this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
139 points (96.6% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26734 readers
1802 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

You were disabled and realize it is not getting better, and no one seems to be able to fix the issue. You're stuck laying down most of the day, you have enough mobility to function at home, but anything outside of home leaves you in bad shape beyond your control where you are not professionally functional. What do you do to earn a living and survive?

This is not a hypothetical for me.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I could continue my current job, working from home as a software developer.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The problem I run into is not knowing what it takes professionally. I've learned a lot but I'm just a hobbyist and have no clue how to get past that phase. I struggle with complexity, but I know hardware fairly well at the registers/stack/ALU level and can make a gagillion IF statements do anything wrong for a radar proximity triggered cat toy in Arduino. I just don't know where to go with that and without any networking potential it seems a little hopeless.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Make projects for a portfolio, throw them on a public GitHub repo and shop that around to employers.

Make sure to have neat, commented and mostly polished code that covers a decent breadth of topics. Like authentication or low level hardware handling.

Also try your hand at submitting contributions (and getting them accepted) to larger open source projects and point to those as well

NGL, the employment scene for junior devs...isn't the best rn, expect to have to put in hundreds of applications with few if any call backs for a while. BUT companies are always hiring for good hardware devs junior or not, so you might get lucky

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Alongside what cm0002 said, I've found that finding recruiters manually and putting yourself out there has significantly increased my callback rate. They really know how to pitch you a lot of the time, and I wish I knew this as a junior.

Basically, look for postings by TekSystems, Jobot and other recruiting companies and put in applications to their systems (make sure to only apply for a few so as to not seem like a "spray and pray" job seeker). Hopefully, you will get a callback and / or emails about positions. Eventually, you will get a call from a recruiter from one of the recruiting firms and they will ask you a bunch of questions about your tech stack, experience, what your preferences are for positions, etc and they will basically file you away for later. When they find a fit, they reach out.

It's great to have like 5 - 10 of these recruiters (from different companies) since you know you'll be getting calls even in dry periods like this one.

Also, I really cannot emphasize this enough - LEARN DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHMS. It sucks to get a call from a company, have them set up a technical interview and then fail it and lose out on the opportunity.

This Udemy course is a great place to start if you know JS and it regularly goes on sale for $15 like every two weeks (not sponsored, it's just genuinely a fantastic course and it's worth every penny at any price, but for $15 it's a steal if you know JS): https://www.udemy.com/share/101WNk3@wU2BBFJCNjPisNOAOq7G4IopJulzdWP6mkQD_4_vkOPjMfs8zL8f8CUVsevYRvCjBg==/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

You can also do temp work, English language teaching, proofreading, data entry.