Launch HN: Hatchways (YC S19) – Internships Instead of Interviews
I seriously hope you folks succeed. All the luck to you! Here&#x27;s my non-traditional story:<p>I&#x27;ve worked on my own personal projects for 10 years, always looking for new challenges. I&#x27;ve dropped out of college after 2 years since it was crystal clear to me that I learned <i>much</i> more when working on my own stuff. I would learn new things in college, but at a much slower pace. I guess it was useful to learn calculus...<p>Anyway. Financially I never needed a fully paying job, so I could spend all my time doing my own research. From web security to docker to bsd to aws&#x2F;gcp, I&#x27;ve managed to gather a lot of personal experience on many tools. Similarly, I went from PHP to Erlang to Haskell and back. For a brief period I even managed my own team!<p>But now, 10 years later, I just started looking for my first job and boy, do I realize my resume is empty! I have some code on github but none of my projects are famous or noteworthy. So far, most jobs I&#x27;ve applied for said I&#x27;m not qualified, and I don&#x27;t blame them if all they looked at was my CV.<p>To solve this I&#x27;m working on (yet another) project, a distributed KV storage with built-in MQ capabilities, automatic clustering and transparent sharding, eventual consistency through the use of operation-based crdts, written in my favorite language for distributed systems (Elixir). Hopefully I can use it to get a job, but I think proving one&#x27;s experience and knowledge should be easier.<p>Interestingly, if I had gotten a job when I dropped out (~6 years ago), I would probably be a specialist&#x2F;senior engineer on some specific tool, but I wouldn&#x27;t have the range of experience I do today.<p>Sorry if I digress, just wanted to share my non-traditional &quot;case&quot; (to be fair, you asked for it!)