5 ms·

Good Rails devs are hard to find and in large demand. As a beginning Rails developer, though, you'll need to convince your new employer that you are a net gain

Good Rails devs are hard to find and in large demand. As a beginning Rails developer, though, you'll need to convince your new employer that you are a net gain. A junior dev can need so much hand-holding that they can steal away precious time from a senior dev. Put some good Ruby code on github. If you can, you'll improve your chances of getting hired quite a bit. If you can't then you're not ready to be hired yet.

BrainScraps 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I'm actually making a part of my transition plan to attend an intensive course like those offered by General Assembly and CodeFellows.org Those programs are designed to give me plenty of opportunity to put up live projects and public code. I have some stuff now, but it's so messy and noob-tastic that I'm not showing it to anybody for fear of being put in the stocks. It's that bad. :/
- nthj 14y ago
  I'm throwing this out there as a tech lead who interviewed and made hiring decisions on juniors in the Austin, TX market. First, working apps are big: put them on Heroku, link them up. I don't care how "straightforward" or "noob" they may seem, I want to know you're capable of shipping working products. If you can only get me 90% of the way to a solution, having to solve the last 10% for you on a regular basis makes you far less valuable to my team. Blog about the challenges or one interesting aspect of each of these projects: even 3 paragraphs can show me you know how to communicate technical things. Second, GitHub all the things. Show that you know the "full stack": front-end markup, data modeling, a bit of jQuery can't hurt. HAML/SCSS are all the rage, not too difficult to pick up, and show you're "hip." Third, go to Rails meetups: in Austin, we have a hacknight every Tuesday, and a monthly Rails meetup. If I've worked on a problem with you over a beer, your resume will naturally gravitate to the top when I have an opening. All of those things are doable over weekends and evenings, and running with just these three tasks for 6 weeks would put you, in my experience, a hundred miles ahead of everybody else looking for a junior position. Good luck man.
  - BrainScraps 14y ago
    Thank you so SO much for taking the time to drop some knowledge here. This is fantastic. If I'm ever in Austin, I'd be glad to buy you a drink!
- cheald 14y ago
  I'm a tech lead who does interviews and makes hiring decisions for Rails developers, and I completely understand your sentiment, but I encourage you to push past that and publish anyhow. More published code is better than less published code irrespective of quality, because it tells me that you're engaged and devoted to your craft, and it gives me a sense of what projects and technologies you're interested in and have been exposed to. Additionally, publishing code gives me a way to see your progression through the craft, and to get a sense of not only how developed you are as a programmer, but how you're growing. A junior programmer who shows growth and improvement is a much better hire than a junior who is competent but shows no growth. When I hire people, I want to hire people who will grow into strong senior developers over their career, which means that I'm primarily looking for ability to learn and grow rather than a specific buzzword checklist. Hiring a junior comes with the expectation that I'm going to have to train and hand-hold them, but I want to hire a junior who will progress out of that stage, and will be able to start taking care of those things for new hires down the road. Publishing code on Github doesn't mean that you're asking other people to use it; it just means you're publishing it. A Github profile on a resume is a +1 for me; a Github account with a lot of forks is another +1, an account with original code is yet another +1, and an account with original code that other people use is the big cherry on top. In all cases, though, I'd rather see an active account filled with "noobish" or "messy" code than an empty account.
  - BrainScraps 14y ago
    Great insight - thanks for this!
  - sbank 14y ago
    I'm curious about GitHub and the code you review. Like many, I can hate my own code and sometimes feel that it will be used against me in a hiring process. So I guess what I'm asking is how much does it count against a potential hire that they have bad code and/or bad ideas on GitHub? > More published code is better than less published code irrespective of quality This is the path I try to walk. I'd rather put something out there than nothing at all.
    - 14y ago

BrainScraps 14y ago

Thanks for the feedback! I'm actually making a part of my transition plan to attend an intensive course like those offered by General Assembly and CodeFellows.org Those programs are designed to give me plenty of opportunity to put up live projects and public code. I have some stuff now, but it's so messy and noob-tastic that I'm not showing it to anybody for fear of being put in the stocks. It's that bad. :/

nthj 14y ago
I'm throwing this out there as a tech lead who interviewed and made hiring decisions on juniors in the Austin, TX market. First, working apps are big: put them on Heroku, link them up. I don't care how "straightforward" or "noob" they may seem, I want to know you're capable of shipping working products. If you can only get me 90% of the way to a solution, having to solve the last 10% for you on a regular basis makes you far less valuable to my team. Blog about the challenges or one interesting aspect of each of these projects: even 3 paragraphs can show me you know how to communicate technical things. Second, GitHub all the things. Show that you know the "full stack": front-end markup, data modeling, a bit of jQuery can't hurt. HAML/SCSS are all the rage, not too difficult to pick up, and show you're "hip." Third, go to Rails meetups: in Austin, we have a hacknight every Tuesday, and a monthly Rails meetup. If I've worked on a problem with you over a beer, your resume will naturally gravitate to the top when I have an opening. All of those things are doable over weekends and evenings, and running with just these three tasks for 6 weeks would put you, in my experience, a hundred miles ahead of everybody else looking for a junior position. Good luck man.
- BrainScraps 14y ago
  Thank you so SO much for taking the time to drop some knowledge here. This is fantastic. If I'm ever in Austin, I'd be glad to buy you a drink!
cheald 14y ago
I'm a tech lead who does interviews and makes hiring decisions for Rails developers, and I completely understand your sentiment, but I encourage you to push past that and publish anyhow. More published code is better than less published code irrespective of quality, because it tells me that you're engaged and devoted to your craft, and it gives me a sense of what projects and technologies you're interested in and have been exposed to. Additionally, publishing code gives me a way to see your progression through the craft, and to get a sense of not only how developed you are as a programmer, but how you're growing. A junior programmer who shows growth and improvement is a much better hire than a junior who is competent but shows no growth. When I hire people, I want to hire people who will grow into strong senior developers over their career, which means that I'm primarily looking for ability to learn and grow rather than a specific buzzword checklist. Hiring a junior comes with the expectation that I'm going to have to train and hand-hold them, but I want to hire a junior who will progress out of that stage, and will be able to start taking care of those things for new hires down the road. Publishing code on Github doesn't mean that you're asking other people to use it; it just means you're publishing it. A Github profile on a resume is a +1 for me; a Github account with a lot of forks is another +1, an account with original code is yet another +1, and an account with original code that other people use is the big cherry on top. In all cases, though, I'd rather see an active account filled with "noobish" or "messy" code than an empty account.
- BrainScraps 14y ago
  Great insight - thanks for this!
- sbank 14y ago
  I'm curious about GitHub and the code you review. Like many, I can hate my own code and sometimes feel that it will be used against me in a hiring process. So I guess what I'm asking is how much does it count against a potential hire that they have bad code and/or bad ideas on GitHub? > More published code is better than less published code irrespective of quality This is the path I try to walk. I'd rather put something out there than nothing at all.
  - 14y ago