Opportunity cost of using the time to search for another, better job or at least something that pays better; potential emotional damage from a terrible environment - there's some correlation between low pay and general abusiveness of the environment in this industry; possibility of learning the wrong lessons as bad jobs are unlikely to teach you best practices.

Not that it's necessarily a bad decision, but it's not a no-brainer.

Depends on where you are. I did it when I was just starting out (It wasnt "terrible" but it was pretty much glorified data entry), and kept nagging them about giving me programming projects and eventually got a bunch of Java experience on little projects they didnt want to waste real dev time on. Thats how I got into the programming career at the start

I learned web programming on a project that probably paid $1/hour when all said and done. But that client lasted for 10 years (at $50-75/hr) and I cut my teeth on the web, so totally worth it.

The most important thing is to be able to grab your nuts and quit when youve outgrown it. Too many ppl stay at **** jobs bc theyre scared of interviewing

Depends. Is it experience in what you want to be doing?

The key question is whether an employer looking at the job on your resume later will think "oh cool, he has some experience" and not "what the **** was he doing in that job, he must be useless".

Not entirely sure. Not really sure what I want to do. But id rather do anything than nothing I think.

I think you'll get taken more seriously by future employers if you have real world exp. I had a Skype contact who managed to get hired with almost no effort. He had a 'cs' degree from some community college. He was a total moron... but he had real world exp. I quizzed him on some really basic stuff (he wasn't able to do any of it). One really simple question... figure out if a string is a palindrome (in js)



He came up with some super convoluted solution which used a for loop and didn't work.

Yes, too many items to list.

Care to explain? It sounds like it's been a long time since you've been in the "no experience" category based on your posts. Things have changed quite a bit in that time frame.

Industries where it is probably worth it to take anything you can get to get your foot in the door:

Entertainment
Politics
Programming
...
Everything else

Seriously unless there's some risk that Noodle himself would be aware of, there's nothing to lose.

My first technical job was fixing computers and maintaining networks for small-medium business clients for $21k/year. In San Francisco. Luckily my rent at the time was only $500. I had messed around with computers some in college but basically had 6 years out of the game waiting tables and doing standup comedy (mostly waiting tables and partying). I remember my boss being amazed because I didn't know shift-tab tabbed backwards.

50% of my time at that job was spent waiting for NT to reboot. Oh that didn't work? Lets try another thing. Reboot. Flirt with the office ladies while waiting. Repeat ad nauseum. BSOD was our life blood.

But after about 8 months (and him giving me a big 10% raise, woo hoo) I landed another job that was half computer programming (in SAS, the stats language), half sys-admin for a network of Macs hooked up to a Unix mini-computer. Luckily they had a full time pro for the Unix stuff. Macs were basically zap the p-ram, rebuild the desktop, and maybe one time ever that those two things didn't fix the problem. Lol Microsoft.

Then I bumped into a guy at the Elbo Room in SF who had somehow landed a gig to design and build an e-commerce site for a medical rehab supply company that had like 8k products. This was '98 before there were pre-packaged templates. I told him I could do the back-end even though I knew **** all about HTML. I didn't even know HTML was based on files. And that was the $1/hr job that taught me web programming and ended up being a nice side income for a decade.

That site was in Perl, driven by a tab delimited text file that was generated from Excel - LOOOL. I wanted to learn Java so I made a homegrown message site in Java Servlets- which was basically Yelp 5 years too soon and 99% less fleshed out. I was a pretty avid Motley Fool forums lurker at the time, so I patterned it after that. I literally had no idea what a database was or how to store messages. So I just saved them as text files. The site barely functioned, this was pre JSP in the "magic servlet" era.

I don't think another human but me saw that website. But I put it on my resume and it just talking about it somehow landed me a gig in LA at a startup as a Java Developer. The job was psychotic but I was able to leverage it to my first real web programming job in 2000 or so.

And the rest is history. I now have two "full time" jobs - the day job, which pays very well, takes about 5-10 hours/week. Probably not sustainable. At some point the day job is going to actually expect something from me, and I'm going to have to choose. But it will be fun making over $300k/yr for as long as I can

Anyway the moral to this cool starry bra is it's hard for me to imagine a situation where someone with no computer programming experience, could take a job that would actually hurt their career prospects. Of course like I said there may be other risks specific to Noodle of which I am unaware.

Look at the controversy upthread about asking about prior pay. Have fun justifying normal wages when you were obviously willing to work for bum wages doing 2x the work that the job you are interviewing for requires.

Mind that 2 out of my last 3 jobs have a one-star review on glassdoor, so my perspective is tainted. They both had programmers on the payroll. The were way underpaid and the way they were treated makes me sick, and yes, I was partly or wholly managing both of them. sorry, but marching orders.

And as already stated above, you probably will get no training or terrible information. In my .Net internship, the manager told me to concatenate strings for SQL because Bill G made sure that security is never a problem.

And of course, you look desperate and now you are totally expendable, especially if you are working for a bona fide dev house. Being willing to undercut myself for experience was, IMO, one of the worst mistakes I ever made.

Someone recently explained life to me in a way that I wish someone had told me 20 years ago: no one takes a job knows what the hell they are doing for the first few weeks. That's just how it works, and it does good to mind that. Look on glassdoor, check out normal wage for the company, and ask for it. No company expects you to walk in and be a productive expert from day one. Clearly, they read your resume and know what you can and cannot do. If they are truly that unforgiving, just take that as strike one and don't bother counting to 3. Walk away and find someone that will respect you.

I'm not sure how crappy the salary is, but there are a lot of start ups in the bay area that would love to hire entry level folks at 60k. That's too low but if I didn't think I had better options and I needed experience, I'd take something around 75k.

Ideally you'd only do something like this if you suck and you know it or you're fairly desperate and there are good folks top learn from there

And both suzzer and candy bar are right. No entry level programming job will actually hurt your career (possible exception porn industry). But it could still hurt you by opportunity cost and outrageously anchoring your salary too low.

Opportunity cost is very high if you consider that you'll likely spend 6 months to a year before jumping ship. Even if it takes you a few months to find something better, you could quickly be better off

so what is the alternative if you just graduated or don't have experience?

are you guys saying just bluff and hold out until someone hires you, with your 0 experience, for 80-100k?

i'm asking honestly, i have no idea if that's actually a possibility, though i'd never make a hire like that myself....

I think suzzer & co are basically right that in general you should take the best job available for experience but I'm a little concerned by how he phrased it - "a terrible, extremely low-paying job" and technically he wasn't asking for us to do a pros and cons, but whether there are downsides. That depends on what's exactly terrible about this job.

- language i hate
- pay higher than trump's "minimum wage is too high" but lower than hillary's original min wage bump
- short sort of contract to hire place, in theory
- almost excessively-long drive

basically worried if some places are well known for being ****ty if you'll get a bad name for working there/working for such low wages. Also developing bad habits isn't something i want to do.

Try to get an entry level job at a place that is not ****ty. This is not necessarily easy. But there are places that are known for hiring and developing a percentage of junior devs. Typically they'll be fairly large places.

UnderArmour, for example, was happy to have, say, 25% of new hires be junior. Maybe more. You won't make as much as a sr dev (obviously) but in a few years you'll be ready for a more senior job and places will offer you more money.

I don't know DaveT's whole story but I suspect he started in tech later in life, and the rules are somewhat different there. If you start as a junior dev at 22 years old then in your next job they will expect that you're ready for and want a more demanding job with higher pay.

If you started programming when you're 30, though, and had a junior dev job for 3 years, it puts you in a weird place because a 33 year old is coming from a job with low pay. They expect that by 33 you'll have found your level and so they assume to some extent that "this is what you're worth", i.e. the market has decided. This is a gut feel that hiring managers have, maybe, more than a logical viewpoint, so explaining may or may not help.

I would not take a job within spitting distance of anyone's idea of minimum wage. But the market is way different now than when I started 20 years ago so wtf do I know.

When I said I undercut myself for experience, I was saying that I worked at about 1/3 less than the salary other employees were making, but still above national average.

If you are getting paid at what you are describing, I'm guessing you are offered a job at a law office or online seller and they are offering $15 / hour to maintain their PHP site? This is incredibly common and I strongly advise against this.

My experience is specific to the bay area but I would say that 70k would be on the lower end of starting salary for a fresh grad that had positioned themselves reasonably well (had internships and side projects).

It seems like even for boot camp grads that only bottom 5 percent or so are taking salaries that low.

From what I know now, you're not too far off. Except the pay. You're still a substantial amount off on the pay.

Seems to be a place that capitalizes on folks with no real world experience who can't get a foot in the door anywhere else. Feels slightly predatory, but if I can't get in anywhere else what the hell?

I doubt you'll get much stigma fit doing a six month stint at somewhere with a bad rep.

But given everything else you've said, taking this job sounds awful. Are you still in the bay area? If so you can easily do much better.

When I started my current job I had a commute that was 1hr each way without traffic and in traffic could easily hit two hours. I only had to do that for three months and it was brutal. And this was for a job that I was really excited about.

If you're looking for experience and willing to take ****ty pay, your primary focus should be on what you'll be able to learn. Is the company using tech you want to use? Do they have any smart developers that will be happy to mentor you?

No

Unsure

Only ever visited when I got accepted into a/A. Never lived there. In another large metro area at the moment. Supposedly a decent start up scene but I haven't had much luck finding the folks looking for entry level devs.

Sounds like this is a clear no then. I don't know what the market is like where you are, but at a minimum you want somewhere that will get you experience with a stack you want to work with and at least one developer that you'll be working closely with who seems very sharp.

It feels sooooooo good to be doing actual programming again. In my free cycles, instead of fretting over my life, my future, my issues - I'm thinking about everything I want to do to their code base. I'm 1000% happier.