Breaking into Tech

[BudtaoParticipant 293]

Let me lay out my situation. I have two degrees, both associates, one in AAS in electronics other is a transfer degree for a 4 year computer engineering degree. I have no money to continue college and a credit rating low enough that loans are out of the question. So, I have all the education that I will get anytime soon.
I have very little experience actually working in technology. I had a helpdesk position for about 6 months, and I did an internship for 3 months.
But I have trained myself in several programming languages, I am deeply familiar with Windows and I am training even deeper in linux. My current project is compiling a linux OS from source. So, I am far from a newb with computers. My only problem is that I have zero clue how to convey my ability, since businesses seem to only care about work experience and education.
So my question, have any of you been in a similar position, and if so, how did you break into the industry?

Nirvanna is never having to worry about a woman ever again.

[BudtaoParticipant 293]

Web design is far from my skill set. My skill set is more into the kernal end of things. Building embedded systems, things like that. To do what you suggest would take months of training into a totally different direction than what I have been working on. But I will take it into consideration.

Nirvanna is never having to worry about a woman ever again.

[KeymasterKeymaster]

Budtao wrote:

since businesses seem to only care about work experience and education.

I have no university (or college) and was in a radically different line of work until I was 35. At 31, I wanted to be a 3D animator – making moves like Toy Story and StarWars – things like that A co-worker of mine actually broke into 3D as well and ended up working for Lucasfilm at SkyWalker Ranch.

Created my first website in 2000 to showcase may 3D art and animations. Completely self-taught. The presentation was over the top and did it all in Flash – incorporating video which was way cool at the time.

Then I saw an ad in the paper – the paper(!) – and sent them one line with a link to it. No resume. No experience. They wanted an interview on Friday and I was hired on the spot. Began Monday. When it came time to negotiate salary I had NO idea if I was any good. They started me at what I learned later was an “equitable” rate for a newbie…. then I realized I was out-creating others and asked for a 100% raise after 90 days — and got it — with no argument. No bulls~~~. True story.

3 years later I was the creative head for the same company.

During those 3 years, I became obsessed with programming. I couldn’t write a line of PHP when I was hired for creatives. Within 6 months, I was hanging with the engineers in meetings and creating full blown solutions…. marrying the front end with the back end.

NOW….. I was “marketable” and created “interactive user experiences”.

The job led to other opportunities. … and only then did the resume start to fill up,. Took years, but NOBODY ever hired me for “the resume”. All I had to do was show them “THE WORK”. In fact, one of the directors of the company told me over 90% of the people they had working for them didn’t have a degree of any kind…… we were the kind of people who stay up until 5AM solving a problem on our own. THAT’s what they wanted to hire.

••••••

If you’re strictly an engineer it’s different because they don’t SEE the work. It’s ALLL invisible. It’s even difficult to prove that YOU DID the work yourself. That’s why “the degree” helps software engineers and programmers because their fundamentals are “certified” in a way. But you can create a site and show case your code bits or release them to others and create a site that shows programming experiments and things like that.

You can also… say…. write plugins for WordPress and release one or two into the wild. NOW your name is on it and you can march into an interview and say you have created plugins used by thousands of people.

That’s ONE idea off the top of my head as an example.

Maybe…. ,maybe…create a site that’s “Budtaos works and experiments” with code bits and nifty Jquery stuff. Like a programming tutorials blog (!!!) … then you can say “see this site? This is my show case of projects and code experiments. Just put it online… it doesn’t even need to be popular.

Budtao wrote:

Building embedded systems, things like that

There you go. Create a site / blog that shows people what you do – but not HOW you do it. Be careful about what you give away. Put yourself out there as someone who does sysadmin stuff and do articles like “How to install Apache / Linux and PHP from scratch”. Like you’re TEACHING THE CLASS. Then just plug yourself to ads everywhere and send them your site.

People will hire you.

No I don’t know that for sure…. but they WILL if you believe that they will.

MAKE them hire you.

If you keep doing what you've always done... you're gonna keep getting what you always got.

[Biggvs_DickvsParticipant 3725]

Budtao:

You might Consider DBA work. For about $200 you can take the exam and get Oracle certified for MySQL. That said, if you do some serious kernel hacking, there’s plenty of places looking to hire – you just need to be nearby when the call for an interview comes.

Keymaster – I would really like to get into animation. I’ve been learning Blender3d in my spare time. Could you recommend some other tools like that, particularly that run on Linux, that would be good to learn to get into the biz? I’m getting sick of the systems/infrastructure game….

Best,
Mark

"Data, I would be delighted to offer any advice I can on understanding women. When I have some, I'll let you know." --Captain Picard,

[RockmaninoffParticipant 1641]

Wow. A real programmer guys! Im not kidding either. I always admired guys who actually count bits and bytes.

Tell me about it. In four months I’ll have a degree in computer engineering from a not disreputable school but I feel like a fraud. The guys in my class all have these amazing projects they work on in their free time, learning five languages for fun in the meantime, stuff that will blow the minds of any employer.

And here I am with my barely passable Java and C/C++ skills. These guys love the stuff, I do it only because I have to.

". . . elle, suivant l’usage des femmes et des chats qui ne viennent pas quand on les appelle et qui viennent quand on ne les appelle pas, s’arrêta devant moi et m’adressa la parole"—Prosper Mérimée

[Biggvs_DickvsParticipant 3725]

FACT: ASSHOLES GET PLOTTED AGAINST AND FIRED OFF.

Good men are insulated, mentored and valued.

And everyone lives happily ever after with unicorns and puppies farting rainbows.

Sorry, gotta disagree with you. I’ve worked in FAR too many places where middle management was top heavy and the only reason many/most of them had jobs was because of the sheer level of chaos that had to be managed.

Example: I worked a contract at a largest international shipping company, I used my many years of IT infrastructure design experience and devised a few solid methods to reduce the chaos and streamline operations. This of course would have meant considerably less need for the myriad of project managers, etc.

My contract was ended within a few weeks, with no official explanation(I work in a fire-at-will state). Keep in mind, during the previous several months I heard nothing but high praise all around, and was supposedly on track to a perm position.

Of course I had another job in a week or three, but I’m just saying, in my experience, there’s often a layer of entrenched middle managers that can be highly resistant to change, especially when it means the need for their services may be diminished.

"Data, I would be delighted to offer any advice I can on understanding women. When I have some, I'll let you know." --Captain Picard,

[BudtaoParticipant 293]

Wow, I stepped onto a political landmine with this post didn’t I? But reading all your posts, sounds like there is no easy solution to getting into work right now. I’ll just keep training myself and hope for the best. Thanks for the advice guys.

Nirvanna is never having to worry about a woman ever again.

[SnakeSpectator 2080]

work non stop(back to work slaves)

This is not shtfplan.com prepper ville(dictating what MGTOW is or is not)

angry men never reach their full potential. They are always fired off.(your full potential is tied to your employment)

group of men and women, it is like a family.(need I say more?)

Good men are insulated, mentored and valued.(WHERE)

Ignore any anti corporate views.(back to work, boys)

Love my 9 to 5 job.(love being a slave)

Peaceful(So peaceful not having to think for myself)

Stealth and ghosting are key.(Bitch you aint got s~~~ to ghost, you are a corporate drone.)

Cowboys never read enough books so they have few skills and have not learned to learn.(have not learned to learn…I don’t even…)

Bullies always end up broken(exactly. you are going to end up broken and bitter f~~~ing with Snake.)

The female “hear me roar” types always fail.(yep, you are going to fail. nobody is saying hear me roar more than you are)

[Crazy CanuckMember 4215]

samy Kamkar have built some cool devices to hack, don’t worry he’s a white hacker. Here is a garage door hack he modified from a toy. Btw he never went to school for programming or engineering he is purely self taught!

"If pussy was a stock it would be plummeting right now because you've flooded the market with it. You're giving it away too easy." - Dave Chapelle

[TheroniusParticipant 975]

If you want to play the corporate game you can make it work. What I always tried to remember was that corporations are about making money. That’s all. They exist to turn a profit, and everything else is bulls~~~. Figure out how to sell yourself by how you can make (or save) more money for the company, and they will want you. Once you get in the first door, focus on making and saving money for the company, and document your success. Use that to jump to another company. That’s how you get big raises. Loyalty to a big corporation is a fools game in today’s world. At my last “real” jobs I made more money than my managers. I could also document the millions of dollars a year in savings that directly resulted from my work. I told upper management of my successes rather than let the manager take all the credit. Never forget that, in the corporate world, money talks and everything else takes a long, slow stroll.

"I am is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that I do is the longest sentence?" - George Carlin

[RoyDalParticipant]

I like Keymaster’s story, and Theronious has nailed the corporate environment. Bunker is right too, in that if you can do things, they will want and need to keep you.

Note; If you cause trouble for them, they will find a way to hire someone from Mumbai to whatever it is you did. If they think they can save money by outsourcing your job, then outsourced it will be too.

What they can not outsource is the guy who gets down on his hands and knees and hooks up cables behind the equipment racks, and then goes to his terminal and pecks in the commands to make the new hookup work. Only an on-site IT guru can do that.

Edit: The last, the very last, corporation I sold my time to went through a massive layoff. All the IT guys got the axe (managers excepted of course). A few weeks later, they were all back, hired as consultants, at what amounted to a hefty raise. The corp probably lost money on the deal.

Moral: Managers need people who can do things.

Society asks MGTOWs: Why are you not making more tax-slaves?

[RoyDalParticipant]

I have never seen a more impassioned and skillful, yet deceitful, whitewash of corporate culture.

Don’t be fooled. All us corporate drones know (or once knew) the life of Dilbert is the unvarnished truth slightly exaggerated for the sake of humor.

Edit: This is a good book on that very subject.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
by Scott Adams

Society asks MGTOWs: Why are you not making more tax-slaves?

[Anonymous 0]

I really don’t see the appeal doing IT work. It’s exhausting and you have no life. My mgtow life is not made to do that type of work. I do see the appeal in the money and having a foundation but see no reason to learn something I hate and just for the sake of money. I can die ten years from now. I rather be on my death be thinking about all the cool things I did in life and chose something I enjoy than have a bank full of cash and regret. Do you really want to behind a computer ten hours a day plus studying all the time about new tech you have to master with a boss yelling in your ear?

[StargazerParticipant 12505]

Keymaster wrote:

I have no university (or college) and was in a radically different line of work until I was 35.

My story is similar. I was a live audio sound engineer (self taught) touring the country with a number of bands at 28 when I started to notice that guys in my industry a few years older than me were making babies, getting stuck in marriages and getting fat and lazy so I moved to San Francisco to get a job producing interactive content.

I had taught myself how to use Director and had made a data driven CD-ROM application using it and Flash to showcase bands for agents to send to potential clients (which I showed at South By Southwest) but that’s all the experience and skill I had. I walked in and applied at two companies and got offers from both… picked the one where I thought I could learn the most and went to work doing photoshop resizing of pictures from the 1996 Summer Olympics for a media site we were producing for $30k a year.

After two years of learning and growing my coding, production art and management skills on the job, I was the Creative Resource Manager overseeing a team of 12 people and making hiring and firing decisions for $55k a year while making another $40k a year moonlighting on Director and Flash projects for former clients of my employer.

When my moonlighting work became more lucrative than my job, I quit the job and went full time as an independent working for companies like Hasbro, Cartoon Network, Wells Fargo and SAP.

After the Dot Com bubble burst in early 2000, I decided it was time to build my own product and lease it rather than doing work-for-hire projects for other people. I’ve been working on that project ever since… at a rate of pay and personal freedom that would embarrass and enrage people with degrees and a “real education”.

After my first job in the industry, I never showed anyone another resume. That one was s~~~ anyway. I showed them my work. The single best piece of work I ever did which got me the vast majority of my gigs was a simple 3D rotating sphere made up of 64 independent objects that appeared to rotate in space (using blur and fade for motion in the Z axis) built using ActionScript 1 in Flash. You could feed it a list of coordinates and it would produce that object and let you control its position, scale, rotation speed and direction by “throwing it” around the screen using your mouse.

The people at Macromedia were blown away and hired me to produce one of their most successful banner ads of the time, an interactive game that let you catch eyeb~~~~ with a little net inside of the banner which received an unprecedented 20% click-through rate.

That little spinny ball thing literally opened the door to millions of dollars of income and I did it and the flash based website I used to show it off in less than three days,

The short of it? Teach yourself something you enjoy and build something amazing with your own mind and hands and you’ll never go hungry. If I could do it (an average kid from Alabama with a 12th grade public education) then anyone with a brain and the will to use it can do the same.

[BudtaoParticipant 293]

Anonymous wrote:

Do you really want to behind a computer ten hours a day plus studying all the time about new tech you have to master with a boss yelling in your ear?

I guess it depends on what you are passionate about. I LOVE building systems. Hell, when I have nothing to build in the real world, I end up building systems in a virtual world like minecraft.(Although Space Engineers is my new passion since it is wide open for programming as well.) I have built whole cities whoes whole purpose is to pump out as many iron ingots at it can. So yeah, I am definately fortunate in that my passion happens to be profitable right now.

Nirvanna is never having to worry about a woman ever again.

[Anonymous 0]

Budtao wrote:

GodEater wrote:

Do you really want to behind a computer ten hours a day plus studying all the time about new tech you have to master with a boss yelling in your ear?

I guess it depends on what you are passionate about. I LOVE building systems. Hell, when I have nothing to build in the real world, I end up building systems in a virtual world like minecraft.(Although Space Engineers is my new passion since it is wide open for programming as well.) I have built whole cities whoes whole purpose is to pump out as many iron ingots at it can. So yeah, I am definately fortunate in that my passion happens to be profitable right now.

Yeah I can work security or construction in my area and make about 30-40k a year. That can help me pay for all of my gear for my dream job but don’t see why I should go for tech. Also I have no kids, wife, or family obligations. I see why not got to school for something I love. My dad paying and told me to focus on whatever you want to do.

[NotMyProblemParticipant 965]

My take:

I have a corporate job out of necessity. Steady paychecks are nice at this point in my life, but will I waste 30 years of my life for it?

F~~~ no.

When you don’t send all the money upstairs to your wife, all you need is like $15,000/year to live like a King.

Get the job if you have to but don’t take it too seriously. There are plenty of tech businesses you can start with little to no capital.

If you have a good idea that requires mega-bucks, just use someone else’s money. The world is absolutely overflowing with venture capital.

Not my property... Not my problem

[Author]

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