In reality I invest a great deal of money in technical books, as well as time in reading them, and writing code for the exercises in the books.
I'm 42, and I performed unimpressively in an interview two years ago. That gave me some motivation to go back and polish the projects I'd been working on, so the projects would speak for themselves. Since then a number of professional opportunities have come up, largely based on the quality of the projects I've been building. It has a snowball effect as well; it's become easier to pick the work I want, and get work in that area.
This because the product was an in-house tool for a client of my client. The very existence of that tool is a closely guarded trade secret.
I read Robert Ward's excellent "Debugging C" back in the day. In part as a result of that book, I am better at debugging just about anything than just about anybody. But what can I show to a potential employer or client? "Here's some code that doesn't have bugs in it." Similarly with Scott Meyers' "Effective C++" series.
Three times I have applied to a certain company to write Mac OS X I/O Kit Kernel Extensions - what Apple calls device drivers. All three times, their HR refused to forward my resume to the hiring manager, unless I removed all the experience that wasn't directly related to Mac OS X.
All three times I refused; I first learned to write device drivers by hand-coding LSI-11 assembly into octal, then entering the code into the LSI-11 kernel with an octal keypad and a profoundly primitive debugger called ODT, for "Octal Debugging Technique".
That was in an Intro to Computer Architecture class at UC Davis that I took over the summer of 1981, while I was still in high school.
Whoever it is who keeps telling me to remove my non-OS X experience, clearly does not understand how computers work. Each time I have refused; I don't want to work for idiots.
There's three hurdles to being hired (and HN has hashed this over before), so the technical chops are there, it sounds like, but then they ask
- is he/she willing to sacrifice for our success?
- "fit/culture", is s/he somebody we want to travel with/hang out, spend lots of time with, most of it involuntary
"So how could you contribute to our company?"
"I have a goatee and look really good in tight blue jeans. Also I like to ride skateboards, and compose original minimalist piano music."
"You're hired!"
