I applaud your ambition and intitiative. Many experienced programmers should take note of how you socialized with other human beings (multiple times!) to get the gig. Enthusiasm is underrated.
How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
151–160 of 183 posts
Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was hired it was with the very clear understanding that I was to be taught a lot and I was being hired for my desire to learn. Sometimes if you can't find a qualified candidate you have to train them.
Yes, and that "have to train them" is the truth that's missing from a lot of these conversations: all these startups want "rock star" devs but they don't want to invest anything in training. But no matter what the skill level of your devs, companies should be investing in lots of training anyway to stay competitive.
This is a more pervasive problem than just the tech industry. Many industries in the U.S. have limited to no training and no mentor programs. Training is perceived as an easy cost to eliminate.
Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
#153Might help credibility if his site wasnt down... http://imgur.com/fhK0M
I'm guessing my blog couldn't handle front-page HN traffic either. Yeah, it's easy enough to fix and I can think of a dozen different ways to do it in under an hour, but as the OP said in another comment, the site gets so little traffic it was never a concern. Same with mine. Ironic? Yes. Damages credibility? Nope.
i'm one to talk, mine probably couldn't handle it either...
Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
#154I wholeheartedly agree with you. I have been learning code about a year and now I have a part time job doing it.
The key thing is to demonstrate aptitude. Period. You obviously have done this. Also, eagerness to learn is a huge huge selling point -- because apparently you do that throughout your programming career. But the biggest thing is to demonstrate an ability to code. You might not know everything a university graduate does, but then again, I hear a lot of the people coming out of university aren't very good programmers right now. =\ Not really sure.
University teaches you a lot of foundational stuff, but if you have someone willing to work with you a little, you'll learn the same stuff (and likely already have a little of it under your belt).
Anyway, kudos to you for sticking it out and being aggressive. Great example.
Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
#155So, there have been a lot of negative comments and I understand where they are coming from. I will try to address them as best I can. "Seeing a self-taught guy with 6 months coding experience writing software at a medical lab testing facility makes me a bit nervous." I am working mostly on internal systems and when I venture outside of that I have my own branch write thorough tests and have multiple people check my c…
Just wanted to say congratulations and keep doing what you're doing. I've found that there's nothing better in life than having a goal to believe in and then achieving that goal, in spite of all it's difficulties. It's one of few things that will give you true happiness. As for the negative comments, you'll get plenty of those in life and you should just ignore them (if you succeed in doing this, let me know how you did it).
Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
#156I should probably do a write-up about how a year later I still do not have a job doing development. Jeff touches on a few things I am pretty sure I would do differently. I think the most important thing is working on visible projects and seeing them through to completion, as opposed to acquiring more depth through study. Additionally, I would have went with Ruby instead of Python. Python jobs and internships seem to…
I'm debating whether to learn Python or Ruby. And the initial post as well as this one has me leaning towards Ruby despite all the good things that have been said about Python. Are there non CS majors out there that picked up Python as a first language and had doors opened for them?
I used to hire in a shop that did a lot of Ruby and if we were hiring for a junior position, Python was perfectly acceptable as a language to know. Knowing a dynamic language, being the type of person who teaches themselves, and being able to have visible code was what really mattered.
We found that we could drop capable juniors in a project that has some senior leadership and they were able to pick it up quickly.
Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our industry needs a lot more of this. Many industries expect that new hires are in apprenticeship mode and will be learning on the job. In our industry people are expected to walk in and know exactly what and how to do things.
I don't think that's true at all - every organization I've worked with has planned for a 1-2 month ramp-up program. Generally you start off doing trivial bugfixes until the codebase makes sense and move on from there. Hell, learning on the job extends past this phase and is essentially neverending. You just need to have enough background to make it through the ramp-up phase and start teaching yourself. That holds tru…
1-2 months is still nothing compared to other skilled professions.
Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
#158It's really frustrating reading all the negative comments here. What happened to positive support for people in our community? This guy had a passion, worked his butt off and got a good result... I'm sure he'll go on to many more good things in the future. We should applaud and celebrate this, not knock down how he's not a senior developer yet. Congratulations Jeff!!
It is great to see these posts and I absolutely applaud him for what he has achieved. Programming, like any other profession takes time to master, how would you react to "How to become a brain surgeon in less than 6 months"? If you were to have a brain surgery would you choose the guy who was unemployed 6 months ago, or the other one who has been performing these surgeries for the last 20 years, every day? My point,…
The comparison you draw is intellectually dishonest.
Many of the articles submitted to HN that frame programming as a craft get a lot of support. And just as traditional crafts are taught through apprenticeships, I believe that the same holds true for programming. Software shops can easily find a place for enthusiastic candidates with aptitude and commitment (as demonstrated by the OP). There are plenty of tasks that the new apprentice could help with until fully trained. This is how bricklayers (a fairer comparison than brain surgeon, you'll agree) are trained, and you don't see many houses falling down.
Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously you can't stop learning, but the thing is that by obtaining an IT degree you'll often learn fundamental things you wouldn't learn otherwise.
You're projecting. I have no degree. I've taken the time to teach myself the fundamentals. Dueling anecdotes here obviously but we all know plenty of people with CS degrees who are worthless when it comes to tackling a problem, and plenty of people without who are credits to their profession. Programmers program. If someone programs, they're a programmer. My daughter uses scratch to write software. She's 8, the softw…
This sounds as serious as claiming your daughter is a civil engineer because she builds LEGO buildings or she's a biologist because she knows to feed her goldfish. At the end of the day we need some terminology that distinguishes the guy that took a semester to learn MS Access from the one that took 4 years to study CS in university.
It's an unfortunate common theme in HN but I can't think off the top of my head other white collar professions with such contempt for degrees and formal education. Are all the other fields doing it wrong or is programming so much easier than everything else that justifies the constant pat on the back for roll-you-own education?
Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months
#160While I value a college education I have to say that a college degree is not a guarantee of performance at all. A programmer, in my opinion, must have some College exposure. The OP does, as he says he graduated with a business degree. Aside from that, programming is a multi-faceted and ever-evolving discipline. We are always learning new things. A proven ability to approach something new and learn it is at the top of my list. He certainly proved that part.
I come to this from the perspective that virtually nothing I do today existed when I was in college. This goes for programming languages and even hardware design areas such as FPGA's. I, as an engineer, have to learn constantly. That aspect of my profession never stopped and, in fact, intensified after leaving college as there's so much to learn.
How is a college grad going to react to a paradigm shift such as what happened as the internet started to take roots? It was the wild west for several years as new ideas popped-up and you had to either play or get off the train. I'll take someone really smart who has the tenacity, drive and interest to learn new things quickly over a degreed engineer who is slow to react.
I have known many engineers who have remained stagnant over the years because they simply didn't want to bother to learn new things or were far too comfortable doing what they were doing. Some of these guys are unemployed today. Their skill set simply doesn't match todays reality and a degree means exactly nothing.
Now, to be sure, the combination of good, solid schooling and drive, tenacity and a rabid interest to constantly learn can be a very powerful thing. In my experience that person is more the exception than the rule. A lot of college grads just want to find a train to ride as long as they can with the skill set they acquired. The self-driven individual who wants to own a topic today and then another topic tomorrow is very rare.
Oh, yes, and a lot of college grads write code that is as shitty as anyone else's. There is no monopoly on the ability to write horrible code due to the lack of experience.