Ask HN: Some career worry questions

The very first internship is always hard to land, honestly it's probably not your age or your skills, but rather your experience with interviews and being comfortable with the process.

When I went to find my first internship I only just got it almost right before the deadlines, I was devastated, but something eventually came along and internships afterwards went much smoother than that. I know a lot of friends with similar stories.

So don't take this personally, all I can suggest is keep applying to jobs, get people to practice interviews with you, keep working on questions, and if you have the time working on some personal projects. Normal school projects aren't good enough, when interviewers ask you about those projects they would've heard of the same project 50 times already, work on something that you're passionate about and that you can solve some interesting challenges with, think about what the projects mean to you and how do they help you learn. They should be something that's interesting to talk about during interviews.

Also I'm not sure if this is a good advice or not, but imo don't set the expectation too high for your first internship, it may be a no-name company that you've never heard or cared for and not Google Facebook or whatever you desired, but you will still be able to learn a lot, and getting your foot in the door is important.

I worked at a "no-name" firm in my first internship, but looking back it probably taught me the most out of all of my internships. And things only got better for me since there.

I was 30+ too when I moved from Mechanical Engineering (with MSc Mech Eng) to Software Development (MSc Info Sys). I'm from the Middle East.

By the end of my MSc study in US, It was extremely difficult for me to get an internship. My professor was inclined to try to push me further into looking for opportunities but it was dry (a recession). Internships give you, as others mentioned, a foot in the door - but also launches your career at the 'level' that would potentially mean a certain level of income in X years. And not to mention the mentorship you will get.

What I did was, through my local contacts, get a a semi-paid gig for building an e-commerce/catalogue for a vendor. I took that opportunity to learn, on my own, as much as I can. I networked heavily. I went to all tech events I could. I built it in Java/Struts-1/MySQL (the stack of the day) in 3 months.

I then moved back to my country (maintaining my launch app for 2 years). I had a job opportunity waiting.

I never said no to work, network opportunities or pet projects. Anything that I came across I'd try to learn/build. I was married with 1 kid (with a very supportive wife).

Forward 15 years - I'm a Canadian software consultant. Reasonable pay. Lots of challenges especially with the economy. Success? Perhaps.

Email in my profile if you want to discuss further.

I transitioned from civil engineering to software engineering.

Your MSc will be a +.

It could be due to your age that you didn't get the internships since they are looking for young college kids.

I would focus on what type of programming you want to do.

What experience do you have.

I do full stack development/web applications.

So I'd recommend you learn HTML, CSS, js, jQuery, PHP or ruby, then Laravel or Rails. It's a long process but you have to start with the basics and work your way up.

Think about what type of development/programming you want to do and follow that path.

Once you are a skilled Rails or Laravel developer finding jobs should be relatively easy and pay well.

It's the in between transition time that is the trick. It's lots of learning/hard work. But I enjoy programming and web app development so it never feels like work (at least not yet).

Personal projects are a big plus. Think of an app that would make your life easier and build it.

Sign up for a github account, find some open source projects to contribute to.

Are you still working as a ME?

As a ME you have some good project management/engineering experience that you can apply to doing/running/managing software projects.

To find work you're going to need to network so meet developers in your area network with businesses that could potentially hire you. My best clients/leveling up has came through knowing someone who needed a developer.

Good luck with the transition.

IMO you need to decide whether you want to leverage your existing MechEng diploma and experience and go into something like CAD or if you want to be a "generic" software eng.

The first route would probably make more sense (there aren't that many people like you I guess), but it would require you to move (the market for such skills is small) - maybe even to another continent.

If, on the other hand, you want to be a "generic" SE (that can work anywhere in the world and maybe has a shot at remote work), you need to pick a specialty and prove employers that you can deliver within it. That's worth more (although less fun) than cute CS projects you've listed. Just select area/technology/stack you like and start learning about it and eventually build something non-entirely-trivial with it. If you want to see what's hot, take a look at monthly "Who's hiring" threads posted here - they give a good overview of what tech is currently in demand and/or trending up.

In your opinion, what makes a non-trivial project? Can you give me some examples? I'm having some difficulties drawing a line between trivial and non-trivial projects. Although it's not that difficult to find things there are above my current skill level.

The role of this project is primarily to showcase your skill in the techniques required for the job. If you can show that you're familiar with technologies required, you're using the right technology for the right problem, can structure code cleanly, have a readable commit history, it will be more than enough for an internship IMO (as these are the requirements for a regular job basically).

As for the project size, (all other things equal) the bigger the better obviously (since software complexity/difficulty raises non-linearly with problem size), but that's not the most important concern - you can for example produce two separate projects instead of a singular big one if you think it will allow you to learn and showcase more.

I have seen this happen when a friend of mine switched from studying medicine to software engineering.

Don't give up on internship, they really matter. You have an age handicap (you'll be lying to yourself if you don't admit it), however you can overcome it by being better then what your classmates are offering.

You bring something very unique to the table, experience and knowledge, try leveraging what your learned as a mechanical engineer into the interview, show them that you have a unique and broad perspective (especially if you're going to intern in an IT department in a company that is relevant to that process)

Personal projects can work, but internships give you a foot in the door in a company. Do you know why you were not offered an internship? Perhaps it's simply because people assume that you want more money than the typical internship provides, but...

Since you're a mechanical engineer, you probably have a network there. Couldn't you ask one of them for an internship? Anything from an internship at a CNC builder to a custom system to organize drawings to a plugin for a CAD tool?

In general, replies were mostly that there was some competition and they decided not to continue with my application... but I have no idea how much of it is the usual form letter reply.

I moved here for studies, so what little network I had is back at my home country. I want to stay in Estonia after graduation and work here for a while, so I'm not sure how much an internship back in Turkey can help with that, if at all.

I don't think it really matters where the internship is. I completed my internships in places that I did not want to move after college. It was more about getting the experience and having that experience on my resume. I wouldn't suggest limiting yourself to internships in the place you want to ultimately end up.

But, there's a lot you could probably do for a local shop -- many have IT departments. Try to network in with an informational interview (cold email the head of IT of anything related to M. E. and offer to buy them coffee for some career advice)

The only time being 30s would matter is when interviewing at a startup run by 20-somes, which is normally not the kind of startup that hires interns. So don't worry about your age. (But on the other side, don't interview in suspenders or old man clothes, you can do things to appear not a frump).

Are personal projects enough to get you an entry level coding job? Yes especially if you can talk about some coding you did as a Mech-E.