Right now, a junior is someone with less than 2 years experience. It is preferably to have at least overall 3 years of professional experience, and 2 at the same company. If you don’t have 2 years experience at the same company, you are as good as invisible on the market … at least this is my conclusion.
In order to get hired you basically have three options:
- get hired as whatever you can in the IT field (support guy, tester or whatever) and switch afterwards. While this brings you a monthly (small) wage, switching might be challenging. As far as I know, this is the preferred option by many fellow juniors.
- getting hired as an intern and remain hired there
- getting hired to bad reputed companies where nobody wants to work and gain experience
Shipping software to production, developing it in good quality requires experience. The ideal way would be to get a junior in a team of seniors and she/he will be learning from them. Of course, this barely ever happens. In fact, for me it went the other way around, like facing arrogance from someone with 3–5 years experience as I wrote here.
Let’s go with the continuation of this article.
#My third employer
After two failed internships, so two firings in a row, I went for option #3. I got hired as a web developer, my desired role, and in two weeks the rest of project was completed and released. I was reassigned on windows phone application, which was already at the beginning of it’s downfall. Of course I couldn’t say “no” since this damn job was my last resort. I knew it will suck from the very beginning, but I had no other choice. Ignore the language if you don’t like it, but right now there’s no point in being politically correct.
Oh, and I was alone for learning windows phone and since I was in a crappy company, my manager had an aggressive attitude towards me as he had to everyone who was not killing her/himself, by meeting unrealistic deadlines. He told me that I am a slow learner.
One day … or rather evening, I was leaving at 19:15 and he asked me why I am leaving this early when I could work a bit harder.
Later, some other day, I stayed until 20:00 and he told me that if I stay that long it means that I am inefficient. And no, he was not joking.
After a year of getting hired there, the client dropped his unpromising windows phone project and I was fired right away.
Just as a comment, my ex-colleagues were all fired one by one, until the company itself failed.
Okay, let them be, but what about me? When I was fired, since I was an obedient employee, my boss didn’t want to be too harsh on me. He asked me if I have other offers. Probably he knew that, with less then 2 years of experience at the same company your’re nothing but a piece of garbage.
I asked what is the point of the question. He replied that he feel that I am going to remain unemployed and laugh hysterically. You can conclude yourself how I felt and what toxic environment that was. His attempt of being nice was garbage (as himself as I am tempted to say).
I’ve been fired three times in a row! And I still did not have enough experience to get another job easily.
Oh, and I had a master degree to finish off, so I couldn’t get hired somewhere else, there were no job offers but for seniors (with 5+ years of experience). My master degree was my priority, because I wanted to finish once and for all.
My third firing happened right ahead of Easter, in 2015 — it was indeed an unusual way of celebrating this public holiday. Right on the Easter, a connection of mine from UK wrote to me, asking how is it like working in Romania. I still have the email, where I explained how I was fired and my sorrow of not having those freaking two years experience at the same company.
#April 2015 — August 2015 — my dead career period. 4 months that seemed like ages. I was depressed, broken and sick.
Now, do an imagination exercise! I’ve done all I could to keep a job while I was working and going to college at the same time. Imagine staying 4 hours at the university and 9 at the office. 1 hour of commutation. College homework for the weekend! Where is my resting time? Forget the spare time, that was out of the question!
I got fired and then people are asking how is to work in Romania. Not to mention some additional personal problems as well. And the health ones!
This company had it’s “office” in a warehouse outside the city. After the bus left me to the last station I had to walk on foot for ~20 minutes on the field to get there. I was lucky enough to get most of the time rainy or windy weather spreading all the dust on me. This got me sick both literally and metaphorically.
After graduating, I was still sick and with my professional handicap. All of my efforts of finding a job in Iaşi proved themselves a waste of time. Bad experiences with recruitment agencies, fake interviews, dumb questions, people looking for a full-stack developers — a jack of all technologies as explained here, and no sign of any offer. I always sent the mandatory documents for an application, but no sign of any offer. Best case: I was close enough, but not good enough. Needles to say the interviews were terrible experiences, I was treated like trash and no sign of someone who had met my expectations for a hiring process.
So, I needed it bigger guns. I needed it a bigger city. Back then I never thought about leaving the country, but moving to Bucharest. One day I sent 11 applications in Iaşi and 11 in Bucharest and I tracked them all. The score:
- Iaşi: 1 job interview invitation just to tell me that they are not looking for juniors.
- Bucharest: 8 interview invitations, 5 scams — technical tests … or rather free code from candidates (after submitting the code I got no feedback whatsoever), apart from one, which of course was a “no” response. At one I bailed out (it was waaaay too creepy to get hired there as a someone new in town), at another one, though the interview went well, I didn’t get the promised answer, and 1 formal offer. That’s all I needed it!
#My fourth employer
Okay, I finally got hired to a giant company and my stable job was on it’s way. I’ve wanted all the time to avoid compromises and to stick to the .net developer role. How cute!
Being hired at large company means that the your money issues will no longer be issues. That’s one of the advantages of working in a … corporation as some are saying on a pejorative tone. I had medical subscription (among other benefits) that helped me heal my serious illness caught when I was working for my third employer.
Only that … I was hired as a .NET developer, but I had to develop work on some freaking robots, which had nothing to do with my role. Resigning? Are you kidding?! I could barely found a job. I needed to stay there for at least two years as explained above. Besides, I was tricked to sign a hiring bonus, which locked me there; as explained here.
When I got hired, that HR guy gave me two contracts one in Romanian and one in English language, both having ~20 pages. He said that I have 20 minutes to read and sign. I was desperate enough, one should understand after reading so far why. The guy came back in 5 minutes and rushed me to sign them.
Back home, I realized that I must stay there for a year, otherwise I’ll have to pay them back their hiring bonus among all taxes and interest, and it would’ve result a truck load of money; money that I didn’t had anyway.
I said to myself that it can’t be that bad, but doing something that you truly hate is a miserable job. And after a year, it wouldn’t made sense to leave. I’d have to stay at least 2 years somewhere else, who knows what would had happened there. So I spend two years caring boxes, completing excels and other stuff that had nothing to do with software development whatsoever.
My spare time was filled with preparing for interview, obtaining certifications and developing a personal project so that nobody could ever complain at the interview “that I don’t fit” … well apart for not performing real programming tasks, but that’s just one issue.
Two years where I managed to resist to all sort of frustrating situations. For instance: a pervert alcoholic manager that I work with for 5 months — seemed like ages. I faced the situation when women had more advantages than men, in order to attract female employees to the company. More details here. I ended up hating my job, as much as all of my previous ones, but at least at this one I was earning a decent amount money every month.
After two years, I started looking for a job outside the country. Since I was not speaking the local language, since I didn’t performed programming tasks and since I was simply not from there, things went badly.
The abroad job hunt outcome: over 80 applications, ~15 rejections without any interview, 3 interviews, all of them did not provide any responses or any kind of feedback.
On top of that, I was about to be assigned to a longer project of a chatbot (WTF?!) and I was asked to sign a “small” contract modification for rising my salary.
If they would’ve reached to me with another year of staying there I would be wasting myself there for good. I had little time so I immediately start hunting jobs in Bucharest.
September 2017: The Bucharest job hunt outcome: 5 applications, 4 interviews, at 2 I bailed out (hell, this time I could afford something better) and 2 offers. One, at Endava, seemed to be what I was looking for a long time. And I was right.
It took me 5 years to get a good job.
More details in the next article.
Conclusion?
The conclusion so far is that, after speaking with other people as well, breaking into this world could be extremely challenging. Nobody is willing to invest on you, you need to work your way up, flying, running, crawling whatever, you need to move on somehow.
I’ve tried all the options enumerated at the beginning of the article. I started with #2 as an intern, and it was a complete disaster. I continued with #3 working in a the worst company in town, and I ended up with #1 by caring boxes, basically.