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Practical Experience As a Beginning Programmer?
LuckyLefty01 writes "I'm 21, going to college, and working part time doing odd jobs like math tutoring. In the past nine months or so, I've discovered and taken to programming (so far mostly C/C++/Obj-C). I am now looking seriously at something in this area as an eventual full time job. Since I don't have much scheduled this coming summer, it would be great to try to get a job of some sort at a tech-related company in order to get some practical experience in the field. Even if I don't have the background to get a job involving actual programming, I think that the knowledge of how such a company works would be valuable. Fortunately, I live in the SF Bay Area, so there should be plenty of companies around. I'm flexible about what I'm going to be doing, and very willing to learn just about anything anybody cares to teach me. If there's some (or even quite a bit of) boring grunt work involved, I can do that too. What type of job would benefit an aspiring but inexperienced programmer the most? What methods might I use to find such a job?"
I don't mean to be a downer, but you've just gotten in to programming at 21, thus presumably are not a CS major -- you don't seriously expect to be paid to write code in the SF Bay Area, do you? (At least not before you graduate). My impression is that the average code jock, as represented on Slashdot, started writing assembly at age 11, and by the time he's entered college has already mastered C and knows with utmost certainty that programming is his future and can't wait to cut his teeth on data structures, algorithms, and Big-Os.
You are way outclassed. I'd be surprised if any potential employer would even let you near a compiler.
Which is pretty much how I started. I had a fine arts degree in design and much less experience even than you have, but I knew that programming was what I wanted to do, more than design. So I first got a short-lived job at a videogame company doing nothing related to programming (translation and graphic design), later got a job at a small software company doing more translation, and after about six years of doing translation, editing, desktop publishing, and localization (still never touched code the whole time), while learning C and an obscure editor macro language in the meantime, my boss (the company president) finally decided, yeah, you obviously have what it takes to write code, so I'll let you do it.
Ten years later, at my last job, I took part in a group interview involving several other software engineers including a kid who'd just recently gotten a Master's in Computer Science, and I was stunned to find that I was the only one who knew what a C++ vtable was.
It probably won't take nearly as long as it did for me (I enjoyed and got good at the other types of work I did along the way), but give yourself some time.