Yes definitely. There are way more jobs opening than skilled laborers, and very likely to continue that way for a long time. Have some fun and enjoy your learning, don't always think about it as a job or for getting a job.
Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
201–210 of 246 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#202If you’re not inherently driven by an interest in computers, I would not recommend a job in this field. You will never be able to compete with people who do this as a passion and the constant need to learn (forever) will quickly burn you out.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#203Yes. 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…
>If you can actually be a productive employee I literally know 100 companies that will hire you today. As a self-taught engineer you have to convince them of that, which mostly means a solid portfolio, but there is insane demand. And if you get even one year of experience you won’t believe how many opportunities open up. This just isn’t true. The industry has become insanely competitive for anyone but the top level s…
This is the result of poor tactics. If you're not a CS grad, quit the CS grad hiring path.
Get off the job boards and use services like Vettery and Hired, do outreach on LinkedIn with recruiters and startup CTOs/VP Engineering/Engineering Leads, go to more popular tech meetups consistently and network. Every job I've gotten has been through this.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array. They ask you to find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, or to find all sub-matrices in an NxM matrix with a positive determinant in a matrix of arbitrary size, or find all words in a dictionary that can be constructed by concatenating other words in the dictionary. The…
I've seen both sides a number of times. Even when interviewing specifically those coming out of code-camp style organizations, there's probably 2/3 that never did anything in terms of discovery beyond what they were assigned. I'm not saying that anyone has to spend all their free time coding, but a bit of passion when starting out is the single best indicator of how a junior level developer will perform. This other i…
What's the question?
I like to ask them to explain either the concept of closures in javascript, or how `this` works.
I don't even need them to know the word closure, knowing why you can't reference a variable written inside another function, the difference between var and let, or what does bind/apply do.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#205Yes. 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…
That is partially true, but it’s flooded with people who cannot code. I no longer believe this. I think “people who cannot code” is a myth perpetuated by those who gain something out of it. People who’s business or job is to filter candidates, people who’s business is to sell their own “improved” version of training, people in need of an ego boost and actually, mainly by people who just repeat it cause they heard it…
I'm skeptical of that trope also. I remember that stack overflow fizzbuzz post, but I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz. I've also never been asked to do anything as basic as code a fizzbuzz example in an interview.
Most people seemed to have workable skill levels. A pretty good portion of people seemed to still be in the novelty phase of programming where they would be slightly too excited and surprised at themself, and perhaps slightly unconfident, in answering a fairly basic question correctly.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#206Yes. 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…
>If you can actually be a productive employee I literally know 100 companies that will hire you today. As a self-taught engineer you have to convince them of that, which mostly means a solid portfolio, but there is insane demand. And if you get even one year of experience you won’t believe how many opportunities open up. This just isn’t true. The industry has become insanely competitive for anyone but the top level s…
I hate to break it to you, but you're just not trying hard enough - keep trying.
During my last round of looking for a job I never applied to a single company, I let all of the recruiters come to me. In five months, I had a total of five interviews and three offers.
I have an active github portfolio which shows a professional picture of myself and I have React skills which might set me apart (React is very hot right now, won't be like that for much longer though as the market is starting to saturate), but aside from that I'm self taught and have about 3 years of professional experience, ten if you include personal/self-taught experience.
I had to go through some BS phone screens though, it was to the point where I had to buy books specifically on C# design patterns and architecture just to pass them, I had managers grilling me on some pretty esoteric aspects of the language, but it was worth it. (I have ten years of self-taught .NET development experience)
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#207The Web isn't going anywhere as society today heavily depends on it for all kinds of solutions. Just think how many things we do these days on the Web. So with that said, gaining the knowledge to build useful applications on the Web will lead to a career in Software Engineering. Because a Web Developer's knowledge spans across many different technologies, we typically use titles like Software Engineer, Front End Engineer, Full Stack Engineer, etc.
For example, here is what a Front End Engineer might have knowledge in:
- HTML (semantic markup)
- CSS (layout, animations, responsive, mobile-first, media queries, SASS, etc.)
- JavaScript (the language itself)
- HTTP, AJAX, Promise API, RESTful APIs, async VS parallel
- DOM APIs, DOM Performance
- UX/UI methodologies
- Accessibility, ARIA
- Module bundlers, transpilers, build tools (webpack.js, rollup.js, etc.)
- Various frameworks and libraries and knowing why and when to use them (e.g. Lodash, React, Ember, jQuery, etc.)
- Programming design patterns, methodologies, and best practices
- Object oriented programming
- Functional programming (.map(), .reduce() and knowing about immutability)
- Test driven development and various testing frameworks/libraries
- Command Line (Bash, and/or other Unix/Linux shells)
- Version control (GIT)
- Data Structures and Algorithms (arrays, trees, DFS, BFS, and more)
- High or deep level knowledge of how Browsers work (the event loop, reflow/relayout, etc.)
- A server side language (NodeJS, Ruby, Python, PHP)
- Databases (MySQL, NoSQL)
- A server side web framework (ExpressJS, Ruby on Rails, Django, Laravel, etc.)
- Security (authentication, authorization, XSS, SQL injections, cookies, and more)
- Ability to deploy a product in a production environment (e.g. AWS)
- Development workflows (GIT, code reviews, continuous integration, and more)
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a hiring manager, my experience has been that the average unsolicited resume belongs to someone who can't implement fizzbuzz. (this has a lot to do with the population that spams resumes though i believe) My experience has also been that most raw junior candidates need significant handholding to implement anything into a typical production system at first, and that the learning curve from there varies greatly. Wha…
Last time I was involved in hiring I created a very simple coding challenge. I've seen far worse on the other side. The goal was to read in a CSV file, read and transform it to a different format (newline separated json) node.js preferred and put it on github. There were no restrictions on what libraries could be used, no requirements for unit tests, etc. It's something that literally took me about half an hour to wr…
Last year, I took a contract leading a dev team at a top company here in Austin. The team, largely educated in India, said doing substantial ETL-like cleanup of the pipe-separated 15GB input file would take then about 3 days: 1 day to write the Scala & Java code, and 2 days to process it through the Spark cluster. I shocked them when I called B.S.! I spent the rest of the afternoon showing what you can do with pipelines of grep, cut, paste, and awk. Took 2-3 hours to build the proper pipeline and only 15 minutes to run it on my local laptop hard disk. The sad thing is they were impressed, but still inclined to use the ridiculously complicated cluster pipelines instead, since that was "the way we were taught..."
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array. They ask you to find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, or to find all sub-matrices in an NxM matrix with a positive determinant in a matrix of arbitrary size, or find all words in a dictionary that can be constructed by concatenating other words in the dictionary. The…
Which would be fine if the companies acknowledged that they are having trouble hiring because they're extremely picky. Exactly this. I'm mid-level, trying to switch jobs. Several front-end javascript positions I interviewed for asked me anything from pretty tough algorithms to "how does Angular do namespacing" to object-oriented questions relating to Java to how to style a page and add event listeners to it without a…
Amen on getting rid of the H1Bs! Not only would doing soclear out the deadwood, the improvements in skills, capabilities, communication ability, and critical thinking would dramatically slash the true cost of software development.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen both sides a number of times. Even when interviewing specifically those coming out of code-camp style organizations, there's probably 2/3 that never did anything in terms of discovery beyond what they were assigned. I'm not saying that anyone has to spend all their free time coding, but a bit of passion when starting out is the single best indicator of how a junior level developer will perform. This other i…
What's the question? I like to ask them to explain either the concept of closures in javascript, or how `this` works. I don't even need them to know the word closure, knowing why you can't reference a variable written inside another function, the difference between var and let, or what does bind/apply do.
What are the values that equate to false in an if statement?
false, null, undefined, NaN, "" (empty string), 0
Bonus: An object with a toString() method that returns one of the above won't evaluate directly, but will roughly equal (foo == false).
sometimes I'll ask for a function that returns input as a whole number or null, if it's a string, attempt to parse base 10, return null if invalid, return null if the input isn't already a number or a string. 0 is usually what will trip people up.