Ask HN: What does my future employer wants?

Generic reply:

When I'm recruiting I ask two questions of a candidate:

* What value do you add to my company?

* What proof do you have that you add that value?

I want to know that you will be of net benefit. To try to satisfy that you need to know what my company needs. Then you need to claim to be able to fill those needs, and finally, you need to back up those claims with evidence.

So you think you want to work for me? I do soft real-time processing of image data, extracting features, compressing the data, transmitting it, displaying it for action by operators. Show me that you can learn about these things - you won't have the explicit domain knowledge, but I want to know that you can acquire the domain knowledge, and then have the skills to do the necessary processing. Have you already read about, understood, and implemented some algorithms? Have you made small improvements to them? Have you chosen the right language for the job? And so on.

I'm unusual, so you need to remap everything I've said into the industry you're interested in.

You will have to prove that you can "ship it". I suggest that you start off by picking a domain that you're interested in and building a body of work that demonstrates your ability. Be sure you pick some thing that's neither too wide nor too narrow. For e.g. picking something as broad as "web development" is too difficult - these days that involves everything from knowing semantic HTML to CSS to JavaScript to CSS to Rails.

Picking a practical "project" will help you stay motivated in learning things and you will also have the benefit of "publishing" it as something you "shipped".

Once you start feeling a little confident about the code you write, start putting your projects up on github. Also, start contributing to other projects in github (e.g. libraries you have used in your own project). There are many projects where you can easily begin by fixing small bugs. Then you can slowly learn the code base enough to contribute features.

Your employer wants results and they want skills.

If you can back up your programming with some other sphere of knowledge science, finance, medicine, finer details of some other profession, etc. You have something additional other programmers don't - a sense of the "big picture" of whatever other skill or industry you know.