Let your mentors know you’re looking for work, and how many hours you can work per week.

New programmers provide negative value, so there’s not a lot of demand.

I’m very good and studied hard, but my first couple of programming roles I got entirely because a mentor of mine recommended me to someone who took a chance on me.

Also keep adding code to your public GitHub. Two of my top developers today I originally hired directly away from their retail roles. One had a ton of academic coding experience and had just not yet landed the right job. The other was just getting started, but posted a ton of low quality homework code to GitHub so I could read it and know who I was hiring.

Edit: In contrast, one of my other top developers has one of the top CS degrees in the world. So that works too.

And more than one of my top developers have IT help desk experience. I have had excellent luck when hiring folks with IT Help Desk experience.

Edit 2: As someone else mentioned - your long term goal is to connect with an IT Recruiter that you trust, and work with them to get your resume, and GitHub, and/or binder full of code you wrote into shape. I’ve hired more than one candidate who admits the simply presented themselves exactly as their recruiter coached them to. And I’ve hired candidates I would have skipped, because their recruiter was someone I trust and they asked me to take a second look at a candidate who made a poor first impression.

Edit 3: Since this is for newbies, some information about recruiters: we pay the recruiter in addition to what we pay you. The recruiter’s typical pay for a rookie hire is around $50,000.00, if you stay for a full year. Half up front, in case you don’t stay.

A few things you should know about recruiters: they only need to make a few solid placements each year to earn a living. As a rookie, you’re the hardest to place, and the lowest layout when placed. But, programmers that are easy to place don’t move often, so recruiters may still have plenty of time for you.

The recruiter is probably mainly placing you the first time in hopes that you come back later when you’re worth big money. The initial payent is nice, but the real payment will be if/when you have 5 years experience and still work exclusively with them.

Hiring managers like me have recruiters we trust and reuse. If you can get recommended to a great recruiter, they will get you interviews at better places to work.

In contrast, there’s lots of mediocre recruiters out there. Don’t be afraid to switch to a new recruiter, if you have the opportunity, and your current recruiter isn’t getting you interviews.

Yep. And I’m saying that when he gets better at it, he will call them, ask them to grab lunch, and openly say at the start of lunch “I’m buying because there’s this thing I might want to hire you for, and I want to talk about it during lunch”.

I’ve head-hunted people over the course of five years, myself. But they knew it, because I bought them lunch at least once per year to talk about how I’m a fan of their work.

This dude is likely to be disappointed because while he’s been thinking about job fit for 5 years, his ideal candidate hasn’t thought about him at all.

“… And the person doesn’t even know…” This dude is bad at this.

Y’all, if you work in my field and I buy you lunch, it’s because I’m trying to hire you.

But you won’t have to wonder. I’ll start the conversation with something subtle, like “I’m buying today because I’m trying to hire you.”

It…uh…works. Really well. Stay tuned for more insightful tips, I guess.

It’s the year of the Linux desktop! /s

But seriously, I think I’m going to buy a SteamDeck.

I’ve enjoyed the whole series, and this piece is particularly cool.

I hope this is a sign of the future of advertising with AI generated stock images. I can’t wait to see a full length commercial with an attractive person enjoying a refreshing Pepsi in each of their three hands.

I predict that, within the year, AI will be doing 100% of the development work that isn’t total and utter bullshit pain-in-the-ass complexity, layered on obfuscations, composed of needlessly complex bullshit.

That’s right, within a year, AI will be doing .001% of programming tasks.

And the movie portrays it accurately, too. Waiting for the 3D flyover to render feels painfully slow, regardless of how many doorknob mastering dinosaurs are trying to kill you.

One silver lining is that those of us who deal with brain fog and memory challenges make the best documentation updaters.

It amuses me when folks say “thanks” for my documentation updates.

Yeah, sure, I distilled that guide down to one incredibly clear, hard to mess up guide, for you, my coworkers. I’m all heart! /s

That would be awesome.

I will sign up on day one to the “every ducking sports team” block list.

I love sportball as much as the next person (I don’t), but how can Paris, Illinois possibly have this many different sportball teams?

Based on my experience with venture capital, I’m not convinced venture capital has ever produced anything worthwhile.

As a book and video game enthusiast, my unpopular opinion is that the average video game is a much better entertainment value than the average book.

I’ve played a lot of games and read a lot of books. When measuring dollars for hours, I think video games win.

On the one hand, I’ve put massive numbers of hours into titles like Zelda, Metroid, Harvest Moon, and Pokemon.

On the other hand, I’ve only gotten two or three read-throughs out of even some of my very favorite books.

And then the video game classics really put up some big numbers: after decades, I’m still enjoying PacMan, Frogger, and Galaga and their kin.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: Tetris.

If I had to pick - on a desert island - between an e-reader with every book ever printed, or one copy of Tetris on a Gameboy…it would be an agonizing choice.

You beat me to it. Everyone knows you get Vin Diesel if you accidentally bleach The Rock. The wax museum artists should have known better.

Yeah, as DM I’ve always house ruled that it didn’t make sense for a character to fail at the thing they’re the best at.

Though I have been known to interpret a natural 1 as a crazy external force - like an earthquake - and have them reroll at -10.

Makes it even more fun when they succeed anyway.

That’s right.

But only because “Vim vs Emacs” is a technically a religious holy war.

Indeed. And when players ask pointed questions to the only NPC who was anywhere near the scene of a crime:

Edit: “Well I heard it wasn’t a guy in a hotdog suit. We can’t know what to believe.”

It must have been traumatic for that Arch user to discover such rebellion in their child. /s

On a more serious note, if my kids find this post: I hope you know we can talk about closed source software if you’re curious about it - and about maintaining a proper virtual infrastructure to protect the rest of the network from it.

My review: “I’'ve always hated this code base, anyway. LGTM.”

In this thread, a lot of folks who would use their one wish to make the language better.

But I would change “their” to be spelled “the’re” and pronounced “all’y’all’s”.

I hope I do grow up to be more like the rest of you, and make better choices, in the future.

I stick to strictly Markdown. because it’s easier (for me) to convert to eBook, PDF, or website - or all three.

Depending on the platform, I use different Markdown editors. At the moment I’m using Markor on Android and VSCodium on Windows and Linux.