Comment by chuck32 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chuck32 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like you are looking for a company who will accommodate your needs (i.e. "Don't care what tech stack you've used") but maybe you need to think about what you can do yourself to accommodate what companies need from you?

You say you're looking for somewhere that will "tolerate a greater ramp-up time for new hires" and thats fair enough but there are also plenty of things you can be doing now to prepare for a job to minimize the ramp-up time.

Also your approach of "looking for a job as a web dev, or anything really" is not going to look very attractive to employers. I'm sure you wont be saying that in an interview of course but why would they hire someone with that attitude when there are plenty of people who can say "I love working with Rails/Python/Javascript/whatever because x, y and z and even though I've been unemployed recently I've done this, this and this which is related to this technology".

I'm not saying you have to become one of these web-dev obsessed hacker-newsy types who spend all their free time reading tech blogs and experimenting with no-sql databases but at least pretend to have an interest in one or two particular aspects of web development and spend a bit of time to code something or do something to demonstrate that interest.

I've had a Github profile for a couple of years, usually filled with some graphics programming or game projects, coded in C#. That's one of the languages I'd be interested in finding a job in. In 3 years went from learning what a reference type in C# is, to writing a graphics engine using .NET that uses object pooling for best performance, and can be implemented as a DLL for other projects. And learning HLSL for writing my own shaders, doing thing like optimize a parallel split shadow mapping algorithm to run in a single pass within the 512 instructions limit of the Shader Model 3.0 spec.

I also made a software rasterizer in JavaScript, it's very small in size uses no 3rd party libraries but supports z-depth checking and texture mapping.

As you can see I like doing graphics stuff in my spare time. But I'm not sure how to sell my skills in those projects to more "mainstream" web development jobs. My real world JS work is not as novel or even up to current standards. At the last startup I worked on a front end JS code base totaling over 25K lines. And it didn't use any modules. No Grunt or Webpack, no packages to automate builds, bunch of jQuery function calls with little grouping to them- it is JS but JS circa 2009.

So basically I have some novel projects but my dev practices may be "out of time" with certain companies. So I'm looking to see how to show the better side of my skill set.

Ok well it sounds like you've done some pretty solid work there and should have things to talk about in an interview. Have you ever gotten an feedback from employers or recruiters as to why you were not picked for a job?

It's usually pretty generic stuff. I wasn't a good fit, or they found someone else that's a better candidate, etc. Liability reasons cause them to withhold details. Many people consider all interviews practice, but practice only makes you better if you get proper feedback.

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