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How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

learnwithjeff.com

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Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

#71

Post by bdcravens »

meritt wrote: post #20

While I absolutely applaud the effort and tenacity of this individual, at the same time, I feel a substantial amount of trepidation regarding the current state of the tech / start-up industry. Virtually every hot new startup I see on blogs, it just takes a few minutes of basic penetration testing to find gaping security holes. Everything from simple XSS or CSRF to blatant leaking of sensitive user data. Obviously he…

I suspect that's the result of over-hiring (giving a $150K senior position to someone who should be junior). I think it's less a matter of experience than laziness: I've met too many CS majors and/or devs with 10 years of experience who write this code. They get lazy, complacent, and confident, and never grow.

On the other hand, the OP has a hunger: I suspect he'll continue to grow if he stays hungry. You don't magically write better code by sitting in a desk for 5 years: you write better code by seeking growth.

Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

#72

Post by mvillena3 »

Nice read man. I just started learning programming as well in early January of this year.

6 months ago, I never thought I would see myself working in a top HCII program as a research programmer. I'm sometimes in total disbelief of where I'm working at and also of the fact that I'm actually helping my professor.

"When I started this search I thought I would be scrubbing toilets in exchange for nightly code reviews." That was definitely my train of thought on my value as well, but I guess I underestimated myself as well.

Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

#73

Post by shousper »

Wow.. so I really could have landed a programming job when I was 13? Damn. Maybe I should have just believed in myself more like this guy.

I shudder to think of the quality of his code and the projects he or people like him are let loose on.

Awesome that he's passionate and landed something, but underneath it just makes me cringe because I see the shithouse quality of work that comes out of people probably equally skilled, but not as passionate, everyday.

I should move to America..

Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

#74

Post by gkop »

xiaoma wrote: post #70

It's really too bad that there isn't more newbie-friendly friendly stuff going on in the SF ruby meet-ups. One of the first things I did upon moving here a few months ago was to join the group and look for anything aimed at learners. Unfortunately in 3 months and dozens of emails from the meetup group, I haven't seen a single event where men welcome (without a woman bringing them). In this city, at least, it's probab…

The SF Ruby list reaches several thousand people. I organize free weekly Ruby classes but don't blast SF Ruby for fear of being quickly overwhelmed. I emailed you with details.

Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

#75

Post by reinhardt »

mattdeboard wrote: post #56

I got some of these same bitter, angry, defensive responses when I posted my "how I became a developer" post a while back. I dunno what it is about programmers here but for some reason "programmer" is considered some sacred title you have to earn. Whatever.

Right on! The nerve of some programmers to think their profession is in the same league with the big boys that need college and university degrees! Who do they think they are, some kind of scientists or engineers?

Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

#76

Post by samspot »

Self-taught programmers get a bad rap because we've all seen the guy who didn't know about arrays and defined 300 variables (I'm not kidding by the way, and this was in perl. Full of wonderful names like $aa1, $aa2, etc.).

However you can get around this by having the OP's attitude about being a life-long learner. It's important to get a lot of exposure to different people and styles to offset some of the lack of background you will start out with.

Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

#78

Post by Wilduck »

hackerbob wrote: post #69
TheCowboy wrote: post #68

I 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 majored in Economics and taught myself Python starting my Sophomore year of college. I am now gainfully employed in a job creating modeles (economic and otherwise, essentially R&D) for the rail industry. My day to day activities consists of writing Python code, and my ability to rapidly prototype ideas with Python was one of the major reasons I was hired.

That being said, don't debate, just pick one and go with it. For every person who tells you that Ruby is better at X, or Python is better at Y, you'll find another person doing X in Python or Y in Ruby. The best advice I can give you is to find a book/tutorial that works with your learning style and go for it. Then grab a fun project as soon as possible and work on it.

Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

#79

Post by textminer »

hackerbob wrote: post #69
TheCowboy wrote: post #68

I 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?

If you're from more of a math background (with maybe a little MATLAB knowledge). Python's a great language for machine learning and natural language processing tasks. Great glue language, lots of libraries, prototype quickly, scale with multiprocessing or Hadoop streaming or pycloud. Build your own analysis stack or classifier then display the results on the web with Bottle or Flask.

Re: How to Get a Job as a Developer in Less Than Six Months

#80

Post by 0xDECAFFEE »

meritt wrote: post #20

While I absolutely applaud the effort and tenacity of this individual, at the same time, I feel a substantial amount of trepidation regarding the current state of the tech / start-up industry. Virtually every hot new startup I see on blogs, it just takes a few minutes of basic penetration testing to find gaping security holes. Everything from simple XSS or CSRF to blatant leaking of sensitive user data. Obviously he…

But it's ruby, and not doubt ruby's tag along Mr. Rails! By your comment, one would think the guy was developing in PHP!
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