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This was me years ago. The short answer is: contract work. Consulting or freelance. This is the way to get experience without having to struggle with finding a

This was me years ago. The short answer is: contract work. Consulting or freelance. This is the way to get experience without having to struggle with finding a salaried position. How do you find opportunities? Go to LinkedIn, search for staffing companies, and message their recruiters letting them know you are available. They will ask for a resume. However, a contractors/consultant resume is different than a salaried resume. You are open to include projects you’ve worked on in detail without them being part of a “job”. Do you have a portfolio? If not, a small simple one works. Bootcamps won’t help. Feel free to email me. Happy to support you through the process.

neontomo 4y ago
Thank you for your offer and the great advice, I will be more proactive on Linkedin!
charlieyu1 4y ago
Is it easy to find the right freelance? I think there are stuff that I can do well, however I don't even know if a freelance job would be too difficult for me or not. There are bunch of web development jobs but it is an area that I'm not good at
intelVISA 4y ago
Genuine question: how is he expected to contract/consult/freelance as a hobbyist with 0 YOE? Outside of race to the bottom Fiver gigs that you probably don't want a lot of good contract work is more "getting shit done" than salary roles; which usually requires selling yourself with a track record/network. Personally I'd just ship some crapware on the app store of your choice and spin it as a 'venture'. As others have noted always nice when they can play with your skinner box rather than glaze over when they see a Makefile.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  I started doing exactly this ~20 years ago, namely getafreelancer.com, fighting with developers at 20$ an hour. Over time I kept some good contacts from there and supplanted the low paid jobs with better clients.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    Same. I started at 15 GBP / hr 13 years ago on peopleperhour, doing cheap jobs and building up trust. This slowly evolved into a network, enough experience to launch my own startup, and now I've been CTO of two startups and I run my own consulting company, at 20-50x the rate I started at.
nyarlathotep_ 4y ago
It's perhaps not a terrible idea to host a simple "blog-type" site that goes through your journey and documents some things about your experience expertise, maybe a blurb/portfolio and things of that nature. Many developer-types seem to have personal sites these days that cover that kind of stuff. I'm not a hiring manager, but I've led lots of interviews and this, IMO/E demonstrates competency in a few areas (this varies depending on how the site was deployed): - basic comprehension of "web stuff" - what "hosting" means in practice (registering a domain + setting up DNS, some sort of service/server to host your assets) - some means of deploying it It's often a good conversation starter too--you mention experience (maybe something on your "blog"), interviewer asks about it, conversation pivots to how you set the site up in the manner you did: "I chose $FRAMEWORK/simple static assets and hosted on $SERVICE as I felt this was a straightforward way to host a site, and I like how $OBJECTSTORE makes hosting easy opposed to setting up a server to just serve static assets." Personally, I like talking about that stuff so it's always a good talk when that comes up during a candidate interview. There's a lot of potential in those conversations, especially given a large portion of software-type jobs are web-related today. Also, regarding the comment above, this is likely helpful if you're a consultant where you can advertise your services more explicitly.

neontomo 4y ago

Thank you for your offer and the great advice, I will be more proactive on Linkedin!

charlieyu1 4y ago

Is it easy to find the right freelance? I think there are stuff that I can do well, however I don't even know if a freelance job would be too difficult for me or not. There are bunch of web development jobs but it is an area that I'm not good at

intelVISA 4y ago

Genuine question: how is he expected to contract/consult/freelance as a hobbyist with 0 YOE? Outside of race to the bottom Fiver gigs that you probably don't want a lot of good contract work is more "getting shit done" than salary roles; which usually requires selling yourself with a track record/network. Personally I'd just ship some crapware on the app store of your choice and spin it as a 'venture'. As others have noted always nice when they can play with your skinner box rather than glaze over when they see a Makefile.

jokethrowaway 4y ago
I started doing exactly this ~20 years ago, namely getafreelancer.com, fighting with developers at 20$ an hour. Over time I kept some good contacts from there and supplanted the low paid jobs with better clients.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Same. I started at 15 GBP / hr 13 years ago on peopleperhour, doing cheap jobs and building up trust. This slowly evolved into a network, enough experience to launch my own startup, and now I've been CTO of two startups and I run my own consulting company, at 20-50x the rate I started at.

nyarlathotep_ 4y ago

It's perhaps not a terrible idea to host a simple "blog-type" site that goes through your journey and documents some things about your experience expertise, maybe a blurb/portfolio and things of that nature. Many developer-types seem to have personal sites these days that cover that kind of stuff. I'm not a hiring manager, but I've led lots of interviews and this, IMO/E demonstrates competency in a few areas (this varies depending on how the site was deployed): - basic comprehension of "web stuff" - what "hosting" means in practice (registering a domain + setting up DNS, some sort of service/server to host your assets) - some means of deploying it It's often a good conversation starter too--you mention experience (maybe something on your "blog"), interviewer asks about it, conversation pivots to how you set the site up in the manner you did: "I chose $FRAMEWORK/simple static assets and hosted on $SERVICE as I felt this was a straightforward way to host a site, and I like how $OBJECTSTORE makes hosting easy opposed to setting up a server to just serve static assets." Personally, I like talking about that stuff so it's always a good talk when that comes up during a candidate interview. There's a lot of potential in those conversations, especially given a large portion of software-type jobs are web-related today. Also, regarding the comment above, this is likely helpful if you're a consultant where you can advertise your services more explicitly.