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I seriously hope you folks succeed. All the luck to you! Here's my non-traditional story: I've worked on my own personal projects for 10 years, always looking

I seriously hope you folks succeed. All the luck to you! Here's my non-traditional story: I've worked on my own personal projects for 10 years, always looking for new challenges. I've dropped out of college after 2 years since it was crystal clear to me that I learned much more when working on my own stuff. I would learn new things in college, but at a much slower pace. I guess it was useful to learn calculus... Anyway. Financially I never needed a fully paying job, so I could spend all my time doing my own research. From web security to docker to bsd to aws/gcp, I've managed to gather a lot of personal experience on many tools. Similarly, I went from PHP to Erlang to Haskell and back. For a brief period I even managed my own team! But now, 10 years later, I just started looking for my first job and boy, do I realize my resume is empty! I have some code on github but none of my projects are famous or noteworthy. So far, most jobs I've applied for said I'm not qualified, and I don't blame them if all they looked at was my CV. To solve this I'm working on (yet another) project, a distributed KV storage with built-in MQ capabilities, automatic clustering and transparent sharding, eventual consistency through the use of operation-based crdts, written in my favorite language for distributed systems (Elixir). Hopefully I can use it to get a job, but I think proving one's experience and knowledge should be easier. Interestingly, if I had gotten a job when I dropped out (~6 years ago), I would probably be a specialist/senior engineer on some specific tool, but I wouldn't have the range of experience I do today. Sorry if I digress, just wanted to share my non-traditional "case" (to be fair, you asked for it!)

jaclynmling 7y ago
Really like your story. Thanks for sharing! Really hoping that the more engineers, like yourself, that get into organizations and spearhead efforts to reduce bias, the easier it will be for non-traditional talent to break into the field. Best of luck in your job search, and if there's anything that you think Hatchways can do to help please let us know.
uhoh-itsmaciek 7y ago
Are there any meetups in your area that are relevant to your tech interests? That might be a good way to connect to the community in person and get your foot in the door.
hermitdev 7y ago
In my experience, you don't need to be a major contributor to an open source project to gain notice. I've only 3-5 minor contributions (work rules generally preclude me from being more active) While my contributions haven't been large in terms of LOC, nor have I added new features, I have identified, debugged and supplied patches for bugs. I mean, I did this out of self interest, of course. A defect in a certain DB lib on bulk copying with nulls would fail (uninitialized memory in the C portion of the lib). That took about 6 weeks of on again/off again attention. Debugging a C module in Python is a bit of a pain in the ass. Fixing 64-bit compatibility in a Windows ODBC C++ wrapper was another. This was a pain because it required a line by line audit to make sure the correct types were used on every ODBC call. A problem with some inline assembly using rtdsc as a highres timer reporting 200 years had elapsed in a few minutes. This took a long while to figure out and only stumbled into the cause of the bug. I was using the timer to measure socket timeouts. We were supposed to timeout after 30 seconds, but randomly, the timeout would trigger immediately. Stumbled into it because we were using the same timer to measure database queries. Found it odd that my logs were reporting queries were taking more than 200 years to complete, as I sat there reading the logs and seeing them complete. Another was an issue of file handles being, no pun intended, mishandled on a .Net logging lib. I forget the details on this one. Dont think the file was being properly closed at exit? Reported an issue with Boost DateTime overflowing on certain arithmetic situations. Coworker found the issue, but I narrowed down the issue, figured out a solution and reported upstream. Finding the wrong typeset in a template zoo like Boost is an arduous task. I'm sure there's more I've forgotten, but my contributions haven't been much in the way of LOC. My contributions have been in the hours spent and expertise in finding the typically 1 or 2 lines that are wrong. Having experience like that on a resume (and being able to talk knowledgeably about what you did and how you do it) do open doors. Having "found and fixed obscure bug" in a widely used OSS lib is nearly just as valuable as churning out lots of OSS code. Probably more noticeable if you fix bugs in an OSS project that lots of people/companies use, rather than churning out tons of lines in a project almost no one has heard of or uses (beyond the authors). Edit: spelling Addendum: providing bug fixes for 3rd party libs also demonstrates an ability to work with and understand code written by someone else, which is a valuable skill in of itself.
- xiphias2 7y ago
rvz 7y ago
As a former candidate now turned software engineer and interviewer, I seriously like your story and it does reflect the sad state of the tech industry's hiring process. When I need to find candidates, I usually ignore degrees or hello world based projects, but I ask for either original work or open-source contributions or features added into another project. As with your own project, I don't need to throw a test at you if you dealing with a project with advanced data structures like CRDTs, which I'm sure you already know to apply them well. Unfortunately, this industry tends to believe that implementing something like a R*-Tree or a Van-Embe-Boas Tree in less than 10 mins is an indicator of being qualified for a CRUD application-level job. If I were hiring right now, I would preferably take on more candidates that have open-source contributions over leetcoders because with open-source, you can obviously code, use version control, do code reviews and as a bonus, you can show your work at a meetup / conference. Leetcode/Hackerrank/Codility doesn't allow you to showcase your optimal solutions and even if you attempt to, you risk breaching their plagiarism rules. So those platforms don't allow you to showcase those soft skills. Your experience alone tells me you are already qualified for senior roles that these companies are 'struggling' to fill.

jaclynmling 7y ago

Really like your story. Thanks for sharing! Really hoping that the more engineers, like yourself, that get into organizations and spearhead efforts to reduce bias, the easier it will be for non-traditional talent to break into the field. Best of luck in your job search, and if there's anything that you think Hatchways can do to help please let us know.

uhoh-itsmaciek 7y ago

Are there any meetups in your area that are relevant to your tech interests? That might be a good way to connect to the community in person and get your foot in the door.

hermitdev 7y ago

In my experience, you don't need to be a major contributor to an open source project to gain notice. I've only 3-5 minor contributions (work rules generally preclude me from being more active) While my contributions haven't been large in terms of LOC, nor have I added new features, I have identified, debugged and supplied patches for bugs. I mean, I did this out of self interest, of course. A defect in a certain DB lib on bulk copying with nulls would fail (uninitialized memory in the C portion of the lib). That took about 6 weeks of on again/off again attention. Debugging a C module in Python is a bit of a pain in the ass. Fixing 64-bit compatibility in a Windows ODBC C++ wrapper was another. This was a pain because it required a line by line audit to make sure the correct types were used on every ODBC call. A problem with some inline assembly using rtdsc as a highres timer reporting 200 years had elapsed in a few minutes. This took a long while to figure out and only stumbled into the cause of the bug. I was using the timer to measure socket timeouts. We were supposed to timeout after 30 seconds, but randomly, the timeout would trigger immediately. Stumbled into it because we were using the same timer to measure database queries. Found it odd that my logs were reporting queries were taking more than 200 years to complete, as I sat there reading the logs and seeing them complete. Another was an issue of file handles being, no pun intended, mishandled on a .Net logging lib. I forget the details on this one. Dont think the file was being properly closed at exit? Reported an issue with Boost DateTime overflowing on certain arithmetic situations. Coworker found the issue, but I narrowed down the issue, figured out a solution and reported upstream. Finding the wrong typeset in a template zoo like Boost is an arduous task. I'm sure there's more I've forgotten, but my contributions haven't been much in the way of LOC. My contributions have been in the hours spent and expertise in finding the typically 1 or 2 lines that are wrong. Having experience like that on a resume (and being able to talk knowledgeably about what you did and how you do it) do open doors. Having "found and fixed obscure bug" in a widely used OSS lib is nearly just as valuable as churning out lots of OSS code. Probably more noticeable if you fix bugs in an OSS project that lots of people/companies use, rather than churning out tons of lines in a project almost no one has heard of or uses (beyond the authors). Edit: spelling Addendum: providing bug fixes for 3rd party libs also demonstrates an ability to work with and understand code written by someone else, which is a valuable skill in of itself.

xiphias2 7y ago

rvz 7y ago

As a former candidate now turned software engineer and interviewer, I seriously like your story and it does reflect the sad state of the tech industry's hiring process. When I need to find candidates, I usually ignore degrees or hello world based projects, but I ask for either original work or open-source contributions or features added into another project. As with your own project, I don't need to throw a test at you if you dealing with a project with advanced data structures like CRDTs, which I'm sure you already know to apply them well. Unfortunately, this industry tends to believe that implementing something like a R*-Tree or a Van-Embe-Boas Tree in less than 10 mins is an indicator of being qualified for a CRUD application-level job. If I were hiring right now, I would preferably take on more candidates that have open-source contributions over leetcoders because with open-source, you can obviously code, use version control, do code reviews and as a bonus, you can show your work at a meetup / conference. Leetcode/Hackerrank/Codility doesn't allow you to showcase your optimal solutions and even if you attempt to, you risk breaching their plagiarism rules. So those platforms don't allow you to showcase those soft skills. Your experience alone tells me you are already qualified for senior roles that these companies are 'struggling' to fill.