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Discussion on: A question on how to gain the experience needed for job entry.

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FJones

It varies from firm to firm, but often experience requirements are heavily-inflated. And: There's still a relative shortage of developers. Building up some references is useful of course, but I would recommend not getting discouraged by the requirements. Embellish your CV if needed to get past HR, but at the end of the day a lot of recruitment processes end up setting you up for a practical test anyway.

Internships are rare (and often require degrees instead), so prefer Open Source contributions or portfolio projects. On the latter, though, my personal advice is: don't do what everyone else is doing, and don't put too much work into it. I don't care about yet another ToDo-List Webapp, and I don't need to see a startup-ready scheduling tool either. Show me that you understand the basics and can bring something to a working state. Fixing things in detail and marketing it is not what I'm looking for when I want to hire someone.