Ask HN: Career building suggestions for a self-taught dev?

1 pointsby deepdesai9 anni fa1 comments

Hey! So I've had an interesting couple of years professionally, and I've spent the bulk of my time teaching myself how to code. I recently released my first project – www.jamsontoast.com At first glance it's probably super easy to dismiss as 'just a music player' but if you spend some time with it, you might be able to tell that I put some serious effort into it.

I wanted to get some opinions on how I would go about beginning a career with my newly acquired skills. I am really interested on the product side of things, and have an eye for good design. More importantly I am open to (and quick at!) learning new things. I am extremely interested in mixed reality, because there is probably a lot of work to be done there in terms of interaction design. I think MR in particular would be a good fit for me because I think I'd do quite well at the intersection of design and engineering – I'm not the person to ask how to shave milliseconds off your DB reads/writes.

I think a pretty obvious move for me to make would be to get an actual job as a developer. I'm working on a freelance project at the moment. But I really want to go work at more interesting places – small to growing startups would be ideal, because that's a place where I can work on product today, while also contributing to strategy for tomorrow. And I'm working on trying to make that happen, but so far I'm mostly getting the silent treatment. I'm not sure how I'd go about presenting myself as an employable self-taught dev. I'd imagine that in India, with its massive supply of CompSci grads, I don't really stand out. I'm more than happy to move elsewhere, but I'd imagine that just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity. Also my professional network in this industry is somewhere between lacking to non-existent. It probably doesn't help that I don't use any personal social media accounts.

Looking forward to your suggestions!

1 comments

deepdesai9 anni fa

My background, in a nutshell: I graduated with a marketing degree from a school in upstate NY, was working in Manhattan at an ad agency. My US visa expired, so I moved back to India, where I was doing similar marketing strategy stuff in Mumbai, both at agencies and in-house at organizations. Brief detour in the middle where I co-founded a (now defunct) startup which was trying to build an Expedia-like portal for medical tourism. Now I'm here, figuring out what's next.