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Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

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Re: Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

#131

Post by drdaeman »

warent wrote: post #88
rubberband wrote: post #86

Late to the party, but maybe I can help. I've helped in the hiring of many developers. (grain of salt, just my opinion, etc...) * Don't do bootcamps. It's a red flag for me. This can be said for any 100% online college. (again, I'm just being honest). Community colleges are fine. * You having a Github that you've committed stuff to often-ish will most interest me. I don't give a crud if you contribute to open source.…

I've been a hiring manager for a couple of years now, and have nearly 10 yrs professional dev experience in the industry. Bootcamps are a red flag for you? What? Do you have any rationale for that? Makes zero sense to me. If someone has done a bootcamp, that's a big plus. Online college is neutral. The rest I agree with.

Yea, this is weird. Bootcamps can be useful or useless (depending on a course, instructors and a person), but surely they don't do any harm?

Not everyone goes there to get technical skills, there are people going there for soft skills (practicing working on assignments, especially group assignments, etc.) and networking (at least some bootcamps advertise they have some relationship with recruiting agencies).

Re: Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

#132

Post by BlueDingo »

It probably won't be feasible due to cost, but my CV was noticed instantly once I enrolled in a Computer Science bachelor's degree program at a local college. I didn't have the degree and was still in my first year but that seemed to help get through the first-pass filter. My knowledge and skills were then apparent during interview.

If you live somewhere with free or cheap public education then this might actually be easy. And even though I never finished the program (due to life reasons, not my intention) that first year really helped fill in some low-level gaps in my knowledge.

So! Not good advice but it could actually help if you've tried everything else.

Re: Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

#133

Post by nicoburns »

torben-friis wrote: post #112
rubberband wrote: post #86

Late to the party, but maybe I can help. I've helped in the hiring of many developers. (grain of salt, just my opinion, etc...) * Don't do bootcamps. It's a red flag for me. This can be said for any 100% online college. (again, I'm just being honest). Community colleges are fine. * You having a Github that you've committed stuff to often-ish will most interest me. I don't give a crud if you contribute to open source.…

I've been training juniors and taking part in technical interviews for a few years now, and I can say that bootcamp hires were generally the best performant. Particularly those in late twenties/early thirties who were coming from an entirely different field - we had tons of applications from former architects and biologists for some reason - tend to outshine younger software engineers fresh out of school in just a fe…

I think it’s because boot camp graduates often have no experience prior to the boot camp, so they’ll often only have 3 months coding experience total. Whereas most other applicants will have much more experience than that even if they have no professional experience.

Re: Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

#134

Post by operatingthetan »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #25
JKCalhoun wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't argue with your experience but will simply add that I did download apps from the two candidates I interviewed that did have apps on the AppStore.

I had one chap refuse to check my portfolio, because "I probably faked it." Here's my GH ID: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY You can easily see that I faked over a decade of checkin history, dozens of repos, in multiple organizations, over 20 shipped apps, lots of blog posts, tutorials, class modules, etc.

>I had one chap refuse to check my portfolio, because "I probably faked it."

I don't know the context of how that came up, but I'd probably let the recruiter know of their unprofessional behavior if that happened to me.

Re: Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

#136

Post by scrollaway »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #96
intelVISA wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: how is he expected to contract/consult/freelance as a hobbyist with 0 YOE? Outside of race to the bottom Fiver gigs that you probably don't want a lot of good contract work is more "getting shit done" than salary roles; which usually requires selling yourself with a track record/network. Personally I'd just ship some crapware on the app store of your choice and spin it as a 'venture'. As others have…

I started doing exactly this ~20 years ago, namely getafreelancer.com, fighting with developers at 20$ an hour. Over time I kept some good contacts from there and supplanted the low paid jobs with better clients.

Same. I started at 15 GBP / hr 13 years ago on peopleperhour, doing cheap jobs and building up trust. This slowly evolved into a network, enough experience to launch my own startup, and now I've been CTO of two startups and I run my own consulting company, at 20-50x the rate I started at.

Re: Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

#137

Post by profile53 »

BlueDingo wrote: post #132

It probably won't be feasible due to cost, but my CV was noticed instantly once I enrolled in a Computer Science bachelor's degree program at a local college. I didn't have the degree and was still in my first year but that seemed to help get through the first-pass filter. My knowledge and skills were then apparent during interview. If you live somewhere with free or cheap public education then this might actually be…

Can confirm this advice. Highly recommended to explore comp sci programs at local schools or online; check WGU for example.

Re: Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

#138

Post by foreverCarlos »

chaps wrote: post #124
foreverCarlos wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn’t make bootcamps a red flag. Also, there are many self-taught programmers who complete a bootcamp just to gain confidence, make connections, etc.

I think it's a red flag when it's also attached to a certain kind of confidence that their bootcamp experience was on-par with years of experience or education. As in, the kind of attitude where that they feel that because they went through the exhausting bootcamp stage, everything next is just an application of what came from the bootcamp. It's something I've only seen with programmers from bootcamps.

Honestly, never encountered that. In my experience bootcampers are usually self-conscious about their background. Maybe they behave differently at small companies/startups (my experience is at a big tech co)?

Re: Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

#139

Post by throwaway0asd »

torben-friis wrote: post #112
rubberband wrote: post #86

Late to the party, but maybe I can help. I've helped in the hiring of many developers. (grain of salt, just my opinion, etc...) * Don't do bootcamps. It's a red flag for me. This can be said for any 100% online college. (again, I'm just being honest). Community colleges are fine. * You having a Github that you've committed stuff to often-ish will most interest me. I don't give a crud if you contribute to open source.…

I've been training juniors and taking part in technical interviews for a few years now, and I can say that bootcamp hires were generally the best performant. Particularly those in late twenties/early thirties who were coming from an entirely different field - we had tons of applications from former architects and biologists for some reason - tend to outshine younger software engineers fresh out of school in just a fe…

Most likely the difference in performance is due to differences in expectations. The two greatest common failures I see repeated among software developers is:

1) The inability to consider diverse perspectives

2) The inability to differentiate writing instructions from building something larger

For example many developers cannot imagine the career requirements associated with other careers. That could be due to lack of experience diversity, poor empathy, or weak imagination.

Likewise, many developers cannot write original software. The very idea is frequently both horrifying and disgusting. The alternative is just a little help from a tool or framework, because they write instructions not applications. The interesting part of that is how people respond when confronted about it.

Re: Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

#140

Post by jcpst »

mtnGoat wrote: post #123
rubberband wrote: post #86

Late to the party, but maybe I can help. I've helped in the hiring of many developers. (grain of salt, just my opinion, etc...) * Don't do bootcamps. It's a red flag for me. This can be said for any 100% online college. (again, I'm just being honest). Community colleges are fine. * You having a Github that you've committed stuff to often-ish will most interest me. I don't give a crud if you contribute to open source.…

Interesting. I’ve hired At least 100 developers in my career And have never seen coding challenges or boot camps as Red flags, rather I see them as someone going out and trying to learn and improve. On the contrary certain universities and employers certainly are( too much indoctrination(and ego in some cases) to undo). I know a number of boot camp graduates working in FANG level companies. Coding challenges are very…

I don’t have hiring authority, but I was on a lot of technical interviews at my company for a while.

When people put their GH handle on their resume, I definitely checked it out. Sometimes I would even see if I could get it running on the first try. This has been an indicator of some of practices they have.

But it’s only ever a small piece of the picture. Some people push their code to github when they are very junior, and it doesn’t represent where their skills are currently at.

There is the issue of forgery, but I lump it in the same category as lying on a resume- the deception is equally as serious.

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