Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 65 posts

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

#41

Are there any other areas you are passionate about? Particular industries that you may have more knowledge than the average coder? Having inside knowledge of an industry can help make-up for lack-luster coding skills. For example, I work in bioinformatics and the coding problems I face day-to-day are by no means insanely difficult. If you have a decent grasp of biology, many people would love to employ you as a bioin…

Domain knowledge is OP's best shot indeed, putting brain & hands into applications with a defined perspective may help OP extract value from his CS studies and, who knows, a vocation.

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

#42
> It does what it needs to do, but there were no smart decisions behind the back end. I never had to use design patterns nor data structures. I just pieced it together.

If you have shipped this or finished this project for a customer then this is more worth imho then being good in those coding tests. For most tasks it isn't necessary to to make smart decisions. Just piecing stuff together so that a job gets done and/or a customer is satisfied is better then trying to be cutting edge.

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

#43
Time to start thinking about your job hunt as a search optimization problem.

When I first got started in my career I created 10 email addresses and used them to make 10 accounts on Dice.com I made 10 very different versions of my resume and started tracking the types of companies I got responses from. If I had an interview I would take notes about the style of the interview at that company and I tweaked the resumes to try to get more responses from the types of companies I enjoyed interviewing with.

Code problems are rough, I've built some cool stuff in my day but the anxiety of a quick solve on something I have never seen before breaks my brain. How can I have a 4am miracle at 11am infront of a whiteboard.

I have a strategy that has helped me land several jobs I really enjoyed.

Be up front, tell the company ahead of time your sense is that you consistently fail to demonstrate your skills with these types of problems some companies might tell you to fuck off and that will be it. But some companies might find a different way to get what they want out of you.

Additionally do as many in person interviews as possible for parts of the field you aren't interested in. In 2015 I started doing a search and felt rusty, so I made a dev ops oriented resume and interviewed for like 30 dev ops jobs. I didn't want to work in Dev Ops I'm a data guy. But it's amazing how getting comfortable going in for an interview will make you better at the interviews you want to land.

Also as someone who has been a hiring manager I have observed a funny problem that people with CS degrees have. Most early career CS people are really boring there is very little character to who they are. They are essentially a product of the curriculum that taught them.

Go build some opinions on something thats not part of a bandwagon trend then find ways to bring it up in your interview. It will help you be more memorable.

I'm a Data Scientist but I love interrogating app developers about how they feel about authentication methods like JWT and I talk about the parts of Angular that impressed me and finally helped me break through into Javascript. I don't use those things as answers to questions I just bring them up as part of conversation during the interview. It demonstrates that you have depth and can contribute beyond being a ticket monkey.

When you said you knew X and the VP asked you if you y, z he didn't need you to know those things he just wanted to see if you were a one trick pony

if you had said "I'm not familiar with y and z but I am really fascinated by v and w which I have studied on my own time can you tell me how y and z compare to v and w"

No matter how he responds you just go "Wow it would be really cool to get to work with you guys and see how you integrate y and z that sounds super interesting"

If a VP wont let that dialogue happen and they just want to power trip and interrogate you remember: the biggest mistake people make at car dealerships is forgetting that they can get up and walk out.

Its your job hunt take back the power.

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

#44

Are there any other areas you are passionate about? Particular industries that you may have more knowledge than the average coder? Having inside knowledge of an industry can help make-up for lack-luster coding skills. For example, I work in bioinformatics and the coding problems I face day-to-day are by no means insanely difficult. If you have a decent grasp of biology, many people would love to employ you as a bioin…

I have a M.S. in comp sci and a B.S. in biology. I would love to work in Bioinformatics. I'm currently a general developer. Do you have any rec's for places to look for bioinformatics positions?

I was going to suggest something like that. I have worked with bioinformaticians before, and while the code is often very poor quality, it is also used for one off calculations, so doesn't need to be great in terms of maintainability.

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

#45
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The point is once it started to get to medium and large scale, there was experienced developers scaling it instead of zuckerberg.

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

#46
post #43

Time to start thinking about your job hunt as a search optimization problem. When I first got started in my career I created 10 email addresses and used them to make 10 accounts on Dice.com I made 10 very different versions of my resume and started tracking the types of companies I got responses from. If I had an interview I would take notes about the style of the interview at that company and I tweaked the resumes t…

This is one of the best answers I have read today. So many small nuggets of information. As someone in the middle of a not so satisfying job search, this is really helpful. So Thanks!

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

#47
post #46
post #43

Time to start thinking about your job hunt as a search optimization problem. When I first got started in my career I created 10 email addresses and used them to make 10 accounts on Dice.com I made 10 very different versions of my resume and started tracking the types of companies I got responses from. If I had an interview I would take notes about the style of the interview at that company and I tweaked the resumes t…

This is one of the best answers I have read today. So many small nuggets of information. As someone in the middle of a not so satisfying job search, this is really helpful. So Thanks!

:)

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

#49
post #45
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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

The point is once it started to get to medium and large scale, there was experienced developers scaling it instead of zuckerberg.

This was my original thought. Zuckerberg hired people to scale facebook to what it has become today.

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

#50
post #39

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

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 chas…

I honestly was not trolling. Maybe naive, maybe posting without thinking about it much, but not trolling
Post reply on HN