by spooneybarger on 3/30/2025, 2:08:17 AM
For "less experienced" developers, I don't look at their experience when hiring. I look at "knowledge to experience ratio". I look for people who can demonstrate far more knowledge than one would expect based on the level of experience.
It is rather common to meet engineers who learned things in their first couple years on the job and then didn't advance much past that in the next 10 years.
What I am looking for is the opposite.
An exemplar:
I interviewed someone with no CS background beyond doing a bootcamp that focused on Ruby and Rails. When we interviewed them, they did incredibly well with a modeling problem. Better than most of the engineers we ever interviewed. It was very impressive and not what you would expect from someone coming out of a bootcamp.
I would suggest that when interviewing (and it will be hard to get interviews by just sending out resumes)n that you work on becoming impressive with your knowledge.
But you need to get to the interview. I would suggest finding environments where you can interact with engineers who you can impress and use that as a way to get into interviews.
Beyond that, look for job listings that aren't "must have X experience, must know Y". Look for job listings that are clearly written by a manager or an organization that would be willing to someone with your background and then impress the hell of out of them in a cover letter. When your experience on the resume isn't impressive, the only way you can impress is to demonstrate thoughtfulness and knowledge beyond experience in a cover letter.
Getting a job when you don't have a traditional background is going to be hard. Set yourself apart. Find ways to stand out and keep at it.
Most importantly, be brutally honest with yourself and reflect on what you are doing that isn't working then course correct.
by sn9 on 3/30/2025, 9:57:29 PM
If you're graduating with a CS degree, you just have to follow the same advice as for new CS grads.
I'd check out resources like csprimer and Math Academy and Frontend Masters to get a solid foundation. After taking an algorithms course, you can start productively studying leetcode on sites like neetcode.
by mattl on 3/30/2025, 1:35:11 AM
Apply for a junior web developer role. Python and JavaScript are good things to know.
Is that JS on the backend or front end? If front end, do you know CSS and HTML5 well too?
by JojoFatsani on 3/30/2025, 2:39:56 AM
Plenty of companies need junior/intermediate devs still.
I’ve never been able to push past the intermediate level because I don’t work in the tech industry and I’ve been doing prerequisite classes in school which didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know besides having more hands on C++ experience.
My grades are all excellent and I have some personal projects I’d be proud to show off but somehow non of it feel good enough to land a job in tech, most if not all listings require multiple years of professional experience or being a few month away from graduation if it’s an internship. By the time I graduate I will be close to being 30 and I really want to get started much sooner than that, otherwise I’ll be stuck in dead end retail jobs barely scraping by.
Do you have any advice that I can follow?