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Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

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Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#31

Post by imauld »

eat_veggies wrote: post #27
richardknop wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I remember working with "manual" testers tasked with automating software integration tests. Developers end up writing all the tests.

Sorry for such a juvenile question (I've only worked on small projects by myself before, but I'll be at my first internship with a large company ay the end of this month), but when should I even write unit tests? And should I write them for every function? Even the trivial ones? What defines trivial? Also, how about functions that write to a database? Should I refactor the code to separate the db writes and the compu…

Write them for everything (I'll note some exceptions). Use code coverage tools to see what parts of your code are not being hit by tests. You'll find some surprises there (tests not actually testing what they say they do). When something breaks write a test that would have found the bug, and then fix it. A good test suite will save you tons of time. If a piece of code is hard to test, it's bad code (lot's of branching logic, doing way too much in oe function/method, managing/changing too much state). Re-write it so it's easy to test.

However, don't test the compiler/interpreter and don't test your framework/libraries. Tests shouldn't look like this:

  def test_foo():
      foo = Foo(a=1, b=2, c=3)
      assert foo.a == 1
      assert foo.b == 2
      assert foo.c == 3
This test will never fail and won't tell you anything. Don't test your dependencies code if you're using active, popular packages. Test that your code passes in the right values, and handles any errors that could happen in a reasonable manner.

The time savings you can get out of a good test suite are almost limitless. Good test save lots of time in development and prevent broken things from making it to production.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#32

Post by roryisok »

nickh9000 wrote: post #7

Seems like you are taking your interview rejections to heart. Don't do that. Most companies go with the mode don't hire unless the candidate is a great fit, because they don't want to bear the cost of a mistake. I have failed a decent number of interviews, some on technical ground, some on personal ground. I still think I am not a bad programmer, despite the failed interviews. Like you I also have doubts about my abi…

Is Zuckerberg really considered to be a genius programmer? He's a very shrewd businessman alright, but Facebook is just a php website

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#33

Post by vtsingaras »

roryisok wrote: post #32
nickh9000 wrote: post #7

Seems like you are taking your interview rejections to heart. Don't do that. Most companies go with the mode don't hire unless the candidate is a great fit, because they don't want to bear the cost of a mistake. I have failed a decent number of interviews, some on technical ground, some on personal ground. I still think I am not a bad programmer, despite the failed interviews. Like you I also have doubts about my abi…

Is Zuckerberg really considered to be a genius programmer? He's a very shrewd businessman alright, but Facebook is just a php website

'Facebook is just a php website'

....... ok then

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#34

Post by doubleplusgood »

vtsingaras wrote: post #33
roryisok wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Zuckerberg really considered to be a genius programmer? He's a very shrewd businessman alright, but Facebook is just a php website

'Facebook is just a php website' ....... ok then

As originally built by him, it was indeed just a php website.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#35

Post by samblr »

doubleplusgood wrote: post #34
vtsingaras wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Facebook is just a php website' ....... ok then

As originally built by him, it was indeed just a php website.

>> it was indeed just a php website.

How quickly can one build and how quickly can it scale ? - Speed is the name of the game - is it not this rule which holds true when building things on internet.

Or else, most of top internet apps are just going to be php,rails,node web-apps

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#36

Post by King-Aaron »

echlebek wrote: post #28

You probably do suck at coding, but that's actually OK. Lots of people suck at coding, even people who have been professional software developers for years. It's hard to get that first job, but just keep trying. With a bit of luck you'll end up in a position where some people with more experience can mentor you. This will be a bit painful at times because you'll fail a lot, but you'll learn rapidly. Do learn Python,…

+1, been in the industry for about 15 years now, and I still suck at coding. At least I know how to indent it and make it look pretty!

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#38

Post by WhiteSource1 »

What kind of companies are you looking at? (And where are you located?). Don't look at the super sexy startups but consider enterprise crudware? A lot of times they have important problems - code that "just works" - but don't need the latest tech and have teams to handle different testing methodologies.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#39

Post by batoure »

roryisok wrote: post #32
nickh9000 wrote: post #7

Seems like you are taking your interview rejections to heart. Don't do that. Most companies go with the mode don't hire unless the candidate is a great fit, because they don't want to bear the cost of a mistake. I have failed a decent number of interviews, some on technical ground, some on personal ground. I still think I am not a bad programmer, despite the failed interviews. Like you I also have doubts about my abi…

Is Zuckerberg really considered to be a genius programmer? He's a very shrewd businessman alright, but Facebook is just a php website

After I started writing my response I realized you might just be trolling but I thought people might think its interesting anyway.

One of the reasons that facebook succeeded in the early days of social was because it was so stable and well built. Their major competitor in the early days MySpace was a notorious frankenstein's monster of different codebases that regularly went down and broke parts of the site.

The chasm that separates web site and web application is wide facebook has always been a very advanced web application. I have spent a good portion of my career building decent scale (not facebook scale) web applications.

Several years ago I hired a data engineer who's primary experience had been in building custom data sets for BI organizations in big companies. He happened to drop in on an early planning meeting for an RFP we were completing and heard what we were proposing the MVP cost to build out an internal application for a company would be. Shocked he asked the room "why would someone pay us this much to build an overblown website". Two years into the project he gave our wider team a presentation on his role in the project the architectural complexities and places the team had innovated on the last slide of the deck he wrote "Closing Remarks: We should have asked for twice as much to build something this complicated"

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#40

Post by ry_ry »

usuallybaffled wrote: post #21

Contribute to open source projects.

I'm not convinced that is the solution to the problem in this case - If the OP is concerned about the quality of their code and has taken a string interview rejections to heart, having pull requests closed with minimal explanation would probably compound the issue.
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