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I have a decade of experience and a masters degree. Devoted the best parts of my life to 50-60 hour weeks in tech. Im about to go work at an Amazon warehouse. Tech is basically over now.
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This is claiming an accomplishment that was not achieved for the intent of financial gain. You are suggesting fraud.
That's not how fraud works in a legal sense between private parties. It's a job. They pay him to perform work, not to accurately represent whether or not he earned a piece of paper. If he's taking government benefits explicitly intended for degree holders, that is fraud, and not what I'm suggesting. He doesn't need a degree to slap some shitty code together for some half-baked statup.
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You didn’t state where you are based now. Are you still in India or you moved elsewhere?
Still in India. The layoffs and the recent batch of fresh graduates have really made it impossible to get a job as companies can basically take their pick. Immediate joiners, low salary expectations, work experience from FAANG like companies. And then there's the great vanishing of VC money as interest rates have been raised sharply
If you don’t know where to start, you could start by reviewing COSS (commercial open source software) projects that need help from contributors in exchange for payment (aka bounties) on Algora [1].
Issues typically have a dollar amount attached to them and the dollar amount is often a proxy of how much effort it would take you to complete it.
So, a $20 issue could probably take you a few mins to complete, while a $200 ticket could probably take you a few hours to a few days, if you are not familiar with the codebase/stack.
Note that competition is fierce for the “easy” tasks on Algora and many Algora regulars will open a PR (pull request) within minutes of a bounty being available publicly.
Good luck!
In the interview, be able to both explain technical decisions you have made on the job and answer technical questions. If you don’t know the answer, say what you do know, so the interviewer can get your thought process.
Internally, try to let your anxiety, frustration, and fears dissipate (don’t hang onto them). Optimism is good for your mental health, and it is a visible and desirable trait in a prospective employee or colleague.
Be authentically enthusiastic, but try to avoid coming across as over-eager. Try to maintain a pleasant, neutral, but thoughtful demeanor in the interview.
Good luck!
Context - I'm from India, and works at big tech. I do have a degree, but no employer has every asked to see it. They just want to know that I _went_ to a college, doesn't matter if I graduated or not.
> What can I do that would make you look past my lack of educational qualifications?
Your own one-person software-as-a-service business or relevant side projects. Hard to argue that you are not qualified when you can point them to github/website and say "I made this".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how fraud works in a legal sense between private parties. It's a job. They pay him to perform work, not to accurately represent whether or not he earned a piece of paper. If he's taking government benefits explicitly intended for degree holders, that is fraud, and not what I'm suggesting. He doesn't need a degree to slap some shitty code together for some half-baked statup.
I think the primary reasons to not be fraudulent are outside of any legal liabilities. I think the fact that you defended your advice about lying by saying it is not illegal says a lot about your attitude and worldview.
At the end of the day what matters is whether or not you deliver value to the company, and if one is capable of doing that, the employer doesn’t give a fuck about degrees. It’s to hack the bullshit HR/interview process.
I think your comments show you’re a weak-willed follower of arbitrary rules that would rather let their family starve than break-in to a store and steal some bread during a crisis.
When I seriously needed a job as a less senior person, I targeted closer to 100 applications a week. Maybe only a few of these will be "high effort" dramatically recrafting a cover letter and resume, but you can also get responses from "there is a reasonable fit" opportunities and applying with one of a handful of stock resumes.
If your best tailored resume given who you are has a 1% chance of a response and a "good enough" resume has a 0.5% chance of response, you need to play the numbers game and apply a lot more, not hope wordsmithing will make "not having a education" dramatically more appealing and change minds.
Marketers like good messages for their direct mail campaigns, but what they need is to be able to cost effectively get their message in front of a lot of the right people, because most won't respond. As one of many junior people trying to land one of many (slightly less)junior jobs, you need to play this numbers game too.
Lots of other advice here but just wanted to add one piece: when you do get interviews, beware of anything that sounds too negative about your current (or past) employer. Even though the fact that you're looking for work basically implies that you are unsatisfied, if your tone or language is negative it will give the impression that you are a negative person. So, when you do get that interview, just say that the oppo…
> if your tone or language is negative it will give the impression that you are a negative person. I had this backfire. I left a job after dealing with toxic and personal BS and passed all my interviews at a great company. Then came the personal references where one must be my previous manager. My previous manager trashed me and gave me a bad reference and I didn't get the job. In the future I didn't hold back on why…
I'm an East Coast straight shooter and I feel that's enough to get my point across and let them know what my expectations and intentions are. If they're also running a shit show they'll put one and one together and figure out I'm not a good fit. If they're ligit they'll appreciate the toned down honesty.
At least that's what I hope for sone shit shows don't seem to recognize that. It's Dunning Krueger at the organizational level. Frustrating.
You say you're from India but don't say where you're at now. Since you used term CV instead of resume, maybe still in India or maybe a European country? If the job market where you're at is largely expecting a University degree regardless of experience level then I would say at 27 go back and get your University degree. It is not a step backwards to get the University degree it will teach you valuable things that you…
Still in India. And I will not learn a single new thing if I go back to university, unless it's a good one, and I'll have to compete with more than 1 million students to get into one of those and there are maybe 15-30k vacancies per year. In the rest of them, the lecturers just dictate what you need to cram into your brain and vomit it out on the answer sheet and that's it. Lecture done.
While I understand the Indian University sentiment here, there are many other opportunities for learning AND promoting yourself at the same time. For example, contributing to open-source software (especially software that is used by corporations) is a classic route for a reason.