Getting into the tech scene when you have no skills | Hacker News Reader

Getting into the tech scene when you have no skills

josephwalla.com

63 pointskevin_morrill48 comments

I think the first thing people should ask themselves is: Why are you trying to get into this scene without any skills?

In the last 10 years Silicon Valley and startups in general have attracted a mush of people who bring little or no value to the table. I'm not talking about business/product types or MBAs that might at least have some experience and maybe some contacts and financial know-how. No, its the kind of people who for no other reason are thrilled by the celebrity-esque world of high-flying startups that might come with free lunch/dinner/beer, parties, and items found in The Social Network.

People should learn some product and marketing skills at larger, non-startup companies first before taking sweat equity or low/no pay at a startup. Also make contacts at meetups and learn the finance side of things. THEN you will have less of a problem "Getting into the tech scene", skills in hand.

These people are called "startup groupies" and they are a huge problem in Silicon Valley, because that place is infested with them. I thought it funny too that "learn to program" (which the entire article should have been written about) was only given three sentences at the very end of the article.

>I think the first thing people should ask themselves is: Why are you trying to get into this scene without any skills?

For the same reasons anyone with no skills gets into anything. Some people glamorize things they don't know, others have a passion but were slow starters, other still know there is gold there, but don't have the experience to understand how to get it.

I think the best thing is to be able to weed out the ones who truly are passionate about technology and are willing to learn. I would take someone super enthusiastic with an aptitude for learning and no technical skills over most others any other day.

I would also point out that the author implicitly suggests no technical skill = no skills, though it could simply be sloppy writing.

The community definitely needs more blog entries telling non-technical people to learn how to code.

I don't mean to be a dick but this is completely devoid of content. It boils down to IF you don't have technical skills, THEN develop them OR meet people who don't care that you don't have technical skills that will hire you.

Further I fail to see how someone wanting into tech would be better reading a bunch of PG essays than actually, y'know, learning to code. Unless I'm not taking the title seriously enough, and the goal is only to get into the tech SCENE (as in social), not a technical job.

Seemed to me like the goal was to land a non technical job in the tech scene. So for people who don't want to learn to code, here's a quick start guide for getting the skills you need to get into BD, QA, etc at a tech startup.

Right. But out of curiosity... If you want a non-technical job, why must it be in the tech scene? And if you want a job in tech, why aren't you willing to learn the requisite skills. Paradox, I say.

If you don't have skills, can you bring experience? Many start-ups try to disrupt existing industries. If you understand how an industry works and why it's vulnerable to disruption, you can join forces with technical people to become that disruption.

You should still learn to code though :-)

This is the only valid answer I see other than getting skills.

"Do work for free" is the worst suggestion I've heard in a long time. Your time is valuable; it should be to you and it should be to the person you are working for. Even if you aren't getting a monetary remuneration for your services there should be some kind of compensation, and you should be clear – at least in your head – what it is. Never – ever –work for free. It may seem like a good idea but its not.

> The problem with having no skills or track record is that it's not worth paying you

Required experience for paid work is a fact of life. If you don't have the skills to work for pay in a certain area you work for free. You can do that by putting in the time on your own side projects or you can accomplish it some other way. Like doing free work in exchange for experience.

That's not for free. Doing work for free means "I will do this for you and get nothing in return." All I'm saying is don't run around willy-nilly doing work for free, thinking that will somehow magically lead to success; be cognizant of what you will actually get in return. And I'm not saying that money is the only type of payment, not at all.

Frankly, I think you are deliberately misinterpreting the spirit of the suggestion. Your interpretation reduces the original point to absurdity: "do something for no reward."

I'm not in the startup scene at all and if I were, I wouldn't expect that working for free would magically lead to success, but why is a bad idea to work strictly for experience - assuming you have some idea of what "good" experience would be? What's an example of the non-monetary payment you have in mind?

Wages are only part (I've heard 50% before) of the cost of hiring. There are other expenses like training, desk space, insurance, etc. So I can't imagine that it'd be much easier getting an unpaid position as a paid one. At the very least there'd have to be some expectation that you'd offer a return on any training you receive. If you've got the potential, they'd probably just pay you. There's nothing stopping them from employing casually or on a short term contract to alleviate risk. Taking people on for free might even violate labour laws in some jurisdictions.

Volunteering for a not-for-profit is a different matter of course.

If you're not planning to have monetary return from a project, it's almost always better to work on a personal side project than for someone else.

Your enjoyment of the project will be higher, you have more control over scope and tech stack and you can choose to solve an interesting problem within your ability.

In short, think it as marketing material development for yourself, which will be way more effective at getting future work than some free work you can get.

The author's time is apparently not worth much, considering the things that he recommends doing.

I have to give the author credit–I like his approach much better than poseurs who drop into the scene and start running workshops or being mentors, all while never having actually built anything or attempted a startup.

Ugh, a 'friend' of mine is doing this. No skills, never worked at a startup. He's put up three landing pages over the course of the past 6 months and now blogs about his experiences 'starting' 3 companies. Its incredibly obnoxious.

Adam Savage of the Mythbusters once gave a talk on problem solving and how he went about acquiring the skills he has :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhAt-7i36G8

While the talk was about a different industry, the lessons are still applicable to tech and pretty much most other fields.

My gut answer to the title of this post was "acquire skills." I don't know that this really deserved a post all on its own.

Personally, I really disliked the "crash conferences" part.

One could update the "crash conferences" advice to "volunteer at conferences". Being behind the desk giving out badges is a powerful place to be in terms of developing connections or fitting into a scene.

A list of people who got into the tech scene without tech skills:

1. Julia Allison - she tried to cheat her way into a fundraiser and despite that ended up on the cover of WiReD: http://gawker.com/284123/an-east-coast-hustler-tries-to-chea...

2. Nick Starr - my cousin who is a cop is still interested in talking to you for laptops that were stolen that you are selling.

3. Hermione Way - I honestly wanted to work for you as a coder because you had entrée into all these "cool" parties, but despite now having an app that gets 100,000 photo uploads a day (Via.Me) I'm still not cool enough to work for you? WTF?

There isn't a scene to get into. Instead there is a long standing list of problems that have existed since the beginning of computer science. Read Knuth or something similar if you don't know which these are. Either you are on board for solving those problems or your real interests lie elsewhere. Decide which you are.

I don't think this article gets it quite right.

I think non-technical people that do best stumble into the tech scene - rather than want to get in. By this I mean if you want to make it anywhere - especially in a world where you have none of the technical skills needed to actually build anything - you have to LOVE it. And that love comes from a deep and not-too-well-understood place within us. The kind of place which is not very easy to access with the cognitive part of your brain that lets you create the sentence 'I want to get into the tech scene now - but I know nothing - what steps can I take?'.

I am (sadly) non-technical (for now (but learning!)) - an Economics graduate who was on the path to investment-bankdem - but I couldn't help myself but be part of the tech scene. Some old colleagues from a hedge fund I interned at wanted to start a community for motorcyclists and, as I was young and more tech savie than them, they asked if I wanted to help out. It was (and still is) SO much fun thinking about how someone could use things - have an enjoyable experience, gain value, and try to find a way for us to extract a little value too. That is such a beautifully complex challenge to think through.

Our budget for the build was £25,000 - which is how much I thought it cost to build a website - so my plans for my own ideas had to go on hold - as I didn't have that kind of cash. Then a friend told me he got a website built in Romania for £2,000 - I can afford that!!! I designed my first website in microsoft word - from top to bottom - and sent my files over to Romania, greatly confusing the web agency who had never received 30 microsoft word files as the basis to build off. I was learning Spanish in Spain at the time and happened to meet an awesome German graphic designer. He took me through my designs and showed me why they sucked, and he told me about a program called InDesign. I came back to England and learnt that.

Since then I've won prizes for tech entrepreneurship, worked in a company that existed to build other tech companies, built a team of 6 around one of my core ideas, and learnt a little front end code myself. I would love to say - the rest is history - but now I am learning how to execute on ideas. Something which I have not yet done well enough.

But the point is I couldn't help any of this. And I think if you have to force yourself to read PG, or it is a 'I want a job', not a 'I want to build what's in my head!' mentality that makes you write your first piece of code - then maybe the tech world is not the place you really want to be.

Well one strength you have already would be in user testing as your mind is infetted by the `how would a computer do this best` approach towards interfacing with users.

You could start by looking and reviewing and spotting bugs in many programs out there, will help build a resume and also at the same time perk your interest into what tech scene angle you wish to start heading down. Be it codeing, design, testing, support, managing, selling, testing, providing. That is without even looking at the market area's within those feilds which could be anything from games, web, plant, automation, planes trains and automobiles, or washing machine spin cycle control systems. Many area's within area's. Tech is such a large feild and this is just the basic computing stuff. Designing new solar panels, specialist clothing, you see what I mean, such an open subject.

Two things I would advise keeping in mind. What are you good at and what do you like. It is a fine balance and to do the things you like you might not earn as much and work all hours bluring the lines between hobby and work. You could focus on what you are good at and treat it as work, have more time and money to focus on those hobbies and pet projects and get better quality time doing them how you enjoy them. It is extremly rare to fully combine the two, even then it will not be all the time. You can spend a long time chasing that end-goal and end up becoming disenjanted with what you enjoy. So a fine balance is advisable and by all means learn your own balance. Being mindful of that will help you be more objective and happier in the long run. Dreams can become nightmares, don't spoil the dream. So tread slowly, but firmly and you will know what you are good at and what your are not, so even if you descide to go another direction all together. You would of learned good foundations for any path forward.

So my suggestion in short - levridge your skill you have now and that is you are the perfect user, so testing/QA would be a great start and one you can define. You will then know which area of tech you wish to focus upon, though will gain the eye for detail early on which is handy in all walks of life.

Step #1 for how to get into the tech scene is read a boatload of nontechnical articles?

I still think this point is valid because there is a lot more to the tech "scene" than just technical advice. reading about VCs, startups etc will still help you understand the system as a whole and can help you find better places to start learning more.

At the end of the day that's still massively putting the cart before the horse. At the core of it startups are about building products - if you have nothing to contribute to any part of the product building process (whether dev, design, bizdev, marketing, etc), you are literally of no use to anyone whatsoever.

It's easy, just tell them you're into "UX".

I think if you have no skills the best way to get into startup is to get rich first and become an angel investor! I believe there are more high probability ways to get rich than starting a startup.

I agree everybody should know the basics of HTML/CSS to become what I call "semi-technical", even if you're not attempting a startup. You might find you have an artistic flare for digital design, and suddenly become that much more marketable.

That being said, why would you want to found a startup if not to build something cool and get people interested in it? If that's not your natural passion, it's no coincidence you don't already have skills a technical company would find valuable.

Since when was having skill a prerequisite to being in IT? I have interviewed, and sadly worked with, way too many people who had no clue how to do their job.

This. Just get a job in IT at any large corporation. You will fit right in.

The OP mentions hustle - probably the most important skill of all. One good way to get into the startup scene is to actually start something, yourself.

I've always been wary of the online programming sites like codecademy and the like, because when I did Rails for Zombies I realized it never shows you how to set up an actual Rails application nor how Git and Heroku work. Are all the tutorials similar in that they baby you?

Yes they are.

I had a couple friends who wanted to learn JavaScript and went to CodeAcademy's course[1] only to find it was more like Programming 101. Not a single mention of what is a closure, how you can modularize your code, how prototypes actually work, etc.

[1] http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/javascript

That's because for 99% of javascript written today in the Real World you still need not know a single thing about those things.

You simply can't cater for every ability level in a single course.

I don't agree.

Modules and closures are needed in any serious JS development out there. Believe me. I worked in a codebase where they thought they "still need not know a single thing about those things" and boy was that a mess.

No wonder JS devs are considered crappy coders with that kind of mindset.

Most sites are not one page apps. Their js is silo'd per page.

You misinterpret my personal skill level, I don't believe you as I've worked on more than one codebase of both kinds. Most javascript today is still employed as the scripting language it was originally introduced for. It does very little apart from open a lightbox or get something via ajax or something trivial like that.

There is a tiny % of javascript coders like us that use it to write programs and an even tinier percentage that use coffeescript. It is worth keeping that in mind at all times when discussing coding.

You don't have to be an architect in order to make a wall.

I also spent time running courses for non-coders in basic coding in a previous job to allow them to slightly customize their own product. Going in with advanced and abstract concepts like closures is a sure fire way to frustrate a student, not enlighten them.

> You misinterpret my personal skill level

What made you think that? My point is not that you suck as a developer.

Even when building tiny apps global variables are EVIL and they will eventually make you shoot yourself in the foot. Closures and modules are basic concepts in JavaScript because, well, the language is inherently flawed and you have to work around it.

> You don't have to be an architect in order to make a wall.

But you shouldn't bind bricks with gum either. If you do and the wall collapses, who's to blame? Would you teach bricklayers to bind with gum because using cement is hard for beginners?

This is not an architectural issue. This is about basic skills.

> Going in with advanced and abstract concepts like closures is a sure fire way to frustrate a student, not enlighten them.

I agree there, but my simile about the bricklayers and the gum stands. Sure, you'll frustrate beginners, but what about a last chapter about advanced techniques or at least mentioning it? Specially since closures are a core concept in JS.

Avoiding the issue will never turn beginners into advanced beginners/competent coders. Lack of information in key areas does more damage than excessive information because it creates a false sense of security that eventually leads to sore feet :)

They're a kick off point I've found, they teach a man how fishing could work, and point off from there. They're great for picking some nice basics and then the expectation is you'll head off and learn from there. It's not a great end to end solution though. I'd say the Rails tutorial by Hartl is the best for the end to end coverage, but often they never seem to go that far.

My experience is that those sites are best used understanding the languages themselves. There are other tutorials (like Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial) that walk through building an application from scratch while learning the language (or at least the framework.)

I think some of these sites can do a much better job when it comes learning how to create projects, but I don't necessarily think that is what they were targeting originally.

I did Code Year and was pretty critical of it (I've blogged about it but won't spam here!), particularly as it got less and less immediately practical over the course of the year and spent the last 3 months doing Python (which was bad enough for me who has experience with PHP, HTML/CSS, and JS) I hate to think what it'd have been like for people still getting their heads around coding!

I would categorize user testing under 'Design Skills' (UX Design), as well as CSS and HTML (Web Design). Design might be a third type of role, that is neither technical, nor business.

Surprised they didn't add "start dating startup people" to the list. After all, technology is all about learning to be a good groupie.

No technical skills? Read hacker news.

Brilliant.

Circular reference. You'll follow links until you die.

I would add understanding of social media too. It has become a must since past few years to have a substantial online presence. Personal branding is something that will take you a long way ahead. You can crash parties only once in a while, but in social media space, you can have real-time one-on-one interactions with almost anybody anytime!

No skills? No problem.

If you flunk the interview, try challenging the interviewer to a dance-off. If you win, the job is yours!

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