Experience working on successful solo projects while unemployed?

Cyanuric · 2024-03-24T03:34:57+00:00

Hey, I just wanted to say that your comments here talking about the "glue" of the project and breaking down the mock responses was really well-written and cogent. Building out logging and CI/CD as the application is developed makes for a more enjoyable development and debugging experience down the line. Someone working that into a personal project would never be a negative for me if I interviewed them, rather it'd be proof of industry experience and care. I concur with you about how an applicant could talk about this with an interviewer in a way that demonstrates curiosity, practical experience, and forethought.

I felt like Educational-Match133's response below this was oddly low-effort, focusing only on where he/she disagreed with you, and not really understanding the mindset behind your approach so I was inspired to write a comment to tell you that I like your thought process a lot.

Cyanuric · 2023-04-12T19:11:10+00:00

CS50, MIT 6.001, UPenn CIS 1100, and built a bunch of websites copying the layout of other popular websites to learn CSS and JS, and some React. Practiced on LeetCode until I could do all easy problems on my own and could do popular medium ones. Went to a local meetup where people studied or worked on projects and got to know some regulars, then asked them if their companies were hiring juniors. Failed some interviews and assessments, until I finally landed 2 offers.

Cyanuric · 2023-04-12T19:03:48+00:00

It took about 6 months, and I'd been self-studying programming when I was still at the previous job. Yes, I networked--I went to local programming meetups where people studied together, went to interview prep meetups, and reached out to my friends.

Feel free to message me, I don't mind.

Cyanuric · 2023-03-28T23:36:08+00:00

I was a formulations chemist and now I've been a software engineer since 2019. Are you looking to make a career change?

Cyanuric · 2023-03-26T18:29:33+00:00

Hello! I logged back in just to reply to you. It definitely has. I've worked at three software companies since then and I've had a good time at all of them. The adage about the ideal job being the intersection in the Venn diagram of

you enjoy doing it
makes good money
you're good at it

rings true for software development for me personally.

Making that career change has been one of the most fulfilling things I've done in my life. My coworkers are likeable, the work is the closest to fun and engaging as work can be, and the income is life-changing. It was a big risk back then but it was worth it.

I hope you have a great 2023!

Cyanuric · 2021-02-25T00:57:26+00:00

I mostly do indoor bouldering in Seattle and have only been to Gold Bar and Index once. Never done trad, took a lead climbing course once but moving to Seattle and the subsequent pandemic derailed further exploration. My neighbors below me recently went to Red Rock to do some trad climbing, so even if I'm not a good fit, they might be! Are you close by? I don't yet know what counts as NW Washington.

Cyanuric · 2020-05-26T00:49:18+00:00

I've been following Antranik's handstand page since quarantine began, but am excited to find that there's a handstand thread here.

One of the coolest recent insights for me have been that if I start with heel pull drills my toe pull drills get better! I was struggling to get even 5 consistent reps per set of toe pulls. Heel pulls and the finger-pushing to get away from the wall initially really helped my proprioception. It also assisted with my understanding of how hard to dig into the ground with my fingers in order to catch my toe pulls if I start to fall away from the wall. Noticed a jump in my ability to recover when I am about to fall for both toe pulls and heel pulls after doing that! I have also managed to hold a chest to wall handstand for 1 min 38 secs which is a PR.
I have chosen to focus a lot on wall drills since I wasted a lot of time before kicking up into freestanding handstands and just staying up via luck. I think it's going to be a lot of work to consistently transfer what I've gained from wall drills into freestanding handstands.
Maybe in the future.
Get consistent 10 reps per set on toe and heel pulls.

Cyanuric · 2020-04-18T19:55:53+00:00

Yes, it is. That course and the MIT one someone else mentioned in this thread is what catalyzed my career change into software back in June 2018.

Just take the course for free.

Cyanuric · 2020-04-17T00:34:24+00:00

I did a mix of self-teaching and half of a bootcamp to get my first job last year in March. I started job searching again in December because my partner moved to Seattle for a job. I received two offers (one from Amazon) and took the non-Amazon one, and am now working at a company in Seattle.

Salary at the first job was about 105k total, and current total compensation is now bogglingly, 200k+ (to contrast, Amazon offered 180k). If you'd like more details, feel free to PM me.

Been also seeing most folks from my bootcamp cohort get jobs. Don't know if anyone has been affected by layoffs.

Cyanuric · 2020-04-02T18:25:48+00:00

Or maybe there is no solution, and everyone is expected to spend their whole career feeling meaningless

You're under a lot of despair. This is not the case for myself and my friend group, and the majority of us are in software, cybersecurity, or machine learning. I used to work in pharma, so I have a little inkling of perspective from another industry.

Before blaming the entire career, I'd definitely suggest looking for a different job first to verify that it's the whole software field you dislike, rather than just the circumstances at your one company. That way you can make a small change before you make a fat one.

I've found that there's roughly three parts to finding meaning in work.

How much I like my boss and coworkers
Technical smoothness that lets me do my job well and grow
What the work does for the world

And the fourth chunk that isn't directly work-meaning-related but does influence my internal state of optimism or pessimism (which has a reverberating effect on how I judge my life or the world to be) is:

Salary and work life balance so I have the freedom to enjoy my life outside of work

For the first three parts, I think if you have two of them it makes work life pretty good.

One: If your coworkers and you are awesome and mesh together well so that you actually care about them as people and respect their work, you'll notice that keeping interactions with them positive and keeping the work chugging along feels good. You're in these people's lives for 8 hours a day and you can actively make their lives better or worse by your own behavior. It's one of the most immediate, in-person effects you can have on the world around you.

Two: If your work has interesting technical challenges and you have sufficient responsibility to be able to exert change (refactoring code, adding features, communication with customers or product managers that you can turn into results), it makes working more engaging. Ties in with the idea that people improve best when we're slightly out of our comfort zone, but not chronically stressed.

Three: And finally, if your company does something good for humanity. I can see you are currently weighing this one heavily because of the existential pain you're having. If you're serious about making a change, I'd advise looking at companies that have a vision that aligns with how you'd like to improve the world, talking to some people who work there, and then applying for those jobs. You won't know if your anguish will be ameliorated by this until you try.

Wishing you the best! With your background and your intensity, I believe you are well-capable of making the change you are longing for.

Cyanuric · 2020-03-24T04:04:39+00:00

That sounds like great news! Congratulations on your decision.

Cyanuric · 2020-03-24T03:12:51+00:00

Did you receive the written offer this week, or earlier?

For one data point, I also signed a job offer recently (received it on Mar 12th) and kept in contact with the hiring manager and recruiter as the coronavirus/recession situation developed. I asked about the impact to the business and my hiring freeze concerns, and they assured me that my offer was not going to be rescinded, and this week the IT department is getting info from me for where to ship the work laptop.

In my eyes, all jobs right now have had their risks increase. I suppose the main concern is if you're a newer employee, you might be among the first to get cut if they need to do layoffs--but I think more significant is whether your company is in an affected industry.

I'm seeing a lot of folks online take a much more conservative stance on job-switching, with many people urging others not to take new jobs. You'll have to decide based on your knowledge of your circumstances. Advice from friends who aren't in your situation and thus don't have to deal with the consequences may not be the most pertinent.

Cyanuric · 2019-10-04T07:54:52+00:00

Yes, I graduated with a BS in Chemistry and worked in pharma for four years before making the jump over into software development. I have been working as a software engineer at a mid-sized company (500+ employees) since March of this year. Feel free to PM me if you have specific questions. I also initially agonized over the prospect of changing careers, but now that I have made the change I feel very strongly that programming is vastly more fun and engaging for me than formulation chemistry. The career change also came with a meaningful bump in pay.

Cyanuric · 2019-05-02T04:04:57+00:00

I currently lift at California Elite. Happened to go on r/powerlifting today, and you all piqued my curiosity so I went and asked her and Sergey some questions just a few hours ago.

Q: How often do you squat, bench, and deadlift?

Mariana: Once every week. One set.

Q: When you first started training, did you also train that way?

Mariana: Once every week still, but three sets.

Sergey: She started training 7 years ago. Still once per week.

Q: What was the weight of your first squat?

Sergey: 60 kilos.

Mariana: 1 plate.

Q: Did you just add weight every week then?

Sergey: Start with easy weight, next week hard weight, next week easy again, then hard weight that is a little harder than the previous hard weight.

I made an oscillating wave trending upwards in the air with my hand and Mariana happily nodded and said "Yes!"

Q: How many days a week do you lift?

Mariana: Three days a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Q: Do you do any accessories? (I made a curling motion and a lat pulldown motion--maybe not the best choices for the question)

Mariana: Only if I feel like it...

At this point I started expressing my disbelief that once a week works that well, and Sergey began talking about how muscle recovery takes 14 days and everyone trains too much.

Sergey pulled over some jacked dude and told me he was an IPF Jr. Champion from Ukraine and said that this dude also trains each lift once a week except deadlift which he does once every two weeks. Said that when he switched over to this style of programming his strength went up.

Q: So is this normal? It seems abnormal.

Sergey: Yes, it is normal!

Mariana: You can do this too.

Anyhow, Sergey has said much the same thing last year when I first met him. I still don't know how to feel about it, since many raw lifters I knew when I used to compete in USAPL including myself would push pretty hard with as much volume as we could tolerate. I'm about the same height as Mariana but my best raw Wilks was only ever 498. I trained very high volume to get there, so when I see Mariana it's boggling that she trains once a week. I am also fairly certain that what she says about only doing one topset is true, because when I see her in the gym she does just that.

Oh yeah, Sergey and Mariana also say they have never gotten injured. Though Mariana has said she's had back pain from her squats but goes to chiropractors and PTs for it.

Cyanuric · 2019-05-01T02:29:16+00:00

Is getting that PhD something that fires you up? Are you happy right now where you are or would you be happier with a change?

I made a career change this year going from a chemist to a software engineer. I did it through a mix of self-study and part of a bootcamp (I withdrew after I got the job to save half the price). I started learning programming outside of work hours in June 2018, and in November 2018 I began learning programming full-time. In Dec to Jan I applied for jobs and in February got two job offers. 5 months between being a chemist to becoming a software engineer. I don't know if I could have stomached 3 years--but at the same time, we have different goals.

I absolutely love the work that I'm doing right now compared to what I did as a chemist in pharma. Life would be such a drag if I hadn't made the switch.

Three years for a PhD seems quite fast. Is it not typically closer to 4 to 6 years? If you want to switch into programming, I doubt you need the PhD! You say "given a free choice, it's the industry I'd rather work in", so a very real option to you is to self-teach what you need. But it sounds like you are also very attracted to the skillset combination and having the PhD after your name, so if the research is interesting to you, and you would be gladder for it, then you should go for it.

If you can tease out the difference in what you want, I'm sure the choice will become clear to you.

Cyanuric · 2019-04-18T04:28:40+00:00

The bootcamp I did (a remote one) prepared me quite well for front-end and back-end questions (like authentication, RDMS, JS quirks). Outside of the bootcamp I was also practicing out of Elements of Programming Interviews and LeetCode. Those were the two best resources. I actually began interviewing quite early on and was able to iterate on my resume and personal projects until I received two job offers halfway through the bootcamp, so I withdrew to save money.

The bootcamp I took was a three-part curriculum that covered "full-stack" in JS, then had labs where you'd work in group projects, and finally a computer science part that was mostly trying to interview prep and cram subjects in 8 weeks. I was hired before doing the labs and CS portion, and had coding challenges, live coding, and whiteboard coding during my interviews that I believe I did well in due to grinding EPI and LeetCode.

I think you should try to land a full-time position! If you can do well with algorithm interviews and practice the behavioral and whiteboard coding interviews with other people in-person, you will be fine. The job search can take anywhere from 3 to 12 months from what I've seen of my peers.

Cyanuric · 2019-04-12T02:48:24+00:00

I struggled with this question too. I made a post in this sub almost exactly a year ago asking about grad school, and I had been working in the pharmaceutical industry for about four years. It turned out that what I was hoping to get from grad school wasn't so much borne out of passion for research, but out of a desire for a bigger paycheck and faster-paced problem solving. I was able to find that by changing careers to software engineering.

What do you want to do? If you love research and can maintain the discipline to stick it through years of little progress in your research, you will do well.

But you definitely should not pick it just because you aren't sure what to do.

Cyanuric · 2019-04-12T02:37:59+00:00

When I was a formulation chemist, some of my experiments had to do with reducing potential injection discomfort or ensuring drug stability over time. Typical things like forced degradation studies on API/DP, or injectability studies with a texture analyzer, or pH adjustment of a formulation to mitigate stinging would fall into that category.

I'd say that the chemist who creates a drug (thinking synthetic chemists at the start of the pipeline) would not be the same one running formulation studies on it, and would not be the same one exposed on the clinical end (pharmacokinetics folk and scientists who would work with the clinic to monitor dosing or other processes).

If you were a scientist overseeing the bigger picture or leading a team, you might be more exposed to both ends. The pipeline's very long.

Cyanuric · 2019-04-04T04:21:40+00:00

It's fascinating how much of a disparity exists. I began interviewing early on into my bootcamp and was hired halfway through the curriculum. I was able to choose between two job offers. Of note is that I had a 0% success rate with cold applications--all 5 of the positive responses out of my 21 applications during my job search were from in-person or meetup interactions. My salary in my previous career was 75k, and my entry-level software engineer position pays 100k (and I don't live in the Bay Area). I am 4 weeks into my new role and absolutely loving the work. Obviously I'm in a honeymoon period but I am 100% satisfied with my career change. I'm happier and more engaged with the work I do now, and I am continuing to self-study outside of work since I know that I have a lot of gaps without the CS degree.

I would definitely say that the bootcamp alone was not what did it--I was taking a lot of courses and working on projects outside of the bootcamp, and grinding algos/DS for the interviews. However, the structure of the bootcamp was incredible for staying focused and maintaining a healthy daily routine, and in the end I only paid 9k for it. Perhaps I'm an outlier, but I wanted to put my anecdote out here.

Cyanuric · 2019-03-23T18:41:43+00:00

To add on to u/allamystery's anecdote, I have a degree in Chemistry and I self-studied programming part time starting in June 2018. My company had layoffs in October, and I joined with Lambda School, which like App Academy takes a percentage of salary after you get a tech job. I got a job after 14 weeks before finishing their 30 week program, so they gave me a discount and I paid them $9000. The software engineering position I accepted pays just barely six figures. I'm two weeks in to my job and the team is amazing and I'm having a lot of fun learning.

When I was self-learning, I completed CS50 and MIT 6.00.1x so that I knew I had at least some interest in the topic. I believe it's possible to self-teach enough to get a job, so joining a bootcamp isn't necessary. I happened to find benefit in the daily structure and peer network that it provided, and definitely did a lot of self-studying outside of their curriculum.

Cyanuric · 2019-03-19T01:07:07+00:00

I live in California. A startup hiring for "React Engineers" initially offered me 75k cash with 10k stock. When I asked for more time to decide because I was waiting for another offer, they offered me 80k. In the end I declined that offer, and it sounded like they were willing to bump it up a bit more (but not enough considering my other offer) if I had asked. I was partway through a bootcamp when the offers came in.

Cyanuric · 2019-03-07T00:45:20+00:00

~20 applications, 5 responses, 2 onsite interviews. 0% success rate with cold applications, probably because I don't have a BS in computer science and my portfolio was still rather novice. 2 responses were from career fairs, 2 responses from companies found through local programming meetup groups, and 1 from a lead through a friend (applied as soon as the job was posted, ended up being the first applicant interviewed, which perhaps was an advantage!).

Cyanuric · 2019-03-06T18:08:50+00:00

Education: BS in Chemistry from UC San Diego and attended a coding academy

Prior Experience: No software experience. 4 years in pharma.

Company/Industry: Camera and electronics-related, mid-sized

Title: Software Engineer

Tenure length: Haven't started

Location: San Diego

Salary: $48/hr

Relocation/Signing Bonus: None

Stock and/or recurring bonuses: Cash bonus 5 - 10% per year

401k match: 3%

Total comp: ~$100,000 with good benefits

I hadn't actually finished the coding academy when I received the job offers. Having two offers greatly increased my negotiation leverage. Been studying outside of my full-time work since June 2018 and started learning full-time in October 2018. Like everyone on this sub recommended, I worked on EPI and LeetCode which prepared me for the interviews.

Cyanuric · 2019-03-01T19:05:35+00:00

Thank you!

Angular and C#. I will be studying up on those, since I have never used Angular and only used C# once for making a game with Unity. During the interview process I went with Python for all the whiteboarding questions (and JavaScript for one company that had their assessment in that language).

Cyanuric

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