How I Landed My First Job As A Front End Engineer
Without having a computer science related degree and how I still rock at it!
What I’m going to tell you here is my personal story of how I managed to land a dream job as a Software Engineer at a leading company. Expect some tear-exciting bits but I’ll blame those nasty onions for that.
I was pretty good in high school, straight A student but things slowly started to change once I went to the university. Going to university in another town or another country is really challenging, especially in the beginning when everything changes and you have to continuously adapt to different circumstances, be more independent. I was growing interest in taking care more of myself, eating regularly, going to sleep on a schedule, working out, cramming textbooks, developing new skillsets ….. and managed to do none of that entirely (at least in my first year). Why ? Oh, it’s pretty simple, didn’t know the concept of burnout. I was so excited about all the good stuff that was happening to me that I forgot to take a break, and it rapidly got me tired.
Something’s off ….
My grades were getting worse and worse, went from the straight A student to the straight C student. But you know what they say ? A students work for the C students, right ? Well, in a sense … and not in all the cases 😆. I started playing tons of video games to keep me distracted. Couldn’t bear how poorly I was doing in university, but honestly, I wasn’t giving any effort to it. My nutrition took a huge hit when I slowly changed my diet to mostly junk food and beverages. Consequently I gained a lot of weight, the scale was showing +35 kilograms(approximately 77 pounds). One day I went for a walk on a hill like street in my town. There were a bunch of people walking by, enjoying their walk, but I was in pain. I was all sweaty and barely able to breath properly … and then I felt ashamed. And then I realized something was off, way off … And then, the change started.
The change
I started working on myself again, gave up fast-food, started working out, made sure I sleep enough each and every night. But I also felt the need to do more. So in my second year of university I started looking for a job in the field. Didn’t know that much at that point about programming, just the basics of what I was taught in the few semesters I went through so far. My first interview was, let’s say, pretty weird at least. I applied for a Javascript Internship at a local company. The interviewer, politely asked me a bunch of questions to which I didn’t had the answer at hand. My application was rejected but the interviewer was kind enough to give me some feedback on my application, which turned out to be a life changer for me. Initially I felt bad, I interpreted his (negative) feedback as a critique. But his feedback was actually the changes that I had to make in order to get hired. And I decided to focus on that.
“The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude”
It didn’t take too long for me to get hired. I was spending my days and nights, for 3 months learning what it takes to be a Front End Engineer. The routine wasn’t always the same. Some days I would focus just on learning different topics and some days would be dedicated to creating my own portfolio of apps. One particular resource that really helped me learn Javascript and all the necessary tech stack was codecademy.com. I really enjoyed the entire user interaction and all the gamification the app was built upon.
I finally decided to resume looking for a job after 3 months when I felt more well prepared to start my journey as a software developer. This time, the interview was a bit more hilarious than the previous one. If you’ve attended an interview so far you’d know one of those common questions that most technical interviewers or HR people will ask you: Why did you choose our company ? I froze in that moment and all I could come up was: I wouldn’t enjoy starving to death. But in that moment, the interviewer bursted into laughter and moved on to the technical part of the interview. Everything went extremely well and in 2 days I was at the office, signing the contract.
The journey
Getting my first job changed everything. My self-esteem skyrocketed and I’ve found an inner motivation I thought I’d lost at some point in time. I felt empowered. I had enormous amounts of resources for me to learn and I had a mentor, a really good one. If you ask me for the most important advice when starting off as a programmer, here it is: find yourself the best mentor you can get. And the best one is the one that loves what he does. Having a good mentor is invaluable, especially in the beginning, to teach you how to become a professional in your field of work and to help you grow as a human being. It’s not always just programming. There’s also going to be lots of soft skills you’re going to have to learn, in time, for you to succeed.
What to do in your first 1–2 years
Now is the best time to lay the foundation for what is called a “professional” programmer. Depending on your tech stack, which is all the technologies you are going to have to interact with, you’ll probably come across something called version control. Initially I had no knowledge about version control and I found it pretty difficult to understand and use it, in the first few months at least. Even though it might seem painful in the beginning I guarantee you it will be totally worth it to be able to track different versions of your application later on. There are lots of free resources available online for you to master version control (e.g. Git) such as Codecademy: Learn Git, which I’ve found to be invaluable to me while trying to understand version control.
You can probably infer that any technical based job will imply strong learning skills, as a programmer you will always have to keep up to date with changes in the industry, different new technologies or languages and in this sense I want to share a specific course which helped me a lot to more easily digest all the information I had to go through in my first years. This course is called Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects and it is available on the Coursera platform. Just a small spoiler about this: it is the course you need to upgrade your learning capabilities and also learn different techniques to do so like the pomodoro technique.
Furthermore, you should definitely focus on delivering clean, easy to read, quality code. In this sense, makeuseof.com has a pretty good article about 10 programming principles that will really make you stand out regarding the code you deliver.
Be proactive and get out of your comfort zone. I found that being proactive really helps extend your expertise, whether you volunteer to do something new or something that nobody else want to do, this is the foremost thing you have to do in order to start your journey to become a successful developer. Even though getting out of your comfort zone will be painful at times, there’s no successful person who didn’t have to grind and sweat to succeed at some point + I guarantee you it’s totally worth it and also rewarding. I try to be as proactive as possible most of the time and reaching out of my comfort zone often times because later on I like to watch back and notice where I was, let’s say 1 year ago and where I am now, which is really empowering and I recommend everybody to try this.
On your day-to-day work you’ll probably notice that some of the issues you encounter are pretty much repetitive. In this sense you might also want to get a good understanding of algorithms and design patterns. There’s also an entire specialization for Algorithms you can take on Coursera, Algorithms Specialization. I strongly recommend spending a big amount of time on learning and understanding what design patterns are and what they can do for you. Personally, I learned design patterns by reading all I could about them for a matter of 1–2 weeks, then went ahead and held different internal presentations to my colleagues to make sure I totally understood the essence.
“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.”
A final advice
Don’t rush your process of learning! It’s really important to make sure you properly understand sensitive topics from the get-go. I personally had situations when I wasn’t very interested in a subject, skipped it only to have that come back to me and daunt me for hours because I couldn’t solve an issue because I wasn’t understanding properly what I was doing.
If you liked my article you can drop a comment here or we can keep in touch on LinkedIn.
