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Ask HN: Am I employable as a web developer?
Hi Hacker News,
I'm currently studying web development at college and I'm having a hard time assessing my own skill set. I'd like to quit college in favor for working with webdevelopment, but am afraid I might not be skilled enough for hire. These are my skills, what are your honest opinion?
Skills I possess now:
* JavaScript:
Understanding of protoptypical inheritance, alot of quirks, === not ==, this that bind this, call, namespacing, selfinvoking, ES5, AJAX, WebSocket (Socket.io), jQuery syntax, linting, strict mode.
At the moment I'm building a public chat using the MEAN stack and Socket.io. The chat will be able to parse Markdown, embed metadata, do user highlighting and maybe be downloadable as an npm package when ready. Messages will be pushed to MongoDB via Mongoose and the server runs on Node.js with Express. I'm still uncomfortable with Node and Express. Quite comfortable with Angular.
* CSS:
Can pull of responsive designs and am somewhere between intermediate and advanced in skill level. I use SASS with Susy most of the time. Have worked with Bootstrap, Foundation and Pure CSS.
* HTML:
Know of ARIA, semantic best practices and templating (I prefer Hogan).
* SQL+noSQL:
Am familiar and comfortable writing SQL statements, db.inserts and have studied normalization/denormalization.
* Git:
Comfortable to do versioning using Git and Github from the console.
* SCRUM and Agile:
Have done courses in SCRUM and UML, mainly theoretical.
* Testing:
Currently developing using TDD and write tests in Jasmine.
* Tooling:
Gulp, Yo, preprocessors.
* Deployment:
I've deployed static pages using FTP to webservers and will soon deploy my first app to Heroku.
On my TODO is PHP and I will create my first WordPress theme this summer.
How does these skills match up for a junior position? For a front dev position? Am I missing some skills - which skills?
Your feedback and answers means alot. Thanks in advance.
- calcsam 13y agoNot a domain expert here, but keep in mind your portfolio > your resume, every time. If you can talk intelligently about these concepts in terms of the things you've built, that will speak volumes.
- javascriptish 13y agoYeah, I can understand that. So, what size of a project is a junior dev supposed to have built/be able to build? Thanks for your reply.
- patio11 13y agoShort version: Yes, you're hireable. You're going to learn an awful lot in your first 6 months and 2 years of employment in industry. Slightly more verbose version: You will be better served on a career-ROI-per-hour-invested-basis in talking to people, particularly people with hiring authority, versus learning any technical skill that I could hypothetically name for you. Having at least one portfolio piece wouldn't hurt you, but talking to people wouldn't hurt you either. Remember, the first question you're going to be asked in an interview is something like Fizzbuzz, designed to separate you from the ~90% of candidates who cannot code a for loop. [Edit to add: Don't quit college.]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- javascriptish 13y agoThanks for your comment. I'm working on the portfolio. After you said FizzBuzz, I googled it. Couldn't grasp what the trick question was in the test, so I had to google solutions since I thought I must have misunderstood. Where are these statistics that claim it has such a crazy failrate coming from? This is the first thing we do in the first course, but with line breaks and colorcoding. I would only quit college if I got a decent web dev job, since I'm living of my spouse and it can get a bit too sparse sometimes.
- patio11 13y agoI know. EVERYONE thinks it is a myth before they try hiring. I did, too. Trust me, in 5 or 10 years you'll be interviewing folks, and you will likewise have your mind blown.
- dennisgorelik 13y agoJust today I interviewed "web developer" who was not able to create new web project on his computer (which he supposedly is using for web development).
- 13y ago
- shawndrost 13y agoI'm a cofounder at http://hackreactor.com http://hackreactor.com, an immersive school for Javascript engineers. Our grads have your skillset plus a portfolio, and they all get jobs. A few notes: * The portfolio is key. Here's one from a grad; you can get away with just 2-3 projects: http://tylermcginnis.com/ http://tylermcginnis.com/ * I would suggest learning Angular rather than PHP -- learning PHP will put you in a socio-cultural programming context that will lower your career salary and quality of coworker. * You'll find life way easier if you look for a job in SF. * Study up on "Cracking the Coding Interview" and make sure that you can code up interview questions. You may want to just attend my school, which is a structured three-month program to take people like you through the above and more. Average graduate salary is $105,000.
- javascriptish 13y agoThanks for your answer. I'm currently in Sweden, so SF isn't an option. I'll learn Php as part of curriculum but I'm doing my side projects and project courses in JavaScript, mainly Angular :)
- JSeymourATL 12y agoThe conventional wisdom is that you need a degree to be professionally successful. Corporate America still trains managers to screen out capable individuals for pedigree and credentials. But the Market truly only cares if you can execute and provide value. An area to explore-- when you daydream, where do you see yourself in 3,5,10 years? As an experiment-- try working in the business part-time while you go to school for a semester, then reevaluate.
- jwheeler79 12y agoI really like that you seem to already have a handle on your weaknesses. that coupled with your striving to understand where you fit into things will eventually build into the confidence of a strong engineer. the longer it takes, the better.