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?"

Comments

GSOC

[thefear]

Google summer of code is pretty good for practical experience, but the application period closes tomorrow :(

Re:Bugzilla!

[hacker]

The last 10 years of my resume has nothing BUT Open Source/Linux work, much of that working for big, non-OSS companies.

I just got a new job at a Fortune 500 financial firm in lower Manhattan spending my day building and debugging FLOSS applications for Linux and Solaris. Their criteria for hiring me was specifically because of my long-standing ties to the OSS community and my work on FLOSS for the last 14 years.

These companies do exist, and they DO value your OSS contributions, if you state them clearly and succinctly on your cv/resume.

Re:A temporary job that'll benefit you the most ..

[ChrisGilliard]

The skills you're less likely to pick up there, but which you can pick up in a shorter temporary project are things like QA, marketing, sales, system administration, maybe even customer support.

I see your point, but I sort of think if he wants to be a developer, he should do development. If anything offer to program at a very low rate as others have suggested. I've seen many people that want to code get stuck in QA for years. If he does take a QA job, he should definitely try to get access to the source code and try to write up much more detailed bugs than the other QA engineers and always be telling people he's interested in becoming a developer. This is definitely a delicate subject because the QA managers will probably not be happy with that. Also, I don't see this path with marketing/sales since it's really a different world and does not interact as much with development as QA or sys amdin. I have seen customer support folks move over to development on occasion too. But again, all of these take a lot of time and hard work, when if you have development skills, I'd suggest just being a developer right off the bat in any way possible (e.g. internship)