6 Steps to Getting an Awesome Tech Job

So everyone wants an awesome coding job using the ’latest technologies’ at a amazing company right? And the competition for these jobs is tough! People from big corporations want in on the exciting world of start-ups, and well-seasoned start-up coders want to work on the next big thing. Previously you needed a great hand crafted CV and 100 years of experience building monolithic Java EE / C++ apps to get noticed. Now companies want to see you are up to speed with new school technologies like Node.js, Groovy & Grails, Ruby, Scala, Clojure and that you also actively contribute via Blogs, GitHub, BitBucket, StackOverflow etc.

How do you get one of these awesome jobs you ask? Follow NerdAbility’s fool proof 6 point plan!.....

1.  Create a tech blog! – Have you been trying to learn a new technology but found the documentation is a bit shady? Did you spend hours on forums and post multiple StackOverflow questions to finally get to a solution? Then write a blog about it! Document the problem, the steps you took to solve it and give some sample code or even put the project on online. Next make sure to share it back with the people and forums that helped along the way. This is a great way to get your solution out there and people checking out your blog (maybe even the CTO of your next employer). Sites like Blogger and Tumblr make it super easy to get started, so go make one today!

On Privacy

Online privacy is a serious thing. People take how much they reveal of themselves online very seriously, and quite rightly too.

Privacy is important to us at NerdAbility as well. From the start, we have been upfront with where we stand - your NerdAbility profile is a public profile to the world of just how awesome you are, its not somewhere where people will upload photos of compromising situations, or share trade secrets, its a place where people say, hey, I have my blog, and my StackOverflow profile, and my GitHub profile.. why can't i just bring them to one place, so rather than hoping a potential employer googles me, I can just say, check me out!

After all, NerdAbility doesn't expose anything that is already private on the web to anyone - it only shows already publicly accessible data (GitHub, StackOverflow, BitBucket, Blogs - all public data only).  When we recently rolled out the BitBucket integration, on first launch, we were alerted that private repositories were being displayed - this wasn't something we had done intentionally, it was actually because making anonymous, unauthenticated calls to the BB API returns private data too (we know, crazy right?) - but this is important to us, as well as to you guys, so as soon as we were alerted, we put in an emergency fix it and released within an hour.

So, why are we going on about all this stuff? The reason is, pretty soon we will be rolling out user search, making it much easier for people to discover just how awesome you are (searching by name or by skills) - so we just wanted to make sure we are all on the same page.

If you still have concerns, fear not, we know this is a hugely important and sensitive subject, so despite NerdAbility only showing publicly available data, we will also be adding a privacy option, allowing you to opt-out of the search results!

Why We're Not Worried About Facebook's Job Board

Not long after NerdAbility was released in to the wild in beta, Facebook announced that they were going to be creating a job board.

Hmm, Facebook seems like tough competition, after all, they already have millions of users, about whom they know pretty much everything, but, to be honest, we're really not that concerned.

Here's why..

1. We're techies, looking to deliver a service for techies - even if the Facebook job board becomes a massive success, how worthwhile will it be for them to build up the service to cater for tech folk, integrating GitHub commits and stuff like StackOverflow? I cannot see it being worthwhile for FB to do so.  NerdAbility is focusing entirely on tech recruitment, and all our efforts are in enhancing the site to make tech recruitment a wonderful thing!....