[thaumasiotes]

At the risk of whining...

I'm now three years out of college, still trying to get a tech job (during the middle year, I was otherwise employed and not trying). My degree is a double major in CS / math; I obviously can't provide an objective evaluation of "decent software development skills", but I worked at CreateSpace for six months during college with no complaints in that regard, and I got that position by winning the contests they'd hold at my school. It's getting to the point where I wonder if I should go back to college so I can be eligible for internships...

Certainly, I'll take a portion of blame here for being totally incompetent at seeking and landing jobs. But I'm so, so sick of the memes that "tech hiring is super hot right now / it's a seller's market in tech labor / look how easy it is to get work".

Is it, in your opinion, possible to have decent software development skills without years of experience under your belt? Do you meet many such people?

[patio11]

So, those memes are true descriptions of the market right now. You have presented persuasive evidence that you have sufficient programming skill to be marketable at present. How about spending the next six weeks in a self-directed boot camp for learning how to be better at seeking and landing jobs? Treat it like you're learning a new language: wake up in the morning, go to it, pound on it until evening, stop.

There's a billion things you can do to start here. In general, read Ramit Sethi on the topic. Specifically, who do you know that has hiring authority? (Buddies at CreateSpace? Have any moved on?) Who can they introduce you to?

Do you like coffee? I actually don't, but they often sell chai tea at the same places, and you could drink pretty much infinite chai tea right now just by saying "I can FizzBuzz, interested in getting coffee or something?" Hiring directors at most companies needing engineers are desperate and they'd love to hear you out, if for no other reason than you maybe be Starcraft buddies with their next hire.

[Woost]

I don't see anything that mentions where he is...it's entirely possible that he's in the middle of nowhere tech-job-wise. If that's the case, the first move should be "go somewhere with a tech job market".

[mechanical_fish]

One reason why patio11 suggests the whole "coffee" angle is that a coffee meeting is a better way to provide personalized advice. Otherwise we're reduced to playing HN Twenty Questions. ("Startup or not a startup? Bay Area or not Bay Area? Is your CV bigger than a breadbox?")

Having said that, "are you looking for your dream job in Zanesville, Ohio, or in SoMA?" is a fine entry in the Twenty Questions game. My own contributions would be:

A) "Could you put some contact information in your HN profile?"

B) "Can you describe something you've actually built? And if you haven't built anything yet, could you build something this week and send us the link to its Github page?"

But, of course, this is Twenty Questions, so either of these could turn out to be silly questions once we know the context.

[thaumasiotes]

(A) yes, I was bitten by the "your 'email' setting doesn't show" feature. It got me even though I'd been warned in the past. :(

(B) (1) This past week, as part of an interview, I've built a django project that provides text and video chat to logged-in users. This is, I would say, small-scale. (2) Some years ago, I wrote a quick scraper to download Peanuts archives from comics.com. The main thing I learned from that was that, years afterwards, I encountered the web page for Beautiful Soup and immediately understood what problem it was dealing with. I'd call the scraper tiny in scale. I'm not too sure what qualifies as a "project", but, as you guess, I haven't done much. (3) If you have hiring authority, or even if you just know someone who does, I'm happy to build something for you. I'm less happy to think of something to build myself. :/

As to the pre-questions, I don't have much of an opinion on startup vs non-startup, I'd prefer to be in the Bay Area, and my CV is, unfortunately, smaller than a breadbox. I'm apprehensive about moving somewhere just on spec; as a cousin post illustrates, that seems like a great way to exhaust all your cash and still not have a job. I'm only too happy to move for a job, since Santa Cruz could be charitably described as a "dead end".

Please, anyone, email me: username at gmail

[mechanical_fish]

I'm apprehensive about moving somewhere just on spec;

One can do this by couchsurfing. That was my technique, back when I was in your position. It needn't be expensive. Just don't wear out your welcome by staying on any particular couch for more than a week or so.

The fact that you're in Santa Cruz, though, makes me wonder if even the couch is strictly necessary.

Your projects sound just fine. (If that word sounds too highfalutin, call them "hacks" or "scripts". Whatever.) Put one or more of them on Github if you can. I have interviewed CS majors with good GPAs who had literally never built anything that they weren't assigned to build for a class, who had (e.g.) never deployed a page live on the web. The skills and disciplines required to build and ship things are largely orthogonal to what they teach in undergraduate school - it's like the difference between being an art historian and painting a portrait, or between having a Ph.D. in linguistics and delivering a lecture in Hungarian - so any chance you have to demonstrate them, even at small scale, adds depth to your qualifications.

I have no hiring authority at the moment (and am on the wrong coast, alas for both of us) but I'll give you this link to my colleagues:

http://www.acquia.com/careers/acquia-u

There's still plenty of work for Drupal developers, and PHP programmers in general, if you have (or can develop) the personality to deal with it. You will probably need a sense of humor. ;) It's not a great job for perfectionists. But it is a job where a little knowledge can go a long way. If you learn how to analyze queries and create strategic indices in MySQL, for example, people will think you're some species of wizard. The wizard bar is low.

Think of something to build yourself. It's a good thing to practice doing. Start small and develop the habit. Heed the words of Ira Glass:

http://youtu.be/BI23U7U2aUY

[natrius]

Google suggests he lives in Santa Cruz. I'd always assumed someone with his description would have no problem finding a job in the Bay Area.

[xiaoma]

>So, those memes are true descriptions of the market right now.

I can't agree. I made my move to SF largely motivated by Ramit's info products (which I owe $400/month for). I've been engaging in exactly this kind of networking for 2 months while watching my savings dwindle to critical levels.

Inviting people out for coffee is good for networking and networking is useful. It's not sufficient for getting a job and hiring managers aren't that desperate. I've managed to bypass some HR filters, which is a good thing. However the market is hot for very specific skills and for 100x programmers. It's not so hot for those with more modest experience, especially those over 30.

I am far beyond fizzbuzz. I got all the cookies on Hacker Rank with a pure JS solution. I've been coding a little here and there for several years, and have 1 year of work experience at a start-up in China. The thing is, the bar is a bit higher than that.

True example #1: I met a YC founder at a meet-up had a great chat with him, and was invited to visit a start-up. I bypassed some of the normal HR process and got a chance to write a UI widget (as a pre-interview challenge). It was to read a bunch of user data from JSON and make a list with pagination, with user selection by clicking anywhere on their LI and a select all/none box. Here's what I wrote (modified to obscure the identity of the company in question):

http://logicmason.com/UI%20challenge/playground.html

I thought I was awesome for building it on top of jQuery pajinate and separating all the CSS and JS customization I made from the libraries. In reality they were looking for a something with a lot more abstraction, maybe built on backbone.js or angular.js with handlebars. That's stuff I'd never even heard of until moving to SF!

Example #2: A 4-5 year old company aggressively recruits me, goes over code I've written in the past, gets me to go in to meet them, all is going well and then they ask how many years of professional experience I have with ruby (answer 1 month). End of interview.

Example #3: I get a phone screen at another cool start-up doing something similar to the one I worked for. I'm open for any position, but apply as a junior level front end guy. I get a phone screen in which I do okay on algorithms, but not so well on obj C memory management...

I'm not saying that networking isn't worth it. I am getting a steady stream of opportunities and sometimes miss by the slimmest of margins. Hopefully I've made a sports or starcraft buddy from it as well, who I'll meet up with after getting my cash flow in order.

But the market isn't nearly as hungry as you believe it is from your perch as a fairly well known expert who does highly paid consulting. I say this as someone who has a business background and who has invested heavily in exactly the techniques you suggest. I had a much, much easier time getting a tech job in Beijing.

I'm still hustling for odd jobs to hopefully make rent and pay Ramit, but in the remaining time I'll be working on the hard skills (as well as stuff to show off on github since that seems to be so huge here). That means doing everything I can on codeschool and building a project on a JS framework so that next time I have an opportunity like #1 above, I seize it.

[patio11]

But the market isn't nearly as hungry as you believe it is from your perch as a fairly well known expert who does highly paid consulting.

Sidenote (and it is Ramit-y in character): if we have this conversation again in two years, what will you be a fairly well-known expert in, since you have (correctly) noted that it gives one attractive options in terms of career growth?

Meat of post: I do not believe that the hiring market is on-fire because of my little one-man slice of it, but rather because it has been reported as on fire in the media, because people who are extraordinarily credible to me on the matter describe it as on fire, because I talk to startupers like it is my hobby and they are in virtually unanimous agreement that it is on fire, and that my paid-for clients say things like "Dude if you can find us an engineer then forget about actually doing what we hired you to do and play League of Legends for the next two weeks and we'll both walk away happy from this consulting engagement."

[xiaoma]

Popularity and fame are highly self-reinforcing, thus not nearly so deterministic as you might think. There is some luck and a lot of volatility involved since people tend to copy each other's decisions (even when the signalling quality is poor).

See: http://www.livescience.com/7016-science-hit-songs.html

Did you have a plan two years before BCC to be well-known for it? I think it's more common for people to stumble onto a first hit, but there are things you can do to increase the chances. My meta-strategy is to work on multiple projects and stay close to new, emerging things where there is a lot more space up for grabs.

If what you say is true then send startupers or clients or both this way and go play League of Legends. No, really. Do it right now.

[alinajaf]

Do you have any social proof to speak of? Testimonials from previous employers or even just a well-designed case-study of the work you did for them?

In any of your interviews did you engage the client in terms of their value proposition to customers and suggest improvements above and beyond what you were being hired to do? Anything from 'What have you tried to get more information about your users?' to 'I've had success using #{some_tech} for managing complexity in #{something} codebases, what have you tried so far?'

Can you demonstrate technical skill beyond what the clients are expecting of you? For example, if you didn't use backbone.js or some higher level abstraction around your paginated list, were you able to discuss the tradeoffs of using that sort of framework? If you have only one months professional experience with ruby, did you at least send an example rails application over to them for their developers to look at?

If I click on your HN profile or a link in your email signature, do I get linked to your portfolio website that clearly outlines your value proposition to potential hirers? What is it exactly that you can do for me? Your LinkedIn profile for example is mostly about your non-technical experience, which is great, but doesn't make me feel better about hiring you. You have a list of technologies but what exactly is it that you're a specialist at?

As someone who is charging a hefty daily-rate, with nowhere near the level of acclaim as patio11, with comparable technical skills to you living in a city with a substantially smaller tech scene, I get the impression that your lack of secured work is more to do with your communication/sales skills than it is with your technical ability or connections.

[xiaoma]

That's a lot of questions... here goes:

>Do you have any social proof to speak of? Testimonials from previous employers or even just a well-designed case-study of the work you did for them?

Yes some social proof, but none in SF and most of it related to EFL, running a small-business and sales.

>In any of your interviews did you engage the client in terms of their value proposition to customers and suggest improvements above and beyond what you were being hired to do?

Yes. Many, many times.

>Can you demonstrate technical skill beyond what the clients are expecting of you?

No. My technical skills are fairly modest. If the market is "on fire", though, surely there are places looking for junior developers as well as experts, no?

>For example, if you didn't use backbone.js or some higher level abstraction around your paginated list, were you able to discuss the tradeoffs of using that sort of framework?

No. As I written in the GP post, I'd never even heard of backbone.js. Also there was no discussion after sending the widget. It was just a "we regret to inform you that we won't be continuing this". I did however re-engage and ask what I could have done that would have been better and they were kind enough to give some solid feedback, which is why backbone.js is on my radar now.

>If you have only one months professional experience with ruby, did you at least send an example rails application over to them for their developers to look at?

I've never used rails at work. I used some ruby server-side scripting for my previous employer. If you look at my LinkedIn profile, you'll see projects I've worked on and links to the code and in one case video.

>If I click on your HN profile or a link in your email signature, do I get linked to your portfolio website that clearly outlines your value proposition to potential hirers? What is it exactly that you can do for me? Your LinkedIn profile for example is mostly about your non-technical experience, which is great, but doesn't make me feel better about hiring you.

I'm working on building a site like what you mention, but to be honest, my value proposition isn't that I've already built amazing technical things.

>You have a list of technologies but what exactly is it that you're a specialist at?

I'm not a specialist! There is no technology that I'm an expert in, but we all have to start somewhere, right?

>As someone who is charging a hefty daily-rate, with nowhere near the level of acclaim as patio11, with comparable technical skills to you living in a city with a substantially smaller tech scene, I get the impression that your lack of secured work is more to do with your communication/sales skills than it is with your technical ability or connections.

I find this odd since I've done a lot more communication and sales than tech stuff in my career. FWIW, I also had a much easier time finding a tech job outside CA. I did it with no professional experience at all in Beijing, on the basis of selling myself and my hobby projects. It took about 3 weeks.

Since, I'm successfully "getting my foot in the door" about 70% of the time, but having a harder time with the technical interviews and challenges, I have 3 alternate theories:

1) The bar is higher in the bay area. There are lot of companies looking for talent, but their definition of talent is more demanding than it would be if I lived in Colorado or Texas.

2) I've lived for so long in the Chinese-speaking world that I've adapted in ways that are good for marketing myself there, but bad here. Maybe my vibe is off for job hunting in the US.

3) Maybe age is a factor. Lots of fresh grads who know even less ruby or objective C than I do are getting hired as interns or junior devs. It's possible that companies are subconsciously grading me against what I could have been if I'd had a straight and narrow technical focus for the past 10 years.

[tokenadult]

I'm now three years out of college, still trying to get a tech job (during the middle year, I was otherwise employed and not trying). My degree is a double major in CS / math

My deepest sympathies about your job search. The "double major in computer science and mathematics" part of what you wrote sounds scary, as I have a large circle of acquaintance among young people who are pursuing similar studies. I don't have comprehensive information about how the general mass of such students is doing, but I'll relate a few anecdotes that may suggest some paths forward for you.

Anecdote 1, a scary anecdote: A few years ago, that is BEFORE the financial system crash threw the world into recession, I had occasion to meet a young man who had been on his state's all-state mathematics team to compete in the ARML contest

http://www.arml.com/

during high school. Rather than stay in-state for his computer science degree, he went to another state to attend its state university (presumably on financial grounds). The other state's state university is a Big Ten university that ought to have a decent reputation for its computer science department. But as I met this young man, he was four or five months out of college, and living in his parent's basement while still looking for work.

Anecdote 2, a lot less scary: Another young person I know, nineteen years old (barely) just now, accelerated his high school studies by doing two years of dual enrollment (college studies as part of his high school program) with a grade skip or two thrown in besides. He did not participate in any formal mathematics competition programs. He then transfered to our state university as an advanced standing undergraduate, and finished up an undergraduate degree in computer science (with a few but not a lot of elective courses in mathematics beyond the computer science major requirements) before he was eighteen years old. Since he turned eighteen, he has been out on the west coast, and is now in Silicon Valley, telling many of his friends that there are a LOT of jobs for anyone who is a decent programmer. He programs for fun and has apparently always done well in his school programming assignments and in technical interviews. He is convinced that anyone who can get through a technical interview with coding work-sample testing can find a good job in Silicon Valley.

Anecdotes 3-5: I know several other young people who got various summer internships during various phases of their recent undergraduate studies in computer science at various universities, and once they made a good impression on one company by their work in the internship, they started looking around at other possibilities around the country. All of the better job opportunities seem to use the research-based process of work sample tests as part of hiring. One young person I know who is in the job search phase just now while wrapping up a summer internship has had full-day technical interviews with multiple work-sample tests and discussion of each phase of the work samples after each test. It's gratifying to hear that some of the young people I know are getting to the second interview phase at multiple companies and some others have started career jobs at Google (if that's the kind of job they like) or at brand-new startups (if that is what they like).

The crucial thing seems to be being able to do on the spot what industry jobs expect programmers to do. In the extreme case, people who can do that who haven't finished their college degree programs seem to be able to find career jobs. It doesn't sound like the degree as such is really the crucial hiring criterion in most places.

Is it, in your opinion, possible to have decent software development skills without years of experience under your belt? Do you meet many such people?

It is possible to have strong development skills without years of full-time employment in career industry jobs if one does the right kind of recreational reading and takes on challenging programming tasks "for fun." I know a few such people. For them, where they went to college, what they majored in during college, and whether or not they finished college seem to be almost incidental details about their biographies.

Good luck in your job search!

[jedbrown]

Writing good libraries seems to take a reasonable amount of experience. Of course if you have been doing a significant amount of software as a student, you'll have a head start. My skills improved a great deal when I transitioned from one-off projects to research-driven projects (where the project lasts longer and requests for new capability appear as research progresses) and open source development.

What sort of math background do you have? Any experience with numerical methods for PDEs, discrete optimization, uncertainty quantification, graph analysis? If you pick up an issue of SIAM J. Scientific Computing, J. Computational Physics, or Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, can you make some sense of the articles? Academic faculty and many senior industry research positions want to see PhD, but there are plenty of places just looking for a software person that "speaks the language".

What sort of places have you tried applying?

After years of going to research conferences and getting several offers at each one (despite not "looking"), knowing colleagues with unfilled positions, etc, I'm certain the demand exists.

[alinajaf]

> Is it, in your opinion, possible to have decent software development skills without years of experience under your belt? Do you meet many such people?

This is going to sound mean, but have you considered doing entry-level programming jobs that aren't so great to get that experience? Digital agencies that don't know any better are always looking for people to build CRUD websites, and it's where a lot of other experienced developers I know cut their teeth.

I don't know about the average programmer on HN, but most of my ability to deliver value to clients comes from the battle-scars and horror stories of working at not-so-great jobs, along with learning from the few exceptionally bright people I happened to be working alongside. You can't pick that up at university, via online tutorials or even dare I say it, by reading HN.

[thaumasiotes]

Yes, of course I've considered that. Where would I apply? I've never tried to present myself as anything other than entry-level.

[genwin]

Step 1 is moving to where the jobs are. Where depends on the skill; use job search engines (e.g. indeed.com) to find where.

It is easy to get work with the right skill and location. Assuming you're young, you should have no problem if you do step 1.

[ericb]

If I were in your shoes, I'd either work on my own startup, or create some demo projects in a hot area like IOS or Rails. Register as a DBA (Doing Business As) and put your side project/startup as a job on your resume.

Then put your resume up on monster.com. If you become proficient in an in-demand skill, jobs will find you. If the skill is hot enough, remote jobs will be available. Now you have to pass the interviews, but that is another matter. Note that you need to learn all the ancillary technologies to be a strong candidate (git, for example).