

Tell HN: My job struggle - thecluttering

I can code.  In a world of pre-maddona engineers I still count on my fingers.  If I cube the largest number that's on the high side of your monthly page views, but I still want to work for you.  Sometimes during the interview it's hard to explain why, to put yourself fully out there.<p>In some words, I feel like an interview refugee.  The recruiters who are your friends until you are cut.  After that even a friendly e-mail won't receive a reply.  I have had interviews only to be told at the end that a paid internship is no longer being offered.  I'm not sure if that's a lie, half truth, or just poor planning.  I have had interviews that were interrupted by phone calls to the founders "other" business no less than five times.  I have spent time on an assigned functional product to get garbage feedback and an interviewer who when I followed up hadn't even read my documentation.   I had two interviews, sent in code samples, and completed a code test and asked if I was open to a trial period or apprenticeship of sorts.  A week later that opportunity was nixed because they thought about it and said I don't have enough experience.  False hope.<p>I had some great feedback from some companies.  One setup a chat on the phone and said I would need to live in California and then perhaps something could happen in the near future.  I had another company who wasn't looking for junior engineers but liked my style and the e-mail I wrote.  There are nice people out there.  Those people usually know what they want.<p>But I can code...<p>Not only can I code, but I'm a genuinely good person.  I spent a year overseas teaching English to children in Korea.  On a trip to the DMZ I met a young Argentinean who lives in Germany and works for company in Palo Alto.  He said if you can code, you can get a job. I have an IT internship on my resume now so I thought that I could at least get another django internship.<p>I can code.<p>I'm not cynical, just feeling a bit worn from this experience.  Part of it is my fault, that much I would admit.  I decided to take a different path in college and graduated with an Anthropology degree.  I couldn't handle the math portion of a computer science degree and didn't want to go to a technical school.  So now I'm thinking about applying to a university for computer science.  Of course this brings a whole new set of challenges and being a student changes a lot of things.<p>Just some soul searching, hope you don't mind.  Throwaway account.
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dools
EDIT: Although I studied Mechatronic Engineering for 3 years and so have some
formal programming education I dropped out of Uni and have no formal
qualifications.

You'd be surprised how many shitty little jobs you can get by just meeting
people and doing websites and occasional IT odd jobs around the place.

Put up a site, get some business cards, start telling everyone that's what you
do. Eventually, you start to get your act together and figure out how to be a
real business but at the start you can make enough money to live on simply
because most people at the very low end of the market have no idea how, or
cannot be bothered, to go in search of good "IT people" or "someone to fix up
the website". If you happen to be there, sometimes that's good enough.

Also don't underestimate the power of knocking on doors.

A couple of years back I was really hard up. I had run out of work and money
and my credit card was dangerously close to it's $10,000 limit.

I was finding it very hard to get a job because I'd broken my heel into 12
pieces trying to do parkour (massive, massive fail - note to self: lose weight
next time you try to jump off things) and was really not very mobile and
having to turn up to interviews with a cast on crutches all sweaty and pale
was not particularly attractive. On top of that I've been self-employed since
2003 and it does NOT look good on a resume, believe me. I was starting to
think I was unemployable.

Anyway it was a difficult time. I moved into a new house when I left hospital
and didn't have an internet connection (pretty crippling when you work from
home, and are actually phsyically crippled as well).

I didn't have a car and couldn't get far on my crutches so I was catching
taxis to internet cafe's everyday to do work. I was finishing up a few
projects (the money from which was already spent), supporting others (for
free) and trying to get some more work out of existing clients.

One day I struck up a conversation with a cab driver about his mobile EFTPOS
system and he said that he gets 4% of the revenue when he uses that rather
than the normal one and that it was owned by a local broker company. He said
"Man that guy is rich" (referring to the taxi broker that owns the EFTPOS
system).

I run an SMS gateway so I thought hell, if he's rich, maybe I could sell him
something so I had the driver take me over to the broker and walked in there
without ever having met the guy and asked if he needed any software.

It turns out he was sick of his driver database software which was this old
monster written in Access and paid me a few thousand dollars to redo it for
him in PHP/MySQL as a web app running on a server I setup on his LAN.

That few grand kept me going until I got my next big project at the end of the
year.

Sometimes you just gotta hustle mang, you gotta hustle.

Of course, there was every chance nothing would have come of that meeting, but
if you put yourself out there like that 10 times a week, something will
happen.

Always think "how am I promoting myself today?", always think what
opportunities there are in every social interaction you have.

I hand my business card for SMS gateway services to almost everyone I meet.
Cafes, real estate services, people I meet in bars, gig promoters, bands. When
I buy coffee from places and notice they have a signup sheet for their email
news letter, I ask if they also do SMS.

If I ever overhear someone in a cafe discussing anything relevant to my
business, I introduce myself (if it's possible to do so without being rude).

I've only ever gotten a handful of customers this way but this type of self
promotion doesn't cost anything, it's just a way of life (WARNING: there is a
thin line between hustling and being an annoying prick!! Tread carefully).

There is great value in talking face to face with people and always being
aware of what opportunities that presents you with. Find out about people's
businesses and their problems and help to improve their situation somehow.

If you really listen there are opportunities all over the place.

Also RememberTheMilk.com mentioned last night that they're hiring and will
hire people remotely :)

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david_shaw
I believe it's prima donna. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_donna>

Full disclosure: I'm not employed as a programmer, but I do work a technical
job in information security. I've gone through the technical interview, so I
feel like I am somewhat qualified to comment.

I see that you keep commenting "I can code." Do you have an impressive
portfolio of work on your GitHub? Have you contributed to open source
projects?

You say you have an Anthropology degree. You don't have a formal education in
computer science, and you don't have professional programming experience. If
you haven't contributed to open source projects, how can a potential employer
distinguish you from someone who just picked up _HTML for Dummies_ and wants
to write Ruby on Rails apps?

It's a tough economy, but there are many jobs--even junior positions--out
there. Craigslist or elance jobs are a great way to build your portfolio.

Drive means a lot. Writing a personalized cover letter to each potential
employer with your resume AND PORTFOLIO is a great way to move further in each
opportunity. Express interest.

I usually dislike interviewing people because I love the way my team works
already. If you're working on a team that really gets along, bringing in a
new, inexperienced hand is a cut out of their potential salary and a hit to
their working order.

So you need to show that you are driven, bright and friendly, just like any
employer worth working for will already be.

I know my thoughts might have been a little bit scattered, but seriously:
write code, write personalized and interested cover letter with your resume
hilighting your technical strengths and good luck. The jobs are out there!

edit: One last thing. Networking with people you already know is great. I know
you said this is a throwaway account, but keep an ear out for HN jobs near
you. I'm sure that if you're coding, you probably hang out _somewhere_ on the
Internet--whether it's forums or IRC, if you know people working in the
industry well you might ask them if they know of open positions in your area.
A letter of recommendation from someone in the industry who knows your work
well can be very helpful in securing an interview.

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kls
You are focusing on the wrong items. You keep on going back to your weakness
in math which in reality only disqualifies you from a select handful of jobs
in development. I don't know the specific segment that your are targeting but
from your mentioning django I am going to assume web. While math skills are
never a detriment that are really not that valuable in web. Understanding
business logic and creativity trump math and raw CS a thousand fold. You need
to accentuate the fact that you are creative (if you are) and that you can
contribute real solutions to real problems or envision new markets that can be
pursued via technology. These are the things that you need to highlight in an
interview not that you can code or that you are poor in math. Coding is a
small portion of a good developers toolkit.

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jschuur
You keep saying 'I can code'. So code. Don't wait for someone else to give you
permission to do it at a desk they provide.

Build something. Get your name out there, and then you don't have to hide
behind an anonymous throwaway account. The world isn't waiting to discover
your greatness. It's waiting for you to show it.

Your at a defining moment of your life, were you'll find out if you have what
it takes to be a real developer that creates, or just someone else's tool.

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Edmond
Try craigslist, got my first coding job via CL and my current one from their
as well... As far as "you can code", seeing is believing. I got my first
programming job easily because I was good at the interview and had a number
projects on codeproject.com that I could point to...You need to build some
sample projects to demo at interviews, it is the easiest way to land your
first programming job.

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andrewstuart
Wherein I help you get a good job
[http://www.aaronboodman.com/2010/10/wherein-i-help-you-
get-g...](http://www.aaronboodman.com/2010/10/wherein-i-help-you-get-good-
job.html)

