
Ask HN: Can I junior dev/intern for a programmer position at 40? - throwaway029102
I am an immigrant and survived doing petty jobs for many many years, learning to program while working. I have a college degree which seems to be of no use in US and I learned a lot of stuff just to get employable as a developer and I have hacked a few stuff primarily using Java, Go, Angular, React, D3, docker, elasticsearch, cassandra, MySQL etc and learned a lot more may tools and reporting software. How can I find a Junior developer job or an intern position and what minimum hourly job can I expect if any !
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im_down_w_otp
Have you considered trying to contribute to a trendy and/or heavily used open
source project? Especially one backed by a vendor?

If you start contributing useful bug fixes or features to Puppet, Chef,
Cassandra, Spark, Mesos, Kafka, anything Hashicorp, etc. you're almost certain
to be able to get a job working for the vendor(s) backing those technologies,
or at the very least a company heavily reliant on those technologies, and you
can probably side-step the intern/terrible-pay angle completely.

Especially if the vendor's market is less mature and stable and they're
currently undergoing a growth-hiring phase. Databricks, Mesosphere, Confluent,
etc.

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throwaway029102
Thanks a ton. This is a brilliant idea.

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im_down_w_otp
Sure thing. Hope it helps.

I met a woman (she comes to my Elixir meetup occasionally) who basically did
this after deciding that a lifetime of being a barista wasn't what she wanted
for herself, and it worked.

New shapes of opportunities and career paths like that are probably my
favorite thing about the open source software ecosystem.

