How do I land a junior dev role at a start up?

I'm in a tech hub city where there are lots of startups . These startups host regular meetups and have open house and are on hiring binges.

How do I land a job at one of these companies? I have a pure math degree, but started taking fundamental Computer Sciences courses as a student at a nearby (but prestigious) university and am doing very well in my CS courses.

I have plans to get an advanced degree in CS (just for my sake not for job market), but in the meantime I want to start working.

It seems like all these startups only want senior engineers. I'm one of the top students in my CS courses, but I wouldn't say that means I'm anywhere near being a "great" software engineer as I'm still new and have several additional courses I need to take to round out the CS core.

I'm looking for junior dev positions but have no idea where to look. All the startup interview processes weed out newbies. I program in Java/Python but most of these companies are looking for senior techies in Swift, AngularJS, D3, Clojure, NoSQL knowledge, etc.

There doesn't seem to be a market for junior devs anywhere I look.

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Startups need someone to build a strong foundation. Newbies cant do that. Therefore startups dont hire newbies. You need a company that wouldn't lose much cause of your mistakes

Look on angel.co/

I know you said pure math, but how good are you with probability and statistics? Cause if you're good (and even if you aren't an expert, due to your math background, it shouldn't be too hard to get good enough at it to stand out from all the CS kids who took a single hand-wavy undergraduate ML course), you could leverage that into Data Science or some other ML-related job. There are lots of startups looking for people like that. I don't know if you've considered it an option.

Especially since you program in Python, if you get familiar with numpy, pandas, and scipy (and maybe scikit-learn as well), it would look pretty good.

Also, be sure to have a portfolio or busy-looking github. I just got hired by a startup and after interviewing with 3 other startups, unlike Google, Amazon, and the likes (which I also interviewed with). they all seemed to care more about what my code looks like and whether I have worked on a complete application (a couple of them even asked me to, not only include my source code, but actually deploy my app) than whether I could solve programming brain busters in the shortest amount of time.

Why the fuck would you ever want to work at a startup?

Claim you identify as a transnigger mexican genderbender agender transgender pansexual anti heterosexual furry
Get hired
Profit

Get comfortable on one of the hot topics in web and mobile developments (for example: node js).

bump pump
i'm pumping the bump pump

>a pure math degree
You're too qualified for a startup.

Don't look into startups though. Generally they're pretty shitty since there's no structure holding them together. They seem nice for a bit then there's drama and all levels of stupid bullshit. Start working on side projects as a portfolio to get yourself hired. There's nothing more effective when it comes to programming than showing that you know what you're doing by example.

How did you manage to land so many interviews? I've been applying to data science jobs for a while now and still haven't heard back much.

Also, do you know much about Galvanize (for data science)?

>How do I land a job at one of these companies? I have a pure math degree, but started taking fundamental Computer Sciences courses as a student at a nearby (but prestigious) university and am doing very well in my CS courses.

Mang, just apply for jobs. Half of getting these jobs is just having a huge ego.

Why do you want to work at a company that, with a 90% probability, will not exist anymore in less than a year?

Not OP, but the reason I wanted to work at a startup was that: not only did I feel, from the interview process, that I wouldn't fit in with the culture at Google, Amazon, Coursera, etc, I also felt I would get to learn more. Sure I don't have to work for google, facebook, or dropbox and could instead be a software engineer for a non-tech company like Home Depot, but I think I wouldn't learn as much as I would at a technology company. I don't care about longer hours, I enjoy work and don't have much else to do anyway (don't watch tv, hardly play vidya, and there's enough time in the weekend to hang out with my friends and socialize). Besides working out and playing guitar, I would just dick around if I had any more free time (no gf anymore, so that gives me even more free time).

You guys are being overly dramatic. It really depends on the startup. If a startup is established enough to have job postings online, high salary offerings, and recruiters firms hooking them up, then they'll probably be around for some time, even if they don't blow up and become the next facebook. Also, for instance, the startup I will be going into is already established enough to be profitable. Just use a critical eye.

My advice to OP: try it out for a couple of years, see if you like it, then leave if you don't. At worst, you will have learned a ton. Working at startups tends to require that you wear many hats and be involved in all states of the product development.

A recruiter hooked it up. No, I do not know about Galvanize.

I didn't go into data science, actually, but do have some experience with it (I did a Masters in Statistical Finance. Did that, but decided to stay a software engineer, but worked on financial applications for a year and a half after the Masters) but based on job postings for startups, it seems to be very popular. A couple of the startups I interviewed at had established Data Science teams.

START BY OVERDOSING ON LSD

>How did you manage to land so many interviews?

Oh, and the recruiter only hooked it up with the startups. I landed interviews with google, amazon, coursera, and airwatch vmware by myself by going to the school's career fair.

Get a beard, wear a scarf, get thick rimmed glasses and wear a bowler hat and suspenders. Use wax on your mustache. Make some web applications on Ruby-on-rails and mongodb and put it on github. Get an apple computer and describe yourself as a "code artesian".

Which is a huge problem in the industry in itself.

Some general tips to wow interviewers:
- Switch to soft tabs if you haven't already.
- Use flip flops extensively in your Rails business logic.
- Write an image-recognition neural network exclusively in Node.js, and train it to recognize the difference between fedoras and trilbies.

What about identifying as pic related?

OP here, been at school all day. Surprised to see this thread is still around.


Thanks, these are excellent suggestions. How do you gauge whether a project is worthy of putting on github or not? I recently created a neural net from scratch but came across a paper that would allow me to squeeze out an extra 2% accuracy out of it. Not sure if I should wait to publish that version, or publish the version I have now.

I hear this everywhere. Why is it so popular right now? What's the learning curve like? Most web developers I know are into functional programming, like clojure.

Good idea. I recently started working on some mathy side projects related to ML.

>do you know much about Galvanize (for data science)?

Airbnb has positions where they send their associate data scientist through the program. I heard its 16k and airbnb pays 10k.

Heard not everyone finds a job quickly that graduates from the program. I believe it's fast paced and you'll learn a lot if you come in already knowing something.

Good advice thanks.