Ask HN: Approaching 40 and trying to get a foothold into Software Engineering

I can see one potential improvement in your resume: BRAND YOU PROJECTS.

It would look so much better if you had something like "Built StoryFactory.io" with cool logo rather than a link to ec2 instance.

And that would be my advice in general - build something that looks professional and not like a project from a coding tutorial. It can be as simple as a to-do app at its core, with a few features, but make a killer landing page for it (you can obviously use a template), figure out a good name, buy a domain, etc.

That's an interesting idea.

Look into less "cool" industries and companies for getting that first job. The pay will be lower and your company won't be featured in TechCrunch or wherever, but the entry bar will be lower and the people generally less competitive and difficult to deal with.

Personally, I recommend the WordPress industry. There are a lot of themes, plugins, hosts, etc. that need developers.

I have been mostly applying to companies that I haven't even heard of. I honestly don't care if the company is "cool" either. I'm not even looking for super high pay. I know that will come later, plus it will almost certainly be more than I'm used to making, and will definitely be more than I'm making now, which is nothing.

Maybe I should go for wordpress/shopify liquid jobs if you think there are more opportunities with this sort of stuff.

> If anyone has any helpful advice, I would love to hear it.

Skip the Junior part, go for mid level and find a way to justify it. Somehow show that you already have 2 years of experience and you now qualify as mid.

I'm not saying "lie", but I'm also not saying not to.

Wouldn't you be cheating yourself out of any kind of mentorship one would expect as a junior (in addition to lying and putting yourself in a position to slow your team down r/t lack of expected experience) ? Title inflation is a thing, but maybe they're not "totally" arbitrary.

In his case not so much, i think he is competent based oh his portfolio.

I have been applying for jobs that aren't explicitly junior. I know that "years of experience" is really just a wish list. I have used coding at work for several years, although i've never had a "software engineer" title.

First of all your portfolio is really good in my opinion. I finished a boot camp in 2017 after moving to wa state from Berkeley. One thing I think is tough about the industry now is everything being remote - I’ve gotten my two dev jobs through in person connections (and ironically of all the hundreds of jobs applied the only two I’ve worked are the ones I didn’t apply for). My suggestion (based on what’s worked for me) is to work in dev adjacent roles as a way to get your foot in the door. For me this was technical writing and qa/manual testing.

That way you’re getting real world experience and at the same time making quality connections.

There are also contract opportunities which can sometimes be worthwhile.

Based on your portfolio you are competent to be considered for an interview, dont get discouraged but possibly find the things you haven’t been doing and focus on that.

Applying online is a tough way to get a position, keep up the good work

Edit: not my first choice but have kind of found a niche as a Ruby on Rails dev. When starting out I think it’s good to have a specific stack to focus on, for looking for job postings and having subject matter expert experience in a single thing. Python is a widely used language and a good one to know (wish I had more experience and something I’d do differently if possible)

I also think your skills should be near the top of your resume.

Thank you for the feedback! I've gotten the feeling that networking with people is the only way I'm going to get hired, so I've been doing a lot of that lately. I have looked at things like QA roles, but in a lot of cases, I'm even less qualified for those positions. They all want you to have done QA testing for several years already.

I do have a stack of choice, but I'm also pretty language agnostic. I've been focusing on Node/React jobs since that's my bread and butter.

I'm redoing my resume and I have seen the error of my ways. Skills will go at the top.

I was in a similar situation as you, and found a software engineer job. But I also benefitted from timing, as I was able to find a job before the market starting turning down last year. Basically I was able to find a startup willing to take a chance on me, perhaps for lack of better options. Unfortunately that will be the case for those coming from non-traditional ways and entry level.

FWIW, the Who's Hiring and Who Wants to be Hired threads here on Hacker News had led me to a few interviews each month, when I was looking. That's all you need, plus maybe brush up on LeetCode.

This is my impression as well. I understand that I missed the gravy train, so I'm doing my best to stand out from the rest. Thank you for the suggestion. I will surely check out those threads.

You seem like a cool person, and are working hard towards a transition - congrats on getting this far. I think with a bit of effort you can follow through. A few thoughts:

- Website makes you look like a front end developer, but you are applying to full stack.

Stepping back a bit, an employer is asking the question: is this person the best person for the job that I'm hiring for? As the job seeker, you need to think about what type of job you are going to be the ideal candidate for and really focus on communicating that.

- Bullet points on resume could be improved. For example, Content is easily added or removed using a JSON configuration file Its a given that you would do that. It is so basic that it raised a flag in my mind. Its like saying, I used numpy to do math computations in python. It would be better to not include that statement.

Full stack web developer who will help your company succeed by completing projects on time and under budget. This sentence comes off as pretty generic, and it is not clear that you have experience with that. It would be better to have an experience where you delivered a project under time constraints.

Anyways, sorry that I'm nitpicking a bit. It is hard to know exactly what is holding you back without knowing more about what jobs you are applying to, what is happening in the interviews, and so on.

I'd also think about if there is any company you can work at where having some background in industrial automation would be a plus.

I suppose I'm also curious, are you applying to jobs that do algorithms and data structures interviews?

If so, you really need to nail those. A lot of people complain about those interviews, but they do serve a real purpose. There is a significant gap between building a small website and building a system that scales. If you are going after high impact software engineering jobs in the bay area, then you'll need to demonstrate that skill set. I don't see anything about algorithms and data structures in your resume, so I'd assume that you don't have that knowledge.

Granted this may be an unpopular opinion, but not having those skills significantly limits your upward potential.

While i've yet to be put through one of those interviews, I would imagine that I'm applying to some of these places. I've been applying to mostly smaller companies, so it's hard to know what kind of interviews they do in a lot of cases. This being said, I do brush up on time complexity/data structures/algorithms/bitshifting etc. before I go to an interview.

I've been working on my portfolio/resume for a long time, so all there really is left to do is nitpick, so I don't mind at all.

I agree that maybe I can do more with the bullet points. I can think of some higher level things that "JSON configuration file"

I also agree with the "Professional Summary". I hate it. I workshopped it with some people and this is what we came up with. It sounds so stupid and now I'm thinking the move is to leave it off completely.

Could I ask what you mean't about my portfolio looking like I'm a front end developer? I'm pretty sure the majority of my projects are either Full Stack, electron.js apps, or have embedded components.

I just mean that the design of the website is very nice (fancy?) so at a glance, that is the main thing that I noticed. Granted, I didn't end up reading things too carefully because I was thinking about the design. I think that the website good as long as you put your resume front and center and improve your resume.

Thanks, i think. My resume is what needs the most work.

Just to be a bit more specific, the most important thing is that you make a compelling argument that you are the best person to hire for a given job among the candidates applying.

I think you need to put in some work to (1) have some more clarity on what you want to do (2) doing more projects along that direction and (3) updating your resume accordingly

As an example, one of my friends was doing public health, and she wanted to get into tech. She learned a fair amount about user experience design, built some projects, and then applied to jobs where her background in public health was an asset. In particular, she got a job doing user experience for a healthcare startup in order to improve the experience for people who are typically underserved by healthcare. She had experience in that area because her public health work looked into how underserved populations used and accessed healthcare.

It felt daunting to her to get into tech, but she did it by making a compelling argument that she was had a combination of skills that would make her effective at her job. She did end up applying to many jobs, but only the ones where there was a good fit gave her an interview.

Now you have to figure out how to make that type of argument for yourself. Of course that template may not work for you, but that level of preciseness and clarity of thought is what you should be aiming for.

One other thing that just came to mind is that if you have experience in the automotive industry, that could be relevant experience depending on where you apply to work. I'm not sure what it is, but you don't need to sell your self short on that.

Honestly I quite like your portfolio. Judging from it alone I'd give you an interview if I were a recruiter. However, I'm not, so I couldn't tell you what sort of secret sauce goes into that pre-interview pass. My experience is having worked in the industry for a few years (have I made it clear enough that my worldview is very narrow? I don't want to beat you over the head with this fact)

I hope you don't mind some constructive criticism about your site anyway:

List your languages/skills strongest-to-least-strongest left-to-right. I clicked C++ since it was the the first language I saw and it told me that you weren't actually that good at it. I would probably opt for more positive sounding language like "this was my first language and while I'm familiar with it I mostly program in X." (here's my naive take - C++ and Java are some of the "traditional" backend languages, so if you want to sell yourself as being fullstack it would especially behoove you to be more forward about your experience with them).

Load things quicker. At least on Firefox, it would take as much as a second for the animations to finish as I was scrolling down. I know that I might have no attention span, but surely any recruiter looking at your page has a legitimate reason to want to see your work easily and fast.

On that note, the top bar seemed to disappear unless I scroll up. IDK if this is like a common pattern, but I'd prefer to have it more easily accessible.

I'd recommend that you put yourself in the shoes of the recruiter who is giving your life story an 8 second glance when it comes to your website. Try and flush your mind (I know you're intimately familiar with it), open it, and decide within 30 seconds whether you'd give yourself an interview. Ask your friends to do the same if you can.

Regarding your resume, I think that for junior roles your stuff is good. Don't pad it and make sure that the recruiter's eyes go immediately to your most impressive projects/skills. I think you have more than enough stuff, so you'll have to be careful about what you pick and how you present it.

I want to say again, your page is seriously cool. I hope you don't take my criticism personally - I wish you the best of luck!

Thank you for the reply and I appreciate the constructive criticism. I'll go ahead and address the points you made.

* This is a good point, I should probably do some rearranging on the order. There seems to be no shortage of Node.js Fullstack/Backend positions, but I see your point.

* I have heard this criticism about the timing on my portfolio. I'm going to speed up some of the fades since this seems to be the main criticism I get.

* The top bar hiding itself was an artistic choice. I see this behavior on a lot of other sites. To me it's pretty intuitive, but I can see where you are coming from.

To address your overall point, I have put together a simple hit tracker with geolocation as an experiment to get an idea of who is actually looking at my work when I put in an application. My estimation is that it's about 5% or less. This is why I think my resume is the issue. Why bother clicking a link if the resume is full of red flags?

This being said, I appreciate the kind words about my work. Thank you.

That's fair. I was under the impression that when places give you the chance to put a portfolio/personal website link, the people reading your application glance through them.

I took a look at your resume. I feel I agree with most of the decisions you made (like prioritizing the projects).

Some comments on this (same disclaimer as before):

I have to wonder whether you would get more mileage out of shortening your summary statement to "Full stack web developer who will help your company succeed by completing projects on time and under budget." or eliminating it entirely. Certainly at least the large font "Summary Statement" can go, which would make room for you to add another project.

I can believe the other commenter here who said that not having a 4-year CS degree will make it more difficult to stand out. So I can agree with putting your education last. But also I have this feeling that most resumes I've seen put it first. So I'm wondering whether it would make more sense to just own it. Again, your projects seem pretty legit to me, which I think can help compensate.

Finally, I would spend some time trying to play with the wording of your bullet points. It can be easy to sell yourself short and just say things like "Built using the React.js library and Typescript." but like your portfolio website is actually really cool and I feel saying something like that doesn't convey how cool it is. Maybe to get you started you can try something like "Designed and built an interactive portfolio page with interactable elements that simulate terminal windows." The JSON part is pretty good but I bet you could embellish it a bit more too. Sorry I don't have great suggestions for this one - I struggle with it too. The other tip I can give is to write impressive numbers where you can. The canonical example is like if you can say "made processing widgets 25% faster" or "increased revenue by 10%," but I think there are ways you can be creative about this.

One miscellaneous point: have you been grinding leetcode/reading cracking the coding interview? Much like the SAT, a lot of these technical interviews are just testing how familiar you are with the format and questions. It's a kind of bogus indicator of competency if you ask me. If you do the grinding, you should be ready for most the tech interviews that come your way.

To be honest, the summary does feel cringy. I'm very new the whole corporate world and the language that comes with it (I'm an auto repair person by trade). I think you are right about the summary. If I were them, I wouldn't care about it either. Same with cover letters, but we need to write them anyway I guess.

(preface: I am not referring to the poster that was mentioned above. I appreciate their input as well) I understand that having a comp sci degree, or really any degree gives you an advantage. It's just really discouraging to hear it talked about like it's an insurmountable obstacle. Especially since I've been told over and over again that "Jobs only care about what you know and what you can do". We actually had a couple of comp sci grads in my bootcamp, which I found interesting.

All of the wording suggestions you have sound really good to me and I'll take them into consideration when I'm reworking my resume this weekend. I've been trying to keep my resume from looking like a big wall of text, while not sounding completely robotic. I've also always had a math/science brain, not a literary one.

I wouldn't say I've been grinding leetcode (I spend time on Codewars for no reason other than I discovered it first), but I do jump on occasionally, more so if I have a technical interview coming up. If you couldn't tell, I spend a lot more time building projects and upskilling than I do with algorithms. Funny enough, the two technical interviews that I've made it to didn't have this whiteboard style interview. The last one I did was adding a feature to a javascript front end. It went okay, but I was seriously out of practice with Vanilla Javascript DOM manipulation as I do most frontend with React, and they didn't tell me what to expect.

Just like before, thank you for all of the suggestions.

You're welcome!

Yeah I'll be honest I think I have the resume game down OK but I'm clueless about cover letters.

I like to believe that jobs only care about stated ability but I would also believe that if a recruiter had to pick to interview between someone without a degree but better-than-average stated ability and someone with a degree but average stated ability, they'd go with the degree-holder. I think especially right now with the higher demand for jobs they can be pickier too.

Good luck with rewording, honestly I'd wager that writing a good 1 page resume is much harder than writing a 10 page essay. Being concise and precise is difficult - not to mention the fact that if you're like me you have to constantly avoid shooting yourself in the foot by not framing things as positively as you can (e.g. I'm definitely more prone to writing "I'm not so great with C++" as opposed to "I'm more adept with X/Y/Z, but I still have good proficiency in C++").

I do have this inkling that interviews are more and more rejecting the algs-style tech interview questions, which is good because those sorts of questions are largely irrelevant to day-to-day work (at least for a junior IME). I certainly don't think you need to nolife Codewars - and also that it's better in many ways to upskill - but I just wanted to check that you were prepared for it. It would be disheartening to hear that a good engineer got their foot in the door but was then kicked out because they couldn't conjure quickselect out of thin air (can you tell I'm still upset about a past interview?).

And just like before from me, best of luck.

When I look at your site, I can't tell what your bread & butter is. I think that needs to stand out... what is it?

Your site says to scroll down - how can you tweak it, so I don't have to read that to know what to do next?

It took me a while to figure out you had a live demo of each of your project. Make that button stand out. Add some color to your site - it's black, and depressing. You want the person going to your site to feel drawn in.

This may sound harsh, but it's not meant to be - but do you have a better photo for your site? It's a cool Facebook photo style... but it's not good for a portfolio/CV type photo. First impressions count for way more than people would like to admit. If your potential employers first impression of you is from the site - then you're starting a step behind.

You do have an interesting and good breadth of work on your portfolio. So you have that going for you.

I don't really know what my bread and butter is. I make whatever I want to make. If a tool is needed that isn't in my arsenal that I need to make the project work, I learn it.

I'll take your portfolio suggestions into consideration. I know for a fact that around 95% of my applications don't result in my portfolio being looked at, but maybe putting the boring headshot I used for LinkedIn on there is worth doing.

> I know for a fact that around 95% of my applications don't result in my portfolio being looked at

At some stage, it will be. And if it comes down to you and this other guy, the portfolio page is going to be a deciding factor.

Ooh your site's fancy.

Summary could use some rewording. Maybe something like

> Full stack web dev with experience completing projects on time and under budget and working with other teams. For my next opportunity I’m looking for ...

Skills goes up top, under summary. You want people to know your areas of expertise sooner so they know the rest is worth reading.

Keep education at the bottom.

Since you're coming from a non-traditional background (absolutely no judgement, just means we have to tweak the template is all), my idea is put your work experience and projects in one section. Organize them as relevant to the position you're applying to instead of chronological, with the most relevant up top, so start with Story Factory, then portfolio-v4.0-react (I'd drop the "professional portfolio" and just call it by the github project name) and continue on from there.

Thank you for the helpful tips. I'm going to make all of these changes today.

Things that stand out in your resume: It doesn’t look like a developer resume because the skills are hidden at the bottom, job history doesn’t mention specific development skills. You say full stack but everything else indicates front end focus. Your education only shows 1 year (looks like you are trying to over represent you went to Berkeley). Your job history gaps stand out. If you applied for a full stack job, I would likely reject based on resume… for front end job would likely interview.

I’d contribute to open source projects and add that as a line in work history xxx-current and focus on front end for now.

Fair points all around

Going straight to 'software engineer' is hard IMO. Unless you graduate from a 4 year degree in CS or have an internship or some other real professional software design experience, I think it's a hard field to break into.

You might want to aim lower initially. Help desk or field rep for a tech company, etc. Ansible, terraform, linux automation, those kind of jobs are more widespread than straight software development jobs.

If you want to go straight software, there's lots of jobs in Java.

IMO, front-end javascript devs are disposable and that's what everyone tries to do because it's less abstract. Backend languages are where the money is.

> Ansible, terraform, linux automation, those kind of jobs are more widespread than straight software development jobs.

There's literally 10 or more frontend jobs for each DevOps position you find advertised. Unless you think frontend dev is not "real software development", which wouldn't make any sense.

Additionally, DevOps requires much more knowledge about infrastructure than just learning some automation tools.

With a straight development role, you're going up against people with 4 year degrees. For the 'devops' side, these are skills that aren't typically achieved by university students.

While there might be 1000 front end jobs, you're competing with 10k applicants. For 100 devops jobs, you're competing with 10 applicants.

> Ansible, terraform, linux automation, those kind of jobs are more widespread than straight software development jobs.

Arguably this guy's portfolio is already better than most new CS grads, no?

I actually had a few CS grads in my bootcamp. They really didn't have any real-world development skills, let alone a portfolio. Thank you for the kind words on my portfolio.

Have you considered going to meetups, attending networking events or applying to internships?

I feel like right now it’s more of a who you know situation and less of a what you know. You’re in Oakland, CA, which is the land of networking. Good ops to squeeze into some role. Don’t be too picky and you can morph into whatever you find passion for.

Btw, neat projects!

I have considered going to meetups, but I haven't really found an in with that yet. I think pre-covid this would have been a lot easier. I spend a lot of time in discord communities, which is how I ended up here. It's been incredibly helpful. I felt like I was flying blind before.

I haven't been picky at all. I have no expectations of getting an insane salary out of the gate. I'd be happy with anything that moves my career forward.

As far as internships go, I do look at them, but more often than not they are only looking at recent college grads.

Thanks for you input!!

Honestly, I would make the link to your well formatted, easy to read, resume much more prominent - https://jgarrettcorbin.com/pdf/resume.pdf

Something that jumps out to me from the resume is the gap from 2011-2016 and then 2019-2021.

This will be seen as a red flag by many recruiters and for anyone reviewing your CV - which may explain why you are doing well in interviews, but then not getting any further.

To be fair - it says "Relevant Work Experience"

Yeah. The gaps look bad. I have no idea what to do to fill them, which is one of the main reasons that I'm posting here. Is there a way to mention "during this period, I worked an automotive job or 2" or most recently "I was a bicycle courier" without it sticking out like a sore thumb and taking up precious page real-estate?

I'm not a college grad who entered their field right after graduation. I don't know how to explain that I am a competent worker in a list of previous jobs.

Just in case you check back.

I wouldn't focus too much on the experience not being technical. Showing that you've been responsible for things is equally important. You can probably "dress up" any experience so that it is relevant - e.g. working as part of a team, managing complex instructions/requirements. Even just turning up to work on time...

Great looking portfolio atleast. Looks like you have been busy making alot of apps and "things". Interested in what the people here at Hacker News has to say about this.

Thank you!

First of all, I'm not currently a manager, but I think your website is great; it definitely demonstrates that you have real skills and could be productive as a junior-level developer. So I'll focus on the resume, where I see a few things that could be improved:

- You mentioned that you've worked automotive jobs with some technical aspects. I would strongly consider listing those jobs, even if they don't include any software experience. They still demonstrate a lot of things that managers are looking for: work ethic, conscientousness, general technical ability and intelligence, motivation, and so forth. And for HR screeners, they eliminate resume gap concerns.

- More broadly, I'd try to make sure that your resume tells a clear story of what you've been doing in recent years. A progression of technically oriented automotive work to a UC Berkeley extension program to a portfolio of working software projects is a great story, but someone skimming over your resume for five seconds might not see that story. They might just notice a smattering of disconnected dates and wonder if you've been in prison, or fired from a succession of short-term software jobs, or sitting at home watching TV. (And if any of that does apply to you, I don't mean to discourage you. But one way or another, I'd focus on structuring your resume to tell a clear story.)

- I'd add something below the UC Berkeley heading to make clear that you were enrolled in an extension program rather than a degree-seeking program. Otherwise, someone might think that you enrolled for a semester or dropped out, or that you're trying to make an extension course look like something more. And if you completed the program and got some sort of certificate, you might want to make that explicit, to demonstrate persistence and follow-through.

- I'd rewrite the summary statement to focus on your story without anything buzzwordy (like "on time and under budget" and "agile"). The key points I'd include are: 1) you've done professional, serious work as an adult; 2) you're making a transition into software; and 3) you've completed a UC Berkeley extension program and a number of projects and thus have demonstrable knowledge and skills. That tells your story upfront, and every point is something substantive and meaningful.

- This is minor, but the fact that the text runs all the way to the bottom of the page with no margin stood out to me. I'd reformat things so that the resume has nice, even margins all around, even if you have to trim some text to make it fit. You obviously a sense for design, judging from your website, and your resume should demonstrate that too.

- You might want to consider trimming your skills section a bit and tailoring it to each position you apply to, if you're not doing that already. The embedded C++ and IoT experience stood out to me; it's actually impressive if you're competent in both C++ and front-end JS, but if you're applying to a front-end dev position, the C++ probably isn't relevant, and I could imagine a hiring manager being slightly bemused by seeing that mix of skills.

The last thing I'll say is that I've had some ups and downs in my career and gone from being really discouraged to finding great opportunities through a combination of persistance and chance, so keep your chin up. It seems like you're approaching this with the right attitude. Good luck!

Two things I forgot to mention:

1. I encouraged you to include more non-software jobs, but you mentioned that you were concerned that your resume would be two pages long if you accurately represented your work history. One solution to that would be to only list jobs going back a certain number of years, and to omit the bullet points for the jobs with no software relevance. You don't need to list everything you've ever done, just enough to give a clear and honest picture of your recent history.

2. I'm no one special and I don't have any expertise in this area, so please take all of this advice with a grain of salt. I just figured I'd share my gut reactions in case they're helpful. You might be able to get more useful resume feedback from a professional resume review service or even an experienced recruiter.

Wow! Really great list of suggestions. Thank you for taking the time. Most of these are things that I have plans to address so let me go through your points.

- So my reasons for not including these jobs is not out of embarrassment. It was more just trying to keep my resume concise. It appears that I have been taking the wrong approach and I am going to try to make my job history tell more of a story.

- The whole being vague about my education was an experiment. I've had a lot of people tell me it was a bad move, and I am going to change it.

- I don't like the summary either. I have heard suggestions to just leave it off. If you have any opinions on that, i'd like to hear.

- I have been doing everything possible to shoehorn everything I can into the real estate one page offers. Perhaps I was too overzealous. This is another reason why i'm considering leaving off the summary all together.

- I agree. I haven't really been tailoring my resume as much as I should. I'm thinking I need to create a few different versions. One that is front-end focused, full-stack, and maybe IoT, although i don't have much confidence I would be qualified to go into that space.

- I'm happy to hear this last point. Before making this post I felt like there were insurmountable obstacles between me and the career that I want. Hearing that there are problems that are actually fixable with my strategy gives me more hope, so thanks for that.

Good question about leaving off the summary. I don't feel qualified to offer an opinion one way or the other; like I said, I'm just some guy on the internet, and you should probably consult with someone with real hiring or resume-writing experience before taking any of my advice. But whatever approach you take, best of luck to you!