How did you get your first rails job?

[James Cheuk]

Hi Hong Kong Ruby on Rails Community,

I am interested to be a Rails developer. I graduated with a Bachelor of  Degree in Accountancy.
Um...Yeah... Totally Unrelated to computer and programming at all.
I did learn some basic programming when I was in secondary school, but I did not take it seriously.
Until I came across with Ruby, I find job in programming. I decided to be a rails developer and full-stack web developer someday.
I started my journey by building a Twitter clone webapp. After that, I applied courses in online rails bootcamp Tealeaf Academy. I learned a lot when I built a blackjack 21 webgame using Sinatra and a reddit-like webapp. Right now, I am build a Netflix-like e-commerce website. And I am thinking about job.
I think it would be great to a lot of people to see how people have gone from having no professional experience with rails to being paid as a professional rails developer? What do you feel employers look for? a CS degree or a ability to build?
What is a good path for aspiring developers to take to get hired?

[Jimmy Chu]

For me, your work portfolio/experience will be my primary consideration. Employers (especially startup) want ppl who get the work done. If you did get your hand dirty in building the product, and understand why u are using those techniques, and trade-off you made in the design/architecture, that will be great.

Secondly, to get to next level, show ppl not just your technical skills, but you are aware of the business implication of features you built e.g. why you are doing what you are doing. This means you may need to get into the product design phase, customer discovery and validation phase. Maybe you talk to 10 ppl and they said they need a certain feature. Maybe you look at the product usage data, and realize this feature could solve a particular problem so you propose it to the team. Eventually, you become good at technical skills, getting products shipped, and could also think/see from a business/broader context.

My two cents. Good luck to your career ;)

[Matthew Rudy Jacobs]

So I studied Mathematics,

and although I had to do some C programming, I had no idea to program.

Then one day I got a job coding Ruby, and they told me to go away for 2 months and learn to code.

After that I was hooked.

The basic skills can be learned in a few months,

but its the wisdom that comes with experience that you can't fake.

With experience will come breadth.

Is Ruby actually the best tool for a particular job? Maybe JRuby?

When is it time to split into multiple services?

What is the bottleneck in our application?

What servers should I deploy to?

Is this new feature worth doing?

How do I hire?

Basically,

just keep going with it.

As long as you're always learning, and having fun

eventually Hong Kong salaries will suck less, and you might get a decent wage.

:)

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[3dd13]

1)
so ... I studied Computer Science in HKUST.

but I didn't study at all and barely passed the graduation requirements.

got my first programming job after graduate, and then I started learning programming.

was working in different big corporate using Java and learnt about different development stuff.

I learnt little bit Rails on my own when I had around 5/6 years web development experience.

then my first Rails job came.

since then, I learn and code much more, because there are so many Web Best Practices built-in.

and it gave me opportunity to work on lots of interesting projects.

2)

the key to improve yourself is to work on something you like which is challenging enough.

it will be a long journey on learning.

motivation is very important to sustain and get over the frustration.

3)
for hiring developers, I myself prefer people who did practical coding and able to solve problems in their own way.

to me, there is not much advantage if you are studying Computer Science.

show me the code you wrote and tell me why and how you write.


4)

I had lots of interview (over 100 times) in my past 10 years, as an interviewee.

one suggestion for you is
ask more questions that you concern.
try to find out more if you like the team or not during the interview.

again, it is all about happiness in the long run.

you have to work with these people everyday.
life is so short.

don't waste time on something you don't like.

there are so many jobs and teams you can choose from.

pick the one that you like and stick with them for a longer while.

Happy job hunting ~

Enjoy coding ~

Cheers,
Eddie