zettavolt

Maybe, my reasoning is that while I'm in the privileged position of being young, it's a greater loss for me to potentially botch the interview today and jeopardize future employment with Matasano than to just eke it out today.

Additionally, how do you convey to an employer without sounding like an asshole "Please, I need to be hired AND get paid at least 700$ before the end of this month"

Thank you for the advice, frankly I would love to work for Matasano, they are arguably one of the premier security firms in the country. However, I have difficulty placing myself in the top-tier category they are in (plus they are not in San Francisco). I honestly don't know if I could write a network protocol fuzzer without relying on SPIKE or Scapy off the top of my head in an interview.

As far as Square goes, I feel I have 0 chance there. I would love to work there as well but no computer science/Math degree, spotty work and residence record and entirely self-taught. I get the feeling that doesn't jibe with their culture and I would just be wasting their time and mine.

I've tried applying at three places. I've done web development "professionally" before and frankly I've always been extremely unhappy with the job environment, maybe it's characteristic of web dev or maybe just bad experience.

I would like to go into something deeper but my experience and interest in Distributed Systems, C/C++/Assembly and security is entirely self-taught and done out of a hobby so I don't have anything "professional" to show for it beyond the ability to talk for hours, a few web browser and plugin exploits I've written and the only substantial project I've done in C++ is one of the early WEP crackers for Windows which I wrote 6 years ago (and is riddled with classic C++ novice mistakes).

Plus, if I applied for a job now I would not feel comfortable asking for money up front to pay my rent, even if a company could figure out they wanted to make a hire before the end of the month.