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How I Doubled my Salary in 5 Months and Got an Amazing Job

Sam Williams on March 11, 2018

It certainly wasn’t easy but I managed to go from a low paid junior dev to a well paid developer in 5 months and even had fun on the way...
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LudvigSv

Great read! Thanks for sharing your experience.

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sagarsarwe

Thanks for sharing your experience. One of the best articles I have ever read. Will follow you for more such articles. And congratulations for your new job.

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Sam Williams

I'm really glad you enjoyed it. I hope you get as much out of all my articles to come.

Thanks, I've started a few weeks ago and I'm loving it.

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Harry

Great article! Nice to see how you laid out a plan and got the job. I am trying to do the same-making a plan to land a junior developer position. Any advice would be great!

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Sam Williams

Hi Harry,

I'm really glad you enjoyed my article and that you're keen on becoming a junior developer.

My main bit of advice would be that the best way to improve is to do lots of coding and to get support from more senior developers. The best way to do this is to start working as a junior developer.

This means you should be working to first learn just the things that you would need to get a junior dev job so you can start applying to jobs as soon as possible. If you can build a HTML website, styled with CSS and have some basic functionality using JavaScript then you should be thinking about applying for jobs.

Even if you feel under-qualified, the process often takes weeks-months so you'll have more time to improve before starting. If you don't get the job, you can always ask why and then use that feedback to shape your study so you nail the next interview.

In terms of planning to get your first job, heres a bit of an outline that I would use. FreeCodeCamp is an amazing, free resource that I can't recommend highly enough and they cover everything in this list but feel free to use other resources.

  1. HTML and basic CSS - be able to build and style a static site, changing colours, borders, understanding margins and padding

  2. Javascript - This is the most powerful tool you'll have as a web developer. You should be confident creating and calling functions, understand scopes and types of variables, use array functions like .map and .forEach, create for and while loops

  3. Build a Portfolio page demoing all the stuff that you've built before. Make it interactive to show off your JavaScript skills too

  4. Start applying for jobs - You'll probably get your first few jobs through recruiters so apply to a lot of jobs on a range of job boards/ sites. You WILL get rejected because of your lack of experience but if you can demonstrate your ability then you'll convince someone to take you on.

  5. Advance your CSS and JavaScript - If you like the design side of development the you can advance and practice your CSS, learn to use animations and try copying some other websites. If you prefer the logical side of things, improve your JavaScript. Learn about more of the ES6+ methods and try to understand why something works ( You Don't Know JS book series is great for understanding JavaScript)

  6. If you've not got a job yet, you can give yourself a big boost by learning a front end library. This will be a big chunk of learning to get to a good point but it will be a massive selling point. I would recommend React (and redux) but Angular and Vue are two other options.

This is just an outline of what I'd do but you should change it based on you and your progress. This doesn't include the softer skills such as how to interview or how to write a CV but these are also very big parts of getting a job and you should definitely spend some time on this side of the job process.

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Michael Minshew

I didn't see how you did on the express api? probably just me missing it after i scanned for it a few times. how did you go about that process?

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Sam Williams

Express is pretty simple, I didn't learn very much new stuff but I got a lot of practice setting up new express servers for each of the projects I built that had a back end.

If you've never used Express before, the Node with React course covers what you need to know.

Most of the back end learning was about using new APIs and services, like Passport for oAuth, MailGun for emailing and Mongo and mongoose for databases.

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Michael Minshew

Awesome, Thanks for the reply. I have to check my Udemy catalog. I might actually have that node course.

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Jason Dunn [AWS]

I enjoyed reading this. 👏

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George Avg.

Hey interesting post.

Have a look in our new product, which automates the job search process!

loopcv.pro

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Jaime Rios

Awesome content, thanks for sharing.

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Maher Zaidoune

thanks for sharing your experience , that's really encourage me to make a similar plan

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Sam Williams • Edited

I really hope you make a similar plan, it helps you get where you want to be ASAP. It's too easy to get caught up in the newest tech or fanciest library and never learn what you need to get to the next level.

Let me know how it goes!

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Guillermo Saldivar

Gotta admit I truly love the way this article is redacted. You have mad writing skills.

Definitely going to follow you for more of this. Keep up the excellent work and kudos on your new job!

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Sam Williams

Thanks, I'm really glad you liked the article.

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Haidren Amalia

Great article Mr. Sam and congratulations for your new job.

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Sergio Santiago G.

I'm in the search for a new job and there are a lot of great tips in this reading, thank you!

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Gene

I really love this kind of posts! Keeps me fueled. Thanks!