Ask HN: Non-CS Hackers, How Did You Land Your First (dev) Job?

I have a degree in IT. My first job was through a personal connection after literally over 100 resumes I sent out (I had a huge spreadsheet of job positions and offers. Offers was almost always "REJECTED"). It was a bit different for me in that I didn't want to work in my home state anymore, and I was actively turning down any local positions. Regardless, I could only get about 2 to 3 companies to even interview a new graduate with nothing to really show on my resume. It probably doesn't really help with your situation, and it might not be what you were hoping to hear, but it's how I landed my very first dev job. Without my connection and someone vouching for me, I'm not sure what would have happened...

That out of the way, don't give up. There are lots of positions out there, and many people are hiring. Keep on trying and don't give up. Careerbuilder and other websites can help a good bit in terms of getting your name out there. Recruiters on there and other resume places have helped me find other jobs, and I am currently at a solid company with good pay. Passion helps a ton, I've found. Find something to be passionate about, both in the tech field and outside the tech field.

But just to touch one more thing - the concepts you are struggling with take practice. I had to teach myself most CS concepts, and a lot of it involved going to MIT's site or going to Harvard's site and grinding them out. I spent many many hours on YouTube and elsewhere just trying to understand the concepts and, most importantly, writing software utilizing these concepts. I still regularly quiz myself once a month on some random interview question, such as how to write a DFS or BFS from scratch, how to reverse a binary tree, or how to implement something like Dijkstra's from scratch without looking anything up. If I find myself needing to look stuff up, I make a mental note on the concept(s) I'm rusty on and do a few more exercises pertaining to the concept. If I find the stuff easy, I make sure not to review it for quite awhile (utilizing Anki is a great way to do this, by the way).

Started programming PDP-11 Basic in freshman year of high school, kept going (Applesoft BASIC, 6502 ML, QBasic, a little C, MS-DOS batch) up as a hobby through college, first job out of college was an operations job, but then the programmer quit and I took up the slack (PL/1), went into computer sales (Amiga; learned ARexx, CanDo, more C), worked at a couple of business consulting jobs (more scripting stuff, MS-DOS/Win, Mac, AIX), started working with a friend doing desktop database (PAL) one-offs for various clients, started doing webdev (when the web showed up), transitioned to Delphi for the desktop stuff, then Delphi generating Perl, HTML, Javascript websites, sold the co. for 45M, out of work for a few years (kept doing more advanced web stuff, learning better javascript, html, css, related junk), now work in IT and do webdev on the side.

BTW, I have a BA Humanities :)

Ex-lawyer, I've been coding since I was a teenager but then started freelancing after leaving law. Got picked up by one of my clients and have been working as a full-time dev ever since.

For the actual CS bits, I've been teaching myself. I recently got an article published in Hacker Noon on Big O which was a way for me to consolidate my learning. Algorithms and Data Structures are next!