There's way more money in the data science type stuff than web dev. So if you find it more interesting it's totally worth the effort.

Why stop at 1. Double phd for the next 8 years.

There's nothing wrong with mostly bluffing your way on a few technologies imo. That's how I got my start. But at least have some kind of piddly little project to talk about.

You're right that it's not that hard to be semi-productive right off the bat if you have the right kind of brain for programming, which if you've already had jobs as an engineer you should have. In this job market, just being semi-productive will make you very valuable, which will probably go to your head. But no one on earth is a good programmer without a few years of experience under their belt. I've been doing it for 15 years, and every year I still learn new things that make me significantly more productive. Often times just knowing the wrong road to not go down not go down can benefit your project exponentially more than all the programming brainpower in the world.

I've also known plenty of people with PhD's, high GPAs, degrees from MIT, etc – who were terrible programmers in the real world. This is why employers value experience - they like to see those people already weeded out.

Also if you come off at work like the ******* you present in this thread, you better be very productive or people will get sick of you. Likability is about 50% of how much a company wants to keep you around.

Maybe I'm a simpleton but "can read code", "can write code" + syntactic sugar is what I tend to use.
I expect any programming test etc. to be held in a "can write code" language

[and a good question to be prepared for is "how long would you estimate it would take you to get this can read language to a decent can write level"]

Let's rather be abstract. Statistics and mathematics are merely subfields of programming. Turing machines are pretty awesome.

Soon you will discover the difference between learning and practice and thus begins the path to enlightenment. GPA pretty much measures nothing it's just a pretty peacock feather.

Mine is exactly 1. Actually it's >1.

Disagreed. I try to stay as close to 100% as possible. I only apply at companies that I want to work for and that match my (rather esoteric) requirements about what I think a good company should be like.
Well actually I agree because I def. think you should apply for stuff you consider "way out of your league". Guess I've just been running hot so far

My programming job offer to interview ratio is > 1 too. And that includes when I had no idea what I was doing. Don't let your job being impossible to fill go to your head. If you seem smart and don't have an arm growing out of your head you'll probably get the job.

Now if you want to talk every other crappy job I've ever applied for we're down around 50%. I've had some waiter interviews that were disastrous. ****ing Sprint had me in for 2-3 interviews and strung me along for months for a ****ing mail room job when I had a degree in physics. Thank god because I'd probably some bitter burnt out fat telecom engineer still living in KC and hating my life.

From a purely credentialing standpoint, for sciency jobs:

PhD > MA + BA/BS or MA with serious research component > BA/BS > MA (courses)

That you talk about courses as qualifications is a bad sign for sciency jobs. What was your research focused on?

There are two simple ways to get good sciency jobs in technology:

1) Be a legitimate scientist with significant research experience.

2) Be a really good software engineer that can be counted on to implement large complex systems.

Unless you're either of those two, the remaining sciency jobs are not that different from typical web-dev or whatever generic business application jobs - you will be working under those people and be treated mostly as a grunt until you can step up. You have to either be really good or have extremely solid understanding of the domain - some random "graduate-level" course in ML/AI isn't going to make you all that useful.

And about that whole python nonsense - the problem with dressing up your resume to fool people is that in the long run, you end up working for mediocre people who are easily fooled. The kind of people that you want to work for, experts you can learn from, aren't going to be amused by your resume tricks.

I web dev.

That's what I was getting at - especially for someone just starting out who is complaining about not being qualified for the jobs they really want.

Love this line.

I think that's awesome.

I just wonder how it feels to go to school for 4 to 6 years,.learn all this cool stuff, then get stuck doing Wordpress sites for a living. Considering how much web design and UX takes a back door to next !feature!, I get the feeling that, for most companies, web is a means to an end.

Still waiting to know what school you go to and how you think there is only web jobs being offered.

I also find it amusing that you think the hard part is getting an interview when getting an interview may be difficult but actually impressing people when you have nothing to show to them.

I'm guessing that you think, they feel really good about doing one or two interviews and investing tons of money into someone right out of school.

No offense OP if you didn't mean to seem so arrogant in the posts I read but you seem to have no idea.

to add to this. I really do think its awesome you like web building. I know that if I was running a company, I'd dig deep into my pockets to get someone who is really passionate about the stuff. Takes an amazing amount of dedication to do it and do it well. The fact that you like it, and your posts indicate that you really want to be great at it, is valuable stuff in ky book.

Thanks.

I am still relatively new to this stuff, but isn't there room in web for people who are way more educated than me? I know that everything google does blows my mind... surely there's a lot more big data/algorithmic stuff going on there that might require a Phd

That's certainly related to the Web, but not really what most people mean by Web dev. To be sure, lots of room for both intelligence and book l'arnin' to be rewarded.

Yeah, I think people who mean web dev pejoratively are generally talking about cranking out simple CRUD apps, not working on interesting frameworks, difficult scaling problems or other technical challenges, etc. There's also the possibility that those people don't know what they are talking about. Web is just a platform and it doesn't really limit what you do with it.

The vast majority of web projects are simple CRUD, storefronts, or blogs. I don't think there is anything wrong with this.

I get the impression that most companies that are attempting to innovate simply use the web as a delivery mechanism, thus why so many "bootstrap" sites, and while said people may be ignorant of good marketing practices, design, or web building in general, I wouldn't discount them as not knowledgable.

Web building, when taken to its full realization is a very difficult thing to do and I anyone worth their salt has my hat tipped to them. Studying UX, design, speed efficiency, security, etc etc is no small feat.

I don't really think that Google's web team is working on the Animal release. Map Reduce is relevant to Google, but it isn't really relevant to web building in general.

I don't think web building has reached a place where it is an agnostic term no more than building a mobile app makes you a kernel engineer (or a games programmer if we want to be honest). If you write "Web Programmer" on your resume, you aren't going to assume the reader of said resume thinks you are an AI expert and can talk simulating gradient descents with the best of them. I personally do not want to conflate the terminology.

I agree but you have to start getting experience which might mean paying your dues doing something that isn't all that exciting.

Can you work in the US and are you willing to relocate? PM me and I might be able to get you an interview at least. Can't promise anything, but we hire people fresh out of school who have a Masters and we need people. Always looking for people.

CRUD apps can still be exciting to develop even if you've done it a lot. I often spend time just staring at a "new resource" page or "list resources" page thinking of how to improve the user experience.

It's really gratifying to me to go from a working CRUD implementation with no styling to a polished version. It's extra gratifying to me when you watch someone use it in real time and they do what you expect them to do because the UI guides their decisions.

I think that's true when you get to interact with the customers and learn about their domain and shape the site to what they need. It's probably a lot different if you're just given a site to build directly to spec.

Well, given the emergence of MVC frameworks like Rails and all the million PHP equivalents, the basic CRUD plumbing should be pretty trivial anyway, letting you spend time on UI, right?

I think UI is fascinating. (My school has a ton of faculty and students doing research in human-computer interaction, and I find that fascinating in general.)

Me too. I had a human-comouter interaction prof that was amazing. Most of us going in thought it was going to be a stupid class that we just had to take but I learned a ton about UIs and even more about the processes that people go through when learning stuff.

Some frameworks do let you quickly pump out CRUD pages but you can totally see the difference between a page designed by someone who cares vs someone who doesn't.

I really like just thinking about quality of life features on a per-resource basis. Like today I put together an "add blog post" page and eventually thought it would be a cool idea to have not just a word count on the post but also an estimated reading time based on the # of words. Something that's so easy to implement but adds a lot to the experience.

You sound a bit like me years ago. if I was starting out now I would do some neuroscience and get into the direct mind-machine interaction field.

Its interesting and going to be huge.

Thanks for the tip chezlaw! Sounds super interesting.

explain please