Tell HN: Looking for dev work? My best advice on getting a dev job
I am a developer who happened to do recruiting of developers for 20 years.
Along the way, many people, frustrated and upset at not being able to get a job, would ask me "How do I get a job, what do I do, I can't even get interviews?".
My advice was always the same, and I never once had anyone take that advice (that I know of). Why? Because it takes effort.
The advice is straightforward...... if you want to get a job with a given programming language or technology, then become a genuine contributor to the biggest, most well known, most recognizable open source project in that field.
By "genuine contributor" I mean you must have fixed minimum 10 bugs or implement minimum 10 features and had them accepted and merged in. Only then can you list yourself as a contributor to that project.
Want to work at a company doing Django programming? Become a genuine contributor to the Django project.
Want to work at a company doing Python machine learning? Become a genuine contributor to the TensorFlow project.
Want to work at a company doing JavaScript web development with VueJS? Become a genuine contributor to the VueJS project.
Love Ruby On Rails and want to work on ROR projects? Become a genuine contributor to the ROR project.
Usually this is not the advice people want to hear - they want to know how to get a job without doing real work.
It MUST be an instantly recognisable open source project - it MUST be known by the people doing the interviews at the employer you are applying to - less well known projects definitely have impact and improve your resume and your credibility, but if you want the knockout punch, then be a contributor to something huge - it impresses people.
If a company is using a technology such as VueJS for example, and you are a genuine contributor to that project, then this gives you outsized credibility..... employers using VueJS cannot and will not ignore you. You will at least get an interview and your chances of getting the job will rise significantly, all else being equal.
Presumably you read this far because you really genuinely want to get a job. You now have my best advice. You can ignore it and keep looking for work, or do the work and get the interviews.
Do something impressive - make yourself so impressive that employers simply cannot ignore you - I have described here the one way to do that.
Good luck I hope you get the job you want. Its good for you and good for the open source projects too, who often value the help.