[Collide]

From an outsider unfamiliar with programming looking in, I thought iOS app development would be hot right now. Is learning Objective-C not important?

[frenchcorporation]

(04-30-2014 04:57 PM)Switch Wrote:  

How high can a salary be in remote software engineering jobs? I heard that remote jobs top out around 100k/year. Is this true? How hard is it to progress up the ladder if you are working remotely? Is it impossible?

if youre talking dollars, more than half of jobs are above 100k, according to the infographic posted by beserk earlier in this thread:

(04-17-2014 12:44 PM)berserk Wrote:  

There is a big infographic about salaries and languages here: http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2...700&h=5347

Won't post it because of huge size.

[SVK]

Guys, Sunday night I posted my resume on Dice.com for the first time in almost 8 years (still at my first dev job), and the response was fucking overwhelming. It's probably like being a hot chick on an online dating site. I made the mistake of posting my phone number there and my phone started blowing up at 5 am PST monday morning, I had to take my profile offline and remove the phone contacts.

Anyways, the market is really hot right now, especially if you already have some experience. Will post a separate thread later.

[Switch]

(04-30-2014 06:29 PM)frenchcorporation Wrote:  

(04-30-2014 04:57 PM)Switch Wrote:  

How high can a salary be in remote software engineering jobs? I heard that remote jobs top out around 100k/year. Is this true? How hard is it to progress up the ladder if you are working remotely? Is it impossible?

if youre talking dollars, more than half of jobs are above 100k, according to the infographic posted by beserk earlier in this thread:

(04-17-2014 12:44 PM)berserk Wrote:  

There is a big infographic about salaries and languages here: http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2...700&h=5347

Won't post it because of huge size.

I'm only asking about software jobs that you can do from anywhere. For example the company you work for is based in New York, but you live in Moscow and work remotely.

There's no question that programming jobs, especially at senior levels can demand enormous salaries, but my question is, how high is the pay when you aren't stuck to one place?

[TravellerJay]

SVK, what a lucky sod! but good thing you removed yourself with contacts otherwise they d blow your phone away.

Please include all your mates here in any future thread. Thanks to frenchC, you and pete and everyone commenting here, we have some solid clues on getting a better salary and jobs for the near future.

[SVK]

Found this interesting website:

https://www.wfh.io/

It is a job listings site focused around remote (work from home) jobs in the technology space. Most of the 'Country' requirement says 'Anywhere'. Not that many jobs, but still quite interesting.

Not sure how much these jobs pay, but I can imagine it is definitely much less than Bay Area. Still, this is something I would want to do eventually in a few years, but I would really want to get established first. I anticipate these 'work from anywhere' jobs are going to be a lot more common in the future.

Do you think that the jobs that have requirement country USA could be done from somewhere else, at least if it is in similar timezone? Still keep an US address, but work from some Latin American country. These US jobs probably pay a lot more than those 'Anywhere' jobs.

[TravellerJay]

SVK, unless is strictly needed, like federal government requiring special clearance and US citizenship and US address, my experience tells me that anywhere means exactly that. As long as your resume is an ass kicker, have lots of industry certifications and IT/PM/programming skills, you can do the work from home. they may not pay you like Bay area salaries.., but the other day I read that the IT industry giants has frozen salaries by not hiring from each other. Since the IT guys cannot go to the competition or to Apple, Google, etc they have to stay in the same job even if that means no increase in salary. So, unless this is needed to give an edge to the resume/CV, then I d say, we stay the hell away from these companies and do remote work. Since remote work is exactly remote, I d love to do the work as I travel through the very same pussy lands we have discussed in the travel and game forums.
Maybe one day I can do it. Now I am concentrating in getting my PMP certif, then study Python and following frenchC recommendations and other users.

[TravellerJay]

(04-30-2014 02:11 PM)berserk Wrote:  

Guys, I am done with Python in Codeacademy and doing the API courses. I think I am almost ready to start coding and learning from that. What is your recommendation for IDE or not? There seems to be two suggestions: SublimeText with addons or PyCharm. I'd like to have a terminal in the same program as my code is in, is this possible with SublimeText?

Berserk, how was your experience with codeacademy? to me seemed very interactive but with little to learn from example. It was fun to begin with but lacked a more challenging approach.

Did you have an earlier rogramming experience and Python was just another one or was this your first programming time?
Do you feel confident you can program and apply for a job?

[berserk]

(05-03-2014 01:33 PM)TravellerJay Wrote:  

(04-30-2014 02:11 PM)berserk Wrote:  

Guys, I am done with Python in Codeacademy and doing the API courses. I think I am almost ready to start coding and learning from that. What is your recommendation for IDE or not? There seems to be two suggestions: SublimeText with addons or PyCharm. I'd like to have a terminal in the same program as my code is in, is this possible with SublimeText?

Berserk, how was your experience with codeacademy? to me seemed very interactive but with little to learn from example. It was fun to begin with but lacked a more challenging approach.

Did you have an earlier rogramming experience and Python was just another one or was this your first programming time?
Do you feel confident you can program and apply for a job?

I had experience with VBA from early work and knew all the basics of loops, arrays, function etc, but back then I didn't write anything resembling structured code, just really bad hacking (that did work though).

I think CodeAcademy is pretty good for the newb who doesn't know anything about coding.

For me it was definitely boring to have to go through the basics of programming, but I did learn the syntax which was most important and the Python course is really good at explaining basic OOP (which I didn't know), where the PHP course sucked about OOP.

I'm writing a learning project now for something I will use. I am nowhere near being able to apply for a job and will buy a physical book, so I can look up stuff. I am trying not to copy paste too much, which is easy with Google.

Keep in mind I am not looking for a job, but to learn enough to make an alpha/beta of a webapp and enough to know who to eventually hire or partner up with. I'm a builder not a coder.

What I liked about Codeacademy is the pragmatic approach. I really dislike the academic method to learning in anything, it's not useful for someone like me and I say that as dropout from a math heavy line. That being said, I will probably take a basic course in some uni about algoritms and OOP to get the stuff down.

[TravellerJay]

Thanks for your input berserk. So when you say builder I assume you want to create something and start up from it, right? you want to create instead of program for some company or start up.

that s pretty cool. That is another possibility, to partner up or hire someone as we all want to make money out of our creations.
If you partner up with someone, will you look up here in the forum? can it be a remote partner or you d prefer a US local person that can meet with you in person?

thnx

[TravellerJay]

Frenchcorporation, how is the work going? any updates for us wanna be programmers?

[frenchcorporation]

(05-19-2014 09:18 AM)TravellerJay Wrote:  

Frenchcorporation, how is the work going? any updates for us wanna be programmers?

nothing significant to mention, work is going well, adding new features at work, been working remotely a bit as well, which has been useful as I've been able to travel round the UK a bit at the same time

Also currently sorting out a project for a client as well

Career-wise I've kind of got two paths ahead of me that I'll need to choose from, and they are:

1) Do remote/freelance web development work full time, which will then enable me to move out of england to somewhere much cheaper with good internet e.g east europe, SE Asia

or

2) Work in the finance sector for big £££, im seeing ridiculous (in my estimation anyway) contracts being offered for people with the skillset I'm working towards


Im leaning towards the second, best to do it now and save up whilst I'm young and have the energy, can take the 1st option afterwards if I feel like it

[TravellerJay]

FC I agree with you. If money is thrown in contracts for the 2nd option which I believe you mentioned it already, the finance sector, then save as much as you can and then freelance remote work with the finance background and the names of employers as reference.
when you big $$$, sorry mate couldnt find the pound symbol, ridiculous contracts.., what numbers do you mean? and you can elaborate a bit more?

thanks mate

[faznine15]

Not a huge poster, but will chime in with my IT experience regarding remote work.

If only it was really "remote" it would be a hell of a lot better. I work remote almost all the time. I've only have to head to a main office once a month at this point. However, the rest of the time I'm mostly stuck at my house going crazy from lack of human interaction that doesn't happen in a chat window.

I know what you thinking, "I'd do it way different and travel all over the damn place and bang tons of willing randos" I had this same thought and for a while I did travel a bit. On occasion I'll extend a vacation or surf trip by working from the place I was just vacationing at.



However, there's a bunch of problems that come up.


Corporate Tether

At Cock Stroke and Guzzle INC you'll be guaranteed that big brother will be watching. They'll stick you with round the clock email, company messenger, or some other sort of program that allows them to ping you or check in on you at any random moment.

When you are working in the office no one seems to care that you aren't responding to a chat request because you are taking an hour long shit on company time -- they just assume, "hmmm I bet he's busy I'll try back later."

When they know you are remote the psychology changes and co workers and bosses suddenly assume you are off sunning you balls while watching reruns of madmen or something stupid like that. The expected time-frame for a response drops exponentially. They will always assume the worst if they have trouble reaching you as I think it stems from a place of jealousy on their parts.

For example, I went to the bathroom at my own house the other day an emerged to a a shit storm of blinking windows and flashing lights on my desktop. Something broke while I was on the john and after not responding for 5 minutes a "crisis" was born. Sure enough I got a strongly worded email reminding me that working remote "is a privilege not a right".

Another thing is that you'll either have to come into the office for some bullshit meetings that you could probably just dial into or have some sort of physical hardware you just can't get rid that will break and require your physical presence.

Open Ended Tasks

In IT related fields most of the tasks are ongoing or open ended so you can't work really hard and finish up early to go out and play. This really sucks when you work remote since shit is always randomly coming up.

In programming this isn't always the case as you may have certain modules or portions of an application you may be responsible for. However, most of the coders I work with seem to get stuck with the maintenance and system administration aspect of their application due to cost cutting measures. "You program computers you must be swell at setting up scale-able cloud stuffs I'm putting you in charge of that for our app!"


Shitty Internet

The biggest thing you notice when traveling and doing remote work is that the internet really sucks most places. If all you do is send emails about public policy documents you didn't write or bother people all day long for status updates the 1 Meg internet at Starbucks is great. For the average tech person its going to blow. Need to restart a server in remote desktop, upload or move a large file, or maintain a VPN connection? It's often not going to be happening on big chain location internet. You'll become an expert at hunting out libraries and other weird places that have decent internet otherwise it back to the comforts of your blazing home connection.

This goes double while traveling since you won't know all you perfect little work remote spots. When traveling internationally you'll quickly figure out that unless you are in western Europe or certain parts of Asia the internet is less than ideal and goes out frequently.

Oh and while cellular internet is finally here thanks to LTE I find its too pricey to do real remote work. At $75 for 5 gigs you could easily rack up a couple hundred dollar bill in no time. I tested and use around 2-3gigs on my laptop at home per day.

Shitty Work Conditions

Working from a cafe or coffee shop for a whole day gets old real quick. Need to take a piss? Gotta find someone to watch your laptop. Gotta drop a deuce? Better make sure you are working from somewhere that a) has a bathroom and b) one with toilet paper.

Most places that have free wifi don't have power outlets on purpose to keep you from freeloading all day and most laptops have yet to truly crack the 6 hour mark in terms of battery life. I'd say most average around 3:30. This leaves you with finding that perfect spot that lets you recharge or going on a power outlet hunt. The craziest place I recharged my laptop midday was from a random light-pole in the middle of a traffic circle that for some reason had a power outlet. While this hunt is going on god forbid you get someone looking for you as I mentioned before or you 10 minute absence will turn into 10 nastygram emails.

Time Zones

Big business loves the EST. Want to go to Poland and chase the ladies? Might not be happening if most of your clients are bothering you at 10PM Karkow time.

As an american you can still see a whole bunch of places in South American +-3 hours but trust me starting work at 6am in Cabo Mexico gets old real quick.


I know this was kinda of a rant but wanted to share a little bit about the remote worklife and how it isn't all fun and games like digital nomad travel bloggers like to paint it. That being said I did manage to have some great times working and surfing in western PR for a few months so it is possible.

[frenchcorporation]

(05-20-2014 01:04 PM)TravellerJay Wrote:  

FC I agree with you. If money is thrown in contracts for the 2nd option which I believe you mentioned it already, the finance sector, then save as much as you can and then freelance remote work with the finance background and the names of employers as reference.
when you big $$$, sorry mate couldnt find the pound symbol, ridiculous contracts.., what numbers do you mean? and you can elaborate a bit more?

thanks mate

Ive seen job listings for contracts, from £500 - £700 pounds ($800 - $1100) a day ..this is a lot of money imo

an example: http://www.theitjobboard.co.uk/IT-Job/Qu...259743/en/

and these are jobs openly posted on the internet, which means there are even better ones that would only be available via word-of-mouth

[Onto]

I've been contemplating quitting my job, moving overseas and re-tooling my skill set so I can get a remote software developer job.

I'm wondering how likely is it to get a decent paying ($50k/year) dev job that will allow 100% remote work. I have a Bachelors in Computer Science and have programmed in many languages but I've been stuck in QA doing test automation for the past 15 years.

It seems like Ruby offers the most remote work options, but there just doesn't seem to be very many remote jobs available in general which has me nervous.

Is anyone here successfully doing 100% remote work in software?

faznine - I appreciate your post. I was puzzled by the Shitty work conditions section though. Working from a coffee shop would suck, why not just work from the comfort of your apartment?

Oh I just re-read and saw that you like human interaction in the workplace. Have you been in the work world long? Just kidding. Myself, after 15 years of it I would love not to have to listen to other peoples conversations all day, smell their body odor, deal with terrible commutes, terrible office chair, desk, etc.

I think if you were able to 100% remote it would be different, as you said. Then you could rent a place for 3-6 months at a time, travel and enjoy nice women. At least that's my hope.

[Player_1337]

(05-20-2014 03:50 PM)Onto Wrote:  

I've been contemplating quitting my job, moving overseas and re-tooling my skill set so I can get a remote software developer job.

I'm wondering how likely is it to get a decent paying ($50k/year) dev job that will allow 100% remote work. I have a Bachelors in Computer Science and have programmed in many languages but I've been stuck in QA doing test automation for the past 15 years.

It seems like Ruby offers the most remote work options, but there just doesn't seem to be very many remote jobs available in general which has me nervous.

Is anyone here successfully doing 100% remote work in software?

faznine - I appreciate your post. I was puzzled by the Shitty work conditions section though. Working from a coffee shop would suck, why not just work from the comfort of your apartment?

Oh I just re-read and saw that you like human interaction in the workplace. Have you been in the work world long? Just kidding. Myself, after 15 years of it I would love not to have to listen to other peoples conversations all day, smell their body odor, deal with terrible commutes, terrible office chair, desk, etc.

I think if you were able to 100% remote it would be different, as you said. Then you could rent a place for 3-6 months at a time, travel and enjoy nice women. At least that's my hope.

Check out this site (We Work Remotely) dedicated to remote tech jobs. I'm thinking of scoping it out for my next position.

[TravellerJay]

Great post faznine15 and everyone who has posted. It s all your fault frenchcorporation, look what you did mate! hehe for starting this thread. Seriously, thanks man for you started a nice thread and users had something to share.

I d like to chime in and add my experience in the IT and Services field.
I am a Project Manager but used to work as IT agent and IT Team Lead. Working as PM now but looking for a coder future, something that FC triggered as well as others who posted.

In my experience working remotely 100% in your home city or home country really sucks because you miss human interaction as you get deeper into home office. It s also true that commuting sucks, you have to deal with local transportation issues such as strikes or huelgas/paros as we call it those who live in an spanish speaking country. Working from home and managing your time is great, you dont have to get up so early and when you finish you can get a warm mug of coffee or tea and take a shower or goof around sitting in the couch, etc. So a balance is always necessary- Plus you get the chance to see the hotties commuting like you, streets with college babes, MILF s showing their nice and juicy 30+ years bodies, etc

But if you live up your dream and work remotely while travelling pussy paradises, remote really helps and you can benefit from getting that warm human interaction later, after you finish working or before you work if big business starts in US EST timezone.

Regarding corporate tether/VPN/ etc: I know companies will use the " it s a privilege and not a right" to scare off employees of abusing remote teleworking but unless the VP of the area is conducting an IP scan to determine who is using the corp VPN to work from home then there should not be a real issue here. Most companies are focused in profit and a sad reality is that working from home has a tendency of employees working harder and more hours than the 9 to 5 standard office time. You may report the extra time as overtime but companies get the bigger portion of the pie. Always.
I know such an IP scan can be performed but if your boss or the senior manager you report to lives overseas then remote working shouldnt be a problem as he is also doing home office most of the times. A harsh reality is that most senior/subject matter experts/ jobs are home based. And I heard that some senior engineers in my company were working remotely from Europe and never returned from vacation time and since their senior managers were overseas there was no one to really conduct an analysis to find out if the dude was in the local office or not.
Yes, from time to time you need to attend office meeting/monthly meeting and this sucks but this happens ONLY if your job is not freelance and or contractor.
Some companies will even pay trips as part of the annual get together in corporate HQ to meet the boss, the partners, the council board, etc etc.

Internet: I use a VPN and 1x communicator softphone (in case you want to know which company i work for you can google the product), i use proprietary e-tools and yet I can browse and goof when I can FROM home. I need to attend a certain number of days to office but this is ok for the moment. I have a modest 1 MB because the area where I live is completely saturated and no new plans are offered and local telecom company needs to upgrade and offer bigger connections. Except for lack of enough bandwidth to do torrent, it works for doing my job. Sometimes VOIP is a bit choppy, suffers a delay but customer can live with it, my english is awesome so they dont complain, they remark how american or british I sound depending which region I am serving.
So it will all depends which city you are going.
So unless you are going to a shithole or a rural area with no wifi, then it should not be too bad. If work as remote consultant/PM/programmer, engineer, etc is paid in dollars, euros or pounds, currency conversion should work in our favour if we go to non EU areas where euro is not yet the official currency.

Open Ended tasks: unless you are doing maintenance or there is a planned upgrade and you have to attend because, you are the PM or you are the technician doing the upgrade, remote of course, making firm statements and drawing the line should not cause issues with customer. They have lives too and they dont want to work after hours and or spend too much time in endless meetings. Sometimes, yes, you will not escape from a call that needs to be set up with all the parties, if there are too much parties involved, but unless planned, I finish work at 5 pm EST and if I am in the mood, I sometimes respond emails from the phone but not so much now
If the work you do can be done at any time without the 9 to 5 logic, then you can do it at any time unless there is an specific deadline or commitment.

Shitty working conditions: office I work in is not bad, centralized AC/heater, microwave and free coffee machines in every floor, chairs could be better but I used worse.
Personally I dislike shouting and too loud human conversations but at home there is always the distraction of my pets, the females hotties in the neighborhood which I see from my windows , the TV, playing games, etc
So is a balance, plus power sockets everywhere I can take my laptop and find some cozy silent niche anywhere as long as the owner of the space is not returning soon. I agree with body odors, smells, and how everyone assumes you are not working because you went to take a shit and they couldnt find you or internet went down or router turned off due to power outage or simply because you took 10 minutes before killing the laptop.
If anyone asks me, I went to take a break, what do you want? and we move on. But again, each one is different and there lies the beauty.

if your work pays nice, I d say rent a flat/apartment and avoid local internet cafe or burger king spot unless you have to.
And there are portable laptop chargers so no more worries there. I agree that taking a shit on a cafe place is risky because you may end up with laptop stolen and having someone looking after is sort of shitty too.
I d go 100% for the apartment, besides where do you want to take a local hottie back to? this is essential.

Time zones: I agree that most US customers will go nuts and piss all over you if you work outside US time zones BUT if you work remotely and they hired you to develop an app, a web site, etc you can work during US working hours even if this means that as example when is 8 am in East Coast is 2 or 3 pm Central Europe time. You will finish late evening but if you can live with it, you can do daygame, working out and do night game during weekends, unless you have to work
if you are a programmer and there is no pre defined milestones and or phases that require customer to fuck your afternoon european joytime, then it is doable whether you are in Poland, Ukraine or Russia or in West Europe.
These days you can get a US Google number they can call and it will ring in your Android Device and or Iphone.
Leave a message after the bip you fucker, I am making out with a gorgeous russian babe
I know it sounds ideal and reality might not be like that but you k now what? you escaped from a shitty office job or IT job and now you can travel and work from the very hot babes lands everybody dreamed about. Might not be perfect but is way better than what you left back at home.
Is not this to be jealous about? of course! Have fun and fuck all the hotties you can.

This is my ideal plan for the future, remote software developer and or Project Manager while travelling and living local life in the places I want to visit to enjoy.

Cheers!

[BLarsen]

Just wanted to let the RVF boys know that frenchcorporation's blueprint is legit. I just got offered (and accepted) a junior dev position...ruby on rails.

The only prior experience i had were 2 comp sci classes at university.

From start to hire took 7 months. I'll update the thread in a few weeks with my experiences.

[TravellerJay]

BLarsen, congrats mate! and yes, we all knew frenchcorporation was legit.

We can all make it in 7 to 10 months or longer but it is doable. Also peteh got a summer internship, paid job in x amount of months, you may read his post here http://peteh.me/posts/from-zero-to-summe...ne-months/
they did it and so we will.

Some companies will not hire anyone without a bachelor s degree minimum BUT the lack of developers is putting companies between rock and a hard place. Good coders dont necessarily need a CS degree. I met developers who had terrible problem solving skills, anyone can read and write a clean simple code/syntax but some college drop outs can better solve problems let alone they can write even better than those engineers.

BLarsen, please let us know how you did it.

Cheers

[frenchcorporation]

(05-22-2014 06:49 PM)BLarsen Wrote:  

Just wanted to let the RVF boys know that frenchcorporation's blueprint is legit. I just got offered (and accepted) a junior dev position...ruby on rails.

The only prior experience i had were 2 comp sci classes at university.

From start to hire took 7 months. I'll update the thread in a few weeks with my experiences.

Congrats

What tutorials did you use to learn ruby & ruby-on-rails, and in what order?

[Andy_B]

(05-20-2014 03:27 PM)faznine15 Wrote:  

Time Zones

Big business loves the EST. Want to go to Poland and chase the ladies? Might not be happening if most of your clients are bothering you at 10PM Karkow time.

As an american you can still see a whole bunch of places in South American +-3 hours but trust me starting work at 6am in Cabo Mexico gets old real quick.

You can actually work the time zone thing to your advantage if you're creative.

I'm a bit of a night owl, and I tend to work with a lot of Australian clients for that exact reason.

[Onto]

(05-22-2014 09:59 PM)TravellerJay Wrote:  

BLarsen, congrats mate! and yes, we all knew frenchcorporation was legit.

We can all make it in 7 to 10 months or longer but it is doable. Also peteh got a summer internship, paid job in x amount of months, you may read his post here http://peteh.me/posts/from-zero-to-summe...ne-months/
they did it and so we will.

Some companies will not hire anyone without a bachelor s degree minimum BUT the lack of developers is putting companies between rock and a hard place. Good coders dont necessarily need a CS degree. I met developers who had terrible problem solving skills, anyone can read and write a clean simple code/syntax but some college drop outs can better solve problems let alone they can write even better than those engineers.

BLarsen, please let us know how you did it.

Cheers

Let's not get carried away here. But yes, all one needs is to do well in 2-3 classes of a particular language and they are good to go. If a person is driven they can just buy some books and study on there own. Real knowledge will come with on the job experience and more so if you work at lots of different companies, or on lots of different projects.

Coding is easy, but what sets peoples apart is there creativity, and what's most important to being successful is having a helpful and humble personality.

[BLarsen]

(05-23-2014 02:56 AM)frenchcorporation Wrote:  

What tutorials did you use to learn ruby & ruby-on-rails, and in what order?

First things first, when I started I didn't know if I should choose Ruby or Python. I did a quick search for my local job market and found more Ruby jobs than Python jobs, which is how I made my choice.

1) I started with Team Treehouse, which was suggested on page 1 of this thread. Team Treehouse had a number of different "tracks" when I first signed up, e.g. "Web Designer" and "Web Developer". I chose the Web Developer track (HTML, CSS, Ruby, Rails, Git, Unix Command Line)

1a) At the same time I also complete Codecademy's HTML, CSS and Ruby courses.

2)Ruby Koans

*Completing the Treehouse and Codecademy courses took me about 6 weeks. The longest slog was doing the CSS tutorial, which I really haven't even used since.

3)Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial. I tried doing this after 8 weeks of study. If I had to do it all over again I would SKIP every single portion of the tutorial that deals with testing and just build the app. In fact I would build it 2 or even 3 times in a row. But the first time SKIP the portions on testing. I think it's too much too soon for a beginner.

4) CodeSchool. Team Treehouse is really great for beginners, but if you're dedicated like I was you start to realize their tutorials can only take you so far. Enter CodeSchool. CodeSchool has some intermediate level Ruby and Rails courses. They also have good courses for CoffeeScript, beginners JavaScript and the various JavaScript MVC front ends (Backbone, Ember, and now Angular)

I must've built about 30 or so web apps. Not all of them were unique. For example, I would complete a tutorial on how to build a blog in rails and then build it 5 times until the methods started to sink into my brain. At the job I'm leaving we have some internal facing applications that I tried to recreate using my Rails skills. Since I had a working model at work I knew how the app was SUPPOSED to work.

After 5 months I submitted my resume to Monster, Dice and Indeed and immediately got interest. This is very flattering, but I soon realized that the recruiters I was getting contacted by were using the shotgun approach and mass emailing everyone that matched their keyword search.

I did not land my job through a recruiter, I applied directly to the company. They contacted me to see if I was still interested, did a quick phone screen, then take-home coding challenges and an on-site interview.

As far as salary I am going to be making mid $60s to begin, which I am pleased with. I would recommend that if you get to this stage of the process that you MUST negotiate even if it's a trivial attempt. DO NOT just accept the first offer. We did the typical "You go low, I go high" type of negotiation and I ended up getting them to increase their original offer. The negotiation was by phone, and I had already developed a rapport with the guy in person so I think he was really willing to be flexible to meet my request.

A final note, if you've chosen this path DO NOT GIVE UP, you MUST see it through to the end of the process. I mentioned earlier in this thread that I had an interview shortly after I posted my resume and I absolutely fucking bombed it. I spent about 3 days in a zombie-like haze wondering if I had just wasted 5 months of my life, if I really had what it took, if I was just fooling myself. More than anything I was SCARED. Fuck fear. What was my alternative? To continue on my stable but boring career track? Or to fucking sack up and keep pushing. I decided to keep pushing.

That nagging feeling of "Am I really cut out for this?" never really left my head, but I kept going anyway. Every few weeks I'd come back and read frenchcorporation's post for inspiration. If he could do it, then I could do it, fuck being afraid.

It finally hit me last night that I accomplished my goal of being hired. Before last night I really couldn't believe it had happened and I was more shocked than anything. But goddamn last night I felt like a MOTHERFUCKING BOSS. I set a goal, did the work, and accomplished it.

But getting hired is only part of the goal. The next goal is to absolutely blow my senior Dev and manager's minds about how much work I'm willing to put in.

[TravellerJay]

Excellent post BLarsen. What was your education background? Did you have CS degree or engineering or what?

Congrats for a well done job. And yes, FC post is really inspirational