I feel better now but I do think most of you were lucky, I think a microsoft certification may help my chances and won't take years, any opinions on this?

Quote: Original post by SteveDeFacto
I feel better now but I do think most of you were lucky, I think a microsoft certification may help my chances and won't take years, any opinions on this?

Graduating high school and taking on a serious debt to complete college isn't 'lucky'. Its taking an investment that pays off for most.

If you want to be a game developer then its really not worth the paper its printed on. Even for non game jobs its not going to count for much of anything. With no degree and no experience an incredible demo is the only thing thats going to give you a chance at a job. Another way might be to go the Top Coder route and slowly work your rep up doing a lot of small contract jobs. But there are a lot of people with degrees trying to do those jobs to make ends meet as well.

I am a Sr Business Operations Analyst, I have 4 teams of programmers (IVR,RPG 4 on AS400, web developers etc). I am hiring, and I can tell you that I do not even look to see if they have a college degree. Most of the time I do not even look at the resume. I have interviewed too many people with computer science degrees claim C++ knowledge on their resumes but could not write a basic hello world program. I am still scratching my head on that, how can you graduate with a computer science degree and not know how to write a hello world program? Moreover how can you go for a programming job interview without even looking it up.

I wouldn't worry too much about formal education. I spent five years at University on a CS degree which was honestly about 70% programming, and I still don't feel like I'm that good at it or know that much about it. I went into an internship and was blown away by how many talented people there were with piss-poor academic credentials, whereas those with University degrees better than mine didn't have too much obvious talent.

Just because you've got a degree doesn't mean you're good at your subject area. I consider myself to be a mediocre, hacky programmer and that's even after my degree where coding and software development was snuck into just about every area of the course at some point or another and, if I'm being honest, I got burned out on it and am no longer interested.

It's about you, not your education. There's some great advice in this thread.

Is it possible? Lots of things are possible.




Is it likely? That is a better question.

You are not hired in a vacuum. You are compared to other candidates.

The hiring process is one of elimination, not inclusion. Candidates are eliminated from the pool until it gets small enough to interview. Those remaining are called up, given a quick phone interview to exclude them early. Those who are not excluded are optionally given programming tests, and those who do poorly are excluded. Those who remain are brought in for interviews. Most of those people are excluded based on the interviews, the remaining (if any) are offered jobs. Once the positions are filled, the remaining applications are ignored.


Imagine you are an employer.

Imagine we are in a recession and there are lots of talented unemployed industry-experienced developers looking for work. There are also talented unemployed non-industry-experienced developers looking for work.

Imagine you have a stack of applications to sort through.

The pile can be split into several categories:
* Industry experience and college degree(s)
* Industry experience and some college
* Industry experience and no college
* Non-industry experience and college degree(s)
* Non-industry experience and some college
* Non-industry experience and no college
* No work experience and college degree(s)
* No work experience and some college
* No work experience and no degree

Those piles can be subdivided further, based on if they show hobby and amateur game development experience.

There is also a separate pile: Applicants who were recommended by your current employees. (Hint: this pile is very significant.)

Now for the challenge: Considering yourself as the employer above, which get called in for interviews first? Which get called second? Third? Last?




There were many good points by capn_midnight, with his first point being the biggest: Admit your deficiencies and work to overcome and correct them.

If you're a good programmer who interviews well, you can find a job.

If you're not a good programmer, or you don't interview well, then you're probably out of luck.

Good luck.

Quote: Original post by Antheus
Up until 2001 anyone with a heartbeat could get just about any title on chance. Meanwhile, tens of millions of CS MScs and PhDs entered the workforce, majority of them working at 20% of western wages, and without exception willing to work 80 hour weeks with no benefits and no extra compensation.

I started the programming job in 2003 which could be considered the lowest point after the bust.

Quote: In addition, programming positions changed. Expectations today are much different, assume familiarity with all the development practices as well as other demands.

Not all that different from when I started, especially when you consider how slow some companies can be to adopt anything. There are plenty of places that still have no idea what agile programming means, or what source control is (Oh, you mean like Visual Source Safe?).

Quote: Today the equivalent of such self-start position would be what appears to be called devops. A developer that is capable of programming, design, UX, QA and operations - all on their own, and fully up to expected standards with regard to metrics and methodology.

You're acting like this is any different from how things worked 7-8 years ago. It isn't. Especially if you join a smaller company or startup, you're expected to be able to do it all. This is an excellent place to learn new skills and has been invaluable for me.

Also your perception of required knowledge of metrics and methodology are overblown. Most development jobs won't require any knowledge of metrics & methodology from a hiring perspective. I don't think you realize quite how bad most companies are at software development! The only standards that I have encountered on the job have been standards I put in place. I was always more knowledgable of development practices then those I worked with / for because I didn't get in it for the money. I had a genuine interest in problem solving that manifested itself in software development early on and I have been practicing it for the last 15 years.

The average developers are NOT like the people you meet here on GDNet. They are 9 - 5 workers who only code for a salary and do little to no self learning. If you can get past the HR screening process and into an interview, you have the opportunity to show them that difference and you should have little problems getting a job.