Getting your first job in software engineering may be the biggest challenge you face when starting your career writing code. Exception is if you start your own company, but that's another story. I've always recommended the following: - Side/pet projects - put on resume. What problem did you have, what did you do to solve it and what did you use, and the result. Reference the public repo. - Social - blog, stream, record your coding adventure. It gives insight into who you are, how you think, and how you communicate. There is also added exposure here. - Open source projects - volunteer, do documentation, fix bug. - Network - user group, meetups, conferences. Get people familiar with seeing your smiling mug. I realize it's tough to handle life and do all of the stuff. But if you are in a large demographic of entry level devs, and one person is doing all the stuff and you're not...well... Anyone else have any advice?
Andrew Burns
5mo
Lots of advice: As someone who has conducted interviews, I'm much more impressed by what you've done than what you know. A sloppy app actually deployed? Yes please. A perfectly coded sliding window solution? I can Google that. You'll learn a ton of stuff by doing and failing that can't be learned anywhere else. Speaking of which - when it comes to interviewing talk about what you learned with these failures. Get into interviews with whiteboard exercises and fail. HARD. There is no substitute for preparing for a "real" interview and having an idea of what to expect and where the bar is. Sean alluded to this. Start a project with other newbies. Teamwork and collaboration are vital skills to be able to demonstrate, and are very hard to have evidence without already being an engineer first. Hackathons can be great opportunities to code alongside seasoned engineers, to better understand what it is they need to know and what/how they do it. From one of Sean's competitors, and the best advice (sorry): I asked some recruiters what skills and roles they were having a hard time filling. One of them gave me an answer, which led to a project that became a bright shiny direct path to my entry job as an engineer.
Tom Willis
5mo
Get into an internship or apprentice program with a company that uses those programs as, essentially, recruiting tools to find great candidates. Ideally do this while in school (internships) or right out of bootcamp, so make those educational choices with an eye to institutions that are successful at helping students get those internships and apprenticeships through their industry connections. +1 to a great portfolio
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