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Hi thread, I've been learning to code in my own time for a few years and now want to get a job doing it. I need to redo my resume, but I have no formal software experience and my time in college was for architecture, not CS. I took a look at the sample resumes, and they were helpful, but I think mine needs to be a little different given my background, so I wanted to just check to see what is kosher to put on the ol' slip. I've built and launched one complete web app. I used the following garbage for this: Django, postgres, ES, Celery, Jquery, nginx/gunicorn. This is probably the most complex/significant thing I've worked on. The source is on my github, and the site is live and operational but not super good looking because I am a poo poo designer. At work, I have done a little bit of scripting under light advisement from the software team. In short, I wrote scripts to automate physical materials testing using an internal Python API. I wrote scripts to interface w/ a micrometer and thermometer using pyserial to collect data into a mysql db and then make graphs of that data. Finally, I have done work writing scripts to alter json/gcode files to create neat effects while printing. Finally, I have contributed a tiny change to one of Django's built-in template tags. I noticed that Django's automatic url converter was not converting urls like google.com/foo (e; looks like SA doesn't either  ) so I fixed up the regex and submitted the patch and some tests. It was accepted and the change will be making its way into Django 1.8 (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.8/#templates). It's a really small thing, but I figure it at least shows that I'm proactive? Is this worth including in some way on my resume?e; In case it matters, I'm in NYC and would probably be looking at places looking to hire for web development. ee; reduced this massive wall of text. The March Hare fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Sep 29, 2014 |
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Sep 29, 2014 17:49
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Bognar posted:Write a good cover letter to make up for the lack of programming in your resume. In your interviews emphasize how you taught yourself programming, built a website from scratch, and contributed to a widely used open source project (with a patch that was accepted). It shows that you know how to get poo poo done, and how to figure out how to get poo poo done. Very few of the people I interview have actually done all those three things. NovemberMike posted:Put the tiny change to Django front and center. Maybe even put "open source contributions" as a header and provide a link and a brief description of the patch. Thanks for this guys. Should I send along a cover letter even if I'm being contacted by recruiters/people at the company I would be applying to? I've had a couple of people reach out to me on Angel.co, and my profile there makes it pretty clear that I am self-taught and has links to my github and projects. Additionally, if anyone can take a minute to offer critique on this first-draft resume I made, I'd really appreciate it. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52707/RickRoss.pdf (<patch> link deliberately dead here, normally links to the patch)
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Sep 30, 2014 06:21
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Pollyanna posted:See, that's what I don't get about people going "you don't need a degree to get hired, not having a CS degree is not a mark against you". That's an example of that very thing happening. It seems like bigass companies and corporations will ditch people for not going to college, but medium, small, and startups won't. I don't have any degree, the schooling I did was not in CS at all, and I have made precisely one feature-complete project, exactly one contribution to an open source project, and have (more or less) no professional developer experience. I live in NYC, put my info up on angel.co and the HN who wants to be hired thread a week or so ago. Since then I have met with one company who want to bring me in for an interview and have talks scheduled with three others. I was never dishonest in any of my advertising, these people knew what level I am at before they contact me, they have my Github and an honest self assessment of my abilities at their disposal. The job market is totally insane and, though I do not yet have a job, it certainly seems like people are willing to spend time talking to me.
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Oct 9, 2014 21:31
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So I had coffee w/ the CTO (1 of 2 backend engineers, by my understanding) of a place that reached out to me and sent him some code. He said he was looking it over, and wanted to do a technical interview with me sometime this week. That interview seems to be pending my meeting with one of the two founders of the company, who I am meeting later today. I've never done any of this stuff, including being a developer for a living. Any hot tips on things I should ask during coffee w/ a co-founder?
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Oct 13, 2014 17:18
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JawnV6 posted:It's going to be about "Culture Fit." It's key for you to understand their motivations for starting the business and if that's the kind of thing that will motivate you too. It's their dream, you're sorta along for the ride. Spot on, the words "Culture Fit" were used verbatim during the conversation. Nothing is solid yet, but he said he would talk to the CTO guy and set up a technical interview @ their office for me. Pretty stoked on this, they seem like good people.
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Oct 14, 2014 00:11
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So I've had a bit of interest over the past couple of weeks and done a few interviews. So far one place got back to me, small team (2 people right now on dev team) and I liked them both. They said I did really well on the whiteboard question, and that they think I show promise etc. but then told me that they need someone a bit more senior and mentioned that if I could read through a couple of books they linked and make a project with those things in mind that they would happily talk to me again. So, no job, but very cool of them. However, my current spot is that I have some dude in Germany who runs some kind of creative firm talking to me. He wants my "CV" and some references. What is the protocol for these things in Western Europe? Should I make any significant changes to my presentation layer? Do they want a mix of personal/managers/coworkers here for references or what?
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Oct 24, 2014 22:22
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Cicero posted:I think he's referring to the resume formatting? Yeah, I just meant do Euros do the whole 12 page resume thing or should I mostly stick to what American HR expects? e; & yeah, US citizen who speaks not even a single phrasebook line of German but I told the dude this and he is still, evidently, interested.
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Oct 25, 2014 07:10
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KidDynamite posted:Do you have a good link to a good German job board? I wouldn't mind applying there as I speak the language(poorly) and wouldn't mind getting away from the States. I don't, unfortunately, this dude just sent me an email - I think he found me on angel.co.
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Oct 27, 2014 17:45
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Tunga posted:I also got asked "how much electrical wiring is there on a 747" which resulted in much "Probably quite a bit more than is required to maintain flight."
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Nov 4, 2014 23:40
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in my head.
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Tunga posted:I said that most wiring would be going from the cockpit to some other part of the plane. The cockpit's control paneling is about 3 m^2 split between above and below the window. Controls vary a lot in size from small buttons/switches/lights to large throttles but let's say an average size is 10cm * 10cm so there are 300 controls in the cockpit. In case anyone cares, the answer is evidently 274km of wiring. Or, as I said earlier, a bit more than is required to maintain flight. http://www.thic.org/pdf/Oct01/boeing.jgreen.011009.pdf The March Hare fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 09:29
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I know a kid in NYC who did one and managed to get a job as well - two data points.
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Nov 10, 2014 17:41
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Any chance any of y'all have a hot lead/tips on where to look for jr spots in NYC/Brooklyn? I've been putting myself out there on angel and SO careers, and have been getting plenty of love from recruiters but everyone seems to be hiring senior Python positions out here. Went all the way through a tech interview with one place and the dude said he would love to hire me, but he needed someone more senior. Gave me a fat reading stack and told me to check in later. So, I'm doing that, but I'd really like to get going on this as my current job is sort of not great.
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Nov 13, 2014 00:53
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DimpledChad posted:I got my current job here via a recruitment agency. I worked with several, if you're interested pm me and I can give you some advice. What is your general background/skill set? General background is that I dropped out of architecture school in my 5th year of college, moved to Brooklyn and started working at my current company in R&D. My dept. is in charge of bringing new materials to market, so I've done everything from clean molten plastic made from algae off of a terrifyingly hot 8' long screw to writing the scripts that my teammates use to test different material performance on printers. I started playing with Django a little over a year ago, and brought one site to "completion" but have since been working to actually complete it. I'm writing a shitload of unit tests and working on some functional tests in Selenium right now because I did that thing where you just go 'writing tests sounds boring, I'll do it when it matters' and, welp. Buzzword soup for the project includes: Python/Django/elasticsearch/celery/DRF/pyqt/javascript/compass-sass/nginx/gunicorn/git and probably some stuff I forgot about. I've also got one itsy bitsy commit making its way into Django 1.8, which people seem to really like to see. Current employer has been promising me a move into software for almost a year now with no actual move, and I feel like I'm really not progressing because I have no oversight so everything I do just goes from my hands directly into 'production'. I've been teaching myself all of this stuff in isolation for a while now, and I'd really like to find a place that can afford to take on a smart baby dev so I can finally blossom.
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Nov 13, 2014 04:01
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On algo chat, this is currently front-page on HN and should be good given the names behind it: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algorithms
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Nov 18, 2014 16:59
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Dougie McdDouger posted:Showing how little I know of America now. Is NYC as hard to live in as the stories outside the US say? I thought it was crazy expensive to live there. Even more than SF? I live in NYC and make well below median dev salary (bc I am not a dev!) and I've been here for two years. If you don't mind a 40 minute commute you can pretty easily live a lil' bit far out in Brooklyn and get more space for about the same rent as Manhattan. Don't be afraid of NY basically, millions of people manage to live here making far less than a developer would.
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Nov 20, 2014 06:26
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Just got an email from Amazon.com consumer division. Anyone have advice/cautionary tales? Email said they'd be hiring for Seattle and SF and obviously they cover relocation.
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Nov 27, 2014 01:28
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FamDav posted:were they more specific than that? there is afaik i know no division defined as "consumer", and i think if there were it would encompass way too many parts to be able to help you out Not yet, but I can post as I get more info I guess. Recruiter just made it sound like it she did recruiting for jobs working on the bits that touch Amazon.com rather than aws or anything else they do. E; looks like it's for jobs from this page, of which there are many. http://www.amazon.jobs/team/consumer-website The March Hare fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Nov 27, 2014 |
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Nov 27, 2014 04:06
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Has anyone considered lying about your current salary to the recruiter? Just say you already make 90k or whatever.
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Dec 2, 2014 16:51
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Tunga posted:In my case, they don't want my current salary (well, they do but I just say it's under NDA and that works). They want me to give them a number up front for how much I want from a role before they will put my CV forward to the company. $12 million.
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Dec 2, 2014 17:15
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Is taking a QA role @ my employer a bad idea if I would eventually like to move into doing actual software/web development at some point in my life? I can't really say with confidence that they will ever move me out of it, and I'm worried that having no experience might be better than having only QA experience (because recruiters/companies may want to pigeonhole me into doing QA for the rest of my life).
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Dec 5, 2014 16:36
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I'm really not sure what kind of QA I will be doing, I have a sit-down with the dept head next Thursday to discuss the role and my salary etc. I can, and am, applying for software roles right now, but my concern is that I basically have to either accept this QA role or quit my job, as the only reason this is even on the table is that my department effectively collapsed last week when my highly specialized boss quit without notice. I was really just wondering if it might have been my own unfounded fears creeping up on me, but it looks like it may not be.
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Dec 5, 2014 17:07
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JawnV6 posted:If you're bad at something, practice. Have a friend ask you your salary and run through holding your ground. If you get a scummy recruiters attention, go bold and lose them by remaining firm at 100k instead of ignoring them. On this, every time I've been asked by a recruiter what I expect for salary I have just categorically refused to give a number. The last guy I talked to just gave up and eventually said "So, at least 100k then, right?" to which I replied "Yeah." I'm in NYC but similarly have basically no experience. I'm not ~expecting~ 100k as a jr dev, but these guys don't seem to have any problem saying they will ask for it.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:07
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Tezzeract posted:I'm in NYC too and I'm pretty fresh outside of student projects and an iOS internship. You interested in getting a job club together and sharing leads and keeping motivated? (CS/tech is so big that there are plenty of positions that I'm completely incompetent at but can share opportunities with to others Yeah, sure, you want to just do an email list or some kind of google doc or something?
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Dec 12, 2014 17:58
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Space Whale posted:If you're more mature than most junior devs you'll be fine. Your resume doesn't list your age, does it? It's pretty easy to infer a minimum age for someone, if you assume that they entered college straight out of highschool you just do this year - starting year of college + ~18. e; Not that I think anyone is going to give a poo poo. The March Hare fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Jan 7, 2015 |
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Jan 7, 2015 02:52
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Pollyanna posted:And I'll be damned if I don't take advantage of it. Right now, though, I gotta practice my whiteboarding and interviewing. I've used it in your position, it seems like most places are willing to reach out/talk to whoever but it quickly becomes pretty clear that one/the other will not fit. It's like any other job marketplace really. Expect a lot of noise, learn to filter.
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Jan 9, 2015 00:24
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Kumquat posted:Has anyone in the thread been to or heard anything about General Assembly specifically the Boston Campus? Any opinions on whether it is A Good Idea or A Bad Idea? Has anyone hired or worked with someone who has come from this specific bootcamp? A friend of mine did GA in NYC and he has a job as, I think, a front-end guy somewhere in NYC. Had done basically 0 code stuff prior to attending GA. If you have specific questions feel free to PM me and I can pass them along to him.
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Jan 15, 2015 02:27
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There is no consensus on serial commas in American English. To say it isn't standard is not really true. Chicago and s&w both say it is, ap says to avoid it except in cases where it clears up confusion. Most newspapers don't use it, many magazines do and others do not. It's all preference, do what feels right! E,f,b,,,,,,,,,,
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Jan 16, 2015 00:00
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Safe and Secure! posted:So I'm looking to apply to the following big companies, because I figure they tend to have the smartest people, the highest compensation, and name-recognition (not sure if it would help me much in the long run, but I would enjoy having recognizable a name on my resume): The Times employ a pretty rad set of dudes. I think they have the guy who made d3js and the dude who maaade... sass? or less. They have the opposite of the one they use, can't remember which.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:04
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:I got my quite good job by making a twitter bot that yelled at people that called "LEGO Brand Building Blocks/Bricks" "Legos". Holy poo poo you're the Lego guy, thank you so much for doing that - I laughed way too hard when I first saw it.
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Feb 6, 2015 00:33
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Tunga posted:I can beat everyone for the ridiculous work environments for development: my company plays music through speakers installed around the office via a Spotify playlist that anyone can add things to. I work in the middle of an active warehouse and have to avoid forklifts &c. while wandering around. Additionally, we have half walls so no noise privacy just loads of slamming pallets and shouting warehouse dudes.
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Mar 18, 2015 20:45
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bonds0097 posted:And who do you propose pay for the cost of running these programs, if not the people directly benefiting from them? I mean, they're a tiny fraction of the cost of a four-year degree but seem to result in similar outcomes (employment at good-paying dev jobs). Another potential model, used by App Academy (and possibly others), is that you tie tuition payment to the success of the program. They offer the camp for free, and if you get a job after the program you pay them 15% of your first year's annual salary. Further, I know Hacker School is straight up free - the scholarships are offered to women and minorities in order to cover housing/expenses for the few months you are there. Hacker School charges nothing, and takes basically recruiter fees from companies that hire from their camp - so in that way the people hiring their students, arguably the ones benefiting the most and most able to pay, are paying for the tuition.
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Mar 21, 2015 22:01
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:do you have a chart that shows which areas of the US have the smartest asians? It would just be a bar graph with CT at 100% and the rest of the states at 0%, hth.
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May 15, 2015 20:19
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In case this is somehow still not clear to anyone, Charles Schwab.
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May 27, 2015 17:17
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Mr. Crow posted:Are they good to work for our something? Saw a couple positions and they don't even offer relocation, apparently they're not that desperate. If nothing else they are a really kickass bank from the consumer perspective. Like, probably the only company I have ever actively recommended to people solely on the basis of them being nice to deal with.
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May 27, 2015 17:48
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Jun 1, 2015 00:54
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triple sulk posted:Rails jobs are plentiful for people who have been doing Rails for a while. Go and Clojure are poor comparisons. I see like 5 jr rails positions for every 1 jr python position in NYC, maybe I'm looking wrong?
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Aug 19, 2015 03:03
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Skandranon posted:This x1000000. Rails it's on it's way out, so attending a bootcamp teaching Rails means you'll just have to attend another one for JS in a few years. JS isn't going anywhere for a long, long time. Alternately, go to whichever one seems like The Best One to you (this may take into account things like cost, placement percentage, the feel of the place, etc.) - and then learn how to code (in whatever language they teach) and get a job (doing whatever they taught you which, I assume, will be web based) and just learn JS on the job because there is literally no chance you aren't going to have to do that. Learning rails right now in a program that has high placement isn't a death sentence for your career. I mean, I agree you should probably just learn JS, but I know people IRL who have done rails bootcamps in the past year and they are all happily employed. Getting started is the hard part, you can always pick up X or Y hot language later if you need to, as long as what you are learning is reasonably employable in the immediate future (rails is) then I don't see the problem.
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Aug 19, 2015 04:12
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ToxicSlurpee posted:No, I got denied already. There are also a lot of remote gigs. Not having any real work history might make it tough on you, but if you can show off decent work I can't see it being a huge problem to secure one.
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Sep 18, 2015 22:09
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D-Tron posted:Thanks to the goons who offered advice in this thread a few days ago. I got the job! Out of curiosity, what was your interview like? I've been interviewing for jr general dev/web stuff in NYC and I've seen a really wild range in questions.
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Nov 5, 2015 01:58
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D-Tron posted:Snip Yeah, I've had a really weird time so far, but I've only been on like 5 interviews and I feel like I'm learning a lot with each one I do so I'm not discouraged just wanted to get a sanity check from a contemporary. I actually just crushed one doing a problem I hadn't seen before and the dude asked if I had ever seen it after I finished it, seemed impressed enough.
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Nov 6, 2015 00:59
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