
Ask HN: How does someone get their start in IT? - xook
I&#x27;ve looked at various job postings for my area of the American midwest, and nearly all of the positions that are above CSR ask for requirements of 2-6 years experience working with server technologies (RHEL and Windows Server), Bachelors&#x2F;Masters in CS, and salaries sometimes being less than $35k for the position. I&#x27;ve not followed the IT job market for that long so I cannot say whether that is the average pay for the skills in question, but even that seems outrageous. I could be wrong, of course. Some do have much more reasonable requirements, but I don&#x27;t come across too many of those.<p>Now I would expect to see people much older applying for these positions. Somewhere in the age range of &quot;Slackware in college&quot;. Instead, I see people who are 18-26 being offered - or already have - jobs in these fields[0]. I don&#x27;t mean customer service, I mean working on actual hardware for companies or developing for front&#x2F;backend.<p>How are these people getting these career deals so easily? Am I not looking in the right places? Are these people really just the extraordinary Hacker types?<p>To ask this a different way, how does one get the god-like experience working with enterprise systems when the bar to entry already <i>requires</i> that you were simply born with these abilities?<p>I know this may come off as another &quot;how do you get experience for experience without experience&quot;, but the point that separates this question for me is that these aren&#x27;t people already in their 30s. They are sometimes not even old enough to buy alcohol. I&#x27;d find it hard to believe that someone who just turned 20 could afford the pricing of Win Server for the experience of using and certification. It could very well be that my perception is warped, but it is safe to say that these people do exist and this does happen.<p>[0] People living in more tech-oriented areas of the US, such as the coasts.
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id122015
You need to read books about careers. Its not only about IT, the following
method applies everywhere: From what I've read I can tell that the way
employers look for employees is not the same way employees look for work.

The number one venue for employers to get new employees, is through referrals
of existing employees. If you've ever applied for a job, and there was a
questionnaire asking if you know someone who already works for that company,
that's how they give more credit to those.

The jobs that are published and you read are for the hardest to find roles.
Most good jobs don't even get published.

Better than study books, study people. I think sometimes programmers have a
hard time to understand "how people work" and wrongly assume that "people work
the same way as computers work". You'd be fooled. Read history, read about
betrayals, read about market inefficiencies, read about international
politics, you'll get it.

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imaginenore
That's simply not true. If you can demonstrate your programming skills, there
are many companies willing to hire you as a junior developer.

If you spent your college years doing nothing besides the bare minimum, and
have nothing to show, you can't count on good salaries.

It took me literally 15 seconds to find 18 junior jobs in Javascript in one
city.

[https://www.monster.com/jobs/search/?q=junior+javascript&whe...](https://www.monster.com/jobs/search/?q=junior+javascript&where=chicago)

You can also walk into any major agency, and they will start looking for jobs
for you.

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matt_s
Do stuff on your own, go to meet ups on what you're interested in. RHEL is the
same as CentOS, download that and download Vagrant. Install CentOS onto a VM,
if you don't know something, google it. Go to tech events and meet people, you
could get referred to an opening that way. Work at a small company which
usually requires many different skills, slide into doing more IT work there.

