Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer) to a dev position?

There are no entry-level programming jobs. You have to lie, cheat, and steal your way into a development career. Practically what this means is getting a company to take a chance on you. This isn't too hard because the market for web development talent is really hot right now and nobody wants to pay the salaries developers are commanding at the moment.

But getting a company to take a chance on you requires that you adhere to their expectations of you R.E. salary, what you're putting on your resume, what you tell them in the interview. Once you have some professional experience under your belt, then you can start to be pickier about who you're going to work with.

I was in your exact position two years ago, down to the sysadmin and electronics military experience. First job I took was $40K. It lasted three weeks before they let me go with a letter of recommendation, which I never ended up using. Second job was with Panasonic for similar money. I hated it so I found another job after about six weeks for where I'm at now. They hired me at $60K and I made enough noise after a year that they bumped me up to $75K. I was a Test Engineer at Panasonic but represented myself as a Web Developer, as that's what I was actually doing at Panasonic when I wasn't doing testing.

I'm active in the development community and while there's a hot market for talent, there's a lot of pickiness on both sides of the table, perhaps justifiably. I would love to hire an entry-level guy to work with me, but my company doesn't seem to want someone that's actually entry-level, but rather someone who is experienced but willing to take an entry-level salary. They lowball the experienced guys and won't even make offers to the unexperienced guys. So none of my candidates have worked out so far. Companies don't want to foot the bill for teaching someone how to code, perhaps because they don't want to pay all this money just to watch them walk out the door a year later.

I disagree with a lot of this. The guy is junior, this is stuff that can be taught on the job.

I made this jump about a year ago. I was a DoD contractor out of college for 4 years, but I knew after ~2yrs that there weren't going to be any fun challenges. The closest you'd get would be prepping for the demo days to present to the higher-ups.

I started working with the MEAN stack to offset the boredom and after about 15 months I switched to a local startup. The pay was about 30% less, but I didn't have any professional experience on my resume (just my side project) so I saw it as more of a stepping stone. After ~6 months there, I applied to remote positions and ended up finding an awesome Senior level front end gig making quite a bit more compared to my DoD job. Also, I'm way happier now that I get to work with the cool things I used on my side projects. If our situations are as similar as I think, I'd say float your resume out there and see what bites. GL!

In Summary, you say "Expert" and then "entry level" in the same line. You don't want to do that. Take the word 'expert' out and if you indeed are an expert in something, show it to us in the experience details.

Professional skills section. This is a usual culprit for most entry level folks as we are all taught to add keywords like "great communication skills", "accomplished career history" etc which are just fluff. No need to mention these because either your Resume shows it or it does not. I would take the entire section out in my opinion.

Rest is pretty standard for entry level.

The idea of a good Resume is to demontrate what "you" accomplished in a particular position and what the "company" achieved with your help. This is easier to say and hard to put on paper. Think of real metrics even if as an entry level, you don't have much to show. Did you make your employer's life easy in any way ? Talk about it. Did you solve something that was pending for a while no matter how trivial ? Talk about it.

The content honestly isn't great. It looks like you have some experience, but you haven't told a potential employer about any of your projects or accomplishments.

Your bullet points read like job descriptions, and anyone else who submits a resume that has had a job remotely similar to yours will sound about the same. Focus on your projects and accomplishments while employed, and make it look less like a job post.

I know you aren't emphasizing the front end skills, but leaving them out in the open if you aren't great, and aren't up to date with your front-end skills (tables, adding classes to make paragraphs look like headings - just use headings) can make any semi-critical resume reviewer cry "eek!.." Showcase what you are best at, and don't try to justify your hiring with things you "kind of, sort of" know how to do.

As others have said, tailor your bullet points to the job you are applying for. I don't care about your systems engineer work if you're applying to be a junior dev. Talk about your internal tools and app development. Those should be your bullet points - not that you "started and completed projects" or "were a member of a team".

Focus on your strengths and your goals!