Ask HN: What about us under valued developer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10364947

by swcoders • 11 years ago

6 4 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi All, I think I am undervalued developer. I have good expertise in my field and I have caliber to solve the hard problems. I am not too good to show my skills to others. On my day job I have good impact on others but I am some what undervalued. I am capable to do so many things but my day job is not much challenging. In interviews I was not able show my true skills so that I am in very small company. I think big companies do not give shit to candidate expertise. I am very good at my work. I need your advice. I am really got depressed some time because of this. My day job does not have good challenges and I think this is my mistake because I am not able to show my true potentials to others. Please advice. What you do to show your skills. How you get a good job. What should I do. Please help!!

hex132• 11 years ago

"In interviews I was not able show my true skills" Do you have sideproject? This makes a lot easier to show you true skills if you can show to recruiter what you have done, talk about it etc.

Besides, to pass well a programming interview you need one more thing: self-confidence. Somebody mediocre but with a lot of self-confidence looks better on job interviews than somebody with good skills but with low esteem and with no confidence.

Recruitement is a psychological process rather than technical.

Second important thing is to be cool or appear cool to you recruiters. If you're good at programming this counts as cool. If you have some interesting sideproject you can talk about, this also counts as cool. If you are up-to-date with current trends (you probably need read much of Twitter, HN, Reddit, Github etc.), this also counts as cool etc.

TL;DR keep calm and be confident and appear cool.

swcoders• 11 years ago

Thanks for the advice. Can you please advice me what type of side projects I might choose. I get really confused when trying to work on side projects. So Please advice what type of side project I should work on. Currently I am working on mobile platforms.

hex132• 11 years ago

You can do something that

- it's interesting to you, something you will be passionate about. Something that is fun to program.

- something that will help you learn new things, that will help you grow as a programmer

- something that solves you problems (for example open source library that solves some problems you encounter when programming on mobile platforms)

or:

- something that solves problems of other people

Please advice what type of side project I should work on.

"should" is Wrong word. You can. It's more like mental attitude. Take a look around on hacker and startup communities. Many things arose from sideprojects.

But even if you don't have this kind of sideproject mental attitude it's still good to spend some time programming on your own, at least to get familiar with other tools/libraries and approaches than you have in your work. If you can really don't know what to do it's still better to make anything just for learn new things (for example to learn popular framework you don't know yet)

christopherDam• 11 years ago

I think there are lot off people like us who are undervalued

Ask HN: What about us under valued developer

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