Please don't go by the echo chamber that is the Bay Area based Hacker News. A Github profile is nice, contributing to OSS projects is nice, yet those aren't th

Please don't go by the echo chamber that is the Bay Area based Hacker News. A Github profile is nice, contributing to OSS projects is nice, yet those aren't the only things that matter to acquiring a job. Unless you are targeting specific companies which are so overwhelmingly biased towards hiring people who only fit a certain demographic. There are loads of people, for example who work in Finance, who don't have all these things. They make the transition to tech just fine. Source: I worked for two years in SF. I am currently working in NYC. A bunch of my co-workers are incredibly smart ex-finance folks who are good at Math and C.S. I am willing to bet that most of them didn't start a github profile until they joined us.