Ask HN: Advice for applying to Junior Software Engineering roles?

So how does one find your email?

I'm asking this to showcase a problem I'm having right now while job searching (not at the junior level).

Basically I'm trying to get in touch with companies directly, in the UK, and not through external recruiters, but I just can't seem to find an email of someone that does hiring.

I go to LikedIn and search for the company, there is no contact email there, I browse through the people list, everybody there has InMail disabled so I can't message them (unless I pay for a recruiter account). Then I visit their website, they have only a generic contact@ or hello@ email there, if any. With that I message them and they disregard what I wrote and tell me to apply for the already open positions through their 3rd party apps (lever, greenhouse etc).

Basically if I wanted to ask a few questions before formally applying I'd have no way of doing it. From the 40+ companies I tried to approach this way I have found only 3 people on LikedIn with InMail disabled that replied back, two "careers@" emails that even bothered to reply and exactly 0 emails of a person (hiring manager or equivalent) anywhere...

This comes from someone at the senior level, who's not affraid of "cold emailing" around and insisting until I get a human on the other side of the chat.

My point is, if you want peole to mesaage you please make sure they have a way to do it, and actually reply.

Market is hot, not so much for Juniors. Big part is that with everyone working from home mentoring junior developer is a massive pain. For every 2 you hire you lose probably 80% of productivity of a senior dev for at least 3-4 month.

For concrete advice, drill those idiotic interview questions. People use them because who knows.. being able to solve everything is impressive. For take homes do a good job on the cleanliness aspect, write tests..

Pick one language and get decent at it. Be it python, js or C++. Be able to solve basic stuff on the HackerRank etc using that language.

Avoid remote only companies; target those with offices. They will be a better learning environment for you and they will be keen to meet people who don’t think remote is the only way to work.

Once companies reach a certain size (30 people?) someone will have HR in their title, find that person on LinkedIn and add them and then just tell them you’re looking for an in-person junior role once they accept. Below that size find the CTO or CEO and do the same.

Good companies will have a take home coding challenge that models real work. When you get one try and return it within 3 business days.

If you’re in Chicago or open to moving, I’m hiring juniors, details are in my profile.

> I guess what I'm asking is: If you were fresh out of college, how would you go about getting a job?

Leetcode and hackerrank all the problems now that university is fresh in your mind. Do some programming competitions.

Get a job at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Work there 2 years. See this as your "real world" M.Sc. degree.

Then move on to whatever interests you. A M.Sc. or PhD or some other job.

I was in your position at the start of the pandemic. I personally think I wasted a lot of time doing side projects and hackathons when they didn’t seem to matter that much, I got way more interviewers when I put a few part time jobs at school and a non profit on my resume than I ever got off side projects. I applied to around 200 companies and got an interview with around 5 of them (one of them ended up being an internship at a FANG where I now work full time).

In my opinion you should try to apply to as many jobs as possible every day and by as many as possible I mean 15-20. Dont bother with a cover letter I never got a interview for any of the applications where I wrote a cover letter and demonstrated “interest and value” like you’ll read online.

I also recommend that even though it sounds like you’re in your last year you should also apply to internships at the big tech companies. I applied to around 140 companies in my senior year and got rejected by all the full time positions but got accepted into a FANG internship after I graduated its the best way to get into a FANG (if thats your goal).

The other thing I recommend is focusing on leetcode as much as possible.

Also for new grad positions they are mostly looking for keywords relating to the languages they mention in the job posting to be explicitly in your resume. I recommend taking some time to use some standard resume format and make sure your resume is written with bullets that are in the “i accomplished x as measured by Y by doing Z” format. Make sure whatever you say in Z matches the keywords in the job postings you are applying to. Also a small tip is that if you apply in the morning it does seem more likely that a human will read your resume.

Also one other thing I will add, referrals really do make a difference. My friend was a low level IT contractor at a FANG and he gave me a referral and out of 10 applications only the one he referred me for ended up getting an interview for me.