Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?

How old are you? If you're young (teen/early 20s) the traditional answer is to attend a decent public university and get a CS degree. If you're already an ok programmer you should find it relatively easy (the math parts are mostly only dominant in the 2-3 semesters - calculus, algebra, probability, etc).

Another option is to figure out an area that interests you and build something interesting (even if simple) and release it online. It's ok if it's released for free with no way to monetize it, your goal is to show you can program something non-trivial from 0 to 1.0 (both in terms of skill and wherewithal).

I found a local placing hiring Ruby developers, and applied. They had a take home project, so I went to Borders and bought Hartl's Rails book and ended up getting hired.

I had used a few other languages before but hadn't done much in the way of web stuff (this was almost 15 years ago)

I'd say try to find places that are looking for people that know things that you've been playing around with. Bring code to show them and be prepared to demonstrate what you know but don't pretend to know anything you don't.

Good luck!

As a domain expert in something else who brings extra value.

Two ways in I have witnessed:

1) Ship something. "App Stores" make that easy. Interviewer can easily download your app(s) and have plenty of material to ask you about during the interview.

2) Get hired into "QA" — preferably for a position that allows you to write (code) tests. Many of our "testers" where I worked moved into engineering when they were seen as willing and able to make the move.

You need the instant credibility that a CS degree provides. A hobbyist will always have to end up proving themselves in each new job and you have to just get lucky on someone willing to take a chance.

Other than that, you could try building out a successful product or freelancing for some time.

This was me years ago. The short answer is: contract work. Consulting or freelance. This is the way to get experience without having to struggle with finding a salaried position.

How do you find opportunities?

Go to LinkedIn, search for staffing companies, and message their recruiters letting them know you are available. They will ask for a resume. However, a contractors/consultant resume is different than a salaried resume. You are open to include projects you’ve worked on in detail without them being part of a “job”.

Do you have a portfolio? If not, a small simple one works.

Bootcamps won’t help.

Feel free to email me. Happy to support you through the process.

Have you considered contribution to an open source project on GitHub? Then in your interview, when your lack of experience comes up, you can point to your open source experience.

Next, consider getting a certification or two. For someone with no experience or formal education in development, it can help.

Finally, if you're losing out to more experienced candidates, then maybe consider applying to true entry-level jobs to get your foot in the door, where experience is not required.

The same way everyone else does: have a compelling offer (towards the people that have the vacancy). Sometimes your offer can only be compelling if you pass some gates like having a certification or having studied a specific subject etc. If those were the types of jobs you'd like to have, then getting hired means getting a certification/diploma.

The other way around applies too: if a job simply needs you to show them that you can do the work, a portfolio can be enough, just like getting a contract job with a supplier can be (technically that'd be like a portfolio with internal stuff they already know about).

For jobs where you primarily need to be able to do the work:

  - Showing off technical skills in various ways and shapes
  - Showing off interpersonal skills in various ways and shapes
  - Build up experience in non-hiring areas (communities, FOSS, contract work)

That last bit can be hard since contract work usually doesn't allow you to talk about what you did in detail.

Job experience is a cheap proxy for the ability to get things done: if you've had multiple programming jobs, then you've probably been able to get things done and so hiring you is a safe choice. The absence of programming job experience doesn't mean you can't get things done, it just means you need to demonstrate to employers that you can get things done in other ways.

You don't need to do a bootcamp (and I'd argue it would not help at all) rather you need to ship something and then layer that with previous non-programming job experience to demonstrate that you can deliver things as part of a team. My greatest value (as a software engineer) is in the non-code value I bring to my team. Given the choice between 2 candidates, 1 with only experience as a software engineer, and 1 with experience of non-programming jobs, I'd be giving strong consideration to the person with a broader range of experience. Leverage your non-programming work experience to show that you can deliver value.

Regarding passing coding challenges: coding challenges are a very lazy method that companies use to filter out candidates. Passing a coding challenge is easy and doesn't mean much (they're also just as easy to fail) so don't focus on them at all. Your focus should be almost exclusively on interviews, and you should work towards giving the interviewer as much confidence as possible that you'll be a valuable member of their team.

Also, don't assume that levels (junior, mid, senior) correspond to the amount of programming job experience you have. If you can ship code yourself, you're already mid or senior level at most companies.

In my experience it’s not too hard to get an entry level role at consulting companies like Accenture, Deloitte, etc, there are also hundreds of smaller consulting companies. Create a resume that shows,

1. You can answer basic coding questions 2. You’re able to work on a team 3. You have some soft skills to work with customers to learn about what they want, so you can build it for them

The first step is to get that interview with the above resume. Then when you interview be sure to be transparent about your experience and interests and your desire to continue learning. If you’re working with _good_ hiring managers this is the most important thing to them.

Good question, I'm in the same boat.

Working on some simple AI projects to add to my portfolio as a start. OpenAI APIs are pretty easy to use.

I was in a similar situation. I got a programming adjacent job to break into the market - I applied as a developer advocate since I was comfortable enough talking about code, and writing code that wasn’t necessarily up to par for a full time job but enough to be able to write dummy code for other developers to follow. While in that role I started working with engineers at the company to improve my skills, and also started contributing to code that wasn’t part of my responsibilities. 2 years after joining as a developer advocate I transitioned to a developer role. Feel free to DM if you have any questions.

I’ll leave a different answer. You can keep your day job and do a side project as SaaS/product. Do you know a problem in your day job that people would pay for? May be a Chrome extension or an enterprise app plugin. Something that has easy distribution and no up front costs or huge marketing required.

You can then parlay that into a software engineering job or even a more ambitious SaaS.

There's a huge industry of bootcamps and certificates clammering for your money. Don't.

Unless a specific job you want needs a specific certificate, don't pay for them. Your employer probably should pay anyway.

Make a nice portfolio of projects, or contribute to open source projects. That's your resume.

You'll always have trouble getting hired in government or big companies without a degree, tho.

Contribute reliably to an open source project. That's how I got my first programming job.

Having said that, the job market wasn't as rough back then as it is now.

Hobby programmer or programmer at job.

Pick one.

Too much screen time if you do both.

I majored in journalism and worked in tech support for a while, but I got into engineering by seeing manual procedures that I could write software to speed up, so I did that. Management saw the value in it (I helped by pitching this as a force multiplier) and gave me an ever-increasing allotment of my schedule to work on that instead of customer support until it became 100%.

They did try to route me into QA first, but I ignored that and none of them were technical enough to know the difference.

I personally wouldn't do a bootcamp. You probably already have the technical skills a bootcamp would teach (or could learn them more effectively outside a bootcamp setting).

I think you have a few possible paths (many mentioned in sibling comments):

Ship something at least slightly novel of your own. Could be a web site, a web game, a mobile app/game, or something open-source that you've kept at for 6+ months. This will both sharpen your own skills and give an interviewer something concrete to talk about.

Complete Advent of Code. This isn't quite as impressive as the previous, but if someone has completed all of an AoC, that's a pretty positive sign for me. (Note that it's quite possible to cheat at AoC, making this not as strong a signal.)

People hate to hear it, but grind leetcode. Get to the point where 95% of leetcode easy problems are truly easy for you and where medium ones are 50/50 within your grasp. Not only will this sharpen your skills, but it (like AoC) will force you to work through some problems that are initially difficult for you. Just like lifting heavier weights, this exercise will make you stronger as a programmer.

Find an open-source project that has some beginner-friendly tasks. See if you can complete any of those. This will both give you confidence, but also give you a sense of "do I really want to do this as a job?" (A lot of programming is, IMO, the best job in the world. A lot of is...not...)

Keep at the applications. Ask for feedback from failed interviews. Sometimes the true answer is just "we had only one spot and the person we hired interviewed more strongly"; OK, only sensible thing you can do is keep interviewing. Other times, you might get a piece of feedback that really helps.

You could consider pursuing some (charged) AWS certifications. These aren't a major positive signal for a lot of employers, but they're a modestly positive signal for some and for a career-changer, they're probably a better signal of seriousness than a more traditional candidate.

If you find none of that lands you a role, depending on your location, age, and life circumstances, see if any companies near you have internship programs and if one would consider hiring you into their internship program.

I would only do the QA-first route if that was the very last option for you. (It's probably better than a bootcamp, but it's close.) Companies that hire you into QA won't want to quickly lose you from QA into coding. I have a few devs on my team who have gone through that route in our company, so it's definitely possible (and they're good), but I think it's on average a longer road than waiting and coming in the front door to software.

> Without any programming jobs on my CV, what is a good way to penetrate into the market?

freelance work.

Sign up on Upwork.com (or similar). Do a bunch of contracts. Put them on your resume.

I did freelance work for years before deciding i was sick of constantly hustling for clients. Then I applied for jobs and said "here's all the things I've done" and they were like "cool. interview. yup. you're hired"

Also, pro-tip: make contributions to big name open source projects. Not only will it be great to be able to honestly say "yeah, I'm a Rails contributor" (or whatever) BUT it is also great experience for working with others. The large projects tend to have high standards and require good code and unit tests. You'll frequently get a code review and need to make some tweaks before it gets merged. Good experience.

I made friends with a lot of professional programmers so many of them were aware of my skills. Eventually one of them helped me get my first job despite the fact that I had just dropped out of a CS program because of depression. I wish I had a better answer for you, but a strong professional network is always going to be key to your career prospects.

Look out for companies that hire people for the sole purpose of hiring people :). Then be a good programmer there.

1) Put your code on GitHub, add the link to LinkedIn and to your resume. Hiring managers and internal recruiters are inundated with applicants with no experience who expect to learn how to code on the job. The way you differentiate yourself from them is by making it crystal clear that you can do the job on day 1. (If you can't do the job on day 1, work on that before proceeding)

2) Ignore experience requirements, apply for everything (within reason). Some folks seem to have the idea that job descriptions are carefully hand-crafted by the hiring manager to present an exacting description of their needs--but this is rarely the case. Don't be deterred by the ubiquitous requirement for 3 years of experience. That said, don't waste your time applying for senior positions, either.

3) Seriously, apply for everything. Many (if not most) of your applications will never be seen for a human being--particularly when applying for entry-level jobs, which see the highest number of applicants. Even when I'm fully qualified for a job, I assume that I'll get a call back on ~20% of applications. In your situation, the percentage will be much lower, probably less than 5%. Spam accordingly.

4) Track your applications in a spreadsheet, and follow up with a call to HR for the most promising ones. Tell the HR person that you know you're the right person for the job, and politely ask them to give your resume to the hiring manager. If you can find the hiring manager on LinkedIn, shoot them a (brief!) message saying that you've applied, why you think you can do the job, and include a GitHub link. Touchpoints like this elevate you from "just a name on a resume" to "actual human being" in the mind of the hiring manager, which is invaluable.

5) In the immortal words of Barney Stinson, "Ambition is the enemy of success." For your first job, just get a job. It will be infinitely easier to find the right job after you've got some experience on your resume.

6) If you get an interview and don't get the job, hit up the hiring manager on LinkedIn and ask if you can take him to lunch. At lunch, tell them that you've gotten a few interviews, but haven't been able to land a job. Ask for feedback, and make it clear that you aren't asking for politeness but for brutal honesty.

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Get a contract gig job doing something small that you can deliver quality work on. I started in 2001 with a 15/hr job making a static website for a college professor’s group ( had no connections just saw an online Craigslist ad and responded ). That job led to more static websites, which led to some database work, which led to a larger contract developing software to help manage a large event, which led to (many) more php/MySQL applications, which eventually led to interviewing and getting a full time job ( still there after almost two decades but different role ). Over the course of all this, interviewing for each next gig/job got progressively easier.

Here‘s how I did it (pretty much accidentally), but found out it‘s a great platform to start from: I stumbled into an ill-defined semi-technical role in a growing company with a great boss. I was a technical ad creative support specialist, and the role was ripe for automation. Within a year I had automated my frustratingly boring job away completely and was promoted to engineering as the guy with the ability to „make stuff happen“. The road was very much uphill from there, just picked up the skills as needed on the way, showed up, took additional responsibility when nobody else did.

I‘m CTO of a Series C stage scale-up by now.

There are literally hundreds of such jobs out there you can‘t really train for with obscure names, just go browse some listings from companies with a good culture and a way up. Show up with a technical enough mindset and an attitude of making things happen and you‘ll get that job.

If you just go a bit above and beyond of what‘s expected and ask smart people smart questions, you’ll kill it in no time.

Good luck!