How to Get a Developer Job without Experience
The annoying thing about hiring managers is that they prefer experienced candidates because they don’t require training or handholding. However, there are things you can do to help you get a developer job without experience:
Ask your professors. They will likely know which companies/organizations have intern opportunities, and can likely arrange introductions. — Gerry Mann
Do programming projects at home. Employers love this — it shows you love programming and have an interest in it outside work / college. — psynnott, a Stack Overflow user
Do volunteer research in computational biology, atmospheric science, or astronomy. In fact, if there’s any scientific subject you like, there’s probably someone doing computational research in it — just google the research area + site:edu — Alex Kuang Chen
Class projects are neat, but they don’t really matter so much. [Instead], come up with your own projects. They don’t have to be complicated, but write them, do bug fixes, and keep them in BitBucket or GitHub under open source licenses. — Sean Edwards
People can get internships without having much project experience outside of classrooms. I’ve seen this happen to my classmates. — Jane Huang
How do they determine that you’re smart? The best measure of that is your GPA. You’re pretty far along now, so hopefully you have a 3.5+ GPA, and failing that, you have a high GPA in your CS coursework. If you have the high GPA, put it on your resume. — Kevin, a Stack Overflow user
One of the biggest fears that companies have when hiring developers is whether or not that developer can actually produce anything. You can completely alleviate that fear if you can show the source code for an application you created yourself, and if you have it in a mobile app store and people are actually using it, even better. — John Sonmez
Talk with companies and say you want the experience. You might be able to get a short term contract (with no pay), but it’s something to put on your CV and you’ll learn a lot! — psynnott, a Stack Overflow user
Photo credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg
