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

Lovely story!

There are a lot of good advice given to you already and I just thought I'd share some of my personal experience with you since I some of your experience are similar to mine mostly because you appear to be self-taught.

I found out the hard way that "being able to learn fast" is a potentially very dangerous mindset to have when you are looking for an entry-level job for the following reasons:

* You could easily open yourself up for exploitation by "sweatshops" (lack of mentorship, time to learn, and terrible pay) which hinders your career progression (assuming that you don't want to end up in one of those).

* You are very likely overestimating your abilities for "better" jobs that have stricter requirements on non-code-writing skills, including computer science.

* You can easily become a jack of all trades, master of none -- not in the sense that you are a generalist and a capable fullstack engineer, but in the sense that you just knows a little bit of everything and nothing well enough for an actual job. It's not that it can't be fixed and developed upon, but for your first job I personally think that's really not what you want, I hope you don't end up wasting time to get to that point.

freeCodeCamp is great to get started with (I have been through different version of the curriculum a few times for various reasons), but even finishing all of it won't get you even close to job-ready for jobs that have heavier requirements on non-code-writing skills.

That's not to say you won't be able to get a job after finishing freeCodeCamp -- with a bit of luck you may even be able to find a job with very good terms. However, if you want to compete for high-level jobs and/or want to continue to develop your skills properly even after getting a job, I highly recommend doing things that are more difficult than what you are doing immediately, and make that a habit.

Since you are reading Eloquent JavaScript (which probably means you care about more than just getting code written and things put on the screen), here are a few things that you might want to consider/get into immediately:

* As many have already mentioned, solve challenges on LeetCode regularly and perhaps spend time read some of the forum posts. The reason is that there is little hint/guidance in the freeCodeCamp curriculum about what/how you could do for more efficient algorithms -- in fact, in many cases brute-force, naive, solutions would be accepted. You don't want to get into the habit of thinking that solving challenges in O(n^2) time is okay when interviewers expect you to solve them in linear or better time complexity.

* Eloquent JavaScript is a great book (I recommend adding You Don't Know JS to your reading list), but try to read it a few times at different stage of your learning/career -- you will likely learn something new/develop a much deeper understanding of abstract concepts every time.

* Supplement your study with other courses such as those freely available on edX or MITOCW. If you are looking for a structured way to learn outside of freeCodeCamp, perhaps consider something like this: https://github.com/P1xt/p1xt-guides (not affiliated with p1xt in any way, I just came across her things when I first started learning a few years ago and find them super useful).

* Get a personal portfolio up as soon as possible, *and make an effort to refine it to show that you are different* as you go -- otherwise you will regret not having it ready when you need it. This is particularly important for people who are self-taught. Writing blog posts are okay (some companies seem to use it as a hiring metric?), but don't things that are just simply copying/paraphrasing/"distilling" without adding value -- it would just make you look very bad to those who know what they are talking about; talk about the problems you encountered, how you solved them, what you did to get personal projects done, etc. Even if it's not writing intended for interviewers/HR, you will still benefit a lot from writing things down (communicating technical details clearly is an important skill and definitely one of the metrics used by interviewers!).

I don't have much advice on entry-level remote jobs, at times it feels like they don't exist and, if they do, only in large organisations whose openings are usually extremely competitive. A few of my peers who were self-taught landed their first and remote jobs simply by reaching out and asking; I'm not sure about the details, but they're all hard-working people who evidently care about learning more than just writing code, perhaps it's not a bad idea to cold e-mail once you get to the point that you are comfortable with your skills.

I hope it helps! Good luck! :)

You hit the nail on the head. It takes time and effort to cultivate the QA mindset, and to shift into it from a developer mindset. Doing both simultaneously is often difficult in practice because it increases the lead time to produce the end-product, something that Project Managers don't seem to grok. You can successfully do both if you alternate between them, spending substantial chunks of time immersed in one role or the other at any given time.

Developers can be reasonably objective when it comes to writing small, self-contained unit tests and some amount of test automation, but beyond that, where serious QA begins, developers are generally too much in love with their creations to distance themselves from them and view them objectively.

You can see this pattern with authors who become (commercially) successful. The publisher, whose most valuable service is editing the author's work, starts becoming too deferential, causing the author's work to become muddled and flabby. A good editor is often the only one standing between mediocrity and greatness...

Initiative and enthusiasm are pretty big factors that personal projects demonstrate, even if the actual outcome isn't anything to phone home about. If you're genuinely interested in the type of thing a job requires, you'll naturally pick it up faster.

I am sorry about the position you're in. For the last several years I have been balancing taking care of my terminally ill wife who recently passed away, all while working remotely in the web hosting industry. It's hard to balance. Harder than you think. Setting boundaries will be vital to being successful in any WFH role.

Now that that's out of the way: You need to focus. You've described your abilities and that's fine, but you lack focus. Your qualifications are great, but your presentation is all over the place. You need a single one page resume that focuses on one aspect of your knowledge and experience, and lightly mentions the others. Make multiple resumes, each with a focus on one thing. Use the resume that's best for the job. I recently saw somebody who must have had 20 different resumes to match the jobs they were applying for. It worked.

Also, you might consider looking into the Web Hosting business. If your temperament is as you describe, and you like talking on the phone or live chat, most web hosts will overlook any technical gaps. Those can be taught. In fact that can lend to your focus! Focus on the fact that you know things that can't be taught: Customer Service, talking down angry customers, talented writing, friendly and always willing to find a solution under dire circumstances. Those are GOLD. Once those are on the table, the rest is negotiable. I'll email you a link to at least one that is hiring full remote entry level.

Additionally, you need to step up your confidence level. Let an employer know that your family is important to you and that you're dedicated to working hard so that you can support them- and leave it at that. They don't deserve the other details, and they aren't relevant.

I hope this helps.