Desperate For A Job | Hacker News Reader

Desperate For A Job

scriptogr.am

5 pointsapruss11 comments

Some friendly advice from someone who's been in your situation:

The post is overly dramatic for my taste. By adding drama and name calling your ex employers you only harm your own image.

There's lack of qualified programmers pretty much everywhere you look, so writing a normal resumé, listing your expertise and experience should be more than enough. Send it to as many job boards as you can find, and try to find a few agencies looking for your kind of talent and pitch yourself to their agents. Sure, agency jobs are not as cool as getting hired by a startup in Palo Alto, but hey... you've got to start somewhere.

Be realistic about it: considering your situation you might want to look for jobs in countries that don't make immigration a pain in the ass. You could be a truly kick-ass programmer for all I know but you are still completely unqualified for a Skilled Worker visa in most countries (too young, not much to show). Don't even get me started on an H1B. Take advantage of your citizenship to try England and Germany, where there are lots of open positions.

Finally, as others have suggested, don't just stop and moan: DO STUFF! If you have the time and resources, maybe write an open source project. If you want to improve your skills while still getting paid, go the freelance route. It's not great, but it pays the bills. Better yet, at the end of the day you'll have a much bigger portfolio of knowledge (notice I didn't say projects, but knowledge) to woo your next employer.

In any case, good luck! :)

I shall do stuff, in fact I already do stuff, an idiotic open source project. And thanks for the advice and luck, all so very much needed.

Haha, there is no such a thing as an 'idiotic' open source project. Remember, most open source has always started as someone scratching his own itches, be it something as awesome as Linus developing a whole new OS just to run Prince of Persia, or one of my many lame contribution to other projects (e.g: fixing some weird behavior on new tabs in Gedit. How 'revolutionary' is that?).

If your itch is displaying all colors in the RGB palette with all their possible alphas, well then... just do it. If nothing else, it'll definitely help you think about how long it takes to iterate over the millions of values that you can represent in 32 bits. It's good programmer food for thought :)

I cannot read this because the writing is soooo bad. If this is your job application, I will not consider hiring you.

what does it say? (CodeIgniter says database down)

Edit: working now

Re: "My average day is spent behind a laptop reading Hacker News, Lifehacker, The Next Web, Smashing Magazine and whatever I happen to discover online."

how about you stop doing that for a while and crank your own side project. then you'll have smth to show, learn new stuff and connect with people.

desperation will probably not land you a job, but creating opportunities for yourself and showing how you can be useful to others may.

Good luck!

I've thought of that, but good ideas are hard to come by and a bad idea is never worth the execution. However yes, I need to be more active. This article is the first step.

Probably better for you skill set, and you CV, to work on a bad idea until a good one shows up.

As in cut through a forest till I see a field? Good point. I already have an idea (bad idea) cracking.

The idea for your project is not important and neither is it's business potential. If it were, you would be hired for the position of CEO or head of marketing or whatever. Just do something, Anything that will show a potential recruiter your value.

I read it all with no problems...

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