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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2342 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 13, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I got a CS degree a few months ago and I have been working as a sys admin for almost a decade. I don't have much of a portfolio other than coursework, but I have been hitting leetcode pretty hard and can solve easy and medium problems pretty well. How can I get interviews for coding positions? I haven't had much success so far.

I'm looking at it from the opposite perspective of someone who's on the ops side that has to look at resumes and gives interviews, but I would definitely consider 10 years of development experience as a plus for a sysadmin; to me that's someone that would be much more comfortable than your average sysadmin with scripting, and who will get infrastructure-as-code much more readily.

I work with a lot of devs and there's a lot of things that sysadmin experience can bring to development. There's a lot of debugging steps that your experience can have you breeze through: connectivity issues, permission issues, policy issues, etc...

Imho it’s a numbers game until you build out a network. My first job was the result of months of cold applying to things. Every job since has been joining someone I’ve already worked with which is so much easier.

Does your school have alumni job placement help? That can help bootstrap a network, along with talking to former classmates.

Are you getting interviews but not offers? Or just not hearing back after applying?

How do you build out a network? What does that even mean?

It's not all about impressing the boss, you need to make a good impression to your coworkers of being a reliable worker. And if you do user/client facing work, to the users and clients. If my employer wants to hire a person for me to work with my first thought will be to go in my head through the list of people I've worked with and see if there's one that I would like to work with again that might be up for a change of scenery.

I mean a network of people who know you and your work. Preferably from having worked with you. I checked in with school acquaintances for instance, many of whom were doing the kind of work I wanted to do.

The more you can be a “known quantity” the better I think during job searches. Someone who knows you and can say good things about you can be a major leg up.

As for how, I know there are often local tech meetups where you can meet people. My personal approach has been to make sure when someone works with me they like my work and they like working with me. It’s opened a lot of doors.

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