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Discussion on: How did you get your first Dev job?

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rhymes • Edited

TLDR: by co-founding a Python conference essentially. An extreme version of "networking" I guess. Instead of going to a conference we couldn't afford, we decided to band together and create one with other people's money :-D.

A friend of mine had the idea while we were trying to find jobs in Python close to us (not really advertised anywhere at the time). We pitched it to other people we knew from local mailing lists, they loved the idea and helped finding the funds and the sponsors. The Python Software Foundation embraced the idea and in few months we had the first edition of the conference setup.

We had some contacts with some professionals through mailing lists and my friend was doing some small contract work in Python (I was doing the same in C# and .NET) but no long term prospects so we bet on the idea.

After the summer I got my first "Python job offer" (my friend too IIRC, he's also a way better programmer than I am). I was hired by one of the other organizers that pitched the idea of hiring me to his boss I guess. He worked at a financial company and everything they had was running on Python, C++ and PostgreSQL. A dream come true at the time :D I learned a lot, but really a lot. Most of my colleagues had PhDs or were mathematicians. I was the ugly duckling college dropout who knew zero about the financial market. So they definitely took a chance on me.

I interviewed during the summer, first with the future colleagues, then with the CEO after a few weeks. I was a junior career wise, but I had programmed for years just as a hobby. Lots of free time before they invented smartphones :D

I got really lucky, I had nothing to lose, we were foolish and stubborn and were adamant that we didn't want to work with Java or PHP (basically everybody was hiring for those two languages). We chose plan B, worst case scenario we could go back to plan A and keep using Python on the side. Having no one to provide for also helped I guess.

This was 11 years ago. I have left the organization of the conference a few years ago but I'm proud of all we did back then!

Some of us still meet, after all this time, at least once or twice a year for dinner, so I'm not totally out of the loop :)