What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
medium.freecodecamp.com
What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
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Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
#2well first thing - that code at the top can be simplified.
function getDevJob(studying, hardwork, luck){
return study && hardwork && luck;
}
It reminds me of that freakonomics article about how real estate agents get more for their houses because they wait longer for a higher offer. By getting the practise and being better at job interviews and NOT jumping at the first offer, you get a better overall rate.
Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
#3TL;DR: The barchart can be misleading. Increasing # of applications can decrease the rate at which they mature into offers.
I like some of your points like get through to real people. That's an incredibly important part of landing a job. However I do have an issue with the graphic at the beginning. I think it's misleading, because you shouldn't really be applying to 200+ companies. When you take that kind of approach its like you're selling yourself short (not putting your best foot forward). Its like saying "I'll take anything, just please give me a job". It's also more difficult to actually show interest in whatever company you're talking to, which is a key part of performing well and ultimately obtaining an offer. So you end up showing 8 offers from 291 applications, but I would argue that by making so many applications, you are decreasing the rate at which the applications turn into offers. I can offer a contrasting viewpoint to this job search thing. When I was in school for Physics I taught myself how to program and started focusing on Web Dev. I ended up dropping out of school and decided to become a programmer. In that initial job search I applied to three companies in SF. (Companies that I was familiar with and legitimately interested in) and got offers from all three. That was two years ago and I've since applied to two other companies in Mountain View (I'm trying to move to an ML engineer position) and received offers from both as well. And like I said I think the difference between what our bar graphs would look like is due to the fact that my applications were much more targeted and my interest and motivation in the companies was much more apparent.
Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
#4How do you even manage this amount of information? A notebook can help but once you hit the 20 applications mark, it's impossible to know to which companies you applied for.
Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
#5not sure how much trust to put into data from freecodecamp.com a company that despite it's name, seems to sell codingcamp products.
Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
#6Are people in America seriously getting offers of $120k with no degree, no experience, and not even a side-project? That is mind-blowing.
In London, probably the biggest/richest market outside of USA, that sort of salary is beyond what most experienced developers get, even some very good ones.
I must be missing something here (some sort of bubble?) because I can't see how businesses can be profitable paying those sort of salaries to people who know almost nothing about professional programming. Either that or businesses in America are just waaaay ahead of Europe at turning code into cash.
Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
#7This whole hardcore quizzing and testing during interviews has to go. As far as I can see, all it does is create selection bias for people who memorize things or like to practice interview questions.
Maybe that's just me being too old for that kinda' crap.
Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
#8>the most important thing you could be doing at any point is studying and preparing.
"Most important"? Have fun with that. Life is too short to spend time memorizing the answers to over-the-top tech questions for some chance to work for a company no one has heard of (and isn't producing tech near the scale of interview knowledge they require).
Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
#9well first thing - that code at the top can be simplified. function getDevJob(studying, hardwork, luck){ return study && hardwork && luck; } But more seriously - I actually really like point #2. I firmly believe that job interviews have a strong bias towards people with experience doing job interviews. Your "offer-ladder" seems to confirm that for me. It reminds me of that freakonomics article about how real estate a…
Also note that the "easier" interviews are from companies that are less competitive/less established. So their offers are going to be lower not because the candidate comes off as less qualified, but because they just don't have the money to pay their employees the 120K+ salaries. So that graphic is also misleading.
Re: What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
#10How do you even manage this amount of information? A notebook can help but once you hit the 20 applications mark, it's impossible to know to which companies you applied for.
I'm not the author, but I went through a similar process looking for a job when I moved to a new city. I had ~120 applications over the course of a month, with a surprisingly similar funnel at each step.
Managing the process wasn't too hard. I simply kept a spreadsheet updated with contacts as rows, and columns with dates for every step of the process including first contact, second contact, phone interview (s), coding challenges, on-site interviews.
However, you're right when you say "once you hit the 20 applications mark, it's impossible to know to which companies you applied for." Early on in my application process, I wasn't applying to nearly enough places, because I wanted to hear back from someone before moving on to the next. A good friend of mine gave me the advice "You should be reaching out to so many people, that when you get a response, you'll need to go back to research who it was from." It's a weird mode to operate in, but once you realize that as a new-ish dev the process of getting a job is very much a funnel like the one in this post, it's a strategy that makes a lot of sense.
I would highly recommend anyone looking for a job to follow the advice in this article, it matches very closely with my experience. Especially resonant were the points about making contact with real humans, and also to push tons of companies into the pipeline.