Been looking for a job for many months and I can't find anything. I've got a bachelor's degree in CS but I feel like I didn't learn much at school, honestly. I see the kind of programming going on here on HN and in hot cities/companies (Google, Mozilla, etc.) and I have no clue. If you give me a project idea and time to discover a framework, I can get something out of it (see [redacted] for my 2-day discovery of Angular). But how am I supposed to sell myself as an Ember, Angular <i>and</i> Node <i>specialist</i>, for instance? This is ridiculous.<p>I have a pretty small network but the people I've worked with know how reliable I try to be. While an intern I've solved many business problems with languages I didn't previously know, such as Excel VBA. None of those people could help me get something although they could have, with a different timing.<p>My biggest achievement is creating and managing a WordPress site now visited 50k times per month. I used to think it was an excellent asset when seeing what my classmates were up to (playing video games, mostly), but companies are definitely not impressed. And in a sense it's true that I didn't write a lot of code for it. But the code I wrote is rock solid. So yeah, I don't know.<p>So what should I do? I live in a small country where German and French are spoken. I speak English and French. I have theoretical notions of German and I could speak it in a matter of months if somebody gave me a chance. Since French-speaking companies don't, I doubt German-speaking ones would, though, and so far they haven't. What have we done for companies to be so afraid of us? I grew up in this country, graduated in an excellent high school and in a decent CS school; somebody'd make a pretty damn good deal if they hired me while I'm cheap. But everybody's rejecting me despite my motivation and my clean profile. This is wicked and there's a point at which I will simply stop and go milk cows instead.
My first suggestion is to forget what you see on HN; it's totally not representative of most of the world's IT work.<p>Excel VBA and legacy business systems and nasty abandoned PHP and shitty Java monoliths are <i>way</i> more common out there than Angular and Node and the like.<p>"…solved many business problems with languages I didn't previously know, such as Excel VBA" sounds like it would make you a fantastic employee for any number of small businesses out there, the trick will be finding them.<p>I lucked into my first gig via a short-term contract (through a friend) that turned into full-time employment. The job was a mix of Filemaker (which I'd never touched before) and PHP and weird CSV import/export formats (so, basically the most awful combination of technologies in existence), but I solved real problems and was of real value to my employer. Sounds like you could pretty easily do the same, you just need to look for the opportunities.<p>The stuff that gets talked about on HN seems to be a weird microcosm of cutting edge tech, too much money, and "we have to convince investors we're worth buying so we have to keep up with all the buzzword tech". Meanwhile the other 99% are just tucked away in small businesses solving boring business problems with boring legacy tech and keeping the world turning.
Honestly I don't think companies expect you to really know anything about specific technologies if you've just come out of school. Most likely they just expect you to have strong fundamentals in CS, which hopefully you learned, though you say you "feel like [you] didn't learn much at school".<p>My only advice is to keep applying and work on something while you are still unemployed. You left out whether you've been getting interviews or not, which might be important to see whether it's your resume or interviewing that is the problem.
You are either from Switzerland or Luxembourg, right? Maybe move to Berlin? There are a lot of English-speaking startups here, and you can eventually pick up some German as well. Learn say some Ruby on Rails / Javascript by building a website and then apply to jr. positions. Software development requires effort and time. You cannot just build something serious without years of learning and coding.
You have a CS degree but you are applying for relatively simply web development jobs where you can easily be out done by less formally educated people who have more web development experience. That's a bad strategy.<p>You should apply for the less flashy jobs at bigger companies that tend to want people with a solid formal education.
Maybe you just need to write your resume better, and work on soft skills when talking to recruiters and hiring managers? Maybe secure an internship to collect even more job experience while looking for a better job?<p>Experience matters more than pay. Do anything to get a software or IT job, and then eventually hop to something better. Howard Stern (the super rich radio guy) used to make barely anything for a very long time.