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Comment by hitokiri82 | Hacker News Reader

So you would say that the whole "3+ years of experience" is bogus, and whats really important is that you have something to show?

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Remember that job ads don't sample the market for programmers evenly. People often complain that there are no ads asking for programmers with 0-6 months of experience. But that's not necessarily because those positions don't exist: It's because advertising for them is a no-win proposition. Think of it from the employer's perspective: If you put up such a job ad you will receive an absolute flood of responses, which you will not be able to screen accurately, because how the hell can you tell the difference between two programmers who have never worked in your field? It's hard enough to judge experienced programmers based on resumes and interviews alone.

So if you need someone with less than a boatload of experience (perhaps because the experienced ones are too expensive, or perhaps because you can't find them...) the most reliable method is word-of-mouth recommendation, also known as networking. You ask your friends and your friends' friends if they know any smart but disgruntled SAP programmers who need a better gig.

So, write some code and use it as a networking tool. If you write a sample app that works decently well and show it to a pro, that pro might put you on his list of people who have at least some clue and who might need a job, and eventually someone will ask him to do a project that he doesn't have time for and he will give them your name...

Advertising in general can be a no-win proposition. Posting ads for a 2-5 years of experience programming gig garners a similarly flood-like number of responses, and you get a near equal number of bad programmers. The key difference is now someone else has had to put up with them first.

There are worthwhile places to look though, anyway. Imagine yourself in the same position as a fresh college graduate, and imagine where they go looking. Past the obvious answer of asking friends, they visit career fairs and university career centers. Those or something analogous might work well for you, too.

As for garnering recommendations, I think they can be a very good source of leads. But, and I'm probably going to gain a lot of flak for saying this, I don't think they are a panacea. It'd be nice if people were impartial enough to only recommend colleagues they know are qualified and will work out well, and it would be equally nice if the people doing the recommending were clueful enough to know when someone isn't. Sadly, not everything is nice, and nepotism for social motives drives more of the recommending that I wish it did.

Thus, I and some of the people I know have developed a slightly thicker skin toward people recommended to us; a smile and thumbs up from someone the hiring manager knows isn't enough, and that not having that doesn't preclude your being considered. Who you know might help you get past human relations, but once you get to someone like me, what you know, and more importantly, what you can learn, really start to matter.

Oh, and mechanical_fish, I'm not trying to provoke you. Your two comments got me thinking the most of the one's I saw here, and so I decided to respond to them. :-)

mechanical_fish, I'm not trying to provoke you.

Your on-topic and thoughtful responses are so annoying! Why can't you write rude monosyllabic flames like everyone else on the web? ;)

But, seriously, I overstated my case a bit. I didn't mean to imply that networking is some kind of miracle solution to the hiring problem -- for either the employer or the employee. AFAIK there is no miracle solution to the hiring problem. We're all forced to play it by ear.

But because there is no one best practice for finding the right person for a given software job, people are using a bunch of different practices. Which is why you can't look at a single aspect of the job-search market (job ads posted to Monster.com; density of keywords on the resumes that are slid under your door; number of recruiter phone calls, whatever) and expect it to accurately represent the whole state of the field.

I (note: not the original commenter you are responding to) would say that "something to show" equals experience, but with more solid evidence. You could learn a lot and gain some experience and network and have fun just by participating in some open source project that interests you (or that uses some of the technologies that interest you). You can do that on the weekends or evenings while you keep your day job, it won't cost you anything, and in the worst case it is just good karma. ;-)

IMO & Experience I felt that the 3-5 years experience is a 'filter' for the recruiter to get less resumes and pick from them. I in fact sent my resumes fresh after college to a lot of companies that needed 5+ yrs of experience and they did contact me. So, I'd recommend create some simple projects in C++/Ruby/Python and put them in your Blog/Web so you can point it to them on your cover letter/resume.

Good Luck

I'm looking for programmers familiar with enterprise software right now, so if someone could show me that they had made something impressive and related to what I'm looking for in any language, I'd be happy to give them some time to pick up PHP if they didn't know it already.

Feel free to e-mail jobs@thinkcomputer.com.

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