| I lead a small team of developers (~12-14) and just hired 2 people without any formal qualifications for junior web roles. I will only do this for Web roles, not machine learning, etc, which does - imo - require a more learned academic mind. I used to go down the usual expensive (in time and money) recruiter / Computer Science grad route however the market is flooded by people who are expensive and generally rubbish programmers, not what I would call Software Engineers but half arsed Programmers. To solve this, for my junior roles, I am now working directly with several programming bootcamps to make sure I can fill these places. MOOCs are something I look for in someone from one of these or someone self taught. It shows they don't want to be a "hacker"/script kiddy but someone who has passion and really wants to understand the theory behind what they are coding, which in my mind is the difference between a Software Engineer and a simple programmer. Focus on the theoretical courses, data structures, maths, algorithms, etc. Then support these course certificates with:
- A good GitHub which showed practical examples of what you have just learned (possibly with new technologies such as RxJS/Angular 4)
- A LinkedIn/Website with the certs on their with projects describing what they achieved, linking to above
- Blog/Medium posts posts detailing their progress/findings
- Great code commenting, which includes not commenting too much. Show the big O notation of an algorithm you made, detail how it works, but don't tell me what a for loop is, etc. I don't really mind which course you do, or who hosts it. I want to see you taking this knowledge and turning it into a different practical example. For me that shows you are potentially a good coder wanting to be a Software Engineer. For me that gives me the confidence to hire. Another note: My CTO, senior engineers and myself also do an online course a month to just keep on top of our skills. Self learning - imo - should always be encouraged and I go out of my way to make sure anyone at my company has paid online subscriptions to do this. |