| * In Boston at least, there are programming-related interest groups meeting most weekday evenings. Most with free pizza. (http://www.bugc.org/ - but it's been buggy this week, and is currently missing groups). So one is paid dinner, to network with programmers at local companies, at a place where hiring managers congregate to look for people. ^.^ * Skill levels in industry are diverse. The lower bound is low. SV is atypical. "so i try to work on things like a compiler and a real-time rendering engine". That is very not lower bound. That's professional development. Get a job first. Learn, and then move on - industry turnover rates are high. One thing notably absent from your narrative, is a report of repeated job rejections. Instead of adding features to yourself, put yourself on the market - you may already have achieved Minimum Viable Product<ctrl-delete>Programmerness. And even if not, you'll get a better feel for market fit, and for what might need to be improved. Time to release. * Put something on github. Even if it's small. Even if it's unfinished - software almost never is. Include a test. There are people looking for programming jobs who can't write a coherent paragraph of code. Or English. Clarify that you are not them. But perhaps set out to obtain at least one rejection first. It'd seem a pity to self-fund fiddling on github, if you could already be being paid for it. |