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Ask HN: A place to sleep, a laptop, no résumé and a hungry man.

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Re: Ask HN: A place to sleep, a laptop, no résumé and a hungry man.

#11

Post by SeanNieuwoudt »

Like you, I was once in the same position. Extremely poor, I literally hand drew business cards and cut them out of cardboard and walked around the city to hand-deliver them. This helped as someone eventually gave me a chance, but I'm sure it's because he felt sorry for me. I had no experience and learnt how to code from making free photo copies of the pages in the visual basic 6 book at the local public library.

Where I'm from (South Africa), internet was expensive and not accessible to all at the time.

Some advice for your situation:

- You are at the bottom, your only way from there is up - this is something to be excited about.

- Fake it until you make it. When meeting potential clients, talk the talk and do the walk later.

- You'd be surprised at how many SME's need IT services and don't know it yet :) You can simply walk in the door and have a chat to them.

- Put your ego away and always be aware that in order to eat, you need to sell. Selling is actually pretty simple if have a bit of confidence.

- Look after your laptop with your life, it's your key to getting out of your situation.

- If you can write code, it most likely means that you can solve problems logically - this doesn't only apply to coding, figure out where you can use that and make a bit of money.

- Don't be afraid of charging for your time. Poverty is also a mindset, as soon as you realize that, you are one step closer to getting past it.

- Just ask for help. You are not alone and most people will be sympathetic when they are asked.

- You don't need to prove yourself to anyone in order to survive, simply do what you do best and the rest will follow.

Goodluck! S

Re: Ask HN: A place to sleep, a laptop, no résumé and a hungry man.

#14

Post by septnuits »

jat1 wrote: post #10

I am about to leave a well paying job to go live in my Campervan and travel around Europe and Morocco. The more work I can do on the side while away means the longer I can stay on the road. I am quite interested in helping teach or working with voluntary organisations if I can make enough money for Diesel and food. It is both exciting and scary at the same time.

This is exactly what I've started thinking about doing. I am working at a great place but I'm getting tired of doing boring work for boring clients. I really don't care about how much money I make at my current place because it is making my hobby, my biggest interest and my talent - into something different.. it is now in a new, ugly shape. It has gone from something I could not resist doing, to something I don't even want to think about.

For me, it's draining more energy than it gives. Programming should be fun. I hope your journey goes well. Hopefully I will be on the same track in a couple of months. First I have to save enough cash to feel secure. Happy hunting.

Re: Ask HN: A place to sleep, a laptop, no résumé and a hungry man.

#16

Post by SandersAK »

EDIT: "our" startup

We've always got room at the lodge: http://gdkr.ma/LodgingSociety

Seriously, we're always welcoming hackers to come hang with us in NY.

We put you up, give you plenty of your own time to work on what you want, and ask for a part time contribution to our startup.

Hit me up if that interests you,

Adrian

Re: Ask HN: A place to sleep, a laptop, no résumé and a hungry man.

#17

Post by JohnnyFlash »

When I started I could just about make a website but hell, it was what I wanted to do.

I did 2 things. Firstly I went on the freelancer job boards and picked up some of the worst jobs going with the most hard to please clients. I think my average wage was like $3/hr for the first handful of projects. However.. soon enough I starting getting 10 star ratings which opened up better jobs. Also I started to get a portfolio from these jobs which gave me credibility. It was a miserable time but I wouldn't have to got to where I have any other way.

The second thing I did was found a framework which was semi-popular and just camped the forum. I learned everything I could about it. I read every thread. I only answered questions. If I had a question I would join IRC under an alias. I didn't want to look nooby.

I would take notes on frequent questions. I was soon known as someone who always had the right answer. I would then usually be the first to respond on the job board for the framework. I would link to my forum profile and reputation. Some of those jobs paid really well and there was very little competition to get them.

I currently make 36k a year from a job I picked up on the forum. The post for the job was titled 'Developer Required'. The message was 'Urgent, please PM name, portfolio and email address'. Turned out well.

Ultimately though to succeed you need to stick with what you are doing. You may find the job terrible but if it leads to a great portfolio piece at the end then you should be doing it. Its rarely about where you are now, its about where what you are currently doing will lead you.

Re: Ask HN: A place to sleep, a laptop, no résumé and a hungry man.

#18

Post by bmelton »

You didn't say where you were located, but if you're in the Annapolis / Baltimore area, shoot me an email. My info is in my profile.

I assume you have some sort of internet since you're posting this. If hosting costs are an obstacle, shoot me an email and I can cut you off a piece of a Linode or something.

As for 'proving you can code', get a free Github repository and start filling it up. Find a project, any project, in any language, and build it. Projects don't have to be amazingly complicated or fit a broad needs. One of my first 'open source' projects was a library that would reliably fetch a favicon from a website.

No, it hasn't made me famous, and no, it hasn't made me rich, but it has helped a few people based on the messages I've gotten through Github. I have had offers from work based on it (not full time jobs, but implementation / freelance stuff), and if anybody questions whether or not I can write a line of code, I can point them at that.

After you write one library / module / program / app / whatever, write another one. The idea being that you'll establish a 'body of work'.

We recently tried to recruit another HNer to fill in on some project work recently and, when my project manager was asking how qualified he was, I just pointed him to his github profile. Not only has he released a lot of code, but he's worked on a lot of the libraries that we're using in our code as well.

Don't worry about whether or not the code you release is 'production ready', or if it's too small, or if you think it's only of limited utility. My favicon parser is under 100 lines of code. Backbone.js is only ~700 lines of code. Code doesn't need to be huge to make an impact. Hell, code doesn't even have to be GOOD to make an impact, but that's a different story.

Re: Ask HN: A place to sleep, a laptop, no résumé and a hungry man.

#19

Post by stonemetal »

Assuming you are capable(and willing) of spinning a wrench spend a couple of days somewhere with free wifi learn some CNC programming and find a machine shop in need. The smaller the shop the less qualifications matter and the more can you do the job matters. Smaller shops have a harder time hiring so they are often willing to train people who show promise.
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