In retrospect, I found three things that helped as someone who quit his job as a journalist a year ago, learned web development and found a full-time job within 6 months:
Having done freelance work, no matter how little it paid, as long as it was part of a new project and not adding features to an existing one.
Going to a lot of job interviews. This didn't actually help me find a job as much as it challenged me to learn new things, as online classes are good in teaching some fundamentals, but you never know what it is that companies actually need.
Not being picky in terms of employment options but being picky in terms of pay. My first job was at a poorly-run small business that stopped paying salaries the day my probationary period ended. However unpleasant this was, it was much easier to find work again because I already had experience. Plus, I got an offer for 30% more than what I last had and now work at a much nicer office where people don't smoke e-cigarettes. If I did anything differently, I would have asked for more money. Companies seem to judge people who ask for less money as less determined, and it's true: managers demand exponentially less from coders who are paid less, and you really need to have people demand a lot from you to have an urge to improve your skills.
Of course, my experience is based on me living in a city with a vibrant IT job market and financial stability thanks to my partner. Without that, doing 3-4 job interviews a week for two months with no experience and facing rejection at almost all of them would have been much harder both in terms of finances and overall morale.
Awesome advice! I'm curious why you specify freelance work that "was part of a new project and not adding features to an existing one." I think a lot of employers would love to see that you can come in and work with legacy code since that's probably what you'll be doing in most jobs.
At least in my case, it allowed me to have something to talk about during interviews. A prospective employer actually recommended that as a beginner, I stay away from positions that have a lot of refactoring and minor fixes as the premise of the job because it doesn't really teach you anything and doesn't let you have a real portfolio of projects.
And honestly, it's true, it's one thing to write new features, but another to just have a lot of boring chore-like assignments like "we need another column in this table" that may or may not cause you to refactor the entire codebase while you're at it. That and if it's written by someone much more skilled than you, it will be hard to understand how all the parts work together and faster to just imitate the logic of it and stick something in that works but doesn't conform to the structure. And if someone who is also new wrote it, in my experience, that can lead to things that are very stressful but ultimately useless for experience, like working with a codebase where a single file can have 2000+ lines of code.
I did 2 and 3. Got my first full-time dev job in a very tiny company with the smallest possible (by law) salary. And yes, it sucked in many ways, but I learnt a lot in 10 months and it was fairly easy to find another job after that, at least a lot easier than when you are a fresh graduate without relevant work experience.
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In retrospect, I found three things that helped as someone who quit his job as a journalist a year ago, learned web development and found a full-time job within 6 months:
Having done freelance work, no matter how little it paid, as long as it was part of a new project and not adding features to an existing one.
Going to a lot of job interviews. This didn't actually help me find a job as much as it challenged me to learn new things, as online classes are good in teaching some fundamentals, but you never know what it is that companies actually need.
Not being picky in terms of employment options but being picky in terms of pay. My first job was at a poorly-run small business that stopped paying salaries the day my probationary period ended. However unpleasant this was, it was much easier to find work again because I already had experience. Plus, I got an offer for 30% more than what I last had and now work at a much nicer office where people don't smoke e-cigarettes. If I did anything differently, I would have asked for more money. Companies seem to judge people who ask for less money as less determined, and it's true: managers demand exponentially less from coders who are paid less, and you really need to have people demand a lot from you to have an urge to improve your skills.
Of course, my experience is based on me living in a city with a vibrant IT job market and financial stability thanks to my partner. Without that, doing 3-4 job interviews a week for two months with no experience and facing rejection at almost all of them would have been much harder both in terms of finances and overall morale.
Awesome advice! I'm curious why you specify freelance work that "was part of a new project and not adding features to an existing one." I think a lot of employers would love to see that you can come in and work with legacy code since that's probably what you'll be doing in most jobs.
At least in my case, it allowed me to have something to talk about during interviews. A prospective employer actually recommended that as a beginner, I stay away from positions that have a lot of refactoring and minor fixes as the premise of the job because it doesn't really teach you anything and doesn't let you have a real portfolio of projects.
And honestly, it's true, it's one thing to write new features, but another to just have a lot of boring chore-like assignments like "we need another column in this table" that may or may not cause you to refactor the entire codebase while you're at it. That and if it's written by someone much more skilled than you, it will be hard to understand how all the parts work together and faster to just imitate the logic of it and stick something in that works but doesn't conform to the structure. And if someone who is also new wrote it, in my experience, that can lead to things that are very stressful but ultimately useless for experience, like working with a codebase where a single file can have 2000+ lines of code.
I did 2 and 3. Got my first full-time dev job in a very tiny company with the smallest possible (by law) salary. And yes, it sucked in many ways, but I learnt a lot in 10 months and it was fairly easy to find another job after that, at least a lot easier than when you are a fresh graduate without relevant work experience.