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Ask HN: Newish developer, no college, what to apply for?

11 points by lacksconfidence ↗ HN
A little background, I'm an aspiring developer in his late 20's. I first started programming by teaching myself C at age 13 to tweak a CircleMUD game. That lasted until i learned about women. I didn't do any more programming until about 21 when i taught myself AutoIT and wrote a bot to play the boring parts of EVE online. Fast forward a couple more years to 2008 and i taught myself PHP to write a program that reads in torrent RSS feeds and parses out TV episode name/season/episode. Once it has this in its database it applies user defined favorites to auto-forward specific titles/seasons/etc .torrent files to a download client. This was downloaded by a few thousand users while i was maintaining it, and is now being maintained by another developer as I have moved on.

I haven't been to college. Up until early last year i was working general customer service jobs. When the place i was working for went under i opened up my search and ended up working online for a small company doing PHP Development. In that time i have helped build the a penny auction system utilizing Redis for live auctions, various generic utilities to speed up our development of admin interfaces to e-commerce sites, and more. I love to dig through API code to understand what it does and I have become the go-to person for understanding framework issues on all of our companies sites.

Moving forward i'm very interested in dealing with bigger data. I've been learning about hadoop/cascading/storm and am very curious about Nathan Marz method for beating the CAP theorem( http://nathanmarz.com/blog/how-to-beat-the-cap-theorem.html )

tl;dr: no college, some self-taught programming experience, almost 1 year employed as php developer. Interested in branching to python/ruby/<insert something interesting>. Naturally curious.

So this finally leads to my question, what am i qualified for? I live in silicon valley and would like to find a local job where i can work with smart people and learn more than i possibly could on my own. Whenever i look at job posting(ex. stack overflow) most postings say 'Must have BS from elite school' or something to the equivalent. I don't really feel that my one year of programming even matches the 'BS degree or equivalent work experience' that seems to be the minimum for local development jobs.

Should i be looking for Intern jobs? Should i be applying to average developer jobs instead of intern? Every time i browse the job boards i just leave feeling completely un-qualified.

EDIT: Also thought i should add i've been using linux on the desktop since the late 90s and also fill a Systems Administrator role in the company setting up/maintaining apache, nginx, varnish, mysql, elasticsearch, redis, etc. daemon configurations.

9 comments

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eternalban
My advice is to start contributing to open source and participate in knowledge forums such as Stackoverflow.com. (Even if you hit on a better idea/advice, the above is a win for you so it is not wasted time by any means.)

If you demonstrate your ability to produce working code, you will find that you have market value.

If in addition to this you establish a record of effective thinking (c.f. stackoverflow) then you can further address any possible concern that may be raised by the lack of formal education in the field.

lacksconfidence
Thanks for the feedback. I've recently opened up a github account. My contributions thus far are minimal(bug reports and a documentation patch) but I am watching the Symfony (php framework we use) issues page to see if there is anything i could write a patch for outside work hours. A small goal i have set for myself is to get enough commits to be in the top 100 of http://symfony.com/contributors, but so far i haven't found the right place to contribute.

What you say makes sense and I will focus on getting some modern code out there with my name attached. My previous open source php app was the first i wrote and i'm not particularly proud of the code when looking back at it. Combine that with the fact that it is basically an app supporting illegal activities(downloading tv shows via torrents) and I have decided not to include it in my resume.

pdenya
Applying for jobs isn't going to hurt you in any way. Go to a few interviews at companies looking for jr devs or devs and see how you do. If you don't get the jobs, ask for feedback. If nothing else you'll get some practice interviewing.
lacksconfidence
Thanks for the reply. It seems obvious but its something i have done very little of so far. Can't get a job without applying for them.
marquis
Perhaps try one of the new bootcamps and get a couple of months of code education. You sound like the kind of person who would be a good intern hire, according to your post you have plenty of self-motivation which counts in your favour.
lacksconfidence
I'm unfamiliar with the boot camps you mention, and googling turns up primarily fitness related links. I did turn up http://devbootcamp.com/ but its scary to quit my job and spend 10 weeks + job search time without an income. Even still it sounds tempting and i will run some numbers to see if its possible to save enough in time.
marquis
Yes, you have a good point about not being able to take time off work. I am sure this is blocking a lot of people from upping their education. Would night school be too much of a drain? There must be evening classes for programming in SV somewhere.
lacksconfidence
Night school is certainly possible, although i'm not really sure where. I've looked into SJSU but it seems there would be at least 2 semesters of pre-req's before getting into the interesting upper level CS courses.

Still I have tried to get a basic understanding of what is taught in cs courses. To that end I am currently in the middle of watching the 20 lectures in intro to data structures ( http://www.youtube.com/user/UNSWelearning#p/u/195/RpRRUQFbeP... ) but i don't feel its quite the same to watch a course as it is to participate in the labs and assignments. So far i have an understanding of basic search algo's and big O notation from the course, and learning more.

marquis
Better than nightschool would be to spend time developing your own product. Look around you, and any time you run into a problem (I wish I could do X easier or cheaper) think if you could build a system that does that. There are plenty of hacker spaces: once you have a project in mind take your latop and go hang out, find a space you like and just get to work. You'll naturally start to interact with others, find out about free weekend classes, conferences etc. Once you start building your own project you'll learn fast (and go ahead - make a lot of mistakes! It's important). Having a working project that does something useful and interesting is a very, very good resume. Use Show HN to your benefit too.

I also read above you are contributing to open source projects: stay subscribed and be proactive if a bug or feature comes up that you think you can tackle.

Good luck!