

Ask HN: How do I start my career after 7 years break with honesty? - worrieddad

I have been living here in USA for the past 7 years unemployed as I was on a visa that did not allow me to be employed. Now finally I got my work permit and I am ready to work but I don&#x27;t have anything to show as experience. I am a self taught developer who loves Golang now, but I am fairly happy to work with Java or any other language. I don&#x27;t want to put lies on my resume and instead start with all honesty. I have loans to clear and bills to pay so I can&#x27;t risk being an entrepreneur. Please give me any suggestions how do I start after all these years. I love startups and I am willing to relocate anywhere within US.
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general_failure
Do you have anything to show for the 7 years? Open source contributions or the
like? If so, I would just put that up on the resume.

If you have nothing to show and simply want to restart your career, I would do
it this way: a) narrow down a bunch of technologies you want to work on. b)
now narrow down on a bunch of companies as well. c) look for opensource things
around the above two. d) make contributions on the above. this can either be
in the for of code, answering things actively on irc, being active on mailing
lists etc. show people you are knowledgeable.

Once you spent a couple of months on the above cycle, you should be able to
generate enough stuff to put on your resume.

~~~
worrieddad
Thank you, I think I have some contributions around open source which I can
show, though fragmented. Appreciate your thoughtful comment. BEST.

