I'm very sympathetic to your plight - I too am infuriated by how crappy the system has gotten when it comes to developing candidates with no experience. This is a situation that's broken across the country though, not just San Francisco - my frustrating experience was in the Washington, DC area, a supposedly excellent job market.
I was once in your situation as well - MS math degree from a top level program (4 year PhD student before leaving in an unexpected manner) who also had problems finding a job & applied to any entry level career track job I could (PR, programming, data scientist, statistician, business analyst, intelligence analyst, HR, secretary, sales, etc.). I got fed up after 2 years of searching (minus 7 months spent in initial active duty training in the military before becoming a drilling reservist) and taught myself how to program. I hit up the local meetup events pretty hard simultaneously, and a recruiter helped me get an entry level position - it was entry level pay, but I quickly proved myself from there and with only 16 months of experience, am about to start making $100k+ doing web development.
Hang in there, it gets better - I've experienced some pretty terrible things as well, and I made it out ok.
I suppose every company is different. As a counter-example, we have two different programs -- one for CS grads and one for other non-CS science grads (e.g. physics, math, ee, biology, etc.). Both programs are about 3 months in length and are meant to either teach or refresh practical skills needed on the job. This includes both outside knowledge (e.g. C++) as well as internal tools/processes. More importantly, the group "graduates" as a class and everyone starts their job knowing a decent size group of people in various places throughout the company. A job isn't entry-level if it requires experience outside of school. I just wanted to give an example to show that programs like these do exist. In fact, some of the best programmers I know were math or physics grads with no CS experience outside of a few classes.
It would be interesting to see data on this. My gut says most companies with a large number of employees have some kind of program, so it may just be something that is acquired over time and only systemic in smaller companies. They maybe don't need to spend the resources on it because there is enough competition for the small number of positions.
Hang in there, it gets better - I've experienced some pretty terrible things as well, and I made it out ok.
Oh, it’s gotten better, and then crappy, and then better… To give you a time frame, he first time it got crappy for me, that was because Building 7 collapsed. That made me the first Truthist, I guess.
I do code, that’s not the problem; I do have experience too… Loads of it. It doesn’t seem to get better then. As the article point out: being old seem to suck too, everything does.
Comments
I'm very sympathetic to your plight - I too am infuriated by how crappy the system has gotten when it comes to developing candidates with no experience. This is a situation that's broken across the country though, not just San Francisco - my frustrating experience was in the Washington, DC area, a supposedly excellent job market.
I was once in your situation as well - MS math degree from a top level program (4 year PhD student before leaving in an unexpected manner) who also had problems finding a job & applied to any entry level career track job I could (PR, programming, data scientist, statistician, business analyst, intelligence analyst, HR, secretary, sales, etc.). I got fed up after 2 years of searching (minus 7 months spent in initial active duty training in the military before becoming a drilling reservist) and taught myself how to program. I hit up the local meetup events pretty hard simultaneously, and a recruiter helped me get an entry level position - it was entry level pay, but I quickly proved myself from there and with only 16 months of experience, am about to start making $100k+ doing web development.
Hang in there, it gets better - I've experienced some pretty terrible things as well, and I made it out ok.
I suppose every company is different. As a counter-example, we have two different programs -- one for CS grads and one for other non-CS science grads (e.g. physics, math, ee, biology, etc.). Both programs are about 3 months in length and are meant to either teach or refresh practical skills needed on the job. This includes both outside knowledge (e.g. C++) as well as internal tools/processes. More importantly, the group "graduates" as a class and everyone starts their job knowing a decent size group of people in various places throughout the company. A job isn't entry-level if it requires experience outside of school. I just wanted to give an example to show that programs like these do exist. In fact, some of the best programmers I know were math or physics grads with no CS experience outside of a few classes.
I don't doubt that programs like your company's exist - the problem is systemic, as opposed to rare, is my point.
It would be interesting to see data on this. My gut says most companies with a large number of employees have some kind of program, so it may just be something that is acquired over time and only systemic in smaller companies. They maybe don't need to spend the resources on it because there is enough competition for the small number of positions.
Oh, it’s gotten better, and then crappy, and then better… To give you a time frame, he first time it got crappy for me, that was because Building 7 collapsed. That made me the first Truthist, I guess.
I do code, that’s not the problem; I do have experience too… Loads of it. It doesn’t seem to get better then. As the article point out: being old seem to suck too, everything does.