[ravenstine]

> What they are hiring is people who have seriously built stuff; not "a webapp", but stuff in specific niches where they've essentially got past what would otherwise be the first year of industry training on their own.

I have no idea what this means. What makes web apps not serious?

[VoodooJuJu]

Going to second this. I'm a self-taught (non-bootcamp) dev who's making a serious webapp (without the quotes). It's serious in the sense that it's a real product of a real company (my own) on track to make real money from real customers.

If you won't take that seriously, then what?

[askafriend]

> on track to make real money from real customers

I'm sorry but to inject a dose of reality, that's a very low bar.

[gwnywg]

Can you elaborate what would constitute high bar? Another Google or Facebook? Or maybe hadron collider? Why does making money mean low bar to you?

The guy is making a web app which other people want to pay for, looks like just about the right height for a bar, and I'd say not low at all.

[VoodooJuJu]

I know technologies A, B, and C well-enough to use them to make a thing that is good enough for people to pay money for, i.e., not a bootcamp copy-paste thing.

"Tech Company" is looking to hire someone that knows technologies A, B, and C to use to make a product that's also intended to make money (allegedly).

If that's not good enough, I ask again, what is? What do you really want in a prospective junior developer?

[ManlyBread]

Ridiculous.

[mythrwy]

Agreed. Plus, isn't that like 80%+ of what we do today?

I realize some people do cutting edge programming, but the bulk of us probably spend much of the day shifting strings and filling in model fields and chasing webpack configs. Or maybe I'm just a sap and everyone else is doing cool stuff idk.

[neon_electro]

Nope, you're not just a sap. There's plenty of "cool stuff" to find in what you describe, at least that's been my experience, but I'm like you - I do not try to market myself as doing programming "outside of the norm" - my skills are full stack Web development and I market myself as such.

[solar-ice]

What I mean is that putting together a webapp without learning about something /other/ than how to put a <pick-a-technology> app together in the process isn't going to have anyone interested in hiring you.

If in the process you learned about something you could actually go up and do an interesting lightning talk about, that'd be worth it. Maybe you learned something about a specific industry and the challenges that developing something for it has that other industries don't have - maybe you accidentally spent weeks/months deep-diving into the technical details of HTTP/3 or some browser API and worked out you could do something that nobody has done before outside of Google.