[JOB] In need of a job

[Colin Anderson]

I have been looking for a job for 3 months, and I haven't had much luck. I was wondering if anyone could point me towards a junior dev position, or even an internship.

[John Shaver]

Hey Colin,

If I may offer some advice: If you're looking for a position, then you
might want to present yourself a little better. Most of the jobs that
we're aware of here will be working with us, so you'll want to
convince us that we want to work with you, if you want us to recommend
you.

First: Most of us will know a few positions available, but we're not
sure if they'll work for you unless we know a little about your
experience and aspirations. If you've been looking for a while, you
should have a resume, or a linkedin account put together that you can
reference from. Don't just link to the linkedin account without
providing a quick summary of your experience.

Second: You don't want to make yourself sound desperate. I know it's
hard when you're hunting for a job for a long time and you may
actually be desperate, but you don't want to present yourself that
way. It will make us wonder if there is something wrong, if you've
been hunting for that long

Third: Spend some more time on the message. Don't make it long, but
it should have the relevant information we need to decide which
available jobs to post here. Communication skills are important for
any job. Demonstrating this skill can be very helpful.

Please understand, I'm not trying to berate you or discourage you.
I'm just trying to offer some helpful advice.

Please reply with some more information and I'll look through the
recent posts I've seen and forward you to any that are relevant.

Thanks,

John

[Paul Baker]

Hey Colin, 

I'd reiterate what John said. That first Jr. dev position is tough to get, especially if you have no production coding experience. Taking a quick look at your LinkedIn profile, it looks like you haven't worked on anything other that personal and/or school projects, which is great that you can demonstrate some coding skill with those. However, most employers want to see that you can be trusted with their production application, can work well in a team, and solve real problems.

One thing that you can do is volunteer at a non-profit to either write a new app or support existing applications they have. If they take you up on your offer, don't be surprised if you are working with some nasty code and stuff that is not in the stack that you were taught at DevPoint. That's OK. If you can jump in and make a difference on some legacy PHP with an Access backend, that's more impressive to me as an employer than if you can work in a greenfield on a project that doesn't serve a real world client need. 

Hope that helps and good luck!

-Paul

--
http://utruby.org
http://groups.google.com/group/urug

please prefix the subject with [JOB] when regarding job opportunities
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Utah Ruby Users Group" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to urug+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to ur...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Gregory Ray]

Colin,

Have you tried a placement agency like RHT?

https://www.roberthalf.com/technology

Best,

Greg

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 9:12 AM, Colin Anderson <ander...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have been looking for a job for 3 months, and I haven't had much luck. I was wondering if anyone could point me towards a junior dev position, or even an internship.

--

[Allen Maxwell]

Hi Colin et al.,

I’d just like to add that Colin attended the SL URUG meeting this past week.  I found him to be bright and pretty knowledgeable in spite of his newbieness.   He has also volunteered to present at next months meeting.  

His attendance and willingness to present tells me that he’s interested in learning more, willing to put himself out there and take risks.  That’s the kind of person I’d be interested in (new or not).

FWIW

[John Shaver]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 10:24 AM, Allen Maxwell <aa...@xmission.com> wrote:
>
> I’d just like to add that Colin attended the SL URUG meeting this past week.
> I found him to be bright and pretty knowledgeable in spite of his
> newbieness. He has also volunteered to present at next months meeting.
>
> His attendance and willingness to present tells me that he’s interested in
> learning more, willing to put himself out there and take risks. That’s the
> kind of person I’d be interested in (new or not).
>
> FWIW

That's worth alot, if we know it :)

Colin: Again I'll emphasize that I'm not trying to discourage or
belittle you. I'm sure you're very hirable as a Junior Dev. And I'm
condifent we'll see that when we know more about you.

-John

P.S. You should consider recording that recommendation, from Allen,
and adding it to your resume. It's not as good as someone you
actually worked with, but it's good for someone new. You can even ask
Allen his permission to include his name/position/phone reference. Or
you might have better recommendations or references.

[Colin Anderson]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I definitely should have put more thought and effort into the original post. I will just put that here instead.

My Experience,

I graduated from the last Devpoint Labs cohort, and I have been working on projects since then. I recently started working on the tests for memorymixer.com. I also built a simple seizure tracker app. My github is  github.com/andercol4, and my linkedin is linkedin.com/in/andercol4.

About me,

I really enjoy developing, and learning. It is challenging and rewarding.

Some of my hobbies are D&D(I usually DM), reading, and games(board and video).