3 ms·

Oh, I'm based out of Columbus, OH, but I'm not especially beholden to the city.

davidw 18y ago
I'd get the heck out of there, first of all, and second, dedicate some time to open source work, which is a great way of 1) proving your abilities, and 2) meeting people. It's doable: I got my first programming job in my early 20ies, with no college. Good luck!
- alnayyir 18y ago
  Actually I contributed a great deal to Ubuntu. I did some multimedia/userspace/64-bit debugging and I helped out with the tech support in #ubuntu. Nothing with my name stamped on it though, I just threw bugs at MOTUs. :\ Where would you recommend as an alternative to Columbus? I seemed to have the impression we had a decent IT/Software Dev market here. (indeed.com/salary says the avg C# coder makes $85k. shrugs) That's partially why I was disheartened, thought I was having trouble finding a job in the context of a good market. I'll look into contributing more time to open source stuff.
  - davidw 18y ago
    In terms of open source, I think you get more bang for your buck in terms of fame and fortune by working on your own projects, if they're relatively successful, than by playing a small role in someone else's. Sad but true. In terms of Ohio... I've never been there, and I have a strong bias against flat places (my home office here in Innsbruck is higher than the entire state of Ohio!), so I'd head to somewhere like California, Oregon, Washington, or maybe Colorado, as that's a bit closer to where you are.
gtani 18y ago
hang out at local user's groups. I've thought of driving down to the Ruby/rails UG, sounds like a really good crew http://groups.google.com/group/columbusrb?lnk= http://groups.google.com/group/columbusrb?lnk= (i bet cincinatti has stuff like this too. Cleveland's pretty, uh, quiet). I'm guessing that there's one job category that there will never be enough people for, anywhere: javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox. So web app's are a little afield of what you've been doing, ubt if your're good at rails or Django, plus mysql/Postgres tuning, plus some Jquery, sojmebody will hire you. Getting a technical job's like parking your car in a major city. Some people have hummers, other have scooters, but when you get a space, you think, hey, that wasn't bad at all
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox Now we are getting somewhere. Look deep into your soul and ask yourself: "Is there an actual reason why I haven't become a web programmer yet?" I'm going to catch hell for saying this on news.yc... but stop learning Lisp for a while. Nobody knows about Lisp but grad students and MIT grads, and they're going to hire other grad students and MIT grads, because there's a long line of people with advanced degrees who would love to be paid to hack on Lisp but can't find that job. Where there's muck, there's brass. Learn some HTML, CSS, Javascript and -- god help us -- PHP, in the form of a good and popular toolkit like Drupal. If you can't stomach the PHP (after learning Ruby or Lisp, PHP can feel like typing in boxing gloves) learn Django, Pylons or Ruby plus Rails -- but, if you want steady work, PHP may be better in the short term. There's an enormous and growing number of PHP-based sites in the world, and nobody can find the coders to keep them all up. Above all, learn SQL. If you're going to pursue some paper qualification that isn't a college degree, make it database administration. SQL isn't going anywhere for the next decade, companies need those skills, and a surprising number of developers have only the faintest notion of how an RDBMS works. Web development jobs can be acquired one short-term gig at a time -- it's fairly low-risk for prospective clients to try you out, and the fact that you'll obviously leave for college in a year or two won't bother most of them. These jobs can be done from several time zones away. They can be done for clients that you've never even seen. If you choose your gigs carefully, each one results in a piece of publicly-visible software that can be linked in your portfolio and shown to future clients. Once your portfolio and reputation exist, nobody will care about what degrees you have or don't have. I'm guessing that most systems programming jobs, and a majority of the Microsoft-stack C#/.NET jobs, involve physically sitting in actual cubicles in offices full of college grads. If you are intent on pursuing such a job, Columbus is probably the wrong place -- it has a relatively low number of jobs in your field and a relatively enormous number of college grads.
  - alnayyir 18y ago
    Thanks for the excellent advice. As I said in another reply, I found a community college that is cheap enough for me to pay for the tuition in cash. I'll just get my degree and go from there.
izak30 18y ago
I'm in Columbus, and if you're good at C#, I may know of a place that is usually hiring good C# devs, I worked IT there for a summer, it's a really good company. e-mail me issac.kelly@gmail.com

I'd get the heck out of there, first of all, and second, dedicate some time to open source work, which is a great way of 1) proving your abilities, and 2) meeting people. It's doable: I got my first programming job in my early 20ies, with no college. Good luck!

alnayyir 18y ago
Actually I contributed a great deal to Ubuntu. I did some multimedia/userspace/64-bit debugging and I helped out with the tech support in #ubuntu. Nothing with my name stamped on it though, I just threw bugs at MOTUs. :\ Where would you recommend as an alternative to Columbus? I seemed to have the impression we had a decent IT/Software Dev market here. (indeed.com/salary says the avg C# coder makes $85k. shrugs) That's partially why I was disheartened, thought I was having trouble finding a job in the context of a good market. I'll look into contributing more time to open source stuff.
- davidw 18y ago
  In terms of open source, I think you get more bang for your buck in terms of fame and fortune by working on your own projects, if they're relatively successful, than by playing a small role in someone else's. Sad but true. In terms of Ohio... I've never been there, and I have a strong bias against flat places (my home office here in Innsbruck is higher than the entire state of Ohio!), so I'd head to somewhere like California, Oregon, Washington, or maybe Colorado, as that's a bit closer to where you are.

gtani 18y ago

hang out at local user's groups. I've thought of driving down to the Ruby/rails UG, sounds like a really good crew http://groups.google.com/group/columbusrb?lnk= http://groups.google.com/group/columbusrb?lnk= (i bet cincinatti has stuff like this too. Cleveland's pretty, uh, quiet). I'm guessing that there's one job category that there will never be enough people for, anywhere: javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox. So web app's are a little afield of what you've been doing, ubt if your're good at rails or Django, plus mysql/Postgres tuning, plus some Jquery, sojmebody will hire you. Getting a technical job's like parking your car in a major city. Some people have hummers, other have scooters, but when you get a space, you think, hey, that wasn't bad at all

mechanical_fish 18y ago
javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox Now we are getting somewhere. Look deep into your soul and ask yourself: "Is there an actual reason why I haven't become a web programmer yet?" I'm going to catch hell for saying this on news.yc... but stop learning Lisp for a while. Nobody knows about Lisp but grad students and MIT grads, and they're going to hire other grad students and MIT grads, because there's a long line of people with advanced degrees who would love to be paid to hack on Lisp but can't find that job. Where there's muck, there's brass. Learn some HTML, CSS, Javascript and -- god help us -- PHP, in the form of a good and popular toolkit like Drupal. If you can't stomach the PHP (after learning Ruby or Lisp, PHP can feel like typing in boxing gloves) learn Django, Pylons or Ruby plus Rails -- but, if you want steady work, PHP may be better in the short term. There's an enormous and growing number of PHP-based sites in the world, and nobody can find the coders to keep them all up. Above all, learn SQL. If you're going to pursue some paper qualification that isn't a college degree, make it database administration. SQL isn't going anywhere for the next decade, companies need those skills, and a surprising number of developers have only the faintest notion of how an RDBMS works. Web development jobs can be acquired one short-term gig at a time -- it's fairly low-risk for prospective clients to try you out, and the fact that you'll obviously leave for college in a year or two won't bother most of them. These jobs can be done from several time zones away. They can be done for clients that you've never even seen. If you choose your gigs carefully, each one results in a piece of publicly-visible software that can be linked in your portfolio and shown to future clients. Once your portfolio and reputation exist, nobody will care about what degrees you have or don't have. I'm guessing that most systems programming jobs, and a majority of the Microsoft-stack C#/.NET jobs, involve physically sitting in actual cubicles in offices full of college grads. If you are intent on pursuing such a job, Columbus is probably the wrong place -- it has a relatively low number of jobs in your field and a relatively enormous number of college grads.
- alnayyir 18y ago
  Thanks for the excellent advice. As I said in another reply, I found a community college that is cheap enough for me to pay for the tuition in cash. I'll just get my degree and go from there.

izak30 18y ago

I'm in Columbus, and if you're good at C#, I may know of a place that is usually hiring good C# devs, I worked IT there for a summer, it's a really good company. e-mail me issac.kelly@gmail.com