[jimmaswell]

I didn't end up with virtually any useful networking from college like you're supposed to, and the job fairs were all worthless - not a single programming related employer showed up to a single one of them. I've never heard back from any of the places nearby that I've ever applied to (there were a lot of them) except for one that called me to tell me they accidentally posted the ad for junior level when they meant senior, which was strange, but maybe it'll start changing soon now that I've graduated. All of this with a good amount of side projects and years-long involvement in two large-scale volunteer development projects (two games). The only internship I was able to get out of going to that college was unpaid and all I learned from it was slightly more familiarity with certain techs. Sometimes it starts to feel like this entire field is completely overblown online where people say with a few side projects you can make 80k on your first job with no degree. All I can do now is hope I find something before the student loan grace period is over or else I'm going to have to start applying to minimum wage jobs. Unfortunately looks like I'm going to have to start applying to ever more distant cities if I want to hear back from anyone, and being a far distance is a negative to hiring managers' perspectives from what I've heard, and there are lots of reasons I'd rather not have to deal with these large cities ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14394709 ).

More on the side of college's usefulness or lack of it, the major classes were generally not challenging and I didn't learn much overall that I hadn't already been familiar with from online sources. A lot of classes were skippable.

[nextlevelwizard]

Maybe there is something wrong with the way you present yourself or your skills? Or maybe money is somehow blinding you, I'm sure there are plenty of jobs if you are not going to for super high salaries (or maybe that is the norm in the US, I don't know, but at least here if you aren't asking for the Moon and you know basics for programming you can get a job for sure)

[jimmaswell]

I've just applied to whatever was there regardless of the posted salary. I've shown my resume to various people in the field and they said it was fine aside from a few conflicting opinions of moving one thing somewhere else or other minor details.

[nextlevelwizard]

There's a pretty big difference between "fine" and "great". Have you detailed what you actually did in each job/project? Are you somehow linking to the final code base? Do you have active Github page which shows your own projects?

My first impression from the fist comment (which obviously wasn't meant to be as a sales pitch, but it's all I got going) was that you've done something, maybe very little, on some open source game projects. Which raise questions like why are these games open source? If they are open source how complex can the games even be? What languages were the games coded in? What did you actually do, did you just adjust something small or did you actually make something sizable?

Even then I come back to "why games?" Maybe it's just my own bias, but there's something about games programming that feels weird if you have no other projects especially if you have no final product to show for it.

[shadowwolf007]

> I've shown my resume to various people in the field and they said it was fine aside from a few conflicting opinions of moving one thing somewhere else or other minor details.

I learned the hard way that, generally, games reflect poorly in many non-NYC/LA/SEA cities. For some reason I will never understand, people think they're easy or that you're a liar. Get in to some new projects and generalize what you did in to specific tasks that demonstrate competence. E.g. I worked on an "MMO-ish" game with about 500 users a month (30 - 40 concurrent). I ended up making no mention it was a game but rather referred to it as a networking system I built in college :) Once I got in to the room, I would de-emphasize that it was a game and focus on some of the cool stuff I did.

Many years of reviewing and having my resume reviewed by varying people (HR, managers in varying trades, etc) has made me come to the conclusion that unless your resume is "Good", it's bad. Also keep in mind tech people are often the last people to review your resume. You're selling yourself (your product) to HR first and tech people second. You need to find managers and HR folks and have them review your resume. Alternatively, some markets have very good recruiter firms that can help tailor your resume to the local market and attract lots of job options.

What people you've talked to are nicely telling you is that your resume is not good enough to get noticed. Your resume is good enough when you hear "Hey, this is good. In fact, I wish (we're hiring/most were this good/I knew you were looking)!"

It sounds like you already have the right attitude, but you need to stand out. Because you aren't living knee-deep in a big city and no appreciable experience, you're at a huge disadvantage. But all of that can be overcome with a pivot on your part, I think.

[linkregister]

What state is your university located?

[jimmaswell]

NY