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What do I need to do?

2 points by maserati ↗ HN
Hi everybody, I am from Northern California. I am a guy working full time in health care field for 8 years trying to switch to a web development career. I have no experience working on a company as a developer. I learned web development through self study and hard work. I used ASP.Net framework ,VB.Net and C#. I have no Computer Science degree or computer related courses. I just read books and constantly learning new ideas through internet surfing and building/tweaking my side projects. For my web dev experiences, I built a social networking site where users can share/create their music playlist, users can upload photos and share them with their friends, a chatroom using ajax long polling technique, private messaging, users can create their friends list, etc. My latest project is a site where users can post stories, comment on other stories, and rate on other stories. If you're interested to see them, email me so that I can give you the links for those sites.

Everytime I see a job opportunity in ASP.NET such as in Craigslist, I applied for it but always have no response. I also included the links to my created sites. It's been already a year that I'm sending emails and resumes but nobody even showed interest. I'm guessing it's because I don't have web development experience in a company. What do you think I need to do?

If you're the employer, are you gonna hire me? Do I need to go to school and get some related courses in web development? I'm not asking for a full time job right away, part-time will be fine for me. All I need is a break in my caregiving job for 8 years and to learn more about web development.

4 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 19.6 ms ] thread
delano
Spend time on an open source project.
Mz
If you haven't already, you could pick up a copy of "What color is your parachute?" which has some good tips on how to effectively switch fields. Also, although I think it is a great idea to ask for feedback here, do keep in mind that there is a recession on. Job-hunting tends to take more time in a recession.
vyrotek
Unfortunately, from my perspective its still an 'employers market'. Meaning, there are still many senior developers out there with degrees and experience really needing jobs. Employers are able to get those folks for less than they could only a few years ago.

I'm a .Net developer and the market is pretty good here in Utah for us. Employers seem to look first at the experience and then for a degree. At my past jobs I worked with some awesome developers without a degree.

So, questions. Are you willing to move? Are you just looking for consulting work or a full-time job? One of my last jobs was building healthcare information systems for hospitals. Shoot me an email and I'll check out your projects.

maserati
Sorry, I'm not interested in moving. All I need is to gain experience and more knowledge in web development and extra income would be great. Anyways thank you. Also I send you the links to my projects.