DEV Community

Cover image for How Samantha Ming lands developer jobs without applying
Ryland @ Stackbit
Ryland @ Stackbit

Posted on • Updated on

How Samantha Ming lands developer jobs without applying

Samantha Ming got her first developer job in 2016 (without ever getting a CS degree).

Today she’s a Front End Developer at GitLab fast-tracking her way to becoming a Senior Developer.

Here are the insights behind her career growth success.

When you dig into Samantha’s magic, you’ll see she’s fully optimized her LinkedIn.

Step 1? Keywords.

A recruiter might be looking for a Javascript developer. If you don’t have the word Javascript in your profile, forget it, they won’t find you.

Alt Text

Samantha also ensures she's toggled on the right settings in LinkedIn.

Here's her set up.

Alt Text

A few months ago Samantha had a friend let her know his company was hiring.

Why?

He said he’d seen some of her posts on LinkedIn and thought she’d be a good fit.

The more you share on LinkedIn, the better chance you have of opportunities FINDING YOU.

Alt Text

Samantha's other superpower is simple – being kind & friendly.

When she was looking for a job a friend advocated for her & she immediately got an interview.

Other developers are your best resource to get a job. If you’re kind you can easily ask for a referral.

So don’t be a jerk!

Here are email templates you can use to ask for a referral.

Alt Text

Now, networking and LinkedIn may help you get an interview, but acing the interview and algorithm will land you the job

Here are Samantha’s tips on whiteboard questions and take-home challenges.

In whiteboard challenges, you can’t use Google.

So Samantha actually treats the interviewer as Google.

Forget a method name? She’d just ask.

Interviewers want to see your thought process, not that you memorized the syntax.

Speak your process aloud. Even if you get stuck.

Alt Text

Take-home challenges always have a time limit, so speed is the game!

Samantha figured out the biggest time saver is optimizing her set up time.

The faster she could set up her dev environment, the more time she had to actually tackle the challenge.

Alt Text

And lastly, the culture interview...

So what makes a person a cultural fit? In Samantha's words:

'It means you’re not an asshole! That’s it!'

lol

In the end, people want to know you’re someone they'll LIKE working with.

Kindness, positivity, empathy are the winning formula for landing a job.

Alt Text

To summarize!

Samantha’s success landing jobs stems from:

1/ Being kind & friendly, sharing her successes, and optimizing her LinkedIn to create serendipitous opportunities.

2/ Preparing for the interview thru simple tactics to help her land the job.

Simple.

Ok, thanks for reading!

If you'd like to learn more from Samantha, she's killing it on Twitter and Instagram,and here’s her site too.

If you learned something and are feeling generous perhaps show some love to the Twitter thread.

I work a full-time job while creating these articles on the side, so this really helps.

Till next time! –Ryland

Top comments (6)

Collapse
 
abdurrkhalid333 profile image
Abdur Rehman Khalid

I just grabbed my pencil and notebook to write down the points from this post.

Being a moderate programmer and having a degree, I am still not able to get any job. I guess this is because of bad keywords usage in my LinkedIn profile and also I am not very much active there as well.

So, I guess I should be more active on LinkedIn and share my articles and thought about common coding practices for a Java and Angular developer there as well.

I have learned a lot from this post, I hope that this post will get the reach that this post deserves and I am also posting my LinkedIn link here as well so that you can have a look and tell me my mistakes as well.

linkedin.com/in/abdur-rehman-khali...

Have a Good Day Ahed :)

Collapse
 
rylandking profile image
Ryland @ Stackbit

Hi Abdur, Thanks for the words. Much appreciated.

I can see the updates you made on your LinkedIn. They look great!

Two things I think will help big time.

  1. I can see you're a Full Stack Web Developer. Now show me the projects you've built and explain the key skills you developed in each.

Add these to the Featured section on your profile.

  1. Message Technical Recruiters on LinkedIn. Ask if they can help place you in an industry you're interested in.

Their goal is to find good developers and place them at companies. So there are 100s of recruiters looking for people like you right now!

Good luck and keep us posted!

Collapse
 
abdurrkhalid333 profile image
Abdur Rehman Khalid

Kindly correct me if I am wrong. You are saying that I should add the projects that I have completed into the feature section. You are also asking me to message technical recruiters for the placement in the industry.

These are little confusions I am having, I will be helpful if you can guide me here as well.

Thread Thread
 
rylandking profile image
Ryland @ Stackbit

Yep, correct on both!

Here's how to feature samples of your work on your profile: socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-use...

And Google something like, "Recruiting agencies" in your area. And you should find a few to connect with.

Thread Thread
 
abdurrkhalid333 profile image
Abdur Rehman Khalid

Excellent Sir, I will surly work on these things in the Morning :)

Thread Thread
 
rylandking profile image
Ryland @ Stackbit

Np. Good luck!