v0lkan
commented
4 years ago I’ll probably get back to this and add more but here are a few pointers.
If it takes hypothetical X units of effort to land a job; you’ll need 10-to-100 X of that.
Think of it like this: Why would someone hire you, while it is way easier to fill a similar position with a citizen of their country.
You must stand out.
Your degree is a good start. Without a college degree, it becomes much harder to get a foreign work visa. Yes, “on paper”, it is still possible to get a US work visa as a developer without a university degree, in reality, it is almost impossible.
What else?
I will sound like a broken record but…
- Contribute to the open-source.
- Be active in developer communities.
- Have an idea of which companies to apply, and use your network to get internal references from them
Sending your resume to jobs[at]company[dot]com is equivalent to shoving it to /dev/null.
Go the extra mile and find that internal reference.
Also, when I say “contribute to open source” I am not saying, “put your calculator clone that you wrote in GoLang to github” What I mean is “find at least ten open source projects that you can actively add value to, and actively contribute to them”
^ That will also help you in finding the internal references which you’ll badly need to expedite your job search.
Other than that, US—especially the Bay Area—has a inexplicable whiteboard interview fetish. There are a throng of “algorithm-related interview questions“ code banks around; leetcode is one of them, geeks4geeks is another.
Check out all of those code banks.
- First try to solve the questions by yourself
- Then after struggling a while, check the solutions.
- Then follow the discussion and dig into any reference materials you find in the discussions.
- Then think about how that question can be asked differently
- Then think about how and if they can be combined with other forms of questions.
That is to say, don’t simply memorize those questions, use your wetware and actively engage with them.
If you can, apply for a tourist visa, visit the companies you’d like to work at; find people, talk to them face-to-face. Ask them to introduce you to others.
In the meantime strive to be the best in something. Generalists are dime a dozen; you need to stand out. No matter how bright you are, you simply cannot stand out as a generalist.
That‘s a quick braindump. – I’ll probably edit this later.
The original question reads as: ”I’m from a third-world country. I am smart. I’m not bad at DevOps (or Software Engineering), I love to learn new things; I am a fresh graduate from a non-ivy-league college in my country; I want to work in the US (if not somewhere abroad) as a Software Developer; what can I do?“
I’ll try to answer it in the discussion thread.