| Folks, thanks a lot for all your comments. Let me try to respond to some questions that were raised: She has a LinkedIn profile, with relevant skills highlighted. She is not active on Github yet - that will be her focus now. She was focusing on sites like HackerRank and CodeEval so far. If she finishes any projects, we will definitely post it to HN for feedback. We are trying to find more “back to work” sort of programs - a lot of banks seem to have them, but the cutoff date for applications seemed to be the end of last year. We do have friends working in the industry, but most are at large companies where it’s hard to bypass HR and go to the team required, or companies where hiring is currently frozen, and so on.. We are going to try to find Hiring Managers to talk to or have a coffee with - if any of you guys are looking to hire an highly competent Python/Java programmer down on her luck, or would just like to talk, she’d love to talk to you over coffee anywhere in the Bay Area. Please send me an email at (username) at gmail if you'd like to talk. It’s great to see the support and advice from everyone here. Really, thank you. |
As a sibling poster has said, never ever ever ever talk like this. In particular, don't talk like this in 2016 in the Bay Area, which is approximately the best time and place to ever be a developer. Your wife should present herself as a confident professional with substantial programming skills who is looking for a career change into software development.
n.b. That transition is not as smooth as changing between dev jobs, but practically speaking after she's gotten one software development position under her belt this conversation gets very, very easy in the future.
In the current environment clueful employers should be foaming-at-the-mouth rabidly enthusiastic to make your wife's acquaintance. Coding bootcamp graduates with minimal technical background, ~12 weeks of Rails training, and no related professional experience are hireable in Bay Area right now.