hjay

Hmm, since the demand is > 0 now, I guess I will! Not too sure how to get reply notifications on HN though, I always lose track of responses.

Wow, I could never write this well in a million years, but as I was reading, I couldn't help but feel that this was a blog post that I've been wanting to write for a while.

Without going on a rant and hi-jacking this thread, replacing "Participation Rank" with "consumption of beer/alcohol", "gathering" with "late night beer party", "Dad had a seizure" with "Mom was very sick", "kayak" with "badminton", "profile" with "LinkedIn", and you have 100% of my story give and take a few breaks in flow and sentence structure errors that are bound to happen with simple string replacement.

Guess it's time to finally go write that blog post.

Seems like I ended up with the opposite experience with Amazon from not having completed college.

First, a bit about my background. I got my first computer 6 years ago, and within a year, I was obsessed with learning to build for the web. Shortly after, this obsession took me to a few online forums dedicated to development and other similar works. I built a crappy content management system for a game that I played occasionally, which was given to people who ran servers for that same game. Shortly after, I myself started a private server for that game, and developed a lot of interesting game mechanics and interactions that did not exist in the official game. This private server grew to be very popular and had about 3000 players online simultaneously at any given time of day. Soon after, this private server received a cease and desist order by the company that owned the game, and I pulled the plug.

During that time, I met my (future) co-founder through one of our players. We went on to co-found Windows7Center and Windows8Center.com (offline as of 2012), and over 3 years, gained quite a bit of success and popularity. During those few years, between these efforts and school, I took on freelance web development work to satisfy both my passion and my family's monetary needs.

I then decided against taking my full scholarship to law school, and attended a local technical college for Computer Science. After finishing my 1st year in Computer Science, I left school to pursue full-time opportunities because of financial difficulties that arose. Up till now, I've been working full-time for close to 2 years.

When I found out Amazon was hiring in Vancouver, B.C, I applied. I was interested but I was not yet prepared to leave my job in the case of an offer. A few months later, I left the company I was in, and around the same time, was asked to participate in Amazon's phone interviews. Throughout the process, they were aware that I had only completed 1 year of college.

My interview was with a senior engineer working in the same area I was applying for over in Seattle, and went quite well. Subsequently, I was flown down to Seattle for a full day of on-site interviews (for a Vancouver position). Long story short, the interviews went well, and after going through the 7 interviewers, my last interview was with the lead recruiter from Vancouver, who had flown down to interview me.

He then proceeded to spend the remaining 35~40 minutes drawing on the whiteboard the compensation details of the position, including signing bonus, equity options, performance bonus, how I could choose between more options or cash for the bonus, the benefits of choosing one over the other, the base salary, etc. He said "when I send you the offer on Wednesday, you will see _______" on a couple occasions. Then he walked out with me and explained that the team in Vancouver was very diverse and full of cool people, how it was much like a startup, and that I would love it. (I guess he was "selling" me the opportunity) He then said "once you accept the offer, we will fly you back down around 3 weeks later to do the training here, because the Vancouver offices are still quite small and we don't have that many hires that week".

Fast forward a month, and after 3 emails from me checking back with them, I received nothing. No offer, no email, nothing.

It's been a while since that whole experience, and after reaching out to a few employees at Amazon to help me gather some information about what happened, a recruiter told me "All of Amazon’s development roles require a bachelor’s degree". Of course this is not entirely true, as they do have engineers without degrees, but apparently I was rejected without notice because of my lack of a degree.

I'm in the exact same situation. Except in my case, in Canada, and (only) after 1 year of full-time courses.

I also did a paid internship, for $18 an hour at a major software company in Vancouver, B.C. Now the Canadian government has decided that I have more than enough (assuming a cost of living of 0 for a 20 year old that has to support an elderly mother).

So basically, I have an income of 0 (aside from my freelance work), costs running at ~$1600 CAN per month for basic shelter + food for 2 people, AND the Canadian government is constantly on my back for student loan repayment. I did not choose to dropout of college, I was (essentially) forced to by the government.

Best part is, now any employer I talk to asks about the 1 year I spent in college. I'm sure they assume that as a 20 year old, I am either lazy, stupid, or irresponsible. But that couldn't be further from the truth. I've worked 18~22 hour days everyday of my life since I was 16, and I'm tired. Not tired of a (somewhat) difficult life, but tired of the assumptions people make. People in the government, people who have power of employment, people around me who judge a book by its cover.

I live in Vancouver. There are quite a few startups in the Gastown area, and a few small offices for large companies like Microsoft, SAP (not that small), and Amazon, and recently, Facebook and Twitter (to come?).

In terms of the work, I've been seeing a lot of Java, and C#/.NET work in Vancouver. Which for me as someone whose experience has been full-stack web development (LAMP/WAMP, PHP, SQL/no-sql DBs, HTML/CSS, JS frameworks), it's quite hard to find a suitable positions.

Also a few Ruby positions opening up lately, but very few.

All I know about Toronto is Google has an office there while they don't in Vancouver. It'd be best if a local Toronto or Montreal dev could provide some insight.