Comment by josephorjoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephorjoe | Hacker News Reader

I didn't learn programming until I was in my 40s. I taught myself and went through one of the coding bootcamps. It took a while but I did eventually get a job.

Probably the three biggest takeaways I have from my own experience:

If the company is big enough to have an HR department, it is going to be hard to get hired as a non-standard applicant. Too many people would have to agree to take the risk, and HR is NOT about risk taking.

Some type of personal connection is extremely important. Meeting someone at a job fair/meetup/hackathon/whatever is going to get much better results than emailing a resume.

Recruiters are probably not going to be of much help. Companies do not want to pay recruiters commissions for jr devs.

    > ...HR is NOT about risk taking.

Bingo!

If non-traditional applicants go "through the front door" by applying/submitting their resume through the usual channels at a big corp, they'll get nowhere.

HR job-applicant pipelines are DESIGNED to screen out, ruthlessly, as many applicants as possible. Anyone who has even a mildly deviant career trajectory is not going to make it to a phone interview by "uploading" their resume.

HOWEVER, if such applicants can get their foot in the door by exercising their professional network or by carefully messaging and persuading the right people, they can get through to an interview.

The amount of spam I get from recruiters looking for junior devs would lead me to believe otherwise. And as a dev that used to work as a dev at a staffing agency, hiring managers often scrutinize the skills of juniors less than a senior or lead dev.

recruiters cast drift nets to rake in resume hauls.

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