Ask HN: Advice for finding an entry-level remote job?
There are a lot of good advice given to you already and I just thought I&#x27;d share some of my personal experience with you since I some of your experience are similar to mine mostly because you appear to be self-taught.<p>I found out the hard way that &quot;being able to learn fast&quot; is a potentially very dangerous mindset to have when you are looking for an entry-level job for the following reasons:<p>* You could easily open yourself up for exploitation by &quot;sweatshops&quot; (lack of mentorship, time to learn, and terrible pay) which hinders your career progression (assuming that you don&#x27;t want to end up in one of those).<p>* You are very likely overestimating your abilities for &quot;better&quot; jobs that have stricter requirements on non-code-writing skills, including computer science.<p>* You can easily become a jack of all trades, master of none -- not in the sense that you are a generalist and a capable fullstack engineer, but in the sense that you just knows a little bit of everything and nothing well enough for an actual job. It&#x27;s not that it can&#x27;t be fixed and developed upon, but for your first job I personally think that&#x27;s really not what you want, I hope you don&#x27;t end up wasting time to get to that point.<p>freeCodeCamp is great to get started with (I have been through different version of the curriculum a few times for various reasons), but even finishing all of it won&#x27;t get you even close to job-ready for jobs that have heavier requirements on non-code-writing skills.<p>That&#x27;s not to say you won&#x27;t be able to get a job after finishing freeCodeCamp -- with a bit of luck you may even be able to find a job with very good terms. However, if you want to compete for high-level jobs and&#x2F;or want to continue to develop your skills properly even after getting a job, I highly recommend doing things that are more difficult than what you are doing immediately, and make that a habit.<p>Since you are reading Eloquent JavaScript (which probably means you care about more than just getting code written and things put on the screen), here are a few things that you might want to consider&#x2F;get into immediately:<p>* As many have already mentioned, solve challenges on LeetCode regularly and perhaps spend time read some of the forum posts. The reason is that there is little hint&#x2F;guidance in the freeCodeCamp curriculum about what&#x2F;how you could do for more efficient algorithms -- in fact, in many cases brute-force, naive, solutions would be accepted. You don&#x27;t want to get into the habit of thinking that solving challenges in O(n^2) time is okay when interviewers expect you to solve them in linear or better time complexity.<p>* Eloquent JavaScript is a great book (I recommend adding You Don&#x27;t Know JS to your reading list), but try to read it a few times at different stage of your learning&#x2F;career -- you will likely learn something new&#x2F;develop a much deeper understanding of abstract concepts every time.<p>* Supplement your study with other courses such as those freely available on edX or MITOCW. If you are looking for a structured way to learn outside of freeCodeCamp, perhaps consider something like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;P1xt&#x2F;p1xt-guides" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;P1xt&#x2F;p1xt-guides</a> (not affiliated with p1xt in any way, I just came across her things when I first started learning a few years ago and find them super useful).<p>* Get a personal portfolio up as soon as possible, *and make an effort to refine it to show that you are different* as you go -- otherwise you will regret not having it ready when you need it. This is particularly important for people who are self-taught. Writing blog posts are okay (some companies seem to use it as a hiring metric?), but don&#x27;t things that are just simply copying&#x2F;paraphrasing&#x2F;&quot;distilling&quot; without adding value -- it would just make you look very bad to those who know what they are talking about; talk about the problems you encountered, how you solved them, what you did to get personal projects done, etc. Even if it&#x27;s not writing intended for interviewers&#x2F;HR, you will still benefit a lot from writing things down (communicating technical details clearly is an important skill and definitely one of the metrics used by interviewers!).<p>I don&#x27;t have much advice on entry-level remote jobs, at times it feels like they don&#x27;t exist and, if they do, only in large organisations whose openings are usually extremely competitive. A few of my peers who were self-taught landed their first and remote jobs simply by reaching out and asking; I&#x27;m not sure about the details, but they&#x27;re all hard-working people who evidently care about learning more than just writing code, perhaps it&#x27;s not a bad idea to cold e-mail once you get to the point that you are comfortable with your skills.<p>I hope it helps! Good luck! :)