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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?

#151

Post by Jarwain »

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 there's a difference between a professional using a boot camp to switch fields, and someone using a boot camp to avoid going to college or something

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

#153

Post by seattle_spring »

wturner wrote: post #51

If you can pass employer coding challenges as easily as you say, the rest is low hanging fruit. It’s hard for me to imagine what the problem is on your end. I have the complete inverse problem. Here’s what I would do: Make up a name for your own personal company and get a matching domain. Make a basic website with your domain. Under the resume/CV entry for this make-believe-company write that you perform contract wor…

It's easy to see right through this little charade. If you label yourself as "CEO" or some related nonsense, any competent HM will throw your application directly into the garbage.

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

#154

Post by dan-robertson »

seattle_spring wrote: post #153
wturner wrote: post #51

If you can pass employer coding challenges as easily as you say, the rest is low hanging fruit. It’s hard for me to imagine what the problem is on your end. I have the complete inverse problem. Here’s what I would do: Make up a name for your own personal company and get a matching domain. Make a basic website with your domain. Under the resume/CV entry for this make-believe-company write that you perform contract wor…

It's easy to see right through this little charade. If you label yourself as "CEO" or some related nonsense, any competent HM will throw your application directly into the garbage.

At least in the U.K. one-person contracting companies are reasonably common. Though I do find the GP suggestion weird.

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

#155

Post by codingdave »

indigochill wrote: post #21

I majored in journalism and worked in tech support for a while, but I got into engineering by seeing manual procedures that I could write software to speed up, so I did that. Management saw the value in it (I helped by pitching this as a force multiplier) and gave me an ever-increasing allotment of my schedule to work on that instead of customer support until it became 100%. They did try to route me into QA first, bu…

I did the same - admittedly, this was decades ago, but when I had no coding experience, I took a tech support job and learned. As I learned, I started doing small projects for my department, and as those succeeded, it took up more and more of my job until I got promoted to be a coder.

I've had people on HN tell me that this path is the most horrible path to recommend to people, yet at the same time -- it works. And you make a living while getting your skills up.

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

#156

Post by codethief »

The IT consulting[0] firm I work for (~700 people, Germany-based + a few satellite branches in other European countries but unfortunately not in Sweden (yet) — which is where I take it you are located) hires people with zero professional SWE experience – often straight out of university (though not exclusively so) and frequently it's people who didn't even study computer science (though in that case it tends to be math/physics and they usually learned a bit of coding as part of their degree or thesis or something). In our interviews we do some coding exercises but what we're mainly interested in seeing are logical reasoning capabilities, communication skills, culture fit and a genuine interest in software engineering. Our stance is that you can and will learn everything else – either in the trainings you attend when you start or later on the job, with some guidance by our colleagues.

Long story short: You would very likely have a decent shot at an offer.

Now as I mentioned we don't have a branch in Sweden (and EU law would require one if you were to work for us remotely from Sweden), so I'm not here to advertize our firm. But maybe you can find similar companies? I know of at least a handful in Germany, so I assume there must be some in Scandinavia, too.

[0]: "Consulting" as in "We tell you how to do it and then we do it for/with you".

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

#158

Post by mediascreen »

I think it depends on what kind of programming job you want.

In my experience hiring practices wary a lot between different types of companies. Getting a job at a FAANG type of company varies from getting hired by a local web agency, a consultancy, startup or just being hired to run the company website.

HN tends to focus a lot on FAANG and well financed startups, but there are a lot of very different programming jobs out there.

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

#159

Post by yshrestha »

- Start a personal blog about software engineering principles

- Have some good code on GitHub

- Work for a startup, they are more likely to take chances on you

- Prefer working on-site if you can. Working remote is great once you have learned how to learn

Good luck with your search.

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

#160

Post by dhosek »

I took a few years off mid-career to try teaching mathematics, but couldn’t make it work.

How I got back on the dev track:

1. I picked up any gigs I could from craigslist, just to be able to get a recent job from someone who would give me a reference.

2. Then I took any contracting job I could get, again, focusing on getting experience.

3. From there I was able to get a full time job and leverage myself over a couple job hops back to where I would have been had I not left programming for a few years. I think that something similar would work for bootstrapping a programming career out of being a hobby programmer.

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