Sigh. Can't believe that I am going to write my first post as someone depressing and pathetic about myself. I've graduated at the end of 2022 as a CS grad. I've tried applying for multiple internships, and to this day, I was not able to land myself my first job. It is going to be the start of the third year. My mental health is in a terrible state, I don't feel like doing anything, and I've lost the confidence to even apply for job portals. #work #job #unemployment #mentalhealth #cs #programming
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@RecurringBloatware what type of internships would you be interested in?
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@rowlandm Thank you for talking your time to read my rant. I'm a CS grad, so honestly, I am comfortable with anything that involves solving problems with #programming. My experience revolves around technologies related to full-stack web development. I am also an #opensource contributor, and I've volunteered for projects involving or related to #rubyonrails, #sklearn, #skiff, #gitlab, #gnome and #nixos in the recent past. Right now, I maintain packages for #guix.
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@RecurringBloatware wow that's really impressive!
I was wondering if you were involved in open source and you answered my question with an affirmative yes!
I'm curious to know if there has been any upside with contributing to these open source projects?
Or what would an internship provide that your open source contributions cannot?
Please feel free to not answer if you don't feel like it :)
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@rowlandm unfortunately, no, I don't feel like these contributions have added any value to my portfolio/resume. For example, let's talk about #gitlab. The reason why I stopped was because I felt #exploited. For almost 6 months, all I did was #contribute - I also took part in 2 of their #hackathon. Any interaction with their employees felt robotic, corporate-like. I wanted something out of the community - #jobopportunities, #mentorship, or #upskilling, but nothing came out of it.
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@RecurringBloatware :(
That sucks.
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@RecurringBloatware what kind of upskilling or mentorship would help you the most?
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@rowlandm an accountability partner would be helpful. I've self-sabotaged myself - deleting my projects from the remote repository because I felt that they were not good enough, deleting my forge accounts, wiping away my previous history of contributions. Right now, I've taken a small break from #opensource , maintaining one package for #guix per day and #leetcoding most of the time.
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@RecurringBloatware :(
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@rowlandm I've struggled with working on a project for silly reasons. Like for example, say I was developing a URL shortener. It didn't feel right to me that the Base64URL-encoded string ID may collide, although the chances may be low, and I get the urge to over-engineer - I want to ensure that if the hash already exists, then I should generate a new one. And the problem with this over-engineering is that now I also have to track if the ID has been exhausted or not, to prevent an infinite loop.
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@RecurringBloatware right, I think I understand
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@RecurringBloatware
Maybe it might help if you have a more business oriented minimum viable product , rather than technical orientated problem, to reduce the opportunity to over engineer?
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@rowlandm I am curious about how complex of a project I should be working on, to show recruiters that I am eligible for a given role.
I mean, a To-do list won't probably do it, as it is too generic. E-commerce projects are also too generic, at least from what I've learnt by reading on other social media.
What would be the two or three projects that, in your opinion, might be a nice pick?
And alternatively what if I use a niche framework/library?
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@RecurringBloatware I think first of all that you're in a tough situation because it's not that easy to get a job right now.
I'm going to make the assumption that you're in America? And I'm also going to make the assumption that the joke market is particularly tough because they've made thousands of experienced developers redundant over the last year or so.
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@RecurringBloatware It might be helpful to pick a niche domain that you would like to work on, but you could find a good mentor who might be able to connect you to other opportunities.
In my field I work in research software which is a little bit more niche, and in particular I work with bioinformatics data in the life sciences.
It may be helpful for you to do something in an area like that because someone looking at your resume is probably going to pigeon hole you.
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@RecurringBloatware so by working in a specific domain the pigeon holing works to your advantage because they think you won't need to be trained up as much then if you had no exposure to that domain.
As you said before, it's really important to find an organization that isn't going to exploit you. Unfortunately it seems like you found this out by yourself.
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@RecurringBloatware I run a student internship program at a medical Research institute and one of the challenges I face is how to create a project where it benefits the intern slightly more than it benefits the organisation.
So I wrote this expectation for open source contributors to make it clear: https://wehi-researchcomputing.github.io/expectations_open_source_contributors
I suggest you keep an eye out for these types of expectations when you're dealing with organisations, and make sure they back this up with actions.
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@rowlandm I am from India. Well, I mustered up a little bit and applied to Canonical, but I'm not really that hopeful, given how the role is for a Field Engineer, and except for my experience in Linux and a college course with Hadoop, I know nothing about Kubernetes, Ceph or OpenStack.
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@RecurringBloatware you might want to try Outreachy.
https://www.outreachy.org/
I write about the application process here https://figshare.com/articles/media/Outreachy_application_overview_for_communities_and_potential_interns/19161107?file=34042364
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@RecurringBloatware good luck with the application!
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