Ask HN: With nothing but an open-source portfolio, how to start job-hunting?

Start applying for entry lever or junior level positions showing a need for the skills you have.

It would help to know where you live and what type of work you would like to get. But I can give you some general advice in the mean time. Really, you are in a good spot to do well!

If I were you I would start to consult on the side while in school. In fact, this is exactly what I did do in high school and college. Make a small but well designed site which shows your projects in a portfolio style. Offer your services to local businesses while trying to focus on solutions you can offer them to help them with their specific problems. For example, as a freshman in high school I helped a specialty billing company to automate some of their reporting which used to be a manual process. I figured out they needed this by calling them up, introducing myself as a high school student who was trying to find companies who needed my services as a software developer, and asking what problems they had. It turns out, it's really that easy sometimes.

If you'd like to get a more salary based job on a team at a company, you might be in a good spot for this too. Create a resume. Focus on what you have worked on and what accomplishments you have achieved. Send this out to prospective employers. It would be good to still create the small but well designed portfolio site to show off your open source projects and mention this in your resume. Send this resume out to 5 companies a day, every day, and you will quickly find you start to get quite a lot of response.

We all started somewhere. A lot of us started out with a lot less experience than you have described here. You'll do well!

If I were you, I'd either:

1.) Keep contributing to open source and working on/releasing/blogging about/otherwise promoting side projects.

2.) Contact founders directly via email and ask about job/contract opportunities.

The bigger your profile/the more samples of your work out there, the easier it will be to get positive responses out cold emails.

I had a friend I met doing open source who was still in high school. He was similarly looking for work, and eventually found a summer gig between his Jr and Sr year of high school.

The thing that got him in the door was attending meetups. We were doing JavaScript stuff so he attended his local NodeJS meetup and met some people who eventually hired him. So if you're in a location where they have dev meetups I'd get out and attend, talk to people, maybe even present.

Reach out to the folks using the open source software you've written or contribute to. To these folks, you are already vetted -- they rely on your code and they "know" you from the community around the projects.

Different projects have different norms around job seeking, so this might take the form of reaching out 1:1 to other contributors or users you have interacted with, or it might take the form of "Hey, I'm looking for a new job..." to the mailing list for the project. Do understand the norms for the projects though, as sending a blanket "I'm looking for a new gig" to some places will lead to being ostracized, whereas for others it will lead to flurry of folks reaching out. If in doubt, reach out directly.

just apply for some jobs. most of your competition has nothing to show. so you already have a big advantage

If those proficiencies include Angular 1 and you have the passion it seems you might, I would be happy to see that portfolio.

I'd use the adult network of your parents and teachers to find an internal dev team at a local business, something relaxed where an older (mid-30s - 50s) dev or two can mentor you and you will have the freedom to experiment and make mistakes. The point isn't to make money or learn the latest greatest tech, but simply to practice and observe and practice and practice and practice, not to mention getting comfortable in an office environment. You'll naturally keep up on the latest tech yourself, but learning some legacy things will help provide you perspective and an internal shop typically has a great deal of interaction with end users--developing user empathy is a skill that's hard to learn on your own or in school.

You will then be very well positioned for college internships, where you can make $$$ and work in a higher pressure environment on cutting edge things. Your résumé will show job experience and you'll likely have more poise than your peers. Be sure you don't stress out too much about a high school job. Life is long.

Write a good cover letter and include some open source projects on your resume.

I've hired several people with no formal experience, but some awesome open source work.

Overlapping with some things mentioned by others:

1) While you search, you might start contributing to bigger open source projects that have visibility. It shows you can be part of a team. Then you also have "references" that can vouch for you; your employers can see your work directly.

2) Try thinking of your professional identity; how do you market yourself. This is a combination of your skills and interests in terms of what types of projects you want to work on and want to be called upon. What do you want to be known for?

Truthfully, your biggest asset right now will probably be that you have some skills (don't have to be trained from zero), and are super cheap and willing to do more than you get paid for.

It depends on what kind of job you are looking for - part time while still in high school? Summer job? Or full time permanent?

For either of the first 2 options, call around to your local businesses and ask about internships. That would be an easier sell, and get you experience.

For a full-time job, you methods really aren't any different than the rest of us. Meet people, talk to them, apply to their posted job openings. Let people know you are looking so they think of you for opportunities that are not posted.

Ask your professor(s) if they have any suggestions.

Find local meetups regarding those technologies. I'm in high school too, with a good amount of knowledge already and definitely the best way to find good jobs/people you can learn from are local meetups. Try to find the most advanced/knowledgeable/passionate developer there and discuss something you both are passionate about with him. After repeating this a few times you'll surely have a lot of job offers. Otherwise, you'll know what you have to work on.

I did this a few years ago. My suggestion is just to create a CV that showcases your experience, and then start applying to jobs. Definitely try to apply directly to companies rather than through recruitment agencies (as they won't understand), but I can't imagine you will find it too hard to find a job. Developers are in high demand.

I would take the opportunity to build something yourself. If you're young and in school chances are you don't have any big financial concerns. This is a great time to try to build and sell your own products, something which becomes much more difficult when you have to pay rent. I'm speaking from experience too as it was in high school that I started selling my own software and my services as a freelancer. I didn't make a huge amount of money (although it seemed huge as my reference was a £50pw supermarket job) but I had a lot of fun, much more than I've ever had working at a company, and continued it for a few years after high school. This also gives you the freedom to make mistakes, tackle problems you're interested in/expand your knowledge in areas where you are weak, and it looks great on your CV when you do actually need a job (despite 'average' skills I was able to get very well paid dev jobs without a college degree).

Secondary to the above it gives you some basic business and marketing/sales skills which always come in handy.

My company recently hired a young student right out of high school. What made him stand out was a few apps he had published on the App Store. I believe he had a couple of games and two or three utilities. All of them were free, but they all had quite a few reviews and 4 to 5 star ratings.

I believe you can achieve similar results by showing the work you've done on OSS projects. Just share your commits with potential employers.

For some companies, open-source projects or contributions to open-source projects are a pretty strong signal that you: a) are commited enough to work on a long term project; b) have had some experience in working on a team; c) have worked on a project that has real-life use.

Find a business that could use one of your projects to solve one of its main problems. Then get a meeting with somebody there who has the authority to hire you (this can be done simply by email, but it helps if you have some common connection with them), go to them and show them what you have made, explain how it and you will help their business, then ask for a job.

Do this a bunch of times and you should be hired somewhere.

Build and host a web app that uses some real-time public-facing data (train positions, bus positions, satellite positions, cab fares, etc) and renders that information in a helpful way.

That's how I got a job as a very junior developer.

One thing I'd mention is - regardless of your inclinations (sounds like you're more of a backend developer) - put together something that is easy to showcase. Something "live" running on aws/heroku/digital ocean/github pages even - no matter how trivial (well maybe a static "hello world" might be too trivial :) ) - would go a long way towards convincing your potential employer that you have the tech chops.

Also, just being realistic, it's WAY easier to get your foot in the door doing frontend stuff. Doesn't mean you have to drop everything and become a UI person, but if you have some kind of an API sitting on aws, having a UI to drive it vs. driving it purely with curl/postman/etc shouldn't take much effort but will be a good bang for the buck no doubt.

Go to school, go, don't work while in school, load up in your course works and finish fast. Then do the job thing.

I was in a similar position a couple of years ago, and HN's advice as well as some HNers helped me get started with consulting online: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4079567

Show value.

1) Show value you have added to OSS in an easy digestable way for potential employers. A 2-minute checkout on the web, with explanations where needed to have people understand what you did.

2) Show value you can add to their business. Place yourself in the position of the businessowner, and match this with your skills and talents. Eloquently writeup what value you can add to their position in the business.

I have a few ideas here, and the common theme between all of them is that you have to put yourself out there:

* Find some developers in your local area who maintain, or can merge into, an open source project. Work on what they are passionate about, and get to know them. Learn what it takes to contribute effectively, and you'll get noticed. Bonus points if that open source project is something someone uses for work, as you're now another local expert in a tool that someone actively pays people to develop.

* Find something in your local area that doesn't work as well as it should and fix it, or at least offer to fix it. There's a crosswalk signal on my block that is malfunctioning. It's supposed to flash a red hand (aka don't walk) with a countdown from 10 to 1 seconds before turning solid red. Instead, it flashes "99". If you saw that malfunction, you could do a bit of research to see who the manufacturer is, call up city hall, and tell them you'd like to work with the technician who is tasked with fixing the light. Ask the technician if his company has any work you could help with.

* Find out who developed the websites for some local business in your area, or visit that local computer shop that offers website development along with their services. Ask if they'd hire you as an intern, showing them the work you've already done. Even if they don't ask them if they'd be open to discussing their process for hosting and deploying websites. Find a way to improve it, open source the solution, and give it to them. Now you've got a customer for your open source work, which is something you can most definitely put on your resume.

At the end of the day, you'll have to decide if you're willing to figure out what it takes to create opportunity for yourself, or if you're willing to settle for opportunities advertised to you.

Good luck, and stay awesome. And props to you for asking this question in the first place.