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Getting Hired As an Entry-Level Programmer?

Posted by kdawson on from the foot-in-door dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I received a state university degree in Computer Science. After graduation, I immediately took jobs in QA to pay the bills while waiting for other opportunities, which of course turned out to be as naive as it sounds. I've been working QA for several years now and my resume does not show the right kind of work experience for programming. On the whole I'm probably no better as a a candidate than a CS graduate fresh out of college. But all of the job postings out in the real world are looking for people with 2-5 years of programming work experience. How do you build up those first 2 years of experience? What kinds of companies hire programmers with no prior experience?"

7 of 540 comments (clear)

  1. Simple by FooGoo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Lie on your resume...but you better be able to keep the job once you have it.

    --
    People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
    1. Re:Simple by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 2, Funny

      You do know that asking a subordinate for oral sex is against company policy, right?!

    2. Re:Simple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      I once saw a job req that had something along the lines of "Security clearance or equivalent work experience required." I never did find out what that meant.

      "If you have clearance we can train you, if you're trained we can get you clearance, but fuck if we're doing both"

  2. Re:You should have asked this a year before. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    A good QA developer is just as necessary as a good developer. We all like writing original code, and it takes a special kind of person to write smoke tests, et al, for someone else's code. At my previous job, our product's QA department was just as important as our development department to get the monthly releases out on time.

    Top flight developers producing quality code don't need large QA departments. They've already written well-designed, bug-resistent code, unit tests, integration tests, and performance tests, all in the course of producing something that works (the first time).

    If you have to pay a phalanx of QA engineers to find bugs post-facto ("just as important as our development department"), you're doing it wrong. The bugs shouldn't have been there to begin with.

  3. What kinds of companies hire inexperienced program by jprupp · · Score: 1, Funny

    Microsoft?

  4. Re:You should have asked this a year before. by alexj33 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I agree. I'm going to pass this one around the office. Laughed so hard, I'm still wiping coffee off my screen.

  5. Re:You should have asked this a year before. by Chatterton · · Score: 2, Funny

    That what he said: "the last number is never zero..." :D mouhahahaha