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nhamann comments on Optimal Employment Open Thread - Less Wrong
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The common advice I've seen is to spend a few months contributing to some open source project. See this blog post, for example. (The advice in that post is hard to follow unless you already know C++ and feel like banging your head against the enormously complex Google Chrome codebase).
I'm also trying to get a programming job, but my hangup so far has been finding an open source project that I find interesting enough to contribute code to.
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I think the point is that if you're trying to convince someone to pay you to write code for them and you have no prior experience with professional programming, a solid way to convince them that you're hireable is contributing significant amounts of code to an open source project. This demonstrates that 1) you know how to write code, 2) that you can work with others and 3) that you're comfortable working with a complicated codebase (depending on the project).
I'm not certain that its the most effective way to achieve this objective, but I can't think of a better alternative. Suggestions are welcome.
In my case, I found a local startup that employed students to test their code (we'd get a new build every couple of days and run it through a set of tests) on a part-time temp basis, paid by the hour. As the only non-student doing it, I worked more-than-full-time hours for a few months, and got noticed for having a work ethic.