[Linux-aus] Become C programmer

[Simon Lees]

On 5/31/23 18:41, Adam Nielsen via linux-aus wrote:
>> Just wondering what's the right/easiest way to get a C programming job.
>> I have been working as a linux administrator. I have good understanding
>> of the language and how it interacts with the OS. However, I don't have
>> any professional experience. Any suggestions?
> 
> There are a few challenges when looking to employ a programmer, if
> you're responsible for a team of them. The main ones:
> 
>   1. How well do they know the language?  Can they understand our
>      existing code?  How quickly do they learn new things?
> 
>   2. Are they a "lone wolf" who is never wrong, or will they work well
>      in our team?
> 
> If you are willing to contribute to open source projects, then you'll be
> able to give prospective employers answers to both these questions.
> 
> For the first one, they can look at the project's version history to
> see your commits, which will very quickly give them a good idea of your
> level of expertise.
> 
> For the second one, contributing to a larger open source project is
> only possible if you're willing to make compromises.  You have to accept
> criticism of your code, address feedback, make changes, deal with the
> occasional rejection, and all of that directly translates to the skills
> needed when working in a team of programmers.  It also demonstrates
> familiarity with tools like git, participating in code reviews and
> discussions, and so on.

I was going to say basically the same as above with one additional point 
being that, contributing to larger open source projects shows that you 
can read and understand code that you didn't write yourself which is 
really important in many teams including mine where your often either 
fixing or adding new features to legacy code rather then writing new 
code from scratch.

-- 
Simon Lees (Simotek)                            http://simotek.net

Emergency Update Team                           keybase.io/simotek
SUSE Linux                           Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30
GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B
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