Ask HN: Can I work for you, for free? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can I work for you, for free?

5 pointsMathCodeLove2 comments

I'm a self-taught developer without a degree. I'm a US Citizen and I have a full-time job at the moment outside of the technology sector that I don't anticipate quitting for at least another year or so. That said, I expect to be able to work 20-30 hours a week with you should you take me up on this offer.

I want to work on something interesting. I want to learn and grow as a developer. I want to gain some professional software experience to put on my resume. I'm teachable and I'm eager.

If your company or concern could use an unpaid intern, then please consider me. Contact me here or via my email: amacedeveloper@gmail.com

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I'm happy for your eagerness to learn and wish you luck breaking out into this industry.

There is a lot to say about the issue of "hiring" an unpaid contributor, but one thing comes to mind before all else: open source contributions. Have you looked at all into contributing, either technically or via documentation, to open source projects? This has a few advantages over what you're trying to do:

- You don't need to wait for anyone to reach out to you.

- You contribute to the things you care about the most, whether it be web front ends, machine learning toolkits, or the latest PDF parser.

- In my opinion, a resume that says "Contributor to X package <Github link>" is much stronger than one that says "unpaid contributions to a company".

If you hadn't considered this before and want to give it a shot, feel free to post again asking for help getting started. Finally, don't worry about not being experienced enough to contribute to open source projects. Here's a recent post about a one-character pull request to MLflow: https://towardsdatascience.com/a-one-character-mlflow-pull-r... If that can get pulled into `main`, anything you're willing to contribute can!

What does the law say about what an unpaid intern can legally do as a programmer for a company? There are Federal and state minimum wage laws.

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