
How I tricked my boss into hiring me as a developer - williswee
https://www.techinasia.com/talk/tricked-boss-developer
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mattbgates
"Fake it til you make it"

It sometimes is the only way.

I'm a psych major and had only personal experience with programming as a
teenager. No jobs were hiring in the psychology field, unless you had a
Masters Degree, which I didn't have, and I just had no money to do anything.
After applying across the boards on Craigslist after college because I was
broke and had student loans to pay, I took any and every chance, including
programming jobs, specifically Visual Basic 6.0.

I ended up getting an interview and failing miserably in the math section, but
aced logic and knowledge of the programming language, so they hired me,
trained me, and after 3 months, I was ready to go. Ended up spending a year
and a half there... until I could no longer take it and got tired of my tyrant
boss.

During my time working there though, I ended up getting into web design and
development, at first with freelancing, and then even offering to build my
company a website. Most of it was even built on my own time, and implemented
during work. I had wanted to get another job, strictly with web design, and
started looking, but I lacked experience in Adobe Photoshop, which is what
this one company required. My girlfriend said to me, "Don't worry, just apply,
I'll teach you what you need to know."

Ended up applying to two different jobs and getting them both, as a web
developer! I had only just a little experience building one or two websites
before this. I worked for 16 hours a day at both jobs, because luckily, one of
the jobs was from 8 AM until 5 PM and the other began from 6 PM until 2 AM. So
my days were long. I also was doing freelance work as much as possible. I
rarely slept. I ended up doing this for a year and a half, before the day job
ended up laying me off, and eventually, they went under (long story short,
they refused to update their technology -- I had learned Flash for this job,
but all our competition was using HTML5 and ReactJS and all that good stuff).

The night job was building landing pages for the media, and to this day, it
remains my job. I get to work with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript everyday. I love
it. This will be my 5th year working for the company.

So if you take all the experience I acquired in just a few years, I can now
apply to nearly any developer job and be taken seriously. I've also taught
myself PHP, Python, MySQL, and a few others during this time, just to try and
make myself marketable.

I'm sure my personality, my college degree, and my limited knowledge of
programming helped a bit. I think I do have this ambition to learn and be open
to learning new things which also helps.

But it all began.. because I took that same approach: fake it til' you make
it.

