Tell HN: I used to be homeless and want to work as a software developer
I have a degree in the hard sciences and went through a period of homelessness during which I started teaching myself how to program.
I have been on the hunt for developer positions in the United Kingdom without any luck. I am also open to developer positions else where in Europe.
I am reaching out to the great community here in hopes that there are hiring managers/employees who can give me an opportunity at interviews and also for any advice that may help get a foot into the door.
Although I welcome opportunities all over the UK and Europe, I am located in a rainy city in northen England so I have a preference towards any opportunities or leads in my area.
Thank you for being a humanitarian and enjoy your holidays!
136 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] thread1. Register at LinkedIn, fill in your profile as much as you can (especially "skills" section) - it will start offering you matching opportunities. Also, you can find some recruiters there - they will be very happy to make you close the vacancies they're working on.
2. I believe UK also has some startup hubs, but I know only one in Oslo, Norway - and they have a page which lists all jobs in their member companies: https://jobs.startuplab.no/ - note that these are startups, so quite small companies, but I'm aware of at least one case when they helped relocating a non-EU citizen to Norway.
Something such as running your own business is a good option.
what could you (or someone else :)) suggest for the CV, if there were some family problems which came with mental/health issues for the past year, where I didn't found time to work on a project or get it finished?
edit: especially for linkedin and similiar sites
* If it's less than a year, you don't need to explain it or justify it. Just leave it blank on the CV and in the interview, say something like, "...and then I took some time off to take care of a family member."
* If it's more than a year, you still don't need to explain it or justify it, but you should acknowledge it and explain what you've done to make sure you stay sharp. "...and then I took some time off to take care of a family member, but I don't want to get rusty so I've been [whatever]." Don't BS on that last part, good interviewers will delve in to it just like they would for a job. If you say you've been taking Pluralsight courses on ML, I'm going to ask what you learned.
* Seriously don't explain it or justify it. Even if it's totally reasonable, just give me one vague sentence and get back to the stuff that's relevant to the job interview.
Good luck!
Both at the time, because it keeps you active, and later, because it shows character.
Shoot us a note a jobs@epistemic.ai - we build an AI knowledge engine to map and navigate the biomedical knowledge. I’d like to connect.
While you're job hunting, if you haven't already, start building something moderately technical. You don't have to build anything that cures cancer, but if you can build a reasonably complex project consisting of at least two independent modules (say, a frontend and a backend) with a modern stack, you should have a reasonable time finding a job.
Tech is still the place where one may find lucrative work without a field specific degree, but the part that everyone leaves out is that you have to demonstrate above average talent in some other way first. In any case the practice and knowledge will likely be useful to you. Personally I spent some 5 years building a distributed client/server MMO in my spare time before I finally transitioned to tech and it's amazing to continue to see how much of what I practiced applies to professional development.
Note that my experience is with the U.S. job market so yours may differ.
Edit: additional advice is to leverage your past degree and target software development in the area, if it exists. Especially if it's a place where ML is still young. Programmers are a dime a dozen, but those who can understand and translate between code and applied science are hard to find and very much in demand, though generally at smaller outfits and especially startups. Further, a startup may be more willing to take a risk hiring you if you're ok with sacrificing some pay for a hot resume entry. Once you have solid professional coding experience job hopping is relatively easy, especially if you have hard science/math in your background. And the work will be substantially more interesting than pure coding, IMO.
Get in via QA or support, make some tools. You'll probably be able to transition to engineering.
I'm lucky enough not to have had to go that route but if I ever find myself long-term unemployed, that's my plan-B.
Couple that with SharePoint not being great at its core competency (collaborative editing of MS office files, which ends in data being lost pretty much every time I’ve used it), and bingo, it isn’t usable for much of anything.
If you can demonstrate good programming skills I think most companies would still hire you even without past job experience (I assume that's what you mean by portfolio - if you mean Github projects then in my experience nobody really looks at those).
A CS degree is also irrelevant - pretty much all programming jobs in the UK just want any technical degree. In all the companies I've worked in most people did maths, physics, engineering or CS, but CS was still a minority.
If you can program well then the real difficulty will be getting your CV past HR since they probably will dismiss it based on lack of experience. I'm not sure how to solve that but asking here seems like a decent thing to do.
This makes me so sad. As a hiring official I love reading through an applicants commits. It says so much about their personality, what they choose to say, when they choose to commit, their attention to detail when they think nobody is “really” looking.
I've spoken to recruiters who pretend I didn't say anything when I mention my GitHub account. I think if enough people don't have open source / pet projects, it seems hard for a non-tech to evaluate it.
Whereas a CTO / hiring tech lead would probably learn more about a person by viewing commits than the resumé.
Come contribute to https://github.com/rubyforgood/voices-of-consent if you'd like!
Continue developing your portfolio while you continue to job search.
Eventually your resume will rival your portfolio, but you gotta start somehow, and this is one how.
As others have said, in lieu of a recent degree, you need a portfolio. Happy to help you understand how your previous experiences or projects might map to a portfolio - work with what you've got :) This doesn't necessarily have to be totally technical; "soft skills" are core too. Also, LinkedIn is the way to go for finding local work. Happy to critique your current profile too.
In the past I have helped several people, including international candidates, navigate the UK recruitment process to secure positions in this field and academia.
Question:
- When did you get your previous degree?
Depending on when this was, this could enable you to apply for graduate programmes.
Likewise, as someone mentioned below, leveraging your undergraduate knowledge to position yourself for a job at the intersection of software development and that domain might be a good option.
I got my previous degree in 2016 but I really don't want to do anything related to my previous degree unless it is in robotics/ autonomous systems because it is now mostly software driven unlike in the past.
However, Newcastle is much cheaper so you'd be able to afford a generally better lifestyle that might make you feel more comfortable and happy. For example, a nicer apartment that you don't have to share, more cash to save for a rainy day, etc.
I'd second that: work in a large company or a startup (if that interests you) in London for a couple of years to learn the ropes and build your career.
Then the world (or the North East) is your oyster. Or course, it's always difficult to move once you've settled down, even in London.
Of course. I'm Jay, and have updated my profile to include my email.
That's good to know and sounds like it was a good degree.
My email is in my profile.
tom@strafos.aero
2. Use that as a base to build a public portfolio
3. There are many code golf based platform such as https://www.hackerrank.com/ - Get an account and practice. Others without account - https://projecteuler.net/
4. Also sites which may or may not be great at job hunting - https://hired.co.uk/, https://linkedin.com/
5. Go to meetups - find meetups in meetup.com or google mailing lists. Search for User Groups in your area. London is obviously the best place(sheer numbers) to do this in the U.K. but Edinburgh and other cities should have in some form or another. Universities. A lot of companies keep holding tech events in their offices - that is a good way to get a foot in the door.
6. Build something useful and demoable - search for things you have interest in.
7. Apply to early career/internship programs at companies
All the very best.
While you look for work, may be you can find some casual freelance gigs from upwork.com . It takes a while to get good reputation on upwork, but once you do, finding gigs gets much easier and protects you if you ever lose your job. So worth doing this in my opinion. Tip on finding work at upwork - look for work that is physically closer to you and then apply for it. Geographical proximity often is a good trust indicator and hence helps in winning work. And be patient, it takes a some time to start getting steady supply of gigs.
There is also toptal.com and few other similar sites, you will need to pass their evaluation, but once you do, they can get you some contract positions where you can work remotely for a company. They also pay well and usually there is enough work to go around.
I wish you the best of luck in your job search.
Edit: Here's an example of how I'm writing bids. Am I doing it wrong?
Proposal:
> About us:
> I manage social media accounts, specifically on Instagram, and I am a seeking a more efficient solution.
> What we're looking for:
> An experienced web developer to create a simple web application that displays whether or not a particular Instagram account is following you (the account) back without clicking on their profile. (See attachment) [this is an image that shows how they want the UI to display this to look]
They proposed $300, I responded to their posting by bidding only $100 with the following cover letter:
> I currently study Computer Science at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. I have built a variety of applications, including browser extensions that modify web-pages to add functionality, for my personal usage and for my friends.
> I am currently attempting to start working as a freelance web developer. Were you to hire me for this project you would be my first client. I understand that as a result you will naturally be hesitant to work with me, and I am therefore bidding below the market rate to account for the risk you are taking.
> Do you have any questions about the job description?
> My understanding is that you visit instagram.com using Google Chrome, and that you want a Chrome extension you can install on your computer that will add the text “follows you” next to the username of anyone that follows you. Is this correct?
> Unfortunately, Instagram has restricted its publicly-available API so that the list of people following you can no longer be queried. As a result, I will have to write a program that queries the undocumented internal API the Instagram applications use. Because it is only intended for internal usage Instagram developers may make changes to the API unexpectedly. Historically it has been relatively stable, but neither I nor anyone else can guarantee to you how long an application that uses Instagram’s internal API will work without needing updates. Is that acceptable to you?
> I have the experience necessary to solve every aspect of your task, if I have understood it correctly. I have made applications that query private, internal APIs, and I have made browser extensions that add to existing user interfaces.
I will also not mention the part about being a student. A it is irrelevant and makes me doubt your focus.
Have you verified buyers history? Have they spent money on the platform, substantial money?
* community contributions - I do not find it special any more, but I learned that it is not the default: I have basically millions of people using text and code I created. Again, it's a side effect of the work, but it's also social proof, probably more so than a degree, since the results are tangible. Some people are immediately amazed by this.
* open source: as said above, have some kind of portfolio - it so easy today - in fact, if I weren't that busy right now, this would be the part I would focus on in my position - have well defined clear fun portfolio projects with tangible goals and a somewhat coherent story, maybe around current topics like devops, AR or ML (which are full of unsolved or tedious problems btw)
* be a great generalist: you need the first job or jobs to find some direction you want to go in; but for an entry it's great to be a generalist; me, you can throw frontend-fixes, search engines, ML data pipelines or web API design tasks; documentation or presentations at me - I'll work it out and help you win. Not sure if that helped, but I see people specializing in niches, and not really learning much beyond their focus field is a bit dis-encouraging
* attend meetups and talk to people; many meetups today are hosted by companies and you can have informal chats, which I find much more relaxing than interviews and whiteboard coding questions
* stand out - be in top 10% of kaggle or any other competitive programming site and I would bet jobs would hunt you, not the other way around
The other way to look at it:
Find work at a place, where other programmers won't go. Many orgs are desperate for a software literate IT guy, maybe you find some entry in such way.
Tl;dr
The software development world today is totally different; you can go out and program something useful and get it into the hand of millions of people simpler than ever. It takes some courage to start and put things out there, polish and nourish them. Good luck!
Higher-paying gigs want some bit of track record and those small websites and github stuff are the lowest hanging fruits for me imo.
I do wonder, is there an equivalent to Kaggle in other areas in software (not for data science)?
It's easier for him to find a tech job in the UK (there are plenty) than it is to move to the US and get a tech job (for which he'd need to get sponsored by a company).
The biggest difference between US and UK tech isn't job 'quantity', it's job 'quality' (the culture in the US is better imo). But I'm not sure that's OP's priority currently.
Founder and former homeless here. Have a European/U.K. presence and would love to talk.
Assuming you’re not already a citizen or a lawful permanent resident, your best routes to investigate would be an H-1B petition (now is a good time to talk to US employers about this) or working for a multinational company like this one for a minimum of 12 months, then petitioning for an L-1B visa.
You’d be able to visit the US office whilst working for the U.K. entity by getting a B-1 visa and that’ll let you evaluate if you want to spend several years living in the US.
Can I post a job ad?
Please don't post job ads as submissions to HN.
A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month. Most job ads are welcome there. But only an account called whoishiring[1] is allowed to submit the thread itself. This prevents a race to post it first.
Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down, then fall steadily, and only one should be on the front page at a time.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring
If you were just trying to let him know about the Who's Hiring thread, it was a weird way to start your comment.
It's true that the "Who Wants to Be Hired" monthly submissions would also be a great resource for the OP.
Hiring in general and especially in software is FUBAR. It doesn't matter how good you are at doing the work, all that matters is your contact network and/or how good you are at the hiring process.