Hi all (specifically pen,guipnoker, Bali,tmore Jnoes, and Victor),

It's my first week out of the HR. I've applied to only 3 jobs so far and I have some doubt about listing "Professional Poker" as experience on angellist, linkedin, and my resume. I've gotten mixed reaction from a bunch of people reviewing my resume. Is there a better way to term or list poker as experience?

Also any advice on how my github, linkedin, and angellist should look like?

What did you guys do?

Me too. I listed professional poker as my main 'job'. There are all sorts of ways to spin it into a positive so definitely do not leave it off! I listed online poker as my main source of income from 2008 - 2014. If you need some help with your resume (or want to see what an 'online poker' resume looks like) pm me.

Ya I put "Professional online poker player" on my resume. I put some other stuff like "kept detailed records" and "analyzed data to find profitable strategies" and some other similar stuff.

In my experience, companies are really big on ability and passion for learning. I found it easy to spin my experiences in poker to illustrate learning capability since I did spend so much time reading about poker and interacting on the strat forums.

Poker will certainly close some doors, but I think it's uniqueness will be beneficial. Standing out is important and most people realize how challenging it is and will respect you.

I think the general advice is that you should list it if you did well and can genuinely present it in a positive light. Emphasize analytical and problem solving skills, working under high stress, etc.

One of the most difficult things about listing poker IMO is that it almost requires that you give at least a ballpark figure of how much were making annually (or lifetime), as this is the only real metric for "success" in the poker world (and certainly only the only metric that non-poker players will be able to understand). This may seem a bit tacky, but for those employers that would be open-minded enough to consider a poker player in the first place, I think it will only help. Then again, I haven't actually applied for any jobs yet so others will surely be more qualified to answer this than me.

Depends on age probably too. I would have like a 5 year gap if I didn't list poker. If you made money at poker for one year after college and are 23 now you may be able to leave it off, and it may be preferable to leave it off.

On the most recent iteration of my resume that I can find, I only have one bullet point for poker which is the large number of overall tournaments played and my ROI, no dollar amounts. Obviously we know that's lol, but it looks impressive to a layperson.

I think HR could give you better help on the general github/linkedin/angellist approach than I could.

Hey guys,

Going to Denver this weekend to attend an introductory workshop at Turing School to see what I think of their program. If I finish the workshop they'll let me skip the application process and head straight to the interview. I've conducted a fair amount of due diligence and the school seems legit -- nonprofit, well-regarded in the industry, transparent about their outcomes & finances, etc. Just wondering if anyone has suggestions as far as the kinds of questions I should be asking, red flags to be on the lookout for, etc.

Thanks

Just did the application there recently, was pretty simple. No coding required, but it does take a fair amount of work. Particularly the 500-word essay thing. The video was annoying too.

Only took like a day to get a response.

Ask them what sort of program and resources they have dedicated to finding a job. They should have resume, linkedin, and interview (behavioral, and technical) preparation and services.

And ask them what sort of employer network they have. Do they have a career day time event where employers come on site and interview students? Do employers contact them to set up interviews with students?

My bootcamp set up over 10 interviews for me on site and I ended up getting my job through one of those interactions. in fact, most of my peers got jobs that way as well. and this was with big and respected tech companies in the area.

I am not sure if such a setup is common with other bootcamps, and I am sure its not exactly necessary but it was extremely effective for my bootcamp. My perspective is that a bootcamp should ultimately result in a job. This is ofc likely due to my situation and maybe others have different priorities.

Crappy thing about Turing is that they used to have a tuition refund guarantee until they got accredited or whatever through a state tech college-like certification board, which doesn't allow you to guarantee a job. Before this change in late 2015, they'd only had to do 1 refund, I think.

I follow the turing.io guy on twitter and saw him tweet this report on student outcomes not too long ago. I assume their marketing copy reflects these stats, but it's worth your time to peruse it. There are some links to the raw data at the bottom, but they seem to just link to the report itself.

https://gist.github.com/jcasimir/7640c34d88b5e523d91b

http://frontend.turing.io/

Turing's coursework is supposed to be fully open source. I found a link to this in their github, but can't find the backend/Ruby version

So I was accepted in to Turing and will be starting the back-end program November 28th. Wish I could start sooner but girlfriend and I have too many things to take care of at home first. I'm going to go through the prework to solidify my understanding of the fundamentals until it's go time.

If anyone has questions about the program, my experience at the weekend workshop, anything like that I'll answer to the best of my ability.

Also they're full on August and October cohorts, so couldn't have gone sooner.

At least that's what they told me.

NW,

I thought you were at App Academy?

Hi,
can somebody recommend a good online course for the MEAN stack?
I found something on Pluralsight, but would like to check out more videos/books on this topic.

I noticed that a lot of people from here are learning Ruby rather than Node,
is it better in some way? Should i rather learn that if iam just a beginer/intermediate in Node?

thx

Negative. Got accepted but decided against it.

Bootcamp update from the information I have.

Hack Reactor graduate started at my company as a full-time hire, said that after ~2 months 100% of them have jobs. Class size 35ish.

App Academy graduate has been interning here for a couple of months, graduated in Jan-Feb, seemed to indicate that it had been slow for their class as of June, around 50% hired. I don't know what his status is at my company in terms of having gotten a full-time offer or not, his internship ends soon. Class size is large, 70+.

AA student who just graduated, lives in my building, and is in her first 1-2 weeks of job hunting appears to be doing extremely well getting attention from companies, but she has several years of SQL on the resume with some coding as well. Seems to be one of the breakout stars, which most cohorts have 1-2 of.

still haven't heard back from Turing, was over two weeks ago and I think they said 1-2 weeks.

Just got accepted into Oregon's post-bacc program. So if I got into Turing, it'd 7+ months for a bootcamp completion (more like 10+ since they're full up for a while), or 9-12 months for a BS in CS. About the same cost iirc, within a few thousand I think. Kinda depends on how many credits they accept.

Interesting info Baltimore. I get the impression that HR has done a much better job marketing itself to employers, helping students present themselves, and building a reputation for the program than AA has.

Noodle, I don't think a BS is going to open many more doors for you than completing a bootcamp program will. Your on the job learning curve is likely to be steeper after BS than after a bootcamp though.

I still think the most important thing is to get working in a decent environment ASAP as there is so much on the job learning that you just can't replicate in a classroom.

How a boot camp markets itself to employers, or rather, the relationships that a bootcamp has with employers is by far the most important aspect. That the aa February cohort is only at 50% seems like a pretty big warning sign. It could also mean that that region is not hiring as much which isn't a good sign either.

Pretty much what I am saying is that it may seem kinda lame to spend that much money just so that you get your foot in the door with companies but ultimately its easily worth it.

Having recently interviewed a few AA and dev bootcamp folks I think it's some combination of how many schools there are in the area and the changing demographic of students.

It's been pretty clear with some of the folks we've talked to that they're just desperate for a decent paying job. Like one guy's story was yeah I was working construction and my dad was like hey I heard about coding boot camps, you should look into that.

One of the things we like to see with junior folks is what they'd like to learn and what parts of their knowledge are they excited to apply. And a decent number of these folks don't have answers.

That's on the bootcamp to a large extent. First they should weed out some of these ppl. But they should prepare the students for interviews and especially for those types of questions.

Is Hack Reactor less heavy on RoR than AppAcademy?

can someone explain this to me..

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends

if you add like anything

web developer, software developer, javascript... it clearly shows a downward trend... ?? this is based solely on search terms or what?

Nah, some things trend up or level. I tried "python" and "ux" for example