Trying to get a foot in the door

ArPharazon

I'd like to work in the software industry as a programmer but with my 2.2 I have had not much interview offers. I'm doing a part time masters but due to personal issues, as well as being a poor student, I'm not going to do well in that either.

Does anybody have advice on how to get a foot in the door? Should I try considering tech support or even software testing? I've considered applying for internships as a way of getting experience.

14ned

ArPharazon wrote: »

I'd like to work in the software industry as a programmer but with my 2.2 I have had not much interview offers. I'm doing a part time masters but due to personal issues, as well as being a poor student, I'm not going to do well in that either.

Does anybody have advice on how to get a foot in the door? Should I try considering tech support or even software testing? I've considered applying for internships as a way of getting experience.

You wouldn't get much interview offers in any case as a graduate. Graduates are a cost to a business, they are negative value add. Nobody wants to hire them really.

As has been said many times here, one approach is to do lots of volunteer work on some well known open source project. Not writing new code, but clearing bugs. Do that for six months and get most of your bug fixes merged, then place on your CV on the very first line how many bugs in well known open source project X you fixed and closed between date X and date Y. Second, third and fourth lines should be links to the bug tracker items you are proudest of fixing with links to the source control commit you submitted on the public commit list.

The rest of your CV you don't need, though do mention you have an honours degree in something software or maths. Keep it to a single A4 sheet. No need to blather about personal interests, they don't care.

If that doesn't have a major effect on your interviews, I would be very surprised. The now head of the clang C++ compiler at Google got hired by closing bugs on the LLVM bug tracker whilst working as a pizza delivery guy after not finding work after graduation. He got noticed, got approached, got hired, and now earns an obscene amount of money as one of the most important mission critical engineers in Google. He never even needed to search for work.

Niall

John_Mc

ArPharazon wrote: »

I'd like to work in the software industry as a programmer but with my 2.2 I have had not much interview offers. I'm doing a part time masters but due to personal issues, as well as being a poor student, I'm not going to do well in that either.

Does anybody have advice on how to get a foot in the door? Should I try considering tech support or even software testing? I've considered applying for internships as a way of getting experience.

I got a 2.2 in comp science and it wasn't a problem for me as a graduate.

As you'll see in many other posts asking similar questions on here - get a Git repo together and/or contribute to open source projects. You'll get interviews if you can demonstrate that you can code to appropriate standards and use source control etc.

Dubba

Here's a list of beginner friendly GitHub projects, in different languages:

https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners

I picked TEAMMATES because it written in Java, and that's what we're taught in college. You'd start with a minor contribution, something like fixing a typo. Then you can move onto bug fixes / refactoring.

Working on OOS will look good on you're CV, plus it'll give you experience in dealing with a large code base, pull request, code reviews, etc.

14ned

Dubba wrote: »

Here's a list of beginner friendly GitHub projects, in different languages:

https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners

I'd recommend against choosing not well known projects.

For example, if you starting closing bug count on cmake (https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/issues) then any employer using cmake as their build system (lots do) is likely to not just interview you, but hire you as quickly as possible because cmake is a bear, and hiring anyone who actually somewhat understands cmake is always going to be a big value add because nobody understands cmake well.

Similarly, closing bug count on Etherium's contract programming language (https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/issues) is going to make you extremely attractive to many large financial institutions doing Etherium R&D. A fresh graduate with deep experience there is likely to walk straight into a 60k+ or 80k+ role, and shortly thereafter be promoted to 120k+ upwards. And if you move to London I hear salaries are approaching 200k sterling now for experienced Etherium devs. Crazy stuff.

My point is choose wisely rather than choose something easy or something in a language you did at uni. If you really must stick with Java, probably closing bugs on AOSP Android makes most sense, though the only people likely to hire you from that are Google, Amazon and a few other Android players. Also there isn't much presence on that in Ireland, you'd likely need to emigrate.

Niall

MunGell

I would agree with @14ned if the goal is to build a strong CV straight away.

My advice would be to start with any project you want (and can) contribute (popular it or not so), then move on to more popular projects if you wish to put some big names into your CV.

Smaller projects usually could provide you with better support as maintainers are less busy and can spend more time helping you get up to speed with the code.