Ask HN: How to get web development career on track from being homeless?
I saw another post by a homeless dev in CO after doing some searches to see if there were others out there like me.
I got here due to medical issues that have finally come to being managed after 3 years.
I currently have zero cash, I am fairly new to Portland so I do not have friends and I have no family to lean on for support. I have 10 years of web dev experience, the last 3 years being very spotty; only a few contract jobs in and out.
I have a bed in a shelter for now.
I have tapped into the public health insurance so I can continue my medical visits.
I have food stamps.
I have a good laptop
I am often on a university campus using the library for charging and net.
My main problem is getting a job. This is where you come in HN community, please let me know what you all think or if you can relate.
My main languages are PHP and Python. I have extensive front end experience with Javascript as well.
No one is really looking for a PHP developer right now. And all the front end jobs want React/Redux experience or Angular. I have looked up and down on gigs and postings on Craigslist every single day.
Question: What do I do? All the recruiters think I am fit for a senior level position, but with 3 years of on and off programming I am a bit rusty and I am afraid if I apply and fail skills tests at too many places word will get around.
I really just want a relaxed junior level position, but those are hard to find. Everyone wants senior level guys in React and other frameworks I do not have. (Though I am currently teaching myself React and do know a good bit now.)
I just want to get my career back on track and get out of this shelter
Any advice for work, besides getting a min wage job. What do I do to get my web dev career back on track?
Thanks for any and all comments and my email is in my profile
204 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadYou could look for contract work to rebuild your skills
This is important, watch https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Consider using the skills you do have to solve a real world problem, provide a service that people do want and create something new.
You can do this with PHP, Ubuntu loaded onto the laptop and Apache running on localhost. With progressive web apps your legacy PHP code with a bit of Google demo code could pass as a reasonable app.
But what to write in a world where everything has been written already? Why write yet another Facebook with deluded dreams that it is to take on the world with 4 billion subscribers before teatime?
This is where you have to be you. Maybe in your recent healthcare there has been a problem whereby the advice you have needed has not been so easy for healthcare practitioners to get to you. Perhaps this could be solved with regular emails and an app, neat usable templates so that the patient can provide the required feedback so the doctors know if progress (or lack of) can be put down to any identifiable factor, e.g. not doing the exercises, taking the pills or eating the right food.
If you find a solution that works for you and people like you in the medical practice that you have been processed by then maybe there can be a proper trial in this mystery patient communication app that keeps people and their recovery on track.
Maybe this app that has not been written yet has not been written yet as the people in big pharma don't understand the problem space, the patient perspective and the medical practice perspective.
Go joint venture with a doctor who wants to scratch the same itch as you do, a doctor with a thousand other patients in the same boat, maybe make the thing a paid for service, perhaps based on a kind of 'dollar shave' model where what is being sent out in the post is not a medicine but maybe an applicator that costs pennies, a test kit that can be done at home, whatever it may be. But then make the product not whatever gets sent out in the post, make it so that Mr Doctor is more Football Coach, giving pertinent advice in a email type of way, virtualised and sent out to help however many patients on to the next step of their recovery.
Maybe tailor this to different profiles - kids, mid life crisis folk, pregnant mums, the elderly, whomever is a sub-target demographic. Make the product not the bits of plastic that get sent in the post but a wider service that includes the emails. Heck, you could even run such a thing for smoking cessation, giving the support and patches needed to get people through it 'dollar shave club' style, where people ultimately end up paying for the support not the patches.
Most of your code could be 'if statements' and beautiful prose, words tightened and given UX goodness in a way your doctor partner could not do.
Make the consent form like a cookie notice, make payment easy with the new payments API. Get the doctor to get the medical practice on board, providing support for forming a legit company, legal advice and accounting service during the 'trial period'.
You might have to dumpster dive and put up with the sheltered accomodation for six months to get such a thing together, plus you might only have five customers on day one, six months down the line. But put incentives as per affiliate marketing to the thing, make it white-labelable and get every medical practice in the land to want to take up whatever this mystery service is to be based on the solid results of your initial trial.
Make your design for the project be about solving the itch that has led you to suffer three years of whatever the medical problems have been, look inside your self and the harsh experience you have had, how would you make it better for the next guy, the next girl, their kids and their grandparents? What can you with your skills and exper...
The guy is literally homeless. How could he get more "ramen noodle" than that?
This isn't the time to be picky about working for The Man. Now is the time to get some cash and get his life back on track. He can worry about whether he's solving "real world problems" when he has a roof over his head, some money in his pocket, and a resume that lets him pick and choose.
Just make programming your life until you land a job. No one cares about your personal life if you can get the job done. Don't let it hold you back.
If I were in your shoos I would accept any programming jobe, and after a year may be you can change your jobe.
Some work places may not ask you for skill tests. If I were in your shoos I would apply to all of them. Go to the the interview even if you have very low chance to be recqruited. At least you will learn what is asked and next time you will have some idea about how to reply.
You can accept low salary if you want to increase your chace.
Edit: imo, Also don't deal with recruiters they'll plug anything/anyone for a CTO position if they can pull the commission, although I guess maybe as a way to practice interviewing.
Calling myself out here. I was half asleep when I wrote the parent comment. Nicer language would be:
My feeling is that recruiters can be great partners is you learn to work with them effectively.
Look for more boring jobs that require web development skills, unless you're really stuck on the title.
You know PHP. I did too, once. I made the mistake of taking on a Magento project a decade ago, suffered through it, and I still get hounded by recruiters desperate for PHP developers who know Magento. That fucking platform still powers 99% of the entire e-commerce space; version 2 was released recently and by many accounts it's even worse than v1, which means people who made the mistake of using it are going to need support for it. The demand for PHP developers is still very much there.
You know Python. You can get jobs knowing just that. There are lots of relaxed junior-level *-analyst positions in many domains requiring nothing more than scripting skills and a brain, which you clearly have. I see job postings all the time looking for Django devs. Lots of businesses need reporting-type stuff done, business analytics, ETL, that sort of stuff. Shady businesses always want web scrapers written.
With 10+ years in web development, you might also want to take a shot at jobs involving web application security-- either securing or breaking it.
Just to put it in perspective-- my job title has nothing to do with web development, yet it is an incidentally significant portion of what I do. Best job of my life, and I never would have found it looking for "web developer" jobs, since that's not what they thought they needed when they hired me.
Crawl LinkedIn, not Craigslist. All you'll get from Craigslist are couches, crabs, and people who want you to build out scalable PCI-compliant e-commerce solutions with a full complement of product photography for their hobby business for $500, payable upon delivery. And when they sense your desperation, they'll withhold even that until you go away.
Best of luck to you.
I share office space with a company that does SME consulting work and they do heaps of Magento, Wordpress and the like. Everyone's getting paid and nobody is complaining.
For a past python developer, trying out something like Django a bit with converting a past project would be less work than react for a js developer and probably a good refresher.
But, if Facebook actually hires react engineers everywhere and just doesn't like their own job platform, then they probably hire php engineers everywhere as php is the platform they are the most famous for sinking money into modernizing.. So again, I'm left to wonder why anyone who already knows php would be told to learn react before looking for a job.
It's a lot like always being told to learn Ruby on Rails a few years back even if you knew nothing at all about ruby. I wonder where all those ruby illiterate RoR engineers ended up.
Granted, I don't know your market, but if it's outside the typical 5-10 cities, that might be the problem.
Ok, so let's assume Facebook is hiring today and for the last 5 years in 10 job markets.
Damn hard to find a company actually using it in many markets for most of that time.
Think about it, if two or more applicants have experience, but one also has experience in the exact technology already used at the place, that person is ahead in the game.
I frankly would keep quiet about the personal situation, I think everybody understands if you do. He's not looking for charity because he's homeless, he wants a job because he's a professional developer.
The idea that you should learn modern JS and then react to apply for react jobs with no real world experience is a bad one for someone with work history in 2 languages that are in the top 10.. Particularly if they are in a rather desperate situation.
"I have extensive front end experience with Javascript as well."
"No one is really looking for a PHP developer right now. And all the front end jobs want React/Redux experience or Angular."
So, not learning React doesn't seem like a good call unless he wants to stay in the backend. No matter what he will be learning now, he will not have "real world experience" with it. All he can do between jobs is learn. What's your advice exactly? What does "looking at how Python has progressed" even mean?
Take an existing project you wrote in python and modernize it for newer style, maybe it was in legacy 2.X for compatibility with something and needs to be updated. Maybe convert to a python framework that is popular now (there's not so much churn in python so a past framework might just be updated.)
I'm sorry that isn't as dramatic as taking some knowledge of past JavaScript, learning additions that introduce a different paradigm and then an entire new style of development complete with transpiling and maybe typescript.. and then trying to keep it running with churn in the whole bunch of libraries and tools that are in that bizarre front end process.. While not seeming to have any previous experience with compiled languages and related development processes.
Taking a past project and modernizing it allows you to mix discussion of real world experience with your understanding of new things. Where things are just updates you blur perception and significance of the age of your real world experiences.
But switching completely to patterns, code and development processes you have never used before even by analogy is taking that to the most tenuous extreme..
Who knows maybe the OP's past JS experience was in SPAs in a functional style using node tools and an IDE and react is almost reasonable.. But that seems unlikely if python and php were the first languages the OP thinks of.
It makes more sense to milk and refresh past connections to Python to find a new subfield than to try to stay in web development by switching to JS (if it was your 3rd language from 3 years ago) to move from Backend to frontend in the months right before almost every language will get an opportunity on the frontend..
This is not true. I think you'll find a lot of new projects being written in PHP 7.2 and/or using some newer framework, like Laravel.
There is nothing wrong with getting PHP work. PHP is not going away anytime soon, and the language has improved a lot since 5.6.
The unpopularity of PHP actually means there are more PHP jobs emerging. Nobody wants to swap out of a functional old system, but the younger folk are going to go after new, sexy, technologies.
In 2007/2008, I'd been doing PHP for 11ish years; started in early 96 with PHP/FI, with vb & notes in the early 90s before that. I kept doing some PHP, but moved primarily to spring/java (via grails). enjoyable, learned a lot, but it always felt clunky and convoluted (I never became as proficient as I wanted in that stack). After several years, I 'came back' to the PHP world. A lot of the early warts/problems were still there, but you could avoid them more or less entirely if you chose to build with the new crop of composer packages and psr-compatible frameworks.
The speed of PHP7+ is comparatively amazing (which, arguably, shows how 'slow' it was before!). PHP 5.6 (2014) was roughly twice as fast as PHP 5.3 (2009). PHP 7.2 (2017) is roughly 2-3x faster than PHP 5.6. In the 8+ years I 'left' PHP (was still using it, just not as primary day to day), the performance doubled, then doubled again. Still not as fast as 'pure' java/c/whatever, but incredible improvements all the same. Given that the majority of my dev work involves a lot of 'line of business' stuff with a SQL database as a central piece, db queries are almost always the biggest performance issue, the relative speed of PHP vs other stacks was even less of an issue for my real world scenarios.
Upcoming experimental JIT stuff looks to make an even bigger improvement in some areas.
Some comparisons were from memory, some from https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evo...
This is true in most settings, from office jobs to the service industry.
Always good to remind yourself that usually professional respect comes from your salary, not the other way around.
As you've worked contract jobs recently, I agree with the sentiment others have already mentioned regarding working on applications or open source projects to build a portfolio.
PHP skills are needed on that site quite a bit. It may not be posh but it will get some money in your pocket and give you something to do. Look at ziprecruiter and see if there are any jobs in your area that you would fit. Also check linkedin and see if any of your old workmates can throw you some freelance.
Put your resume on LinkedIn.
Please share the links & many of us we'll re-share them on social media.
Email me. Seriously.
This isn't a technical critique … I think Vue and React are very similar … just a suggestion in terms of job searching. Best of luck!
- Take advantage of any opportunity that sounds legit, like reaching out to leesalminen from this comment => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685318
- Work out a detailed, simple, and clear plan for you're going to practice coding as if it were your full time job, because you may need to ask people for help (access to a computer, a safe place to store a computer, a place to clean up & prepare for interviews, etc.)
- Never, ever get down on yourself for doing what you gotta do to survive & get back on your feet
- To the extent that you can, be careful about who you choose share the realities of your situation with, especially during interviews, as you need employers to think that hiring you is a good business decision, and being homeless (in my opinion) has nothing to do with that
- Despite the fact that many people might suggest you get a minimum wage job, that's going to be a big time suck, and if you can find a way to survive without the job, you may wanna use that time to practice coding & interviewing instead (it might be possible to work out a deal with a employer where you can work on a flexible schedule, but don't lose sight of the fact that flipping burgers will not do much to make you better at interviewing for coding jobs)
- Stay positive when telling your story, because the more people are blown away by how you can stay upbeat as you deal with some tough stuff, the more they're going to want to help you
- If you want to practice interviewing, hear some thoughts on how to attract recruiters, or just have someone listen while you vent, I'd be happy to carve out some time for you (personal info is in my profile)
- Go forth and kick ass
Before everyone goes crazy, I am not saying that people should milk the benefits, but when you are struggling to make ends meet and don't have alternatives those benefits can be crucial to not only survival, but overall general happiness and feeling of security.
If you can’t make enough to live on otherwise, by all means milk the benefits. I’ll say it.
Basically, the benefits are so poor and inconsistent that you can't realistically aspire to live off of them.
I never qualified for welfare but had to claim 4 dependents and lie about my income (120% of which went to rent or late payment thereof) just to collect $600 a month in food stamps (which included 2 infants requiring non-dairy formula not covered by WIC), and they did their damndest to find a reason to kick me off the payroll every 3 months by constantly post-dating requests for documentation or conveniently losing documents I did send in on time. It worked quite a few times and we got nothing in those months. But the idea is that the benefits are enough to keep you/dependents from starving to death. You can't just collect benefits and not expect to supplement it with your own labor.
Too late :)
> the propaganda of people "abusing" welfare is a 99% political agenda.
I agree that this sort of message is crafted to create moral outrage and, thereby, an outsized negative response to welfare as a whole. I initially responded in this way, but I quickly changed my mind when I heard the message that it's just so little.
That is, even accepting the likely-inflated numbers claimed for the abuse, it's such a small percentage of overall tax revenue (and even of social programs), partly because the benefits are so meager to begin with, that it's simply not worth consideration or discussion.
The far more interesting (political/economic) question, to me, is whether it does more good than harm.
In this particular case, I absolutely agree with ancestor-comments that "milking" the benefits rather than risking losing them by working a low-wage job is best, and not just for the OP, but for society and the economy as a whole. The faster the OP gets back "on his feet" and is producing near full capability and is earning (and paying taxes on) full wages, the better it is for everyone.
Neither society nor the economy are a zero-sum game, after all.
Thanks again!
https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/ipresence-php-develop...
https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/x-team-php-developer-...
https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/onthegosystems-senior...
https://www.upwork.com/o/jobs/browse/?q=%22php%22
https://www.indeed.com/q-PHP-jobs.html
(Just a few examples)
I think your best course of action is to spend time preparing for interviews and take any that you can get. Part of this preparation includes learning the popular JS frameworks, but a lot of companies need PHP developers too.
Hopefully you will interview well, but if you don't, word doesn't "get around" between companies as much as you think -- they are afraid of being sued if they talk about why they passed on a candidate.
There are other upsides to interviewing, even if you fail. One is that you get some practice. Another is that you got your foot in the door, and even if you weren't suited for a job you interviewed for, someone at the company might know of another opening that is a better fit.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you should get in touch with any connections you have in tech, such as old coworkers, and let them know you are looking for a job. A personal reference is by far the best way to get your foot in the door.