Ask HN: Where do you look for work if you need experience?

I think you're looking at the wrong thing. You're getting interviews so you're doing something right and looking in the right place. Obviously you can find jobs to interview for and sounds like your CV is fine.

So keep at it?

You just haven't clicked with someone yet. Perhaps the questions you need to be asking is, 'how do I blow people away at interview?'.

But to answer your question, if you didn't know there's a monthly 'Ask HN: who's hiring' thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9812245

That's a list of a thousand companies that hire software developers. Plus loads more on the older threads, there's one every month.

If you're having trouble finding more jobs to apply for, you could email all the ones near you with a brief covering letter (as the body of the email) and your CV and ask whether they have any entry level positions. Bonus points for including something in the covering letter that shows you've read a bit of what they do. If you're having trouble figuring out who to email, you can phone the company and ask the secretary 'that you're looking for an entry level position and you were wondering who you would send your CV to'. They get questions like this all the time. Depending on who you are, that might be scary, but the quicker you get used to doing scary things, the more successful in life you will be.

The worst they can say is no.

In all seriousness, so many companies are constantly looking for developers but not constantly advertising. Like I went to a meetup last Thursday and a no-experience guy there got an interview from another one of the attendees, even though that's not what he came for.

Also, to follow up on that, network, go to technical meetups, talk to everyone and introduce yourself. Drop in that you're looking for your first job without sounding too needy, making it the focus of the conversation or doing the whole 'I haven't got a degree' thing. Also some meetups have job announcements at the end, you can ask to be included in them, if you do ask keep it positive and short.

Finally, though it sounds like your CV is fine, get a couple of articulate people to look over your CV, especially anyone you or your parents know who works in marketing (for the presentation), recruitment (because they know what works) or IT (for the relevant experience).

I really appreciate this reply, I hadn't thought about essentially cold-calling companies that need devs but aren't advertising.

My problem is I live in a small town that's really only residential and fast food - no real industry or large companies here. While I love public transit my transportation beyond that is limited (no car) -- which is why I wish I could get hired in SF, I can easily make it to that tech center. I have looked at the Who's Hiring post, but I wish I could find more companies interested in Coffeescript/JS or Lua that are willing to help with relocation - even remote work.

I have had friends look over my CV, and that was amusing - I had a section that essentially read like "He enjoys long walks on the beach and talking about American Idol". I was trying to sound more like a human than a machine. A friend rightly informed me that this sort of personality information would be best disclosed at an interview. After that I added a bit to my 'Experience' section - work that I had done for friends while acting as a system administrator. I get a little upset when I have friends who are more qualified in security fields and they get hired very easy - it seems like their resumes aren't formatted as nicely. Qualifications really do speak for themselves.

I think I'm just upset when listening to grandparents talk about how 'back in their day' they could easily go find an apprenticeship. I wish I could find the same for webdev, frontend work. I usually go to DEFCON each year if I can save for it, but I haven't had as much luck networking at that. I think most people show up to DEFCON to drink, really.. (not a bad thing)

Anyway, thank you for your kind advice, sir - I will adjust my search <3

By meetup I meant smaller ones like on meetup.com.

The meetup I was talking about only 7 of us were there. Sometimes it's 20, sometimes it's 5. Of which 2 mentioned their companies had open positions and the third gave another person at the meetup an interview (this is what I went to: http://www.meetup.com/NottinghamProgrammers/).

In Nottingham, a fairly small city, there's a different meetup every week aimed towards programmers/designers/web centric people, almost twice a week now. In SF there will be a different technical meetup twice or 3 times a day. They're social things as well as technical talks.

Also, I can practically 100% guarantee there will be a bunch of companies near you, right now, that need a junior programmer, within 30 miles of your town. They'll just be mainly Java or PHP jobs. If you want to be cutting edge, you know what you've got to do, move to SF.

Oh cool! -- I had seen meetup.com before but I hadn't used it myself. Thanks for giving me another space to look through :-))

Brilliant response. Another idea - offer a trial period. A lot of times the burden a company has is that once they offer you a job, they feel they have to keep you, or give you so many chances before ending it. Tell them you'll work for minimum wage for 30 days to prove how good you are, and you'll do it under a temporary contract - if they like you and can use you - convert to employee, if not, everybody's still friends.

I do like this idea - have you done this before? I am no contract lawyer, but it'd be good to know what specific terms you should outline for the probation period so that the company feels safe and you aren't being taken advantage of.

Side-thought: Is there a limit to how long someone can be a temporary employee? You hear crazy stories like people only being made permanent after a couple years of layoff-rehire.

Something you might have thought about is applying for QA (Quality Assurance) jobs for software / startup companies. I got my foot in the door as a QA Engineer and was able to learn many different things besides testing software that allowed me to move on to different roles, including Sys Admin positions.

With your current experience I think you would be able to get a QA job pretty easily and move around after you get a years of experience and move towards being a Dev afterwards if that's your goal.

I think part of the time I'm frustrated looking at QA positions that are largely dealing with customers vs QA testers who work more with developers. Still, a paycheck is a paycheck and I could probably use the experience either way.

Thanks for your input :-))

"I guess I kinda hope that the people posting these ads realize they're expecting too much and do want you to learn some amount on the job. "

It is sad that someone with no experience can see through these ads, and the writers cannot. Hiring is broken. "Come work for us and stall your career (by only practicing what you have already done)". Thank you, no. The underlying assumption is that either you are unable to learn anything, or that some other company should pay for you to learn something, and then this new company reaps the benefit while limiting your ability to advance your career. This is supposed to entice us to work for you how?

But that is not an answer to your question. Unfortunately at this stage maybe you do need to market yourself some. You mentioned learning the Paxos algorithm. Why not write it up nicely and stick it on medium or something? To the right company you'll be displaying initiative, curiosity, intellectual capacity, an ability to communicate, and so on. Those are (should be) highly desirable skills and qualities. Not everyone will value them, because you don't have React or whatever. Those aren't the good jobs anyway, so don't fret too much (I know, easier to say than do, we all need income, and poor jobs look pretty enticing when you don't have one).

I think the meetup ideas posted by others is excellent, even though it apparently imposes a commute burden on you.

Maybe your interviewing isn't going well? If you have a friend, even if they aren't hiring, can you have them run you through a 50 minute interview session? Buy them dinner, 2 tickets to an event, or something. Like it or not a lot of not very emperical things factor into interviews, and if you do something to dispose somebody to not like you in the first 3 minutes that will color the rest of the interview. Something as simple as picking at your face, making a weird face, or whatever can undo you. It shouldn't, but it does.

I would suggest not taking job descriptions too seriously. Some companies just dump a bunch of key words, but then triage the resumes that come in and pick somebody good regardless of whether you tick all those boxes. Of course others use them as gates and your resume will get tossed. But no one will remember your name, you could reapply in six months with more skills, so it doesn't hurt to throw your name in the ring. But chances are good that they got zero resumes that matched everything in that list.

Hmm. I hadn't thought about 'no learning on the job' as 'this will stall my career development'.

You make a really good point. There is a certain area between 'you don't have the skills needed to become useful' and 'you can pick these up in short time' - but I think I have been looking at this wrong another way. I do apply to positions I feel I'm unqualified for (within reason), but it's also ridiculous for me to think companies expect all-knowing engineers. Any other trade would have a worker learning new skills on the job.

My resume does change fairly often - I had an interview a couple weeks ago where I was a little embarrassed because I went in with my current version and they pulled out the resume I had from 5 months ago. I was like, 'er... may I see that?'

On a side-note I think wining and dining potential employers is a fabulous idea, even friends for interview practice.

Thank you for your feedback <3

Internships in Silicon Valley are most certainly not unpaid. The company I work at pays our interns really well.

It sounds like you need to increase the breadth of your knowledge. No one hires for Lua, and although Node is pretty popular right now, you not being able to get a job indicates that you are probably missing some fundamental knowledge, like algorithms, etc. You probably need to increase the quality of your coding, and increase your preparation for interviews.

You are 1 hr away from SF, which suggests to me you live in Livermore or Tracy. You probably need to study up on things that companies are expecting. Go to sites like leetcode.com and glassdoor and work on your skills, maybe that's where you're lacking.

I don't think BART goes to Silicon Valley - is there something to connect the two?

Yes, Lua is very much a niche. I tried applying at Cloudflare because they use the Lua module for nginx - that is definitely in my field as I use them both already. I'm haven't heard back but they've had that position (Lua Engineer) posted for months now. I think my resume might be sitting in a stack.

I had hoped my community college AS in Computer Science would account for something, but when you compare it to those who went to uni I'm sure it's greatly devalued. I like to learn on my own as needed, but I can't show that on paper (can I?). I do feel that I know algorithms fairly well - I spent last week learning the Paxos algorithm so I could apply it to database (mirroring?). I have fun doing things like that, it's just not something I can say I'm accredited for by a university.

I hadn't been getting interviews for a few months but I managed to get 4 all last week (when it rains, it hails?). I was nervous for the first interview but because it was for a friends' company I think I still gave a good impression with him vetting me. I had an easier time admitting my limited frontend experience in the subsequent interviews with other companies. I actually think the way I said this made me appear stronger, like I expected to have no trouble picking it up quickly.

Anyway, I've been trying to decide if I should throw myself into a project to show my ability through Github. I'm torn thinking I should be devoting all my time to the job hunt, but many of my friends have done this to get noticed..

I appreciate your feedback, thank you sir <3

You said SF, not Silicon Valley.

Degree is not relevant, no one in SV cares. There are plenty of people that don't have college degrees that have very good jobs. All that matters is your skill and competence.

You are in an awkward position. You know Javascript, but you don't know front end. There aren't very many purely backend positions that require only Javascript/Node. They probably expect a complete fullstack knowledge, so not knowing front end will hurt you, and not knowing a more back-end language like Python, Java, etc will also hurt you.

Keep interviewing, but learn a new language, like Python or Java, and try to get some experience in it, through open source projects, freelancing, etc.

I did say SF - the fellow before me said internships were paid in Silicon Valley so I was curious if there was a leg that added to BART to get there.

I just don't know what companies expect for frontend work - I have been doing the tutorials for React, Meteor, Ember, and Angular but this sounds more like backend work to me. Should I be looking in the direction of markup languages? I have used HAML to work with data in YAML, I need to conquer SASS, LESS, and Stylus I think.

I feel pretty confident about my language list - IRC kinda 'raised me' on programming.

C, C++ (templates are still hard), Java (don't know popular libraries), Ruby, Python, Lua, Coffeescript, JS, Lisp, Haskell (can read, not write..), Erlang, Elixir (beginning), PHP, ...

I just mean to say I do know Python quite well - I worked through the Violent Python book a month ago and loved the hell out of it :-)

Thank you for your feedback - I just wish I had a better idea of what is frontend. Imo things like React blur that line building components against the backend so closely?

Your main strength compared to other candidates is that you are cheap. When most CS college grads expect a starting salary above $100K, hopefully you are willing to work for half.

So focus on companies that are price-sensitive. A good starting point: small, underfunded startups.

After 1 year working at a low-paid job in a tech startup, starting with QA or similar low-coding expectations, if you are any good, you'll pick up more and more work. Within a year or two, you'll be a full-time, full-stack dev. Your next job will be easy to find.

I still can't get used to $100k being a realistic salary for an experienced dev. It seems so astronomically high - I live at home with a mom who has supported our family of 4 on $45k/year before taxes for over a decade. I do hope to use a minimum starting salary to my advantage, it just feels like I can't gain independence and save for my future with rent being what it is in the bay area. It definitely makes sense to find a roommate though..

Thank you for your childhood. -- oh, I mean input :-) Just having a flashback to The Giver..

Applying for jobs is a volume thing. Don't worry if you don't have specific skills or years of experience, let them assess that, just apply for any positions that seem interesting. Apply for a lot of jobs, have a github with side projects, even if they are half finished,that's fine if they have readmes. Get on Dice.com. Go to events when you have time and meet people. Don't give up.

I actually felt really bad about my Github after I started applying because most of the repos I had were forks of things I wanted to work on but hadn't gotten around to. I felt like I was taking credibility from others so I spent an afternoon deleting a lot of untouched inspiration. I do think applying for jobs is like throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks - but it's such a waste of good pasta :(

(I swear that's a metaphor with deep meaning)

Anyway, I'll go look at dice.com right now, though :-) - my pool has been craigslist, indeed, linkedin, glassdoor, assembly, caljobs, and.. I know there are a few others :s

This might be an unpopular opinions but I sort of wish there were just a government-run site for posting your resume and connecting you with companies. If I ever do get hired I'm sure identity theft is soon to follow from all my applications :(

Maybe try this: https://www.jrdevjobs.com/

Thank you for another resource, I found this that I think I will apply for: https://www.jrdevjobs.com/jobs/1438869644aa61299d