Hi fellow developers!
In a near future I’m planning on attending a college, but these times a degree may not be enough to get a well paying job. Many job offers require certain amount of years of experience, so I’m wondering how to get myself better chances.
I wonder if self-made projects matter to employers at all, and if they do, how should I present my experience? My idea was to make various smaller games and other programs over my college years and post progress about them on kind of a development blog. Then i would make a page about every one of them and write what I learned on the project.
So the questions are: What is the best way to learn things and to show I actually know them? Does it make sense to start with this so soon to show some kind of perseverance, maybe even build a community around game, or is it better to start caring when it starts to matter? Any interesting or helpful experience with getting a job straight out of school?
Thanks for any answers.
The best way would be to make a project so popular and fundamental to your industry that everyone knows about the project. In games that would be making it to number one on the app store or steam or similar.
Make good games. Have them launched in real markets.
It makes sense to start now. It actually makes sense to start yesterday. Its not about showing perseverance, nobody cares much about that. In fact perseverance on something that should have been canned years ago can be a bad thing. What it is about is building your skills as a developer. Experience can’t be earned quickly. By definition it must be gained before it matters.
Can’t help you much with specifics, I’m in the wrong industry. But in general terms its simply a case of applying for as many jobs as you can. Know the companies you apply for well and tailoring your application to meet their needs. Know what job you want to do and why. And generally train yourself up to the point where you can be a valuable employee for the company. Plenty of free advice out there on the internet on general job search and interview techniques.
If you are studying programming know the stuff no one cares about like why use ++i instead of i++, that’s the perfect question to get people sweating Also know the basics like the difference between a Array and List, and maybe be prepared for a binary to hexadecimal conversion. I’m not a programmer really but those are questions I’d ask to check what people know. One of those questions came directly from a job interview.
The best way to work out if you are good or delusional in any discipline is to ask people you think are better then you if they’d like to work on something. If they say yes then you are good if they say no they you MIGHT suck (They might also just have to much on or can’t).
Maybe it depends on the balance between the graphic/programming type jobs but 99% of interviews I’ve had it’s perfectly clear the person or people interviewing me have just glanced at my site and payed more attention to my CV rather than anything else. Sure, they’ll ask for specific examples of certain types of work, and that’s why I keep a copy of my portfolio site on a tablet along with the odd app.
All these types of jobs I’ve been asked to carry out a “task” of some kind and report back with what I’ve done. Maybe it’s different for 100% programming jobs.
As for trying to build up a portfolio, try and bag yourself some freelance work. If you can’t find any, make some. It’s one thing when you know you can do something, but sometimes, getting that across to other people, especially people who may not quite understand what you are talking about (i.e. marketing people, recruiters) can be difficult. So having examples there ready to show can be helpful.
But what do I know? I don’t get many of the jobs I apply for
Well I meant I will try to make a successful game instead of creating it and then not publishing it,having it only as a learning experience. Of course if a game doesn’t play well, I know I should move on.
