Ask HN: need advice for a friend who's just starting out | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: need advice for a friend who's just starting out

6 pointsoceola9 comments

Hi everyone!

I have a fairly smart friend. He's not a programmer - he dabbled in it in high school, thought it was kinda cool, but didn't think of it as a future career. Having spent a good few years in other jobs (manual / small managerial) he's now quite keen on the idea of writing code for a living :-) He's now in a position where he can allow himself some 4-5 months of uninterrupted studying. That's a reasonable amount of time to learn something, but far from enough to get to a graduate level. He asked me something along the lines of, "what do I need to learn to get a job, and what can I learn on the job?" Thing is, I'm a fairly junior Java developer in a huge corporation. In a way such a company would be great - they are fairly tolerant towards juniors and give them time to learn. But they won't even look in your direction without a CS diploma and/or relevant experience.

I wonder if some startups/smaller companies would be willing to take on a junior developer (@junior salary), and if so, what deliverables would he have to show to get through the door? e.g. an end-to-end RoR|django app on github?

Otherwise, perhaps with some knowledge of M$ technologies he could get a job doing business reports or something similar. His degree was in business management, so that might help a little.

(He's in London, by the way).

So, fellow HN'ers, what advice would you give? All opinions welcome! Thanks!

I am in nearly exactly the same position as your friend, and I am attending Dev Bootcamp in the fall.

If he only wants to do development as an interesting way to make more money or have greater job security, some combination of self-learning and mentoring over a year's time I would think could get him into a development position somewhere, which I'm sure could lead to bigger and better things down the line.

However, if your friend thinks he might truly be passionate about coding, I highly recommend he (rigorously research and) attend one of the coding "bootcamps" that has sprung up over the past year. I'm sure that not all of these bootcamps are created equal, but the good ones seem to be run by passionate, skilled, and dedicated people that will do their part and more to give you the necessary tools to be a developer in a desirable segment of the industry. The job placement statistics at many of these schools would seem to bear that out. You can look up lots of info on them on Quora or at www.bootcamper.io (seems to be down at the moment).

The "highly selective" part of most of these schools is not based on a candidate's level of past experience (part of the point is to give opportunities to candidates with little CS experience). I'd say if your friend can present himself well-to-very-well in written communication, show that he has great desire and commitment to learn (assuming that he does), and show that he is already taking basic steps to learn on his own, he has a good shot at making it into one of these bootcamps.

Simply put, I think they're worth it (at least the top 3 or top 5 bootcamps -- can't speak for the others). The beginning of anybody's career is a time where investment of time and money can return outsize benefits. More investment yields exponentially larger results in terms of career trajectory.

And, to encourage you/him, if he doesn't think he's cut out for one of these programs, of course he can accomplish the same things on his own, if he wants to badly enough. I just happen to think that the programs are well worth it, and therefore he should consider them.

Hope that helps! I'll obviously know more when I've actually made it through Dev Bootcamp and hopefully find employment, but this is the best advice I could give your friend, knowing what I know so far.

Timely post - I've just visited Makers Academy (http://makersacademy.com) this afternoon. They run a 12-week intensive web development course, teaching complete novices enough programming to land an entry level job. They have partnerships with many companies to place their students.

I was quite impressed with their approach. It's very hands-on and really teaches people to think from the fundamentals in terms of problem solving, rather than just copy pasting code.

It's an option worth looking at.

Disclaimer: I'm considering taking up a teaching role at Makers Academy.

I've seen that, but he couldn't afford the tuition fee. Plus, the "highly selective" is somewhat discouraging, as I'm not sure he has anything to offer that would make him stand out from the crowd, more the opposite.

If you say he's fairly smart, then the selection shouldn't be a problem. They do offer some scholarships, but the fees might still be too steep for him.

If you email me (see profile), I'll try and see if I can help in any way.

emailed, thanks!

>I wonder if some startups/smaller companies would be willing to take on a junior developer (@junior salary), and if so, what deliverables would he have to show to get through the door? e.g. an end-to-end RoR|django app on github?

Of course they would! Providing he has built some open source / portfolio work by the end of those 5 months, a lot of companies would be more than willing to take on a junior at that level. :-)

well, that's a good start. but reading HN is about as close as I ever get to startups, so I really don't know what technologies to recommend him to study, nor what scope his projects should reach before he can realistically expect to be employable. Any pointers? e.g. Is RoR as ubiquitous as I imagine it to be?

The technology (at least in my experience) isn't as important as the ability to code. If you can code perfect Ruby, chances are you can (with a bit of practice) do the same in Python.

However, in reality a lot of companies hire purely on a per language basis which sucks.

I would have him start interviewing and I would not take time off to study.

Build a project on nights and weekends and use that as a talking point in an interview. Besides that, just keep interviewing.

I think there's enough of a demand that he may be able to slip through the cracks at one company even if not fully qualified.

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