

Ask HN: Any startup jobs for person with PHD in CE but no wedbev experience? - davidls

I'm currently living in Belgium and am in the final year of a Phd program in Computing Engineering.  I also have a masters in Supply Chain Management and Computing Sciences.<p>My area of expertise is Reinforcement Learning (Machine Learning), I know Java, C++ and Python.<p>I want to work for a startup in the USA but have no experience in web development, my interest is in algorithms and AI. Do startups need guys like me or are they more interested in people with webdev and front end experience?
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jfaucett
As a guy who's worked in several startups i'd have to say that yes, I think
they do need guys like you but there is a catch. I've worked with lots of
developers from tons of different backgrounds on three continents, but the one
thing they all had in common was experience. Do you have experience in other
disciplines? I don't mean do you know C++ but can you program your own AI for
a Game Engine? Have you already done this? Can you apply your machine learning
knowledge on an Open Source Web Analytics tool? Your definately backend (as am
I) so I'd say just program something, open source it, and let that be your
gateway in. Just as a curiousity what's your Doctoral work on?

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amorphid
Hi! I'm a recruiter. It's always tough to get a web coding job w/ no web
coding experience. One reason is that you may try it and find out you don't
like it. Another reason is that it's trivial to get started in web
development, so you should be able ti build something that shows off what you
can do. Employers typically have very little imagination or ability to train
new coders, so show them you can do it on your own.

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dylanhassinger
First rule of frontend wedbev: proofread :)

Sounds like you got backend skills. Build something small and useful, it will
open other doors. Usually us frontend devs are lower on the totem poll than
backend

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aitoehigie
I thought I was the only one who noticed

