Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 82 posts

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#61

Post by gadders »

patio11 wrote: post #33

You say you have been attempting to get a job for the past 3 months. Over the past week, what activities, specifically, have you done to get a job? Have you been to interviews? How many? How did they go? Were there any questions you were unable to answer? Was there any particularly difficult part of the interview? Did you not attend interviews in the last week? In the alternative, have you lined up interviews? How ma…

One other thing I would mention - I've been in the situation before where I had to work hard to find a job via agents/adverts etc. One thing I found INVALUABLE was a CRM for tracking adverts I had responded to, agencies, etc etc. I then used this to make sure I followed up with everyone, remembered what I had applied for etc.

This gives a decent free tier of service, but there are others: http://capsulecrm.com/

One handy feature was I could cc: it on my emails to recruiters and it would keep a copy of the email under that contract.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#62

Post by drcongo »

gadders wrote: post #61
patio11 wrote: post #33

You say you have been attempting to get a job for the past 3 months. Over the past week, what activities, specifically, have you done to get a job? Have you been to interviews? How many? How did they go? Were there any questions you were unable to answer? Was there any particularly difficult part of the interview? Did you not attend interviews in the last week? In the alternative, have you lined up interviews? How ma…

One other thing I would mention - I've been in the situation before where I had to work hard to find a job via agents/adverts etc. One thing I found INVALUABLE was a CRM for tracking adverts I had responded to, agencies, etc etc. I then used this to make sure I followed up with everyone, remembered what I had applied for etc. This gives a decent free tier of service, but there are others: http://capsulecrm.com/ One h…

This is good advice. Trello allows you to email to boards and makes a decent free CRM.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#63

Post by petervandijck »

jcmurrayii wrote: post #52
jcmurrayii wrote: post #49

Red flag for me. You have been doing this for a decade...and still consider yourself junior?

I realized I should have expounded a bit to actually make why this is a red flag a little more apparent. A 'normal' year of work nets you 2080 hours of work. Thats 52 40 hours weeks. Mastery of a given topic matter is considered to be around 10,000 hours of work. At that rate, if you have worked a 40 hour job doing something, for 5 years, you should have mastered most of the skills. When I see 'junior' developer, I a…

That's a huge red flag for me too. You've been doing spaghetti code for years and now you're trying to quit?

Don't say that.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#65

Post by __xtrimsky »

divoxx wrote: post #43

A lot of people already mentioned the problems with your resume, so I won't mention that again. Where are you located? I haven't worked w/ PHP for 8 years and I'm really not sure what the market looks like but learning other newer technologies such as Rails could potentially make a much big market available to you. I know in the Bay Area, Jr Rails engineers are in super high demand.

He's located near Salt Lake City, Utah.

He's also a Ruby on rails developer looking at his resume: resume.patrickcurl.com

I am a PHP developer currently, and I don't mind switch over between languages (Java/Python/Ruby), but I do think that the market is bigger for PHP developers vs Ruby. (not sure about the bay area although, it could be different there).

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#67

Post by claar »

kevinskii wrote: post #38
patio11 wrote: post #33

You say you have been attempting to get a job for the past 3 months. Over the past week, what activities, specifically, have you done to get a job? Have you been to interviews? How many? How did they go? Were there any questions you were unable to answer? Was there any particularly difficult part of the interview? Did you not attend interviews in the last week? In the alternative, have you lined up interviews? How ma…

> In fact, if you could take your resume off the Internet, that would probably be in your favor. Please seriously consider taking down your personal website as well. In five minutes of glancing through your blog entries I found too many glaring "do not hire" flags to mention here. You seem like a decent sort of person, and I mean this with all due respect. Good luck in your search.

When I'm hiring, attention to detail is huge, particularly on the technical side of things.

The very first image on the personal site shows badly aligned PHP code (the if statement isn't aligned with the assignment above it). I wouldn't be able to make it past that if I had a stack of 20 resumes to whittle down.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#68

Post by illumen »

Most of the other advice here is shit. This advice will get you a job. Serious. It works.

  1. Make a list of local places you might want to work.
  2. Print out resumes.
  3. Go to the office, and hand resume over to front desk.
In person say - "I would like to apply for a job. Here is my resume."

Top of your resume, put evidence you can do the job.

"These projects prove that I can do the job:

  1. Launched project using php.  http://1.example.com/
  2. Made Y for client doing X.  http://2.example.com/
  3. Shipped X. http://3.example.com/
I am a very hard worker.

"

-- You will get call backs, and interviews on the spot at some of the places. No one else is doing this. --

I'm not going to wish you luck. Since I know after reading this, you will get off your arse and make it happen.

Now. Get going!

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#69

Post by seannaM »

I would like to say this in the nicest, most hopeful-for-your-future-potential way possible: Everybody can see through your bullshit.

I think most people aren't sure what you're being dishonest about, but they can tell that there's something up.

Real software employers will generally not hire anyone that they can smell a lot of dishonesty on, because they have to put a lot of trust in you. Besides your impact on their company through your contributions, you're usually given access to a lot of sensitive information.

I can empathize with you because I'm pretty sure you came from a poor background, and that's the only culture you're really aware of. I did too, and I would like it if it was a lot easier for poor people to make a living in tech.

Unfortunately you can't make a successful career as a bullshitter. Some people can, but that isn't your strong point. You have to understand someone's culture better than they understand it to be a good bullshitter, and you don't understand buisness culture well enough to do it.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#70

Post by TallGuyShort »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #60
patio11 wrote: post #33

You say you have been attempting to get a job for the past 3 months. Over the past week, what activities, specifically, have you done to get a job? Have you been to interviews? How many? How did they go? Were there any questions you were unable to answer? Was there any particularly difficult part of the interview? Did you not attend interviews in the last week? In the alternative, have you lined up interviews? How ma…

The past month I've been working as CTO in a Startup Accelerator, my team had promised me 2k per month to live on during this time, this week they backed out of that agreement and instead are wanting 2k for the entire 3 months. I've been coding 70 hours per week on this project. Before we were sure we were even going to be accepted to BoomStartup, I had been going to about 10 interviews per week, I'm on the jr side m…

Have you talked to the folks at BoomStartup about the situation? As investors and leaders in the company, they will want to know about (and it would be in their interests to help resolve) any potential legal situations. I am not a lawyer, but I would guess that if you cannot afford to fight this legally (though I wouldn't tell them that), talking to them is more likely to get you what you agreed on than just walking away.
Post reply on HN