I don’t know what the bare minimum to get hired anywhere is, but I know that most medium-sized and up places that you might want to work will hire an entry level employee who looks smart but has a very small amount of actual experience.
A good applicant can write a simple program on a white board and has a project on github, or a past internship, or a dynamic website that they run, to point at. If you think you’re on the edge now, these accomplishments shouldn’t be too far away.
BSing interviews and lying on your resume? Or even less if you can rely on nepotism? :P
Seriously, there are places that are basically just looking for warm bodies, but I doubt that you’d actually be interested in working there. Perhaps you could be a bit more concrete?
This question is abstract enough that I’m having a hard time coming up with a meaningful answer. Perhaps someone with more experience hiring for webdev roles could fill in? (I only interviewed for webdev jobs, so I don’t really know what their minimum was!)
It’s tricky as I’m just starting to consider this career, so may not be familiar enough with it or far enough along with my planning to be usefully concrete. It partly depends on where sensible places to start are with my level of professional experience and knowledge (not negligible, but never fulltime webdev). Pick an example: a junior job at a webdev agency which builds websites for hire. The requirements for that might be illuminating.
I would second Ben’s statement – if you have actual experience coding you’re probably overqualified for “a junior job at a webdev agency which builds websites for hire.”
A clarifying question: When you say “builds websites for hire” I think “set up a boilerplate Word press installation with some stock photos to impress the rubes”. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean “create highly interactive single page websites that need to scale to millions of concurrent users”? Those are very different things.
Maybe if you gave a salary target that might help us calibrate.
No, not static WordPress sites—more like the second, or something in between, though as a junior webdev I wouldn’t be the one taking care of the scaling (setting up the server with varnish, etc.), apart from avoiding direct database queries where possible.
Maybe if you gave a salary target that might help us calibrate.
Again I run into the problem of not knowing enough about the industry, but how about €35,000 in a place where you could relatively quickly head up towards €50,000?
This may be highly dependent on your location, but the average starting salary for a computer science grad in the US is greater than €50 K.
Maybe I’m completely miscalibrated, but if you know words like “varnish” and realize that they apply to scaling, then I think you are qualified to be a junior web developer. I would recommend applying to some jobs and seeing what happens. Let us know either way!
What are the minimum skills or experience necessary to get hired as a full time web developer?
I don’t know what the bare minimum to get hired anywhere is, but I know that most medium-sized and up places that you might want to work will hire an entry level employee who looks smart but has a very small amount of actual experience.
A good applicant can write a simple program on a white board and has a project on github, or a past internship, or a dynamic website that they run, to point at. If you think you’re on the edge now, these accomplishments shouldn’t be too far away.
BSing interviews and lying on your resume? Or even less if you can rely on nepotism? :P
Seriously, there are places that are basically just looking for warm bodies, but I doubt that you’d actually be interested in working there. Perhaps you could be a bit more concrete?
This question is abstract enough that I’m having a hard time coming up with a meaningful answer. Perhaps someone with more experience hiring for webdev roles could fill in? (I only interviewed for webdev jobs, so I don’t really know what their minimum was!)
It’s tricky as I’m just starting to consider this career, so may not be familiar enough with it or far enough along with my planning to be usefully concrete. It partly depends on where sensible places to start are with my level of professional experience and knowledge (not negligible, but never fulltime webdev). Pick an example: a junior job at a webdev agency which builds websites for hire. The requirements for that might be illuminating.
I would second Ben’s statement – if you have actual experience coding you’re probably overqualified for “a junior job at a webdev agency which builds websites for hire.”
A clarifying question: When you say “builds websites for hire” I think “set up a boilerplate Word press installation with some stock photos to impress the rubes”. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean “create highly interactive single page websites that need to scale to millions of concurrent users”? Those are very different things.
Maybe if you gave a salary target that might help us calibrate.
Wow weird.
No, not static WordPress sites—more like the second, or something in between, though as a junior webdev I wouldn’t be the one taking care of the scaling (setting up the server with varnish, etc.), apart from avoiding direct database queries where possible.
Again I run into the problem of not knowing enough about the industry, but how about €35,000 in a place where you could relatively quickly head up towards €50,000?
This may be highly dependent on your location, but the average starting salary for a computer science grad in the US is greater than €50 K.
Maybe I’m completely miscalibrated, but if you know words like “varnish” and realize that they apply to scaling, then I think you are qualified to be a junior web developer. I would recommend applying to some jobs and seeing what happens. Let us know either way!
If you can complete this, you can probably get an internship somewhere, and from there you can easily transition to a full-time job.