Reverse Job Search: I will pay to work at your company

[NYC-dev]

I am a coding bootcamp graduate who is having a hard time finding my first dev job.

PROBLEM: Most internships want students who are in college (I'm not) and most junior positions want people with at least 2 years of experience. I'm looking for my first front-end development job.

ABOUT ME: - I changed careers from the medical field. - I'm African-American. - I live in NYC. - I graduated from a good coding bootcamp, so I know basic HTML, CSS, and JS. - I briefly helped a friend with a React / Redux app, so I know the fundamentals of React.

Because I've had a hard time finding my first job, I was thinking about going back to take more web development classes to build up my portfolio. The school I was looking into is about $10K and it lasts 7 months.

So instead of that, I wanted to see if there are any companies out there that I can pay who is willing to let me learn on the job. I know it's a rather crazy idea, but you never know, right?

JOB REQUIREMENTS: - I want to be treated like any other dev in the company (work with PMs, designers, other devs, and be assigned tasks). - I'm interested in front-end development particularly. - Since I have started learning React, I would prefer to work on a React app. - I would like to work with someone who is patient and is good at mentoring beginners. - The company should be located in NYC ideally (but open to remote if you think it can work). - The job should last full-time, 7 months at least (ideally). - Since I'm paying and the whole point is to learn on the job, I'd expect the interview process to be more lenient.

PAYMENT / "TUITION": - Up to $10K

Message below if there's an opportunity out there for me! I'm hopeful.

[jfaucett]

Hi there,

I completely disagree with these other developers. I made it the hard way doing what they are suggesting - taught myself how to program, what SQL was, then JS, php, java, finally rails and ruby, scrounged for work, struggled on my own for years to figure out how to actually build robust software. And now a decade later, I'm an expert, confident and finally doing what I want to do all the time.

So sure there are some benefits that come with that approach - but if I had to do it over again, and had the funds to do so, I would have just done what you are wanting to do. Find a good senior developer/mentor, in an area that I'm really interested in, pay them to train me and give me the work to build an excellent portfolio and get the necessary real world work experience to land the exact job I want to do. Heck 10k for 7 months isn't bad at all, that's a great deal for you. You learn the whole development process, gain the work experience and will get a job making bank in less than a year - that's a nice ROI, much better than most CS degrees.

Also the superhuman discipline it requires to teach yourself everything from scratch while building an extensive portfolio is tough.

Anyway, If you'd like I'd be glad to talk to you and help you out with anything you need, so just reach out my email is in my profile.

[csallen]

I've helped a few friends learn web development while in their 20s, a few of whom were highly intelligent MIT grads. I agree that the discipline and motivation are the biggest roadblocks, followed by discovering an efficient lesson plan (lots of places online will teach you the specifics without giving you the greater picture).

The fact of the matter is that when you have a lot of free time, you will likely end up frittering much of it away. If you absolutely adore programming and working on projects, then sure, you may spend those months productively, but not everyone can count on that. So it very much helps to have some external pressure — in the form of a job or a mentor — to help you push beyond limits that you might not choose to cross on your own.

[daleholborow]

Hi there. I am unfortunately based in Helsinki and so cannot offer you any opportunities - but I would like to offer some advice. You are (in my opinion) crazy to spend more money, especially to work for someone else - if you have 10K and 7 months and want to go full time.. take your laptop to a coffee shop, and build yourself an app.. start dirt simple, iterate... make yourself a website, put up sample pieces... even try to build a real MVP of some product... go to meetup.com or similar events for other IT dudes and see what they are working on. Volunteer to help. Get your hands dirty that way? Good luck!

[daleholborow]

To continue: you are thinking of yourself as in a weak position (and I can both understand and sympathize having been in a couple rough patches myself before), but ask yourself which you think sounds better, to a future employer: "I spent my own money to work for someone else" vs "I spent 7 months working on an MVP for this little idea I had... you know, it never turned out as a big success, but I had fun and I learned a lot as I worked with x,y, z other people that I found in similar community...".

[dangrossman]

What you're looking for isn't legal AFAIK, so you're probably not going to find any real business that would agree to it.

If a business treats someone like an employee, then they are an employee, regardless of what labels you each use or what agreements you may make. If you want to be treated like any other dev in the company, have tasks assigned to you, etc, then you are an employee. Unpaid interns, for example, can't have tasks that primarily benefit the employer assigned to them; they can't do employee work or they will be treated as an employee in the eyes of the law.

Employees have to be put on a regular payroll schedule, paid at least minimum wage, have payroll taxes filed and paid, be provided with health insurance if they're not exempt, etc. Failing to do so would be a violation of federal and state labor laws, regardless of whether you're OK with it or not.

In NYC specifically, if someone agreed to have you work at their business as a developer, and collected your "tuition" without putting you on payroll, they would end up owing at least $10,000 in fines plus 2x minimum wage for every hour you worked (actual plus liquidated damages), plus back taxes and interest, should anyone tip off the state or IRS about it.

[rayalez]

I agree with other people in this thread - this is an incredibly inefficient way to spend this time and money.

Spend these 7 months and $10k learning more and building a portfolio, you'll get much more out of it than you could from a job.

Go to udemy, pickup a few good node/react courses(google a coupon to get them for $10-$15), and you will have expert engineers, who are also expert teachers, spending hundreds of hours guiding you through the process of building projects for your portfolio.

What can you possibly get out of "real work experience" that would be more valuable than that?

Build a kickass portfolio, have a github account you can use to showoff your code. It will make you way more hireable than "work experience".

Here are my recommendations on where to start:

https://startuplab.io/post/fullstack-web-development-roadmap

Specifically, I highly recommend courses by Stephen Grider and Andrew Mead. They are absolutely incredible in quality, will teach you everything you need, and are based on real practical projects.

[TheAlchemist]

On one hand, it's a sign of a dysfunctional job market and that's sad.

On the other hand, you dude may be taking the right approach here. Warren Buffett famously did pretty much the same - he offered to work for free for Ben Graham, his mentor cause experience and insight were much more valuable to him that money. Funnily enough, Graham turned him down initially, saying he was still too expensive :)

So good luck to you !

[noahc]

If you’re having issues getting hired, lack of skills is not your problem. Anyone that takes you up on this offer is exploiting you and don’t expect to be respected when co workers find out your arrangement.

[whb07]

- Buy a ticket to Nigeria $1.5k

- Buy $5k worth of raspberry pi’s

- Spend a month there teaching everyone the basics of what you learned

- Blog and video blog about it.

Come back to NY and get hired right away.

Does anyone see a flaw in any of this?

ps - what’s your race got to do with anything?

[Lordarminius]

My partner and I have a small training school which will open in a few weeks. Anyone willing to go down this route with us ? We aren't rich by any means, but we'll cover some major expenses. It'll be fun! Contact in bio.

[aaron-suarez]

http://raspberrywebserver.com/raspberrypicluster/raspberry-p...

[matt_the_bass]

I have perhaps a controversial opinion:

If you want a position where you will be working on real things and want lots of input from a senior person, then that probably means them spending at least 1 hour per day working with you directly. That’s about 140 hours over 7 months. At a company cost of $200/hour (minimum in NYC) for a senior developer, this translates to $28,000 of company cost.

Why would a company agree to $18000 out of pocket cost in your scenario vs $28000 in an unpaid intern position? I posit that, perhaps, the type of company that would cover $18k cost but not $28k may not be the type of company you want to intern with.

Personally I wouldn’t want to hire someone in this way. I’d rather real internship or no internship because I’d be concerned about mixed messages.

Have you considered a change of location and finding a real internship?

Also remember all this is free internet advice. You have no obligation to agree with any of it.

[vanderreeah]

Please do not do this. Here is my reasoning:

You reasonably would want, for your 10k, to work at / learn from a respectable, successful company. But my guess is that 10k for any such company would not represent a huge amount of money, and they'd be unlikely to take you up on your offer.

On the other hand, there will be plenty of less respectable, less successful companies who would bite your hand off. But from your point of view this would not be a good return on investment.

Of course there will be exceptions, but in general I'd be suspicious of any company who would take your 10k. And since 10k is a large amount of money (to me at least!) I'd personally not want to gamble on finding one of the exceptions.

There is other advice in this thread on what to do instead - I'd think more along those lines. Just my 2c.

[aaavl2821]

Work on the front end for OpenEMR, especially as you have a medical background. It's a open source project and the lead devs posted on HN last month asking specifically for help modernizing their front end with react. They said explicitly that any experience levels are welcome

OpenEMR is in my opinion a much needed project. They have a good amount of users esp in the developing world, so your work would be used to help many people in need. The us healthcare system also needs an open emr

Learn a marketable tech you're interested in, work on an impactful open source project, and save your $10k :)

[faroutchris]

I think you're far better off taking the classes. I was basically in your position 4 years ago, I had some coding skills but not enough to get my foot in the door anywhere. I chose to take a 2 year course (with a 6 months guaranteed internship) and it was invaluable for my career. You'll make connections to people who will soon also be working in the industry, you'll have time to develop your skills and build projects. I don't know how it works in the US, I know you don't get paid to study but maybe there's some free colleges/courses. You could look at alternatives to keep costs down and live on the money you have for a few months while you're focused on studying and networking.

If you don't want to go to school, get an internship but you should definitely not be paying since you're going to do valuable work even while learning on the job. Because the reality is that no devs actually have time to hold your hand, you will get a task and have to figure it out. They'll be able to point you in the right direction but don't expect much more than that.

[faroutchris]

I found some free courses/schools here:

http://www.npower.org/ "Non-profit Npower offers this free program to young adults ages 18 to 25. The program hosts two class cycles per year, beginning in January and July, with each running a total of 22 weeks, including 15 weeks of class-based training and _7 weeks of paid internship_. The courses are based at Npower’s HQ in Downtown Brooklyn and in Harlem."

https://flatironschool.com/programs/nyc-mobile-dev-corps "Mobile Dev Corps is a new, four month long course run by The Flatiron School and fully funded by the city. Starting in January students will learn to build iOS apps over a 16 week course. To be eligible you must be an NYC resident, earn less than $50,000 per annum and have no prior programming experience."

They also offer scholarships you can try to apply for if the above course doesn't meet your criteria. https://flatironschool.com/programs/online-web-developer-car...

https://www.c4q.nyc/accesscode/ "Over the course of 10-months, expect to spend over eighty hours each week learning to code. From collaborating in hackathons to launching products at Demo Day, Access Code is fully immersive, and designed to train industry ready developers."

Forgive my formatting, I'm new to HN....

[SQL2219]

Why don't you use that $10,000 to start your own company. You can then give all those HR people the finger, like they deserve.

[NYC-dev]

My coding skills is not at that level yet where I can be my own CTO.

[tarunkotia]

Markus Frind started PlentyOfFish to learn and implement ASP.NET himself. You start with a narrow scope & slowly start building. No one is a born CTO, you live you learn.

I will be more than happy to help you if you need some mentoring (I live in NYC). I've been a developer for over a decade.

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

Call yourself the CTO and you're the CTO. Only a scammy company would make you pay to join them, keep looking for an entry level job half the day, half the day work on your own project. Good luck.

[bigmanwalter]

If you're interested in trying your hand at short-term projects, I may have some work for you in the coming months.

I am a software freelancer and so my work is project based. I also teach web development workshops at the local college.

The way I see this working is to section off chunks of work for you from my contracts. You would perform the work and pay me for mentorship and code review. Of course, your code would then be incorporated into the project so you could claim the experience on your resume.

I wouldn't be able to promise full-time work as mentorship is quite time intensive and I will have to balance it with my own work. Likewise I tend to have some downtime between projects so there isn't always work that needs to be done.

If this is something that interests you, let me know. My email is [e-mail]

At the moment, I am on hiatus until February so unfortunately I don't have anything to offer until at least then.

[sosilkj]

If you're considering another bootcamp, don't bother. You don't mention if you have a degree or not (even one in an unrelated field is valuable), but if you're considering further education/training, I'd suggest doing so at an accredited institution and earning a degree for your efforts.

Otherwise, leverage your free time to work on your skills/portfolio. Structure your time; get disciplined. Read: http://calnewport.com/blog/2015/09/29/deep-habits-three-rece...

And as others have said: do not to work for free under any circumstances. Don't sell yourself short.

Best of luck.

[JSeymourATL]

FYI: There are several entry-level web dev positions in NYC via Google Jobs > https://www.google.com/search?q=jobs+%2B+entry+level+web+dev...

[1ba9115454]

I'm a CTO of a cryptocurrency business.

Due to the nature of what we do we require access to blockchains for various currencies. We have a mechanism in place for this but I'm thinking of splitting it off into another company.

i.e. Crypto curreny blockchain API service for wallets, exchanges etc.

So here's what I'm offering.

* You will be CTO and sole developer of a new Startup and your 10K would be seed capital.

* I will show you what is required and how to go about it.

* We will be your first customer.

* We will take a 50% stake.

Technologies

* Ruby on Rails

* node.js

* Kotlin (possibly)

* Elm

If this is intesting to you let me know.

Your worst case scenario is the business doesn't take off but you learn a shit load of skills including how to run a crypto business.

[dvidsilva]

Sure you got a ton of offers but check me out.

As a side project I'm building a thing to help devs like you get some experience and make it easier to find jobs later. I'm rewriting everything in react as an open source project.

If you want we can pair a couple hours a week or so and I'll help you get better at react. I don't need or want your money but is more valuable to me your feedback and meeting more people in your position to better understand what I'm doing

Hit me up at david(at)codecorgi.com

[ApolloRising]

Have you contacted any recruiters? There are a ton of entry level jobs in NYC through a good recruiter. Ad agencies are always looking for new coders, try that if you want.

[dzonga]

I wouldn't trust recruiters if you're still starting out. Went through the process! Ad Agencies dunno ?

[etienne_p]

Under no circumstances should you pay to work. You'll be taken advantage of. No company that has anything positive to give you would consider such an arrangement.

[wardy484]

You shouldn't have to pay. Have you tried for volunteering? Perhaps working for free for a short term rather than paying to work? That sounds quite extreme.

[NYC-dev]

The free opportunities I found don't have the structure and leadership of a real company. I want to learn from more senior devs instead of having me be the only dev.

[wardy484]

What I mean is seek to volunteer work at real companies rather than paying them. You may be learning but it sounds like you have some knowledge so you should still be providing them with some value.

[jfaucett]

I disagree completely. He is doing the right thing. Be upfront, pay the company, this sets the right expectations. The seniors devs have an obligation to mentor him and do it well, not just delegate him internship crap work. It would definitely be worth it for both parties.

[faroutchris]

And what will probably happen is that some scummy company will happily take his money and he will still be delegated the internship crap work. What you're describing is a school, but a school doesn't ship production code to clients and has teachers at the ready to mentor anyone who needs help. An internship is just a way to get the foot in the door with some light mentoring which usually consists of a senior pointing you in the right direction, not actually teaching you the stuff.

[djellybeans]

OP's post is disheartening to read.

This will probably less of a problem if more companies offered internships to inexperienced graduates instead of just undergraduates. The idea that you must be a student to qualify for an internship is an outmoded one, especially in a field of work where there are lots of autodidacts.

[chatmasta]

We as a society rely too heavily on resume / CV signals. Social media amplifies our dependence on this reliance.

The real innovators, the people who changed the world, were almost never optimizing for their resume.

[daleholborow]

Coincidentally, a few pages back, some just offered to teach people react: https://assim.me/init_blog/

[qihqi]

Go door to door to small businesses to build them a webpage for free.

[deepaksurti]

>> I can pay who is willing to let me learn on the job.

Nope, please do not do that, as other say.

You have 10K and 7 months.

- Find some part time gig (may be teach HTML, CSS) at local community college - 2, 3 hours: pays you something and you are not completely using up your funds. You have some knowledge and we always underestimate our knowledge to be poor and useless to the rest of all. Ironical in that, we go try and find a job with the same knowledge! So be confident that you can make some income with what knowledge you have right know.

- Write 6 apps in 6 months, extremely scoped, solving simple problems, I will offer one example:

   -- Write an app, that teaches 2000 most commonly used English words. There is a photo for that word, the spelling and sound. The user is shown the photo, he picks the correct word. If app shows the word, pick the right photo. The user starts a session, selects number of words to learn/review, show the words randomly. Next upgrade: you can talk about expanding this to use Retention algorithms in the interview.
   -- Rinse, lather, repeat 5 more apps

- Once your 1st app is ready, go to meet ups, local groups etc where you can do some self marketing with your portfolio, every month 1 more app is getting added to your portfolio. Upload your resume and portfolio on job boards, keep applying.

With some thoughtful planning of a part time gig, 6 portfolio apps, self marketing should keep you busy. Yes, don't forget to sleep, eat correct and exercise.

Hope this helps, this is just what I would probably do. Best.

[pouta]

Send me an email! moura at oko dot ai

We use React+Redux on the front-end and nodejs+Python on the back end. I think you will be a great fit.

[mowgles]

CTO of an edtech startup here. I'd love to talk to you! Shoot me an email at jaydev at mathbrix dot com

[rocannon]

I don't think it's wise to pay a company to let you work for them. I'm a rather skeptical person, and I'd be leary of anyone taking my money in such a scenario. Seems like a good way to lose $10K and wind up in the same place a few months later.

You haven't said what you've done to try to get a job. You should talk about that before people can give you advice. I have nothing to go on there, so take this with a grain of salt.

Did your bootcamp give you a promise of any assistance in finding a job? Have you kept in touch with any of your cohort? Reach out to them for help (explain the problem, ask if they have ideas that could help). These are two things that I'd try, right off the bat.

As someone else mentioned, talk to several recruiters. Present your resume and see what kind of feedback you get. If they tell you that they will be unable to place you, ask them if they think you don't have enough experience, and what they think you are missing. Recruiters are not your friend, but they are in the business of making money by placing people in jobs. If they think that they can make money by putting you in a job, they will try to do so.

Next: NYC has a smorgasbord of tech meetups with free or low-fee entry costs. Go to as many as you can. Most such meetups have an initial 30-minute period when you can stand around and talk to people about their jobs. Take notes, then go home and use the Internet to find out more about the parts of these discussions that you didn't understand. This should help to make you more technically competent.

Next, you want to do some "informational interviews": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_interview If you have friends, friends-of-friends, relatives, etc. who are working in an area that interests you, tell them you'd like to spend 30 minutes or an hour to ask about what they do at their jobs. Keep in mind you're not going to ask them for a job. You're just asking for information. Take good notes, bring them home, and again research the parts that confuse you. You can do phone informational interviews if needed, too.

The informational interviews and tech meetups are intended to help you build a network of people who know you, know that you are looking for a job, and may be able to refer you to an open position. They will also be a goldmine for learning more about the field that you want to break into.

It may help to build a small side project, and have some code samples in github. I can't speak to that, since those things never helped me.

Good luck!