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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.

#51

Post by U_U »

slav wrote: post #31

There is a lot of good advice in previous comments. I'm just wondering, how is that you say you can code and you cant find a job / project to work on. I did my first project for money in PHP when I was 16 - no degree, no experience and not much code to show - just few HelloWorld playpen projects. People rarely ask developers for a degree and even if they do, once you have impressive code to show is worth much more. S…

> I did my first project for money in PHP when I was 16

Can I ask how you got those jobs and what you got paid?

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

#52

Post by runjake »

I've been in your shoes and don't have any advice that hasn't already been said.

But, think of this as an exciting chapter of your life. You're at bottom, so you can go anywhere from here without constraints or obligations.

This chapter happened for me when I was younger, and at the time it seemed almost awful, but on reflection now, it was very freeing. I'm positive you'll see it the same, when you get older.

If you lack commitments (wife, kids, etc), it's kind of nice to periodically reboot (eg. destroy and rebuild) your life.

Do whatever you're passionate about. Seriously.

PS: Make your passion first, money second.

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

#53

Post by devs1010 »

Its hard for me to get a good feel for what your experience level is from your post, but I'm guessing you've worked mainly as a freelancer thus far. I'm someone who started off similarly to you, I don't have a degree, although I am close to finishing a BA degree thats not in CS as I just had a bunch of units from general ed courses. Basically, I just pushed my way in by starting off working at a really small company that couldn't afford to be picky. The pay was fairly lousy but after a few months I found a better opportunity to work with a startup. Then after that, I had enough experience working full-time to start working for a contracting company that did a full-time placement of me at a mid-sized company. Once you get experience working full-time, it gets easier to find the next job so you should really just focus on getting your foot in the door. I've found that companies are often wary of people who just want to freelance as they often want a longer commitment and someone who is going to be more invested in their product / company. Also, there's no reason not to work on your own project and put it on GitHub, its helped me get at least one job, just from being able to talk about it in the interview, as the interviewer found it interesting.
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