Why All Developers Need Client Work To Land Your First Full-Time Job

If you’ve just graduated or switched careers, it feels impossible to “break in” to the tech industry as a software engineer. Client work is the secret ingredient you’ve been missing! Here’s what to do.

Hiring Manager: “Tell me about your work experience.” Candidate: “I don’t have any, but I look good, right?” Hiring Manager: “Uhhh, so you don’t even have any client work?” Photo by Nicolas Jossi on Unsplash

It is the “catch-22 of full-time employment”: you need at least 1 year of experience to be qualified for any job in any industry, but where do you get that experience if you’re just starting out?

If you’re a “new grad” (from a university or a coding bootcamp), sometimes you’ll get lucky and land a software engineering job — or you’ll just give up on coding and apply to product manager jobs until you get one.

But for everyone else, including self-taught developers, many new grads, career changers, and currently-unemployed developers, there’s an incredibly obvious way of getting “real-world” programming experience.

(“If it’s incredibly obvious, why isn’t it universally known, and why am I bothering to write an article about it???” You ask, increduously.)

It’s client work, which typically pays 10% or less of what you can earn as a full-time software engineer, but it is real-world programming work!