Ask HN: Moving from a support role to engineering?

[bourbondd]

I would love to get some advice or if you could share your story about a similar experience.

My current situation: Right now I work as a support engineer for a SaaS startup that makes dev tools. I rather not say company name to maintain some anonymity since our support team is pretty small.

I have enjoyed my job and learned so much about practically every web stack and build suite. For the past year, I have been trying hard to get a full-time software development position. At my company, I've been writing some automation scripts for our production and business ops and when I have a little extra time I'll pick up bug issues and new feature stories from our PM board that is up for grabs. Outside of work, I've been attending several developer meetups, taking online courses, reading books, practicing with coding challenges, and just recently began a personal RoR project.

My skill set so far is comprised of: decent CS foundation (OOP, algorithms, comp architecture, databases), Math(calc, stats, discrete math), Web development (ruby, rails, javascript), TDD, DevOps(linux sys admin, ansible, docker, rake, aws, heroku), as well as dabblings with Java, C, Python, Golang.

Unfortunately, this effort doesn't seem like it will be enough to earn a position on my company's dev team. Everyone on the team is a senior engineer with a minimum of 8 years of experience. The feedback I have received from the engineering manager was that I need to be able to produce code at the same level with little to no collaboration with other engineers (except for code reviews or if production is down). Realistically, I know that will take some time (several years) to achieve this, but I want to develop full-time sooner than later. Outside of work, one consistent feedback I received was that I lack coding samples/portfolio that would warrant someone to give me an interview.

Thanks for reading and your potential response!

[quickben]

Management wise: He is probably trying to keep you where you are. You can't be sure, but he's not willing to give you a shot. Hence: he may not have the resources, doesn't want to bother, thinks you wont cut it at first or at all / etc.

Next: Congratulations. It's the drive that matters.Try to push your manager, if it works, good, stop reading here.

Okay, so: Where do you want to go? Whats your passion? Ignore what you know/dont know. What you want to do?

Lets assume you woke up one day after 10 hours of sleep, opened the windows, inhaled, and said to yourself: I love that I've become the best _________________ ever.

Having said this. Start doing it. Start your new project. It doesn't have to be commercial. Start doing what you love. Google stuff, boot your own Vulkan pipeline for that space invaders clone, write that C++ json parser to replace nlohmann/json or what have you. Just do it. Pour your passion into it.

Then:

Go for an interview; and tell them:

I have a great passion for this. I've worked as a support for so long, because I had to pay my bills, but look at what I'm capable of. I want this. This is where I want to proceed in life. It makes me happy, and I can do it. You seem to be a company that needs that skillet. So I'm here, ask me anything.

And that's how I'd start, if I were you. If passion is your dream, the stars will align to pillar you up. But, you have to decide, and start.

Best of luck, unknown stranger. May the math/algorithms and that C that you wrote (and for which I'm replying), keep your sails full.

And for all the gods sake, if you have the brains for discrete math and oop algos and stuff, try to do something that people shy away from and that will amaze them when they see it. Use AVX2 assembler inlines if you have to :)

May you have an amazing journey.

[radamanthus]

Befriend one of the senior engineers and ask him/her to mentor you. Most senior engineers I know will be willing to spend 30 minutes a week mentoring a promising newbie, which you seem to be. And the senior engineer will also be curious to hear from the support team, to learn about what the has been tripping up customers.

[bourbondd]

Thanks for the tip. This has actually been a bit difficult for me to accomplish. Most of the engineers are tight for time finishing their sprints, so all "mentoring" and feedback is usually done asynchronously via Slack or code reviews.

[nikhizzle]

Hi!

Your progress is very impressive, and you seem to be picking up all the right stuff. Have you considered using triplebyte?

They have an online code screening as the first step, and then they help you find a good fit.

[bourbondd]

Thank you so much for replying! I actually have considered triplebyte, but I've read some mixed reviews about their coding challenges and interview process. The main thing that has discouraged me from applying is the 4-month wait to re-apply if you fail your first interview https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq#scroll-link-14. Because of this constraint, I'm not sure my time is better spent working on a personal project that I can showcase my skills to a potential employer or study/practice to pass triplebyte's coding challenge.

Have you or someone you know used triplebyte? If so, what are your thoughts in their interviewing process?

[nikhizzle]

Yes, I went through their process. I was impressed by their extreme focus on finding a good fit, and truly had a lot of fun interviewing with them.

I would just do the online screen without any preparation. So what if you have to wait 4 months to try again? There are plenty of other options in the mean time.

[bourbondd]

Oh wow interesting. Will definitely give it a shot then. Thanks again!

[bananash]

some tips, build your resume also

side project - get some kind of side biz/app going. literally no reason not to.

code samples - do some interviews with companies (pass out ur resume ull get code samples), complete the sample questions, verify them with someone, then put them in your github under code_samples/ to prove your coding skills

open source contribs - pick one popular app, say a rails util, or some c app, fix a single bug, and for the next 5 years claim yourself as an open source contributor to popular open source package.

these things helped me get a role, they should help transition or get a new dev role also. especially open source; fixing 2-3 bugs in an existing app (that each have hundreds of bugs) takes only 2-3 days... it will drastically help skills and credibility (and bonus: the oss community).

second tip is just write an app, buy a book, keep it as reference, but most importantly write a complete app, ask questions on irc for expert advice (freenode), and that will get you places (it did for a lot of ppl)

[bananash]

additionaly name recognition matters, if you can get one or two bugfixes to a big named app or company, or build an app for yourself, just one previous experience should be enough to get you a dev job because name recognition matters so much.

ask the dev team if you can try to fix a bug. if not on your own, or look through their commits and bugtracking and try to fix one or two open bugs and ask if they want the fix. eventually they will take one and you can use that on your resume to get hired