My current job (and previous one, for that matter) both started with the company emailing me out of the blue with a fairly compelling offer that got even better after we talked a bit. But, they found me because I freelanced my way through college and built up a fairly impressive portfolio + have a ton of open source stuff on github. (It also helps that I decided to focus on JavaScript & front-end dev just before it exploded in popularity.)
Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#32It's a chain of events that started ~7 years ago that lead to me joining this company in early 2015.
Around the year 2009, I helped some random person on the internet to setup a wordpress blog. We stayed a bit in contact, got some freelance work because of recommendations from her but that's about it. In late 2013, she asked me if I can help with a little project, sure. Other guy was working on it too, we stayed in touch.
He, my new friend, kept trying to convince me to join the company he's working for, but at the time I was living in England and the company was based in Lithuania (I'm a Lithuanian) and I loved Manchester too much to leave.
Time went by, and in late 2014 I started to look for a new job. The same friend asked me whether I'd consider joining the same company now (meaning moving across Europe), I thought ok, I will chat with them, nothing to lose.
It seemed like a good company to work for, interesting new challenges. After thinking for a couple of weeks and working remotely for a couple of months (temporary agreement, probation period kind of), I bought a one way to ticket Lithuania. Never regretted. Although still the amount of luck and all involved in this is still mind blowing. If I wasn't browsing that forum that night a few years ago, I wouldn't be where I am now.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#3330 years old, I never went to college, actually I almost failed high school. I wanted to go to college to become a chef, but my fun activity on the side started making money, so I pursued that instead (more because Le Cordon Bleu took 3 years to respond to my request information)
I bounced around doing web development and running my own sites for the first 10 years of my career. Then I joined a startup in Chicago, and with the fallout of working there, I went on a 4 month hiatus of doing only whatever I wanted for myself, before being hired by where I work now, building a startup.
edit:// actually I don't consider what I am building now a startup. I don't like the stigmata associated to the term startup. I'm building a company.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#34I couldn't afford to finish the last semester of college. Lived with some other friends in a not-so-nice area of town, riding a moped a few miles to work for a company to learn internet marketing while getting paid $7.00 an hour.
Started my own web design and internet marketing shop, which proved to be much harder than I thought because I didn't know shit about running a business. Caught a break with a startup building out their website and web assets and doing marketing. Marketing director got fired, I filled that role and got a raise.
Left that company after two years to co-found a startup. Raised a little money. Tought myself product design and front-end.
Startup was unsuccessful, but I used the skills I learned to land a gig at MIT doing product design and front-end dev. Did that for a while. Jumped from 40k to almost 100k.
Left MIT to lead product at a vc backed startup making 6 figures with a good bit of equity. That's where I am today.
Tomorrow, who knows...
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#35Network. Everything is networking. Meet people (in person) and meet more and more people and keep active on those relationships.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#36Mid-30s, got my current (and previous) job through recruitment agencies. They are mostly awful so you have to have a good reccomendation and/or be prepared to fire them for poor performance.
CS degree from Cambridge, which definitely opens doors. Many of the places I've worked would simply reject candidates without degrees as a first cut filter, unfortunately.
Job exits: quit when fed up, made redundant, quit after takeover, reluctantly quit to move city.
Low point was probably a few years of chronic fatigue.
Salary comparison tip: try converting to house-rooms-per year (or m^2 if that's available). This makes London and SF look very different.
I once considered moving to the US, and decided against it as it would have meant abandoning all my friends and family.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#3727. After High School, I screwed up about as bad as I could. I already wasn't doing particularly well in school, then I went to Seattle to attend a community college, with hopes of transferring to a more ideal school afterward.
But, as always, I wasn't at all comfortable with school. I hated learning at someone else's pace, by someone else's rubric. I hated never building on yesterday's learning, using what I'd discovered moving forward, but instead having just as much reason to throw it away as I did the remnants of that day's meal.
So, I failed hard, and my parents stopped giving me cash to survive. I ended up moving back home, and struggled with finding a job in the ruinous California Central Valley economy, which before the recession was already alarmingly high, and as we trended into it, would turn into a complete disaster, regularly fluctuating between 15-18% officially, with the unofficial at times being as high as 25%.
Years later, at 24, I'd get an opportunity through a friend I'd met online playing a game together. As she was off at college, her family would let me stay with them in Claremore, OK, where finding work would be much easier, and I could at least begin to build a life. Within two weeks of being there I had work(which took months to get in Fresno and would often see the company shut down weeks later) delivering auto parts.
Without the influence of my family there to discourage me("You need a degree to do that!"), I returned to programming in my evenings, where one day I would ask just the right person online a question about the Django web framework. They presented the idea of me becoming a junior developer, and from there I was granted the opportunity.
I was paid horribly, but it really was an opportunity. I had no degree, no open source, no experience, nothing. But over 11 months I built a resume to be proud of, and was able to successfully turn that into a high paying job at UnitedHealth Group.
However, neither at UHG or the following startup I worked for, Doximity, did I really find a culture I felt I could grow in. I need to focus on my work, try new things, feel like I have the freedom to make more user-facing decisions. I put time into personal projects, further developing the Ruby skills I'd begun at UHG, as well as becoming a competent Javascript developer, and figured out a whole host of automation problems through a variety of Docker, VirtualBox, and Vagrant.
Eventually, one of those would get me my current position at A10 Networks, and it's easily the best job I've ever had. The culture is amazing, the quality of work is superb, the people are kind yet passionate- it feels like a dream job.
If there's anything I'd want to say to anyone in a low point right now, it'd be "Stop listening to anyone who tells you that you can't do it." You can. Maybe you'll have to change tools or tactics, maybe it's a question of time. But never let yourself rest if you're not enjoying what you're going through, and never tell yourself that the horrible circumstance you're in now is what you must endure for years to come.
It isn't. You've just got to figure out the way forward.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#38Almost failed high school (wasn't interested). Never went to college (didn't even apply). Eventually, after coding through my teens, I founded a web development agency with some friends to build websites for money, while bootstrapping the development of a few web apps. All of them failed. I had severe imposter syndrome. Didn't help that my family had to sell our house while I was bootstrapping a startup, so I was bas…
Just curious, how old were you when you hit the 6 figure salary and which city was that in?
In Los Angeles most positions are really dead end, by the time 6 figures became the norm the housing market here plus the additional taxes on california for singles has turned 6 figures into bare survival money. The attitude of most employers in Los Angeles is that you're essentially a slave and as a tech person you're about as important to them as a maggot, your talents are taken for granted and yeah I have a job but I have to work over 140 hours a week for 40 hours pay. My parents body blocked me from being a part of the Stanford class of 94 despite being a legacy, that was one of those cases where I needed to run away from home and walk from LA to Palo Alto against my parents' will lol.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#39Graduated with a Computer Engineering degree in 2009. Got a job with feds at Ft Monmouth engineering center. Base was closed due to BRAC in 2010/11.
Didn't want to relocate to MD at the time so I started a consulting company with 2 other friends from college. We build rails apps / did other misc ecommerce work mostly learning as we went.
Did that until this past summer when I took a full time position at STAQ in Baltimore. I had decided to take a job with more reliable income / benefits to allow my wife to return to school full-time. Since the majority of my recent development experience was in Rails, I made a list of local or remote-friendly companies who had a similar stack and I sent out emails with cover letters and code samples.
I found STAQ via their recruitment website - https://programmerswanted.staq.com/. Mike, our CTO, got back to me super fast and we scheduled an interview which went well and led to an offer. Very happy with my current position and enjoying the new challenges.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#40"A" student in high school, "B" student in university, sent 100s of resumes and got one offer (programming), moved there to work, changed jobs to a tech start-up, DotCom Bubble 1.0 burst, unemployed for several months (low point #1), contracted a bit to get on my feet, went full-time with a client, left to get MBA, graduated MBA the same year the banks all exploded, unemployed for several months (low point #2), sent 100s of resumes and got one offer (back to programming), moved there to work, job hopping every couple of years ever since. Don't know if there is a way out of the rat race, but grateful to be employed in this environment.