111–120 of 246 posts
I recommend looking at job posts for the jobs you want and teaching yourself the technologies they require. Consider looking for paid internships, especially if you’re in college (even if you’re just taking some community college courses).
Yes. What you're missing is three fold... 1: Where do people hire freelancers. 2: Sales skills. 3: An alternative to worrying about 1 and 2. 1. Create a profile and Upwork. While everything you'll read about Upwork will be negative you need leads. Upwork gets them for you and yes you can create your own website and start there but Upwork already spends a ton of money on ads / SEO and content marketing to keep generat…
People say that web dev (the javascript/react/python/c#/java) fullstack kind is boring and mundane. But what else do people actually do? Sure, there's ML and embedded work but aren't most engineers doing CRUD work anyway?
Is ML even a programming job? I see it more like data science, 10% programming 90% math. Edit: 3% programming, 30% math, 67% scrubbing data. Thanks for the correction shortoncash. :)
Yes. What you're missing is three fold... 1: Where do people hire freelancers. 2: Sales skills. 3: An alternative to worrying about 1 and 2. 1. Create a profile and Upwork. While everything you'll read about Upwork will be negative you need leads. Upwork gets them for you and yes you can create your own website and start there but Upwork already spends a ton of money on ads / SEO and content marketing to keep generat…
If you are worried about Upwork's reputation, choose Toptal instead. I have no connection with them other than having worked with freelancers from them a couple of times. They've been great. I have also come to know one of their devs personally, and he had only good things to say. He is now employed full time by a company for whom he used to work for through Toptal. However, having six months of experience, Toptal mi…
Solving [business] problems is a viable career choice. Web development could be solving someone's essential business problem or totally non-essential for someone else. The key is to find the customer for whom whatever you're doing will solve essential business problem. Quite often web development is exactly what customer needs but he won't call it this way. He won't use this wording. He won't look for web developer.…
This is spot on, whether you are free-lancing or working as an employee in a big organization.
More generally, software development benefits from a large flow of money precisely because, whether directly or indirectly, it enables businesses to accomplish things in a {faster, more efficient, cheaper} way. When career planning, always remember where the money comes.
Interacting with an end-user is not a "solved problem" that has been commoditized. There are still a lot of human touch, optimizations, edge cases and performance issues that are actively being worked on and have not been formalized and standardized in ubiquitous ways for all industries. Sure framework XYZ may get you 80% there but then there are specific UX issues that you will have to delve in, and that's where the real fun begins.
Hell yes! Just don't try and be the guy making 3 page info sites for your local gardener/bakery/whatever. There's simply no money in that, as they can do that themselves for free with an online website builder, so the value add from a good dev is minimal. Once you've honed your skills, focus on the more complex, bespoke projects. Become good at delivering on time and try to find clients that wish to invest in tech to…
The main problem with this is these days it's so easy to whip something together with Wordpress and a template, and many web hosting and domain purchasing sites even offer extremely simple ways to set these types of sites up.
Quite frankly, it was never that hard, but these days the value proposition is practically nil.
Yes. I am the co-founder of Lambda School - (YC S17 - a CS education where the school doesn’t get paid unless you get a good job). Right now we see about 3 students/day get hired. You’ll likely hear a lot of people talking about how the market for juniors is flooded. That is partially true, but it’s flooded with people who cannot code . If you can actually be a productive employee I literally know 100 companies that…
>>> there is insane demand I am seeing it as well. And am recommending Lambda School to just about everyone who asks ;) The main problem I see is the steep learning curve. The intro lessons are facile enough. Anyone can setup VS Code, and install an App Engine SDK. But by the time they get to modules 3-4 ("designing the data schema"). They are ready to throw in the towel. At some point, a student requires one-to-one…
Over the past decades, many developers are self taught. And online communities and resources have only improved over time.
>Six months sounds like a lot No, it does not. Learning new skill from scratch takes time. You're trying to master 2 new, orthogonal, in some sense contradictory skills: web development, and self-promotion (to find your place in "the job market"). Take a deep breath.
Considering how little I knew after a 4-year Bachelor's degree, 6 months of nights and weekends is insignificant.
Which isn't to say the non-programming stuff in my degree was irrelevant, but you don't need to spend 4 years full time studying to learn relevant skills for a junior web developer job, and you could easily learn them in less time outside of a degree.
I think there are many good jobs available in web development. But it will depend significantly on your location.