Ask HN: How long did it take you to get your first dev job?

Also I put a lot of effort into making my resume the best I could. Don't neglect this. It is the #1 most important thing you need to do when searching for a job.

You mentioned your intern experience being at 'lower tier' comonies. Are you maybe being too picky in where you are applying?

I'm not a typical example -- my experience here is over 20 years ago, I had no formal training in CS/engineering, and I was looking for work in an area that no one had open positions for (what people called a webmaster position in '95, but this was '92). I worked as a temp for a year until I got lucky with contacts / networking and found a company that needed my skills. I did very well for myself once I was able to demonstrate my expertise -- and I believe that's as true today as it was 25 years ago.

And don't be afraid to experiment, tweaking your resume and cover letters. In the meantime, build little projects that are interesting enough to put on github and your resume.

The total time it took varied by company, but was generally one-two months. Most companies moved quite quickly, regardless of their ultimate decision. The longest lapse was between the initial contact and the first interview, usually. Of the companies I interviewed with, two were big Silicon Valley names, one was a small consulting org, one was a big insurance corporation, and the other two were fairly large private software companies (but not Valley companies). I went with one of the last two. Three of the companies I interviewed with actually contacted me first; interestingly, all of them made me offers.

I have a good single-page resume, and a personal site with more detail on it. More importantly, though, I'm good at the non-technical side of interviews, which helped me everywhere except the companies that do nothing but demand you regurgitate rote CS knowledge (read: Google). One trick I did was a short (But me talking about me won't help you. Let's talk about you. You're anonymous on here, your profile doesn't link to any identifying info, so be real:

Are you a student or recent grad, or are you self taught? What's your story? If you're a new grad, what was your GPA? If What I'm getting at is you need to take a hard look at your networking/interviewing practices and see where the gaps might be. If you put the answers here, I am sure people will help you. Do post your resume as well.