When I was trying to break into a new field, I targeted applying for jobs I was certain would be bad, in places with high turnover. Try staffing agencies, eventually a recruiter will slap you against an interview with someone desperate to hire ‘someone’ for a role they can be sure you wouldn’t screw up too badly.
There, that’s your first job, do it for 6mo − 1 year, now your resume looks normal and you can apply for others.
Also, you may or may not want to consider changing your resume job title for your startups to something like ‘Senior Engineer’. Technically not a lie—they can call the former CEO and ask him about your role.
Randstad is the largest I think. For something with a more silicon valley feel, I’ve seen ads for triplebyte.
You may be more suited to a management role, or a non-coder role. There are stable, easy, and well paid jobs in tech that are not directly in software engineering where being self taught isn’t as much of a negative.
If I knew how to get a ‘product manager’ role, I’d have done it myself though
I did something similar once: after having a few suspicious years on my resume, I took a shitty job and 1 year later started interviewing seriously. It seemed to me that the one year made a big difference (or maybe just the market changed, I will never know for certain).
The fact that someone else hired you, and you survived the probationary period, is way more costly signal than e.g. giving you a homework at a job interview.
When I was trying to break into a new field, I targeted applying for jobs I was certain would be bad, in places with high turnover. Try staffing agencies, eventually a recruiter will slap you against an interview with someone desperate to hire ‘someone’ for a role they can be sure you wouldn’t screw up too badly.
There, that’s your first job, do it for 6mo − 1 year, now your resume looks normal and you can apply for others.
Also, you may or may not want to consider changing your resume job title for your startups to something like ‘Senior Engineer’. Technically not a lie—they can call the former CEO and ask him about your role.
What is a good way to find staffing agencies?
That’s clever.
Randstad is the largest I think. For something with a more silicon valley feel, I’ve seen ads for triplebyte.
You may be more suited to a management role, or a non-coder role. There are stable, easy, and well paid jobs in tech that are not directly in software engineering where being self taught isn’t as much of a negative.
If I knew how to get a ‘product manager’ role, I’d have done it myself though
I did something similar once: after having a few suspicious years on my resume, I took a shitty job and 1 year later started interviewing seriously. It seemed to me that the one year made a big difference (or maybe just the market changed, I will never know for certain).
The fact that someone else hired you, and you survived the probationary period, is way more costly signal than e.g. giving you a homework at a job interview.
This was my experience in a stable market, the first job makes the second one much easier to find.