Ask HN: I can program, but have nothing to show for it. Where do I go from here? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I can program, but have nothing to show for it. Where do I go from here?

8 pointsRendello15 comments

I'm 22.

I moved to my current city in 2019 to be with my partner and to work in software. I'd been through a rough year and wanted to get out of my hometown, and I moved without much of a plan. My line of thinking was this:

- It will be difficult to work without a degree, but

- There are a ton of developer positions here and as long as I can get my foot in the door, I'll be good.

I had some money saved up and eventually a small income here. But I had no luck getting any sort of software position. I felt like I was spiraling and applied to less places, but I kept my learning up. I've always been developing, and learning new things, so now I'm confident in my ability to program and learn anything I need, but I've screwed up on multiple fronts:

- I still have no professional software experience, years later

- I started a lot of my own projects instead of contributing to well known, Open Source ones, and

- Most of these projects are bespoke, hard-to-explain, and many are unfinished as I lost motivation after I learned what I needed to learn

I'm a bit defensive, but honestly I'm just ashamed. I now make sure to apply for jobs frequently, working on my resume, but I'm not even getting interviews. In the past, when I've had interviews, they've went quite well, but nothing has come of them.

If you can't find work as a developer, seek out development adjacent work and see if you can move into it.

Things like (hands on) technical support/IT, quality assurance/testing, some customer service roles, etc.

Unfinished projects aren't too big of a deal, but make sure you highlight the relevant ones for the company you're applying for. As an interviewer, if I'm asking you about your project, I'm looking for some area where you have deep understanding, so I can confirm you know stuff and can explain things. It's ok for it to be unfinished, as long as you can talk about why you did x or y, how did this part work, what was missing, what would you do differently.

When you get those kinds of questions, you want to be able to have an answer, and not just blurt out; oh i stopped working on that pretty quickly. It's like when people put a group project on their resume but they didn't do much of the work and didn't understand it. Not a lot to talk about then.

I don't know if Ottowa has a junior/community college system, but it's possible to take some classes for not much money, you might want to consider it. It sounds like you've seen how hard it is to get your foot in the door without a credential, so you may be motivated to get one. Working something IT or something during the day and taking a class or two at night isn't easy and doesn't get you a degree very fast, but it puts you on a path.

This is a very good way to get the job you want. I've known a few people that could not get the position they wanted so they "snuck in" by getting a job, any job, at the company they wanted to work at and then talking their way into the position they wanted. If you show that you are a good worker then managers are more likely to take a chance on you.

Just chiming in to agree. I started working in embedded QA in 2008 and have made a couple of hops in those first years into more and more programming-heavy roles. Time-wise, I think the amount of time it took me to get into a full time programming role from QA was about the same as or a little less than the time it'd have taken to get a degree. So not necessarily a time saver, but that wasn't really my focus anyway.

Take 1.5 month, until 1 Jan, to close in finished form (1- why you wanted to do that; 2- how you did that; 3- what you achieved and what you learnt) as much as you can from your past projects… these will be your portfolio, the starting point for any approach, discussion, opportunity. Good luck!

Have you tried posting on the Who Wants To Be Hired posts on HN (first Monday each month)?

You should get a few interviews out of them each month. It's much better than sending out applications, as usually someone who is making the hiring decision is contacting you.

You can also try asking for referrals. Many people would gladly do so since they get a bonus if you're hired. A referral makes the company recruiters look at you.

Until you have a first job it's hard for your resume to show that you are a high probability candidate (remember in a job application system your resume gets screened either by algorithm or non-technical recruiters). So you have to think about ways to be noticed.

You never do describe your skills - not a criticism, just calling out the obvious: what software skills do you have? Do you have a repo somewhere to look at your code?

That's a good call, you're right. Below is what I put for the last "Who's Hiring" post:

  Location: Ottawa, ON, Canada
  Remote: Yes (remote or local)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Lua, C, Zig.
  Résumé: http://rendello.ca/resume/
  Email: gaven@rendello.ca

And my GitHub is here: https://github.com/rendello

My skills are fairly scattered, as is my Github. That being said, I usually indicate on my resume that I'm a Python programmer, and I try to also talk about the lower level C and Zig projects I've done. I would like to apply to more lower-level work, but I don't yet have the skills (I can work in C, but the general ecosystem and interacting with hardware is beyond my current skill-set).

OP here. As an aside, I feel like I tick a lot of boxes in the bottom section of this comic (I know it's a meme, but perhaps still relevant somehow), but perhaps I do worst when HR is looking for schooling, etc.

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/resume_comic.png

Have you thought of upwork or some other kind of freelance platform to get money coming in and expand your portfolio or work?

or just start doing coding tutorials on youtube. To me it seems like people make descent money at that.

I would certainly like to do more technology videos / tutorials on YouTube. It might help with my resume situation, but I imagine it's unlikely to become anything resembling a stable income without quite a few years of input.

I would not recommend taking programming tutorials from someone who is unable to get a job programming. No offense to OP, but there is a certain amount of real world experience you'd want from a teacher. I say this from experience, as a bootcamp graduate that ended up teaching at the bootcamp after graduating. I did my best I could, and I worked super hard at helping my students, many of whom did get a job after, but there was a ton I was bumbling my way through and hand waving involved that wouldn't be if I had 1-2 years of actual industry experience first.

Exactly. There are topics I could talk about with authority, but that pool would dry up pretty quickly at this point.

I had looked at a few a while back. A lot of the work seemed to be grabbed for cents on the dollar by people overseas, but I will look into this again.

The first job is the hardest, nothing to be ashamed about. Maybe start by observing what skills are in high demand in your area and fill that need. I started by taking lots of small contracts that were 'beneath' my skills like html websites, simple javascript apps, etc. Not proud but even took a $300 contract to do someones homework, lol. Good luck.

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