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Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer

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31–40 of 137 posts

Re: Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer

#31
What have worked for me is to use my friend network. Send an application to the same place one of your friends work, and ask them to become your champion. If you do not have any friends in software, prepare a CV and send it out to every emplyer you can find. You will need to contact hundres if not thousands, but when you do get an interview, do not mention you have applied anywhere else if you get asked you need to lie and say that you did not apply to anywhere else, unless you have got multiple offers. In the interview they will ask you how you can help them, and what they should hire you for. You need to reverse those questions in order to find out what they like you to do. What they need... Using any work sites like Linkedin, or Github is a waste of time. Something that will impress employees is if you are a public speaker, so make a talk and have someone record you, it doesn't matter if there is a audience or not.

Hiring in general and especially in software is FUBAR. It doesn't matter how good you are at doing the work, all that matters is your contact network and/or how good you are at the hiring process.

Re: Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer

#32

My girlfriend is unemployed in West Pennsylvania and is having trouble getting a minimum wage job in the area. She has her GED and a resume which contains a lot of art projects she's worked on. Are these irrelevant credits a turn off for employers? Is there anything else she can do? I'm more than happy to share the document.

Has she worked on any "money" projects (as opposed to "art")? Employers, as a rule, don't care about art. They do care if you have a demonstrated track record of delivering stuff they can sell. Art and money need not be mutually exclusive, if she worked on art projects that were commercially successful, she might want to put the tangible, commercial success front and center, preferably with concrete numbers that can be attributed to her.

Re: Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer

#33
Programming is the coal mining industry of our era. Do you want to become a coal miner? Then follow the pointless advices from most of the people here. Being also homeless for more than a year my advice would be to seek any kind of job for living and use your programming skills to build projects of your own. Good luck and happy new year.

Re: Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer

#34
post #28

Don't get me wrong (I hope you'll find a job in a blink), but I see you created an account an hour ago, so this could be useful (from HN FAQ): Can I post a job ad? Please don't post job ads as submissions to HN. A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month. Most job ads are welcome there. But only an account called whoishiring[1] is allowed to submit the thread itself. This prevents a…

have some compassion and screw the rules

Re: Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer

#35
post #28

Don't get me wrong (I hope you'll find a job in a blink), but I see you created an account an hour ago, so this could be useful (from HN FAQ): Can I post a job ad? Please don't post job ads as submissions to HN. A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month. Most job ads are welcome there. But only an account called whoishiring[1] is allowed to submit the thread itself. This prevents a…

The way you wrote this comment makes it seem like you're implying OP has posted a job ad, when obviously he's posting looking for jobs....the opposite of a job ad.

If you were just trying to let him know about the Who's Hiring thread, it was a weird way to start your comment.

Re: Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer

#37

In my experience, in the absence of a CS degree you need a portfolio, though posting on HN may be a good shortcut. While you're job hunting, if you haven't already, start building something moderately technical. You don't have to build anything that cures cancer, but if you can build a reasonably complex project consisting of at least two independent modules (say, a frontend and a backend) with a modern stack, you sh…

> in the absence of a CS degree you need a portfolio If you can demonstrate good programming skills I think most companies would still hire you even without past job experience (I assume that's what you mean by portfolio - if you mean Github projects then in my experience nobody really looks at those). A CS degree is also irrelevant - pretty much all programming jobs in the UK just want any technical degree. In all t…

> if you mean Github projects then in my experience nobody really looks at those

This makes me so sad. As a hiring official I love reading through an applicants commits. It says so much about their personality, what they choose to say, when they choose to commit, their attention to detail when they think nobody is “really” looking.

Re: Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer

#38
Software developer here who’s also been through mental health issues and periods of homelessness in the past, the company I work for is aggressively hiring and already has offices in, I suspect, the same rainy northern city you speak of. Drop me an email at noone.youknow46@gmail.com and we’ll talk about a referral :)

Re: Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer

#39

In my experience, in the absence of a CS degree you need a portfolio, though posting on HN may be a good shortcut. While you're job hunting, if you haven't already, start building something moderately technical. You don't have to build anything that cures cancer, but if you can build a reasonably complex project consisting of at least two independent modules (say, a frontend and a backend) with a modern stack, you sh…

> in the absence of a CS degree you need a portfolio If you can demonstrate good programming skills I think most companies would still hire you even without past job experience (I assume that's what you mean by portfolio - if you mean Github projects then in my experience nobody really looks at those). A CS degree is also irrelevant - pretty much all programming jobs in the UK just want any technical degree. In all t…

If you can identify as x y z for enough intersectionality points zhour HR problem they are solved.
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