
RUN, don’t walk away from that $5/hour dev shop - happy-go-lucky
https://medium.com/swlh/run-dont-walk-away-from-that-5-hour-dev-shop-660c9c9b6ed8
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peterburkimsher
How do I go from working in one of those "sweatshops" to "top talent"?

People say I should "make a portfolio" and publish everything on Github, which
I do for my personal projects. The article specifically warns that "your
source code could surface online at any point". I haven't betrayed my employer
by sharing their code, and I don't want to do that. I can't build a
"portfolio" without breaking my NDA though. I feel trapped in comfort - I have
a job that pays the bills, but everything I read online says that programmers
get paid at least 4x what I do, and I don't know what you're all doing right
and I'm doing wrong.

~~~
romuloab42
Github projects are not as important as people might think. They are a plus,
for sure, but not the meat -- unless you are a legendary open source
contributor, but then you wouldn't have problems finding good work anyway.

I'd say build a non trivial, non toy project, from scratch. No need to be
novel or groundbreaking. Something that really works and is not just the fun
part. That is, both functionality and design must be professionally looking,
it must feel thought-out, polished. It doesn't matter if your code is a
masterpiece if the product looks like hacked together over a weekend. _Then_
use that as portfolio, independently if the source code is available at Github
or not. People really like to see you can deliver a finished product.

I'll skip the details about resume and interview tips. There are plenty of
resources out there.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Ok. I built [https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io) to help
me learn Chinese.

The design is not "professional looking", but I don't know how to do "design".
I've never been good at GUI work. I studied electronic engineering, but moved
into software because I can't go to America to work and nobody outside Silicon
Valley is designing chips.

Marketing is a huge problem for me too. Every time I tell people about my
program, they basically ignore it. There's a company that's doing a very
similar thing to study English (VoiceTube) and I had a nice Skype call with
their CEO, but nothing's come of it.

It really seems like the industry is rigged to support artists and con-men,
while people who actually write code are basically ignored.

