Ya I understand that, if you can get in the door. Those same companies are also the ones I've found more likely to automate rejections of applicants who can't check the right boxes though, making it harder to get in without experience.
Nearly 20 years in now as a self-taught developer.. and I agree with most of what the post says. I would just add that a young person should continually keep trying to get a job, any job, building software. The process of applying for these kinds of jobs helps you identify areas to focus on.
I think the biggest thing that keeps people from being successful is the assumption that, even with all the effort they are putting in, their potential peers are better at the job. In some strict sense that is true but delivering customer value is number one. Keep your focus on that, people will want to work with you. Ignore any feelings of being an imposter.
I got my first contract development gig at 14, first salaried position at 17. Stick with it and make it happen. Be confident. Don't be a dick.
Also, the original question talked about using Java. There is nothing wrong with Java and there are a lot of jobs in that space but I can't imagine a harder place to come in as a young untrained programmer than Java Enterprise development.
There is a pretty important distinction here -- We have seen in the US consulting market (at large corporations) an influx of 90s style contractor arrangements for staff augmentation. This is basically the counter to failed outsourcing efforts. These contractors almost entirely work for large groups like Robert Half, Tata, Infosys, Tek Systems and others.
We also still have a very very strong consultant labor force making 2-3x what W2 full-time employees can pull in. These consultants generally work through smaller consulting firms that take smaller cuts for the placement/handling billing and invoicing.
Using an admittedly expensive Asus RT-AC88U with my MBP connected over 5ghz, I can get ~900mbps on speedtest.net using my gigabit connection.
Example test below [0], admittedly the downstream results aren't the best but I've got some rather large downloads and streaming going on right now. Upstream shows the capability though.
When teams have problems with remote v local employees, I've found this to be because they actively treat them differently, sometimes without realizing it.
It takes work to establish your culture to work remotely well -- if you just hire some people that you only ever hear on Skype during standup and give them work, they don't become enmeshed in the fabric of the company. Cliques form everywhere but they can be especially brutal in excluding remote workers from the 'core' teams that are seen as successful within a company.
I'm sorry to hear it hasn't worked for you. If you attempt it again, make sure you evaluate whether you've built a culture based on 'being there' before hiring people who can't be. Lots of people make this mistake and just see cheaper workers.
I think your last point about data retention is really the big question. Given the ever-growing use of Parallel Construction in making cases from illegally obtained data (or data authorized only for a different use), its not enough that all these policies be stopped -- we need to address how long they can keep the fruits of their labor.
We're building on/and hoping to contribute to the community Code Fixes/Code Actions being built for Roslyn as far as refactoring goes in C#. We have some plans of providing a similar interface for other CodeEngines to implement diagnostics/fixes.
The font is Input Sans [0]. Great font. We wanted to try and package it with Scrawl but we never heard back from the author. Its free though, go try it out!
We've got more direct support for Angular, Knockout and React in the backlog but I don't want to lie to you and say its happening tomorrow. Soon though. Thanks for your feedback!
Founder of fluentCODE here. Really happy to see this posted, we just pushed really hard last night to get the site up. Lots of good comments -- I'll just add that we will be a lot more than just a C#/VB/JS editor. We've got plans to build CodeEngines for F#, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, CSS/SCSS/SASS/LESS, PHP, python and lots of framework specific bits for each of those.
We're a small team working hard on a product we believe in. Ask anything and I'll try and respond if I don't fall asleep!
Our backlog includes support for a PHPCodeEngine and framework support for Laravel and Symfony. Its not the first thing on our list but it will happen!
We had package manager support in our prototype and will have it in the main branch again for the v1.0 release. First nuget, then npm and bower. There will also be extensibility points here to introduce new package managers easily.
