I Am a Bad Developer

I interviewed for nine months before I got an offer, and I have a coupla years experience and a few hot techs going for me.

I attribute the bulk of the time to me living in a place that isn't a technical hotspot.

I think your inability to find a developer position has nothing to do with your ability to develop. I recruit for my company and the most important is how you sell yourself. Every company looks for a very specific profile that fits.

If you feel uncomfortable about your skills, you need to build a portfolio of projects you've worked on / created / designed... Then you can talk about those, how you designed them and why, and that can fix a poor technical interview. Those also help convey your passion.

10 rejections is insignificant, I think nobody has faced fewer rejections than that for anything, whether it's finding a job or finding funding for a startup or even finding a date.

I would need more information to know what's going wrong, but 10 rejections isn't even an indication that anything is wrong. If the technical interviews are not going well then it "could" mean: - you're not applying for the right position - you're looking for something you don't have experience in - you don't show passion or a good attitude - you seem desperate and mostly care for the money - you show a lack of interest in the company and their products

Maybe you are missing out on a lot of opportunities: - You can do freelancing - You can find a non-tech company to work for, you'd be surprised by how many need developers: hospitals, government, transportation companies, airlines, insurances, banks... Have you sent your resume to Bank of America? - You can find a startup that's in a field you kinda know and offer your help - You can talk to a staffing company, they make money by finding you a job - Go to events (eg. PHP event, Ruby on Rails, startups events, conferences...) and do networking. It's the easiest way to find a job, though you need to be good at talking to people. - Look for jobs on angel.co, monster.com, dice.com

Only 10 applications? How many applications do y'all typically apply before accepting an offer? I've been told around 40.

After reading your list of professional habits--writing tests, contributing to open source, reading lots of technical literature--I think you're head and shoulders above a lot of employed programmers. I've been the technical interviewer before, and if you told me all that, I'd recommend hiring you, assuming you have a reasonable background. It sounds like you have a real appreciation for craftsmanship, which far too many programmers lack.

I don't know what your code's like, but I'm going to take a guess that it's above average. In my experience, people who think about the stuff you mentioned tend to write above-average code.

Let me tell you what I always looked for in technical interviews. I wasn't trying to determine whether a candidate was an utter genius who would offer novel and clever solutions to hard problems. That's too high a bar; most companies can't expect to consistently attract those types of candidates.

Instead, I wanted to see if candidates would write maintainable code. In other words, my #1 concern was whether the candidate was going to create a big mess for the rest of us to clean up. Will they pollute my functions with a bunch of special-case if statements because they had to add a new feature that doesn't fit into the current architecture? Or will they recognize the situation for what it is and start a conversation about changing the architecture? Will they take a class named Car and use it to represent a House, just because it exposes the method .door? Or will they recognize the importance of logical naming, create a new House class, and break out the .door method into a mixin? Stuff like that.

Not every interviewer makes that the #1 concern. We all have our pet peeves. But my point is, there's usually some very mundane, practical thing they're looking for. Not super-ninja-rockstar coder status. If you can determine what that practical concern is, you can then try to convince the interviewer why you're exactly what they need.

Tend to agree (though it's impossible to say about any particular person.) Mentioning TAOCP and SICP at an interview (as he did in the post) would raise some alarms with me. They're not useful books in most jobs, and bringing them up just makes you look like the kind of person who doesn't understand that.