| Hi! Person who hires other people here. I too am self-taught, so I'm sympathetic. But these two things in combination scare me: > [nine months] professional experience > just give me a week to look through your website's codebase, I'll figure out how you guys do things and I'll start being productive before you know it. I get why you think you can be productive. But a person with 9 months experience has no experience with long-term maintainability. Your definition of productive and mine are likely very different. And that you don't know that there's a difference means I can't trust you to write production code. You're in the "hazard" stage of expertise: http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/three-stages-of-expertis... Novice programmers are great, and I've successfully hired them in the past. But that requires a context where they can work closely with experts who help them improve while keeping them away from doing things that feel productive but are long-term harmful. Left unsupervised, they can, with the best of intentions, be fountains of technical debt. > the way I think about getting things done with computers isn't tied down to any one specific framework This is a dangerous way to think. In software, everybody is bright. Everybody is a quick learner. If your operating theory is that you're just way smarter than those fools who have spent time learning something more deeply, you're going to keep yourself from advancing in your chosen work. To me, you come across like this: https://xkcd.com/793/ > Apparently I should've learned it all `n` years ago, and it's too late now? Find yourself a context where you can spend n years and dig in. Go make things. Go maintain things. Go find the edges of your knowledge and develop a little humility. Because without it, you're going to have a very hard time successfully asking people to give you a job where there going to have to give you a lot of help. |