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Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

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Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#41

Post by bad_interivewee »

mkoryak wrote: post #16
bad_interivewee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does one simply “get hired” while being mid career with no professional sw experience? asking for a friend.

Look for a company where software is not their main focus. Get hired there by showing them some projects on GitHub. Don't have projects on GitHub? You can make those be there right now for free. You will also need to interview there. Your username indicates that you suck at interviewing. I hate to break it to you, but interviewing is a skill that can be learned. With. Practice. You can either interview at places or t…

i don't have any public facing repos, so i'll clean some up and try to emphasize that a bit more.

in terms of interviewing, no opportunities so no experience. in the past ive had to apply to roughly 80 jobs to get one interview. recruiters on linkedin are a little better at ~30 conversations per interview but its plain exhausting, takes a ton of time, they demand replies instantly or ghost, but really its overwhelmingly likely they'll ghost me anyways.

its been a while since the last round of attempts so ill give your suggestions a shot in a few weeks. thanks

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#42

Post by siva7 »

krisoft wrote: post #22

I don’t want to discourage you, but why do you want to learn these “large-scale” technologies? Tools are tools. They solve some problem. Many of the large-scale companies have problems you as a single frontend developer might not. If we better understand what is your motivation maybe we can better advise you which techniques are worth your time. Are you interested because you would want to join a big company? Then it…

Sometimes discouraging people is the best way to encourage them finding a better path. Over my career the golden rule i’ve learned is: Learn the technology stack when you need it to solve a specific problem. Everything else is likely premature optimisation. If you want to grow as a developer you have to join a team. There is no shortcut to this.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#43

Post by Veen »

have_faith wrote: post #25

Being autodidactic myself the best method I've found is to simply over-engineer your personal projects for the sake of learning. I have side projects that I've never even launched that are built using whatever I could find as "best practice" for solving that particular problem at scale.

This how I learned various technologies. I often re-implement my personal invoicing system (I'm a freelance copywriter) in whatever technology I am interested in: i) PWA with a react front-end, ii) AWK-based invoice processing iii) massively overcomplicated system based on Elixir and Phoenix Liveview, etc. I've also done something similar with a personal flood monitoring app (I live near a river prone to flooding). I'll never be a real developer, but it helps me to understand the technologies a little and know when they might be useful for something I want to make.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#44

Post by bad_interivewee »

vmception wrote: post #26
bad_interivewee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does one simply “get hired” while being mid career with no professional sw experience? asking for a friend.

incorporate your software company list a couple clients if you can point out that you’ve been working for that (your) software company for several years as a senior software engineer pass bullshit brainteaser problems viola

ive had a corp for a while but never called myself "senior engineer". maybe ill give that a shot.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#45

Post by eyelidlessness »

Definitely learn specific technologies and methodologies. But also look for mentorship. It doesn’t have to be formal at all, find people whose work and/or talent you admire and learn from them. Don’t be afraid to help them learn too, you probably have a lot to share too.

This, more than any particular tech or approach, helped me more than anything. Just working with and learning from/with really talented people.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#46

Post by lytefm »

Pandabob wrote: post #27

I'll give this a shot: 1. Learn React and Typescript. React has taken root in the enterprise and it seems to be the frontend equivalent of Java. 2. Learn about CI/CD: Github Actions is a good starting place. If you're hosting your projects in something like Vercel, try running separate staging and production environments. 3. Look at popular open source frontend projects. The newly released Supabase dashboard[0] seems…

This sounds like good advice. Don't worry about Containers, deployment or testing "best practices" until you really need it.

You'd be surprised at how many software companies' testing is "clicking around in the app", deployment is "upload to store/ rsync to server" and containers aren't used at all.

Start learning React (you can also take a look at Vue), do some tutorials and build some CRUD app which has a database.

Stay focused on the front-end, learn "just enough" of everything else when it comes up. I'd recommend getting into Cross-Platform Web app development using something like Electron (Desktop) or React Native/ Ionic (iOS/Android).

After learning the basics, dive into some frontend-heavy open source project that uses your framework, figure out how it works and try to fix some bugs.

For example, this is a Markdown editor using Vue and Electron:

https://github.com/marktext/marktext

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#47

Post by bad_interivewee »

johncoltrane wrote: post #30
bad_interivewee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does one simply “get hired” while being mid career with no professional sw experience? asking for a friend.

Web agencies would be a good start. Expanding on the above… I work at such a place and our bar for recruitment is a lot lower than that of more snooty companies principally focused on software. If you can demonstrate potential then it will be relatively easy to get in. From there, you will start working on projects larger than what you are used to, that _won't be_ "the next $FAMOUS_THING" while still offering plenty…

a few years ago i did manage to get a pm/ba type role at a small-medium size agency. giant mess of a place (norm for that industry i guess) but it was a meat grinder - all about billable hours (which were hard to come by since every project was undersold and over budget), which meant I worked 50+ hours every week with no salary increase or bonus. burnt out and left when it was obvious there was no opportunity there. although to your point the place was a revolving door and SO many hires were gone after 3-6 months, so perhaps ill look for places like that.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#48

Post by haolez »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #20
haolez wrote: post #17

I would invest in learning Rails 7 and Hotwire. Seems to have a great ROI for the effort put in. It can scale pretty far as well and you will be able to focus more time on delivering value. The technical excellence road has a lot of dead ends and false prophets. Be aware!

Hate to be "that guy," but learning PHP is a not-so-bad way of getting into the system architecture field. I know that "PHP" is a dirty word, hereabouts, but I submit Exhibit A, the "fishtank graph": https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin... There are some really big, well-written (and badly-written) systems out there, in PHP, and it's a great place to learn about some of the baseline technologi…

Yeah, it's a great option as well. Laravel has the same mindset.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#49

Post by seaknoll »

bad_interivewee wrote: post #13
johncoltrane wrote: post #2

You won't get there if you stay solo, so get hired, join a team and learn as much as you can from your peers. Large-scale is team-scale.

how does one simply “get hired” while being mid career with no professional sw experience? asking for a friend.

Practice algorithms and read about software design in your spare time. Apply to tons of companies, be prepared to be rejected from almost all of them, and to be asked questions that you have no intelligent answer to. Remember what they asked you, learn the problems you got wrong, and repeat. It may be brutal and embarrassing at times but if you keep at it you will eventually get a job. The only thing I can say about maintaining any sense of morale is to take some pride in the fact that you’re pushing yourself, and that tons of people have had the same shitty interviewing experience but gotten through it and realized it was 1000% worth the pain.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#50

Post by simonbarker87 »

Sorry to self promote but you might find some of the blog posts in my site helpful: https://CareerSwitchToCoding.com

One of the main things I would say is that nothing can really prepare you for the jump because a large web app made by many developers over years is a very different kettle of fish to your own small projects.

That said, making and deploying your own things start to finish gives you a great foundation to build from, your core skills will be fine, you will just need to learn how to orientate yourself in a big app and that’s a skill you learn through doing.

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