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Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

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Re: Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

#31
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is seek to volunteer work at real companies rather than paying them. You may be learning but it sounds like you have some knowledge so you should still be providing them with some value.

I disagree completely. He is doing the right thing. Be upfront, pay the company, this sets the right expectations. The seniors devs have an obligation to mentor him and do it well, not just delegate him internship crap work. It would definitely be worth it for both parties.

And what will probably happen is that some scummy company will happily take his money and he will still be delegated the internship crap work. What you're describing is a school, but a school doesn't ship production code to clients and has teachers at the ready to mentor anyone who needs help. An internship is just a way to get the foot in the door with some light mentoring which usually consists of a senior pointing you in the right direction, not actually teaching you the stuff.

Re: Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

#32

I think you're far better off taking the classes. I was basically in your position 4 years ago, I had some coding skills but not enough to get my foot in the door anywhere. I chose to take a 2 year course (with a 6 months guaranteed internship) and it was invaluable for my career. You'll make connections to people who will soon also be working in the industry, you'll have time to develop your skills and build project…

I found some free courses/schools here:

http://www.npower.org/ "Non-profit Npower offers this free program to young adults ages 18 to 25. The program hosts two class cycles per year, beginning in January and July, with each running a total of 22 weeks, including 15 weeks of class-based training and _7 weeks of paid internship_. The courses are based at Npower’s HQ in Downtown Brooklyn and in Harlem."

https://flatironschool.com/programs/nyc-mobile-dev-corps "Mobile Dev Corps is a new, four month long course run by The Flatiron School and fully funded by the city. Starting in January students will learn to build iOS apps over a 16 week course. To be eligible you must be an NYC resident, earn less than $50,000 per annum and have no prior programming experience."

They also offer scholarships you can try to apply for if the above course doesn't meet your criteria. https://flatironschool.com/programs/online-web-developer-car...

https://www.c4q.nyc/accesscode/ "Over the course of 10-months, expect to spend over eighty hours each week learning to code. From collaborating in hackathons to launching products at Demo Day, Access Code is fully immersive, and designed to train industry ready developers."

Forgive my formatting, I'm new to HN....

Re: Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

#33
I'm a CTO of a cryptocurrency business.

Due to the nature of what we do we require access to blockchains for various currencies. We have a mechanism in place for this but I'm thinking of splitting it off into another company.

i.e. Crypto curreny blockchain API service for wallets, exchanges etc.

So here's what I'm offering.

* You will be CTO and sole developer of a new Startup and your 10K would be seed capital.

* I will show you what is required and how to go about it.

* We will be your first customer.

* We will take a 50% stake.

Technologies

* Ruby on Rails

* node.js

* Kotlin (possibly)

* Elm

If this is intesting to you let me know.

Your worst case scenario is the business doesn't take off but you learn a shit load of skills including how to run a crypto business.

Re: Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

#34
If you're interested in trying your hand at short-term projects, I may have some work for you in the coming months.

I am a software freelancer and so my work is project based. I also teach web development workshops at the local college.

The way I see this working is to section off chunks of work for you from my contracts. You would perform the work and pay me for mentorship and code review. Of course, your code would then be incorporated into the project so you could claim the experience on your resume.

I wouldn't be able to promise full-time work as mentorship is quite time intensive and I will have to balance it with my own work. Likewise I tend to have some downtime between projects so there isn't always work that needs to be done.

If this is something that interests you, let me know. My email is e@ericwaldman.ca

At the moment, I am on hiatus until February so unfortunately I don't have anything to offer until at least then.

Re: Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

#35
Sure you got a ton of offers but check me out.

As a side project I'm building a thing to help devs like you get some experience and make it easier to find jobs later. I'm rewriting everything in react as an open source project.

If you want we can pair a couple hours a week or so and I'll help you get better at react. I don't need or want your money but is more valuable to me your feedback and meeting more people in your position to better understand what I'm doing

Hit me up at david(at)codecorgi.com

Re: Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

#36
If you're considering another bootcamp, don't bother. You don't mention if you have a degree or not (even one in an unrelated field is valuable), but if you're considering further education/training, I'd suggest doing so at an accredited institution and earning a degree for your efforts.

Otherwise, leverage your free time to work on your skills/portfolio. Structure your time; get disciplined. Read: http://calnewport.com/blog/2015/09/29/deep-habits-three-rece...

And as others have said: do not to work for free under any circumstances. Don't sell yourself short.

Best of luck.

Re: Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

#37
I don't think it's wise to pay a company to let you work for them. I'm a rather skeptical person, and I'd be leary of anyone taking my money in such a scenario. Seems like a good way to lose $10K and wind up in the same place a few months later.

You haven't said what you've done to try to get a job. You should talk about that before people can give you advice. I have nothing to go on there, so take this with a grain of salt.

Did your bootcamp give you a promise of any assistance in finding a job? Have you kept in touch with any of your cohort? Reach out to them for help (explain the problem, ask if they have ideas that could help). These are two things that I'd try, right off the bat.

As someone else mentioned, talk to several recruiters. Present your resume and see what kind of feedback you get. If they tell you that they will be unable to place you, ask them if they think you don't have enough experience, and what they think you are missing. Recruiters are not your friend, but they are in the business of making money by placing people in jobs. If they think that they can make money by putting you in a job, they will try to do so.

Next: NYC has a smorgasbord of tech meetups with free or low-fee entry costs. Go to as many as you can. Most such meetups have an initial 30-minute period when you can stand around and talk to people about their jobs. Take notes, then go home and use the Internet to find out more about the parts of these discussions that you didn't understand. This should help to make you more technically competent.

Next, you want to do some "informational interviews": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_interview If you have friends, friends-of-friends, relatives, etc. who are working in an area that interests you, tell them you'd like to spend 30 minutes or an hour to ask about what they do at their jobs. Keep in mind you're not going to ask them for a job. You're just asking for information. Take good notes, bring them home, and again research the parts that confuse you. You can do phone informational interviews if needed, too.

The informational interviews and tech meetups are intended to help you build a network of people who know you, know that you are looking for a job, and may be able to refer you to an open position. They will also be a goldmine for learning more about the field that you want to break into.

It may help to build a small side project, and have some code samples in github. I can't speak to that, since those things never helped me.

Good luck!

Re: Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

#38
Please do not do this. Here is my reasoning:

You reasonably would want, for your 10k, to work at / learn from a respectable, successful company. But my guess is that 10k for any such company would not represent a huge amount of money, and they'd be unlikely to take you up on your offer.

On the other hand, there will be plenty of less respectable, less successful companies who would bite your hand off. But from your point of view this would not be a good return on investment.

Of course there will be exceptions, but in general I'd be suspicious of any company who would take your 10k. And since 10k is a large amount of money (to me at least!) I'd personally not want to gamble on finding one of the exceptions.

There is other advice in this thread on what to do instead - I'd think more along those lines. Just my 2c.

Re: Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

#40
Work on the front end for OpenEMR, especially as you have a medical background. It's a open source project and the lead devs posted on HN last month asking specifically for help modernizing their front end with react. They said explicitly that any experience levels are welcome

OpenEMR is in my opinion a much needed project. They have a good amount of users esp in the developing world, so your work would be used to help many people in need. The us healthcare system also needs an open emr

Learn a marketable tech you're interested in, work on an impactful open source project, and save your $10k :)

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