10 ms·

After the first tech job

130 points by leesec 4y ago

leesec 4y ago
Author here: had some positive feedback on the last one so wanted to keep sharing my experience of breaking into tech without a degree or related experience. As always reach out if you have any questions about switching into tech, happy to help.
- dafelst 4y ago
  Good for you dude, keep sharing - Hacker News content feels like it is predominantly from top-tier CS-degree'd wunderkinds, and for anyone just getting into the industry it feels like an awfully high bar to reach. Your stories show a less traditional but just as valid approach, and I think it's an important thing to show people that you can get into tech and still make a decent living even if you're not one of the stereotypical HN FAANG crowd. The whole world isn't Silicon Valley, in spite of what you often see here.
- perfopt 4y ago
  I enjoyed reading your experience. I have a more traditional college degree -> interview -> job1 -> interview -> job2 -> interview -> job3 -> interview -> job4 experience. Almost all my changes were because either because of change in management or job getting boring. But networking and knowing people played a huge part in ever move.
- tasuki 4y ago
  > A huge break, almost felt like cheating. A huge break for the company owner! You were clearly able to ship things, and he was able to just hire you, instead of having to go through a long and painful process with the recruiters. > Still didn’t really know what I was doing though. I'm pretty sure no one knows what they're doing...
- Zababa 4y ago
  I enjoyed reading your article. Your experience is interesting, and I like the way you write. Thanks for sharing it.
rkk3 4y ago
> but I don’t imagine a barber needing to study haircuts on his off hours to stay relevant. Coding isn’t like that Because the fashion industry never changes ???
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  He said barber, not hairdresser. Men’s hairstyles really don’t change that fast and the degree of technical sophistication involved doesn’t change radically over a career. You can get better at being a barber but there’s always going to be demand for a short back and sides or a buzz cut.
- selcuka 4y ago
  It does, but not as radically or frequently as software. The tools stay (mostly) the same. A reasonably experienced barber should be able to learn this year's haircut fashion after a couple customers.
- DantesKite 4y ago
  I don't think human hair has changed that much over the past 200,000 years.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    You don't? Black women are constantly complaining about how their hair takes specialty tools and special knowledge only possessed by barbers who specifically learn to care for black hair. Someone's hair changed quite a bit.
exolymph 4y ago
Great example of what it looks like to make your own luck.
- geranim0 4y ago
  You can't actually make your own luck though.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    While perhaps technically correct (the best kind) this misses the colloquialism. Someone who goes out into the world, improves themselves, and tries to show that to other people will have more opportunities to be lucky than someone who does none of these things. Obviously both people can strike out, but the person who never tries is way less likely to succeed.
    - backpackviolet 4y ago
      Really hard to win the lottery if you never buy a ticket.
      - WJW 4y ago
        It's also really hard to win the lottery if you do buy a ticket.
  - draw_down 4y ago
  - milkshakes 4y ago
    you can, however increase your luck surface area
  - spideymans 4y ago
    Once heard a coach say that luck was just preparation meeting opportunity. In other words, you’ll be “lucky” if you put yourself in a position to succeed whenever opportunity comes.
hemloc_io 4y ago
hah, great to read someone else ambling about in the industry. I think at any age/level you can get bit by that hacker ethos, and it seems like you got it ;)
ramesh31 4y ago
>Many people stick with their jobs a long time, switch roles via networking, and barely put in any work off hours. That’s well and good and I try to do it as much as possible, but the fact remains you will not progress as quickly as your peers who are Not Doing That, and you run the risk of having your skills stagnate and becoming unemployable-ish. This is the painful reality that anyone self-taught who wants to break into this industry will have to face. I spent my entire 20s grinding endlessly. Constantly learning, constantly coding, working 18 hour days nonstop. I studied CS theory, engineering principles, frameworks, OS internals, etc., etc., etc. to the absolute exclusion of anything else in life. Now at 32, I see my peers all married with families and personal lives. A life that I do not, and probably will not, ever have at this point because of the sacrifices I made back then. But I am also lightyears ahead of them technically. At my current job I've been promoted 3 levels past the midlevels I started with 4 years ago. Life is full of decisions, and unfortunately attaining excellence requires commitment, dedication, and focus. You can do alright otherwise, but if you really want this and have the aptitude to reach the top, it will consume you.
- kliao 4y ago
  32 is too late to get married and start a family? C'mon, you're still so young and have plenty of time to do all that stuff and more.
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    Meh, it depends, but you're generally right. If you waste your 20s on inane technical achievement and ladder climbing, then you haven't spent time figuring out how to form healthy personal connections, or on the extreme end, you might be a total asshole and nobody's told you because they couldn't care less to burden themselves with someone who only cares about their job. If I didn't have a few different relationship experiences, I wouldn't be in a healthy one now. If you get it right the first time, you're very lucky. So you better start now, otherwise the prospect of starting a family might literally be out of reach within 5 to 10 years, though the marriage thing, if you want that, is always possible. At the moment, I'm a bit younger than 32, but I almost consider relentless tech grinding to represent a silly sort of immaturity, or at least a bit confusing. As in "You seriously haven't found something else to do with the little spare time you have?", not that I'd say that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- 1270018080 4y ago
  Software engineers aren't doctors.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Just want to tell the person you replied to that they’re a perfect example of a kind of person no one should be like.
gabereiser 4y ago
I would ask the author to take another look at the meetups. Going to one, even consistently for a few months, will help in a variety of ways. 1) a lot of engineers are introverts, you have to keep showing your face if you want to be included. 2) while most of the time these meetups are “how I achieved X by using Y”, occasionally there’s some real meat to those presentations. 8 or so years ago I used to frequent a meetup only because it was hosted at our office. I figured a chance to hang with a few coworkers I liked and a free beer was worth it. I ended up learning scala. During those meetups we kept getting these really awesome presentations about concurrency and things. At the time a company who was just bought by a really known guy would present their solution to handling massive amounts of traffic. To us Java people we brushed it off as we’ve been handling volume for a while with Spring and stuff. Anyway, what I’m saying is. Keep going to the meetups for the tech you are interested in learning. You WILL learn something. Then, when you ask questions (because you won’t be able to help yourself), you’ll end up networking. Strange I know.
- leesec 4y ago
  I mean I did say it's worthwhile if you go consistently, just not for one off networking events.
onion2k 4y ago
To stay sharp employers want to see you keeping up with new trends, doing side projects, or improving in some way. I don't think this is actually true. Employers don't give a crap about your side projects, what you do in your free time, or what you learn at the weekends. Many don't even want you to learn things in your job. The reason it's so widely believed in our industry is four-fold; - people who are "Twitter famous" devs often work as developer advocates for businesses, and spend their work days building small projects to demonstrate things. Then they talk about them but never mention that they're work projects. Their audience thinks "I could never get to build that in office hours, must be a side project!" and extrapolate from there that getting to be a rich and famous dev advocate means working on weekends. - devs involved in hiring say they want to look at Github repos. I've been hiring devs for the last 15 years and while I do look at repos if they're available I still interview loads of people who don't have them. In fact, to be honest, having public repos is more likely to push me to rule someone out rather than arrange a chat. Most people's public repos are examples of very bad quick hacks, starter projects with no additional work, or things so poorly documented I can't even tell what they are. - we like making side projects and need an excuse to spend time on them. When your partner or kids or parents are nagging you to do something being able to stress that our career will wither away to nothing if we don't spend time on something on Sunday night is useful. - it's a route out of a bad job. If you're working with tech you don't like, at an employer who refuses to give you a training budget, and you don't have any opportunity to learn things in work time, then side projects are an obvious alternative. A better alternative is to find a job where you can grow. An important thing to note about this is that there are a ton of skills that are really hard to learn at home on a weekend (running meetings, talking to clients, using focus groups, mentoring juniors, writing clear docs, etc). Being a dev is about much more than coding after all.
- windowsworkstoo 4y ago
  Heh your bit about Github resonates. I hire plenty of devs and the whole "make sure you have a GH body of work" has become such a meme that when people do include it on their CV, it's usually just a big list of forked repos with no contributions. For me, Github/personal projects have not been a useful signal either way, but it is apparent in recentish years that the advice has been to have one regardless.
capn_duck 4y ago
Barbers definitely need to keep current and I know for a fact attend meetups and workshops or whatever you want to call them to learn new and fashionable techniques. Seems like a weird comparison to make in an article that impresses humble beginnings.
- leesec 4y ago
  It was not a slight! And of course there are exceptions. But it's not the same as in tech. You could be using some esoteric statistic framework or like coldfusion which goes deprecated for 10 years and you simply would not have modern experience. This happens all the time.
t_mann 4y ago
A heartwarming story, but the thought that someone is now driving around in a modded car with a self-driving system installed by someone whose experience with the command line amounts to a few (half-completed?) online ML courses and who had never done hardware modifications before does make me feel uneasy. Really not trying to be dismissive here, and I realize it was only the setup not writing the full software, but there's probably still a zillion things that could be missing / go wrong if you don't really know what you're doing (which is the case if you need a tutorial and help from Discord at every other step, let's be honest). "Failing forward" may work for consumer-facing web startups where nothing really sensitive is on the line, but if your software can physically accelerate two tons of metal to 100mph, it's a bit of a different game.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  If that's a real risk then our solution to it can't be individual programmers self-policing their own competence.
  - t_mann 4y ago
    The risk is very real if that guy is driving around on public streets with this system. There are lots of regulations regarding road safety, but at no point in the article did that guy mention anything about them, what steps he took to ensure compliance, whether the solution was indepently audited afterwards... Laws are only as good as they're enforced, that's why it's important to call out questionable tinkering when you see it happening in the wild.
fedeb95 4y ago
do someone really knows what he or she is doing? Congrats for your job!
- leesec 4y ago
  I've met people who know a lot more than me, anyways. And thank you!
Caroline30 4y ago
My first tech job was with a Vogelback computer with punchcards for programming. Who knew about side jobs in computers then? Thank goodness you grandkids came along and straightened us out!
VivaLaPanda 4y ago
Seeing a lot of folks criticize the claim about needing side projects/GitHub. I think if you already have experience it doesn't matter too much, but if you have a nontraditional background/lacking experience, it is totally the difference between an offer and never hearing back. I've experienced this from both sides of the table.

130 points by leesec 4y ago

Author here: had some positive feedback on the last one so wanted to keep sharing my experience of breaking into tech without a degree or related experience. As always reach out if you have any questions about switching into tech, happy to help.

dafelst 4y ago
Good for you dude, keep sharing - Hacker News content feels like it is predominantly from top-tier CS-degree'd wunderkinds, and for anyone just getting into the industry it feels like an awfully high bar to reach. Your stories show a less traditional but just as valid approach, and I think it's an important thing to show people that you can get into tech and still make a decent living even if you're not one of the stereotypical HN FAANG crowd. The whole world isn't Silicon Valley, in spite of what you often see here.
perfopt 4y ago
I enjoyed reading your experience. I have a more traditional college degree -> interview -> job1 -> interview -> job2 -> interview -> job3 -> interview -> job4 experience. Almost all my changes were because either because of change in management or job getting boring. But networking and knowing people played a huge part in ever move.
tasuki 4y ago
> A huge break, almost felt like cheating. A huge break for the company owner! You were clearly able to ship things, and he was able to just hire you, instead of having to go through a long and painful process with the recruiters. > Still didn’t really know what I was doing though. I'm pretty sure no one knows what they're doing...
Zababa 4y ago
I enjoyed reading your article. Your experience is interesting, and I like the way you write. Thanks for sharing it.

rkk3 4y ago

> but I don’t imagine a barber needing to study haircuts on his off hours to stay relevant. Coding isn’t like that Because the fashion industry never changes ???

barry-cotter 4y ago
He said barber, not hairdresser. Men’s hairstyles really don’t change that fast and the degree of technical sophistication involved doesn’t change radically over a career. You can get better at being a barber but there’s always going to be demand for a short back and sides or a buzz cut.
selcuka 4y ago
It does, but not as radically or frequently as software. The tools stay (mostly) the same. A reasonably experienced barber should be able to learn this year's haircut fashion after a couple customers.
DantesKite 4y ago
I don't think human hair has changed that much over the past 200,000 years.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  You don't? Black women are constantly complaining about how their hair takes specialty tools and special knowledge only possessed by barbers who specifically learn to care for black hair. Someone's hair changed quite a bit.

exolymph 4y ago

Great example of what it looks like to make your own luck.

geranim0 4y ago
You can't actually make your own luck though.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  While perhaps technically correct (the best kind) this misses the colloquialism. Someone who goes out into the world, improves themselves, and tries to show that to other people will have more opportunities to be lucky than someone who does none of these things. Obviously both people can strike out, but the person who never tries is way less likely to succeed.
  - backpackviolet 4y ago
    Really hard to win the lottery if you never buy a ticket.
    - WJW 4y ago
      It's also really hard to win the lottery if you do buy a ticket.
- draw_down 4y ago
- milkshakes 4y ago
  you can, however increase your luck surface area
- spideymans 4y ago
  Once heard a coach say that luck was just preparation meeting opportunity. In other words, you’ll be “lucky” if you put yourself in a position to succeed whenever opportunity comes.

hemloc_io 4y ago

hah, great to read someone else ambling about in the industry. I think at any age/level you can get bit by that hacker ethos, and it seems like you got it ;)

ramesh31 4y ago

>Many people stick with their jobs a long time, switch roles via networking, and barely put in any work off hours. That’s well and good and I try to do it as much as possible, but the fact remains you will not progress as quickly as your peers who are Not Doing That, and you run the risk of having your skills stagnate and becoming unemployable-ish. This is the painful reality that anyone self-taught who wants to break into this industry will have to face. I spent my entire 20s grinding endlessly. Constantly learning, constantly coding, working 18 hour days nonstop. I studied CS theory, engineering principles, frameworks, OS internals, etc., etc., etc. to the absolute exclusion of anything else in life. Now at 32, I see my peers all married with families and personal lives. A life that I do not, and probably will not, ever have at this point because of the sacrifices I made back then. But I am also lightyears ahead of them technically. At my current job I've been promoted 3 levels past the midlevels I started with 4 years ago. Life is full of decisions, and unfortunately attaining excellence requires commitment, dedication, and focus. You can do alright otherwise, but if you really want this and have the aptitude to reach the top, it will consume you.

kliao 4y ago
32 is too late to get married and start a family? C'mon, you're still so young and have plenty of time to do all that stuff and more.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Meh, it depends, but you're generally right. If you waste your 20s on inane technical achievement and ladder climbing, then you haven't spent time figuring out how to form healthy personal connections, or on the extreme end, you might be a total asshole and nobody's told you because they couldn't care less to burden themselves with someone who only cares about their job. If I didn't have a few different relationship experiences, I wouldn't be in a healthy one now. If you get it right the first time, you're very lucky. So you better start now, otherwise the prospect of starting a family might literally be out of reach within 5 to 10 years, though the marriage thing, if you want that, is always possible. At the moment, I'm a bit younger than 32, but I almost consider relentless tech grinding to represent a silly sort of immaturity, or at least a bit confusing. As in "You seriously haven't found something else to do with the little spare time you have?", not that I'd say that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

1270018080 4y ago
Software engineers aren't doctors.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Just want to tell the person you replied to that they’re a perfect example of a kind of person no one should be like.

gabereiser 4y ago

I would ask the author to take another look at the meetups. Going to one, even consistently for a few months, will help in a variety of ways. 1) a lot of engineers are introverts, you have to keep showing your face if you want to be included. 2) while most of the time these meetups are “how I achieved X by using Y”, occasionally there’s some real meat to those presentations. 8 or so years ago I used to frequent a meetup only because it was hosted at our office. I figured a chance to hang with a few coworkers I liked and a free beer was worth it. I ended up learning scala. During those meetups we kept getting these really awesome presentations about concurrency and things. At the time a company who was just bought by a really known guy would present their solution to handling massive amounts of traffic. To us Java people we brushed it off as we’ve been handling volume for a while with Spring and stuff. Anyway, what I’m saying is. Keep going to the meetups for the tech you are interested in learning. You WILL learn something. Then, when you ask questions (because you won’t be able to help yourself), you’ll end up networking. Strange I know.

leesec 4y ago
I mean I did say it's worthwhile if you go consistently, just not for one off networking events.

onion2k 4y ago

To stay sharp employers want to see you keeping up with new trends, doing side projects, or improving in some way. I don't think this is actually true. Employers don't give a crap about your side projects, what you do in your free time, or what you learn at the weekends. Many don't even want you to learn things in your job. The reason it's so widely believed in our industry is four-fold; - people who are "Twitter famous" devs often work as developer advocates for businesses, and spend their work days building small projects to demonstrate things. Then they talk about them but never mention that they're work projects. Their audience thinks "I could never get to build that in office hours, must be a side project!" and extrapolate from there that getting to be a rich and famous dev advocate means working on weekends. - devs involved in hiring say they want to look at Github repos. I've been hiring devs for the last 15 years and while I do look at repos if they're available I still interview loads of people who don't have them. In fact, to be honest, having public repos is more likely to push me to rule someone out rather than arrange a chat. Most people's public repos are examples of very bad quick hacks, starter projects with no additional work, or things so poorly documented I can't even tell what they are. - we like making side projects and need an excuse to spend time on them. When your partner or kids or parents are nagging you to do something being able to stress that our career will wither away to nothing if we don't spend time on something on Sunday night is useful. - it's a route out of a bad job. If you're working with tech you don't like, at an employer who refuses to give you a training budget, and you don't have any opportunity to learn things in work time, then side projects are an obvious alternative. A better alternative is to find a job where you can grow. An important thing to note about this is that there are a ton of skills that are really hard to learn at home on a weekend (running meetings, talking to clients, using focus groups, mentoring juniors, writing clear docs, etc). Being a dev is about much more than coding after all.

windowsworkstoo 4y ago
Heh your bit about Github resonates. I hire plenty of devs and the whole "make sure you have a GH body of work" has become such a meme that when people do include it on their CV, it's usually just a big list of forked repos with no contributions. For me, Github/personal projects have not been a useful signal either way, but it is apparent in recentish years that the advice has been to have one regardless.

capn_duck 4y ago

Barbers definitely need to keep current and I know for a fact attend meetups and workshops or whatever you want to call them to learn new and fashionable techniques. Seems like a weird comparison to make in an article that impresses humble beginnings.

leesec 4y ago
It was not a slight! And of course there are exceptions. But it's not the same as in tech. You could be using some esoteric statistic framework or like coldfusion which goes deprecated for 10 years and you simply would not have modern experience. This happens all the time.

t_mann 4y ago

A heartwarming story, but the thought that someone is now driving around in a modded car with a self-driving system installed by someone whose experience with the command line amounts to a few (half-completed?) online ML courses and who had never done hardware modifications before does make me feel uneasy. Really not trying to be dismissive here, and I realize it was only the setup not writing the full software, but there's probably still a zillion things that could be missing / go wrong if you don't really know what you're doing (which is the case if you need a tutorial and help from Discord at every other step, let's be honest). "Failing forward" may work for consumer-facing web startups where nothing really sensitive is on the line, but if your software can physically accelerate two tons of metal to 100mph, it's a bit of a different game.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
If that's a real risk then our solution to it can't be individual programmers self-policing their own competence.
- t_mann 4y ago
  The risk is very real if that guy is driving around on public streets with this system. There are lots of regulations regarding road safety, but at no point in the article did that guy mention anything about them, what steps he took to ensure compliance, whether the solution was indepently audited afterwards... Laws are only as good as they're enforced, that's why it's important to call out questionable tinkering when you see it happening in the wild.

fedeb95 4y ago

do someone really knows what he or she is doing? Congrats for your job!

leesec 4y ago
I've met people who know a lot more than me, anyways. And thank you!

Caroline30 4y ago

My first tech job was with a Vogelback computer with punchcards for programming. Who knew about side jobs in computers then? Thank goodness you grandkids came along and straightened us out!

VivaLaPanda 4y ago

Seeing a lot of folks criticize the claim about needing side projects/GitHub. I think if you already have experience it doesn't matter too much, but if you have a nontraditional background/lacking experience, it is totally the difference between an offer and never hearing back. I've experienced this from both sides of the table.