So basically I’m a self taught programmer and I would classify my skills as intermediate… I mainly know JavaScript and Python, and a little bit of C++. but I’ve also practiced and gotten fairly good front end web development.<p>I’ve never been able to push past the intermediate level because I don’t work in the tech industry and I’ve been doing prerequisite classes in school which didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know besides having more hands on C++ experience.<p>My grades are all excellent and I have some personal projects I’d be proud to show off but somehow non of it feel good enough to land a job in tech, most if not all listings require multiple years of professional experience or being a few month away from graduation if it’s an internship. By the time I graduate I will be close to being 30 and I really want to get started much sooner than that, otherwise I’ll be stuck in dead end retail jobs barely scraping by.<p>Do you have any advice that I can follow?
For "less experienced" developers, I don't look at their experience when hiring. I look at "knowledge to experience ratio". I look for people who can demonstrate far more knowledge than one would expect based on the level of experience.<p>It is rather common to meet engineers who learned things in their first couple years on the job and then didn't advance much past that in the next 10 years.<p>What I am looking for is the opposite.<p>An exemplar:<p>I interviewed someone with no CS background beyond doing a bootcamp that focused on Ruby and Rails. When we interviewed them, they did incredibly well with a modeling problem. Better than most of the engineers we ever interviewed. It was very impressive and not what you would expect from someone coming out of a bootcamp.<p>I would suggest that when interviewing (and it will be hard to get interviews by just sending out resumes)n that you work on becoming impressive with your knowledge.<p>But you need to get to the interview. I would suggest finding environments where you can interact with engineers who you can impress and use that as a way to get into interviews.<p>Beyond that, look for job listings that aren't "must have X experience, must know Y". Look for job listings that are clearly written by a manager or an organization that would be willing to someone with your background and then impress the hell of out of them in a cover letter. When your experience on the resume isn't impressive, the only way you can impress is to demonstrate thoughtfulness and knowledge beyond experience in a cover letter.<p>Getting a job when you don't have a traditional background is going to be hard. Set yourself apart. Find ways to stand out and keep at it.<p>Most importantly, be brutally honest with yourself and reflect on what you are doing that isn't working then course correct.
If you're graduating with a CS degree, you just have to follow the same advice as for new CS grads.<p>I'd check out resources like csprimer and Math Academy and Frontend Masters to get a solid foundation. After taking an algorithms course, you can start productively studying leetcode on sites like neetcode.
Apply for a junior web developer role. Python and JavaScript are good things to know.<p>Is that JS on the backend or front end? If front end, do you know CSS and HTML5 well too?