Ask HN: Advice for finding an entry-level remote job?

Just an anecdote for you- in 2009, I wanted to drop out of college because I preferred partying. I obviously needed income and was dissatisfied with the jobs I’d had in the past (fast food, waiting tables and hotel customer service). Like you, I had always been a tech “nerd” and had built websites and recycled computers for my church/charities in the past. One day I came across a job post for a small SEO firm that was looking for a “web developer” aka clicking around Wordpress, writing some CSS, and writing SEO content. It paid $11/hr. I sent an email and he agreed to interview me. I must’ve charmed him because he agreed to give me a 90 day trial. It worked out and I worked for him for about 2 years before a recruiter found me and got me a job at a “real” software company on a team of 15 engineers. After a couple years there, I founded my own SaaS side business (which went viral on HN circa 2014). It grew to become much, much more than a side business and was eventually acquired by a PE firm.

I just wanted to say to keep your head up, remain persistent, keep learning and stay curious. It can be done and hard work (usually) pays off.

Stay flexible - even if a job doesn’t seem super relevant to your core interests you never know when it’ll come in handy later. For example, my experience in fast food gave me great insights into POS systems (which I ended up building) and my time working at a luxury boutique hotel taught me how to provide excellent customer service even in difficult situations (one time I didn’t call a customer’s room at the request wake up call time and he missed his flight- eek).

Best of luck to you!

Ps- just sent you an email

Side question sorry, what happened to the side business after the PE firm acquired it?

Hey anon, I feel for you, and most of the answers here are giving you a 12-month plan when you need a 1-month plan.

If you know Linux well enough to configure Wordpress, how about tech support for a hosting company? Try making some short email approaches to old-school hosting companies (I used to run one). They might be flexible enough to take a chance depending on how confident your approach is.

They have lots of customers bashing away at Linux, making mistakes, often without the patience to see their own problems through. Their business problem is that these customers need hand-holding but only pay a fixed, monthly fee. (the hope is eventually they stop asking and keep paying for years).

The combination you can offer those companies could be basic Linux knowledge (no need for advanced cloud stuff) and whatever flexibility you can offer them - especially if they're not in your time zone.

The larger ones might be a tall order, all listing locations by default (Gandi, Leaseweb, GoDaddy, Hetzner etc.), but maybe someone here will have an inside track.

I agree with other posters - never mention difficult circumstances in a job application, particularly a cold application. Just talk about how keen you are to solve their difficult customers' problems, how well you work in a team, and keep the initial approach brief.

Good luck! And please update us if you can.

Thanks for sharing this story!

As a developer, I emphatically disagree about the "same job" aspect. QA requires a pretty different mindset, one which developers lack entirely. This is particularly true about testing things like storage appliances, routers, switches, and such. Putting such complex systems through their paces requires specialist QA folks, including loads of manual QA'ing in addition to heavy automated QA. That said, despite how critical QA is to putting out a product that's even remotely serviceable, the market for QA folks generally pays lower. Apparently, if you are putting out reams of code and tossing it over the wall to the hapless QA guy, you deserve to get paid more. Much more.

I have the misfortune of working at a place where some "bright" person got the bright idea of "eliminating" the QA budget because "developers should be able to do everything a QA can". QA was dissolved and existing QA specialists were told that they had to learn how to program, or get lost. The product quality went down the tube and the place got grief from (Fortune-500) customers who write fat checks that run into the millions for support alone. That has been a train wreck in slow motion.

The simple fact is that you can maybe get away without separate QA staff for a something like an internal website, but for anything else, assuming that developers will test their work and put enough thought into even the most common use-cases and certify that the system as a whole works is delusional.