Ask HN: Am I employable as a web developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Am I employable as a web developer?

9 pointsjavascriptish15 comments

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.

Short 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.]

Thanks 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.

I 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.

Just 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).

When I was applying for an internship position at a startup last week, I started up one of my local php projects to demonstrate what skills I had, and it wouldn't run... but then I pretty much debugged it on the fly and ran it to save face.

And apparently this was impressive because their bar for questions was "do you know what a function is" and "can you use $_POST?" and things of that nature. They didn't give me fizzbuzz, though. And I was scared they were going to make me implement a doubly linked list on the fly or something.

> but then I pretty much debugged it on the fly and ran it to save face.

That means you were able to run your php project, unlike the guy I interviewed.

> doubly linked list on the fly

Very few positions require implementing linked list, so asking to do that is usually not efficient way to conduct an interview.

"What is a function" / "What is $_POST" is the PHP equivalents of FizzBuzz. Simple questions that you can use to weed out the people who literally know nothing.

I went to a Fog Creek open day once, back in 2004 or 2005, and Joel Spolsky said that they said they had some candidates that couldn't tell if point (x,y) was within a certain rectangle or not.

I also thought that it myst be a trick question as even with my limited skills as a PM I could do that.

It's not a trick. There are people who are that bad who apply for programming jobs. You're in university now and probably surrounded by lots of people who like and can programme. But there are loads of people who cannot programme and try to work in programming jobs.

I'm a cofounder at 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/

* 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.

Thanks 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 :)

Not 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.

Yeah, 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.

The 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.

I 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.

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