companies were even on a map as far as serious software development is concerned. Reality is that companies that are not desperate will be pick…

And how do you consistently find said companies?

It's a good starting point to be proficient with a very new/niche technology. For example I got my first full-time job at a similarly desperate company, because next to no one knew how to develop Windows Phone applications back then in my country and they were in dire need of such a developer. So actually I didn't have to find them, they found me. :)
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