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Comment by peterburkimsher | Hacker News Reader

How do I go from working in one of those "sweatshops" to "top talent"?

People say I should "make a portfolio" and publish everything on Github, which I do for my personal projects. The article specifically warns that "your source code could surface online at any point". I haven't betrayed my employer by sharing their code, and I don't want to do that. I can't build a "portfolio" without breaking my NDA though. I feel trapped in comfort - I have a job that pays the bills, but everything I read online says that programmers get paid at least 4x what I do, and I don't know what you're all doing right and I'm doing wrong.

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My personal path went something like this:

2009: Had an idea for an app, didn't know how to develop it (I was a network engineer). Paid an offshore dev firm on Elance $8k to build it. They took months to give me a shitty alpha build. Even I knew that was bad, so I bought some books and started learning enough to argue with them. In the process of learning I built a better version of the app than them.

2010: Finished building my own app, and put myself on Elance, pointing out in my profile that I specifically wasn't one of these sweatshop outfits, and lowballing on price.

2011: With 3-4 of these gigs under my belt, looked for a real job. Found one with a major news org in NYC. I called it "The job I need to get the job I want". Probably started considering myself "top talent" (and being called that by others) around 2015 as I started my 3rd FT dev gig.

Don't know whether it can even work this way in 2017, but my takeaway is you've got to have a mixture of talent, hustle and luck.

Github projects are not as important as people might think. They are a plus, for sure, but not the meat -- unless you are a legendary open source contributor, but then you wouldn't have problems finding good work anyway.

I'd say build a non trivial, non toy project, from scratch. No need to be novel or groundbreaking. Something that really works and is not just the fun part. That is, both functionality and design must be professionally looking, it must feel thought-out, polished. It doesn't matter if your code is a masterpiece if the product looks like hacked together over a weekend. _Then_ use that as portfolio, independently if the source code is available at Github or not. People really like to see you can deliver a finished product.

I'll skip the details about resume and interview tips. There are plenty of resources out there.

Ok. I built https://pingtype.github.io to help me learn Chinese.

The design is not "professional looking", but I don't know how to do "design". I've never been good at GUI work. I studied electronic engineering, but moved into software because I can't go to America to work and nobody outside Silicon Valley is designing chips.

Marketing is a huge problem for me too. Every time I tell people about my program, they basically ignore it. There's a company that's doing a very similar thing to study English (VoiceTube) and I had a nice Skype call with their CEO, but nothing's come of it.

It really seems like the industry is rigged to support artists and con-men, while people who actually write code are basically ignored.

I hear you. Hard not to feel like I'm not getting opportunities to realise my potential.

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