For all of you hired and working devs, I have a question for you: How did you land your first job as a dev? By this I mean, how did you come across this first position? Did you randomly see it on LinkedIn? Company job board? A friend? Old co-worker? Meetup? Career fair? etc. Did you have a CS degree or attend a bootcamp? Were you self taught?
I am asking as a young dev looking for my first role. I’ve been searching for a little over 2 months now and feel like I’m hitting that point of asking myself if it’ll ever happen for me. I understand that 2 months is not long, don’t get me wrong, but there always seems to be ups and downs during the job search and I’m currently sitting in a down. I think it’ll help inspire/motivate me (and other young devs) to see how experienced devs came across their first opportunities.
If you’d also like to include how long you searched for the job as well, that would be great too.
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I was fortunate to get a break right out of college in the year 2000. I was graduating in Statistics from Mumbai university and was simultaneously attending a 2 year computer programming course with a local school in Mumbai (Aptech). This course lead to a fortuitous interview call in a dotcom, they had just moved their offices to Mumbai.
They needed Perl & MySQL developers neither of which I knew at that time, but had some knowledge of Linux which they were using on the server side. Being right out of college, I joined them for next to nothing. And in the interview both me and a friend who had gone together presented a confident facade, which I guess helped to land us our first break.
During this stint I was fortunate to have a great group of techies around me, nearly all freshers who were very hungry to learn. We regularly used to have 12-14 hour days with no complaints, looking back I think I learnt most of my coding/logic building skills in that 2.5 year stint.
Keep the faith, present a confident (yet ready to learn and share) attitude. Good luck & god speed!
Somehow, 'quick apply' on LinkedIn worked for me.
As other devs, mine was accidental too. I was studying a CS degree in university, when at middle year I started to feel down, and exhausted about some classes. The university has a job portal where startups/small companies search for partials works.
I applied to only one, their description of project was good and match my favourite skills. 2 weeks later I forgot about all of this, and the next day I received a call from them
About 5 years ago, a friend texted me to see if I knew someone with basic HTML/CSS skills, and also good hardware knowledge. I had them, so I applied for the job and landed it. Since I also had taken a few programming classes in college, about a couple years later I helped fixing bugs on a old .NET/C# internal application, and wrote another one on my own.
At that point, I felt like I had good enough experience for a Jr dev position, so I applied to a bunch of places. It took me about 4 months to land a job. I can't count how many jobs I applied to, and had like 5 interviews. One of them was for a full-stack position which required good level in C# and Javascript. I didn't land the job, but the recruiter's feedback said that I needed to strengthen my JS skills.
From there on, I took several good JS courses in Udemy. About a month later, I applied for a job with a local startup that was looking for junior JS devs. Because of the courses and training I took, my experience was way higher than what they needed, so they hired me for a jr/mid position (obviously these "jr", "jr/mid", "mid", and "senior" positions depend from company to company). So the feedback from that first interview somehow helped me take necessary actions, and land that job. The startup didn't quite worked out, so after a couple of months I left, pretty burned out and frustrated. About a month later, my current employer contacted and hired me.
For me, the whole initial job hunting process was emotionally hard and heart-breaking and I had the same doubts you may be having now. What I learned is that those feelings came from the fact that this is what I really loved, and my strategy was to use whatever feedback I was provided to improve my skills. Sometimes I applied to a job with skills I didn't had that strong, so what I did was to study and learn more about them.
If you really feel like you love coding, don't give up, use any feedback to better yourself, and have lots of patience. You'll eventually land something good enough, maybe totally unexpected.
This is my story:
While I was still in school (Secondary school) year 2 of 4ca.
One day I was leaving the school when I noticed a job ad on schools info board and took a quick pick of it. Later that day I had a talk with my mother about it (since I was still a minor at that time) and if I should apply or not, as I have been "coding" for about 2 years now (just messing around with a lot of stuff and learning new things, nothing professional).
So we decided that I should send an email with my CV and see what happens. Tomorrow I received a response and an invite for an interview. I stayed at that company for about 3 years before landing my second first real job. As this was more me learning new things and experiencing how to actually do a proper projects and what goes into them.
I found it in the newspaper. I had actually interviewed for the same, or a similar position, and had not been offered the position, about a year before.
I started learning how to code at the age of twelve, my father bought me a book called something like "Visual Basic 6 Reference Manual".
Later on i attended to a technical highschool specialized in computers and there i studied C, C#, SQL. When i graduated i started working repairing computers. When i started to feel pissed off with the PC technician job i started to look for programming jobs in local job looking web pages from my country.
I applied for a job on an insurance systems company, they required no coding experience and offered a 1 month training course. If you pass the exam, you get the job. The course consisted in VB6 and SQL training, since i already had that skills passing the exam was easy.
Basically i was blessed in the sense that at 12 years old i already knew that i wanted to be a coder.
Later VB6 started to feel boring since it's legacy tech and one year on it i already knew the whole full language since it's pretty small.
An ex co-worker recommended me on an start-up where he was working at the time and there i made the jump from client-server apps to web development and that's it.
I guess it is a mix of luck and good timing (having the right skills of course).
Keep searching, you will get your job !
Hardwork learning the right technologies and having a very article CV
I got my first Dev job through IT support. I have a Comp Sci degree but I didn't network at all in Uni and I didn't try very hard after graduating. I landed the IT support role at a ~1500 person tech company through a friend who said that there was the potential for developer mentorship (never really happened, turns out Devs are busy people).
What I did get was a fair amount of free time between calls to learn Powershell and c# and automate a bunch of stuff. This got noticed and eventually I was offered the role of "DevOps Engineer" in a newly formed team focussed on Employee Experience. This was basically a fullstack JS dev but also kinda support too, which was a great learning opportunity.
My advice would be if you can't find a Dev job directly, look for something tangentially related at a company who's culture might facilitate internal promotion. Something where you can keep your skills fresh by using them. I found having a lot of real world problems that I could apply programming to was much more motivating than working on random personal projects that I was never invested in completing.