The Post-Bootcamp Job Search: My Experience
My job search has been weird, and I’m writing this article on March 17 but I probably won’t publish it for a while. See, I started working as a teacher at the bootcamp where I graduated. I thought I did pretty well and so did they and — boom — I was teaching material I picked up a few weeks ago. It felt good.
For about a month. But as the days ticked by and I explained arrays and parameters to people staring at me in confusion, I started to realize that I was never going to level up here. I was constantly wishing my students away so I could get back to programming, a tenuous situation for someone who is supposed to be their teacher. I wanted to build stuff, but my job was teaching other people how to build stuff. This wasn’t working out. If I wanted to be a developer, I had to go find developer work.
(And while it’s true that the teaching life wasn’t for me, I should note that, usually, Craft Academy was an excellent workplace. I’m very grateful for the time I was able to spend there.)
By the Numbers
Applications sent: 31
Responses of any type: 15
Definitely interviews: 3
“Coffee” or “Fika” that was actually an interview: 3
Technical interviews: 3
Job offers: 2
Days between first application and an offer: 58
Meetups / networking events attended during this period: 9 (wow, it felt like way more!)
Times I cried: 2
The Interviews / “Fika” dates
So here’s a thing that happens: you meet someone at an event or send an open application, and someone gets back to you that they want to have a coffee and chat. Cool — you think, networking. Except somewhere ten minutes in, you realize you are definitely interviewing and have to put your game face on. This happened to me no less than three times during this process (you’d think I would have wised up). Maybe it’s just a Swedish thing or maybe folks who have to hire people are trying to keep it “casual” and want a chance to back out if they don’t like you. Either way, half of my meetings fall into this category.
I’ll just talk about each one as they happened chronologically.
The Out-of-Left-Field Fika / Interview
Way on back in early January, I went to a great meetup that was very closely aligned with the technologies I’d been working on. It’s true that I was going to these meetups thinking maybe sometime contacts I make there would help me get a job, but I wasn’t actually looking.
I got an email from one of the attendees that he’d like to have a coffee and chat. When he mentioned his business partner would be there, I wasn’t sure but I figured this was a coffee / interview and indeed it was.
They explained their onboarding program for juniors, talked about office culture, and we chatted about my current position. I was really excited — this is exactly what I was hoping for by going to meetups. Could it be that easy? No. Two weeks of silence, then I get an email from my contact that while they wanted me to come in to pair program (which I now understand is the technical interview), they wouldn’t have time until March. Well that was a bummer, but it was also really nice through this process to think that hopefully sometime way on in March I’d have an opportunity waiting. (See update at the bottom for how this eventually panned out.)
The other thing about this first meeting / interview was that they have a great onboarding / apprenticeship program to bring in new programmers or those not familiar with their technologies and bring them up to speed. In some ways it gave me the wrong impression about the industry, but it also gave me a high bar for where I would end up. Legit onboarding programs exist, and that’s what I wanted.
The Disastrous Interview that Started Great
After the first coffee / interview, I actually started looking for work. If one place was interested in me, then surely others would be as well. I went after the low-hanging fruit:
I quickly found one company that sounded like a great match for my (budding) skills: a Rails shop. The CTO got back to me that night after I submitted my application — exciting! We set up a time to meet in the next few days.
It was probably the best interview of my life. The CTO said I was “checking all the boxes” and I got the distinct impression he was trying to sell me on working there. We spent half the interview going over the structure of the company. This was also my first interview in something like eight years (I worked for myself for a long time before I moved to Sweden).
Later that day he sent me a programming test to “get a sense of my style”. I don’t know if it’s bad practice to publish them, so I won’t, but suffice to say it took some input, from a text file, and was meant to give some output. I put together the test in an hour or so and I thought it was pretty easy, perhaps suspiciously easy. Then again, they said it wasn’t meant to be hard.
The CTO had told me he’d talk to me early in the week to schedule a technical interview later in the week. I wasn’t worried on Wednesday, because people are busy. In the meantime, I saw this company advertising these job openings everywhere, on every job board I looked at. They were clearly desperate for people. It wasn’t my dream job and there were some red flags (after talking to some tech friends) but still, it would be nice to get some practice doing a technical interview and at least I’d get to meet a couple developers and get more of a sense of the office and code base.
Then the CTO writes me: my answer to the test proves I am too inexperienced and the team won’t be able to dedicate the resources to bring me to up speed so that I can be a productive contributor. Ouch!
I spent approximately 8 hours wallowing in self-pity before I picked myself up and started really trying: what did I do wrong and how can I fix it?
What I did wrong and how I could fix it
The short answer to that question is: I have no idea. I talked with a lot of folks about this and they all said that my test seemed fine and that the part I missed (because I did skip what I thought was a small piece) is something I could pick up in just a few minutes. Go figure.
In the meantime, though, this rejection lit something of a fire under my ass. I’d already gotten back into coding in my spare time and now I really stepped up my game. I got an algorithms textbook and started teaching myself basic algorithms. I put together a couple personal projects, one of which actually got more or less finished. I spent a substantial amount of time on codewars. I started work on a much more ambitious side project. In short, I started leveling up.
Some weeks later, I ran into one of the engineers at this company. He apologized that they hadn’t hired me, then told me it wasn’t necessarily the test, but my CV that was the problem. Why did you bring me in for an interview if you weren’t hiring juniors? I asked. He said they didn’t know at the time they weren’t hiring juniors. Fair enough, I guess. But I was glad to have a bit more information.
An aside: the trouble with the job search
Ok, there’s plenty of trouble. But one major problem is that you have so few data points to work with. One always wants to learn from failures, but if you send out ten applications to ten jobs that you are actually qualified for, and four of them write you back with a no, does that mean your cover letter sucks and you should re-write it? Does it mean your CV sucks and you need to gain some more experience? Maybe your Github needs to be better organized and cleaned up. You have no idea! And then you need to send out the next ten applications.
If one of those ten writes you back and invites you for an interview, does that mean the cover letter, CV and everything else are A-ok and you should stick with a “proven” set of materials? It’s infuriating to try to adjust one’s approach with so little data. You mostly just have to do the best you can and read some advice on the internet.
The “Coffee” that became definitely not an interview
I didn’t have another bite for a month, which was pretty discouraging. Then in early February, Chalmers (a local university) had a massive career fair. I crashed it and spoke to as many companies as made sense: a lot of recruiters, consultancy firms and others looking to hire CS grads. I have more and a more complicated work and education history vs. a new CS grad, but if a company is interested in that, they should be interested in me. I left that career fair feeling pretty good: lots of contacts and a couple meetings.
The week after the fair, one of the places I had sent an “open application” wrote back — he’d like to have a coffee.
(Another aside: after you apply to all the job postings on all the job boards, you run out of things to do. The next step is to do a metric ton of research into the local economy — who does the work that you want to do? Chances are they have an “open application” policy where they are always looking. Just send your cover letter and CV over and see what they say. You can also look at jobs for which you do not qualify and head over to the website to see if they are looking for juniors too. Even if they don’t say they are, write.)
I was a really good match for this company, skill-wise. On their list of technologies, I was familiar with probably 5/6. I hadn’t seen a better matchup between me and a job listing. If they hire juniors, I’d make a perfect junior (and that’s almost exactly what I wrote in my cover letter).
So we have coffee. And it’s going fairly well. And he asks me what I’m looking for in my next job. First thing, I say, is I’m looking for a bit of mentorship — not necessarily from one person but I’m looking for an encouraging, helpful environment. And I’m not going to say he freaked out, but the coffee / interview definitely turned into just coffee at that point. He leaned back, put away his notepad, and said this: We give new hires a laptop and then basically expect them to start producing.
Well, gosh.
He was quite done with me at that point, but I used the opportunity to grill him on hiring juniors. Do they do that? (yes) Where do they hire people from? (he mentioned hackathons) How many developers at the company? (25) And they don’t have an onboarding program? (no)
I also asked him for advice on what skills I might try to gain in order to be a more attractive candidate (build something that breaks databases). And if he had any advice for other places I might apply that may be receptive to my CV (consultancy firms). He was a nice guy, and talked to me for quite a while. But yeah, this was a pretty depressing fika and he gave me the strong impression he thought I wasn’t ready to work as a developer (though he did not actually say that).
Is it me or is it bootcamps?
When you’re job-hunting (and basically with anything in life), you can either find a problem with yourself or with outside circumstances. At this point, I was ready to blame bootcamps and specifically bootcamp education in Sweden. I knew I could code a bunch of stuff and that I was getting pretty good with the kinds of things companies actually do with software. But the people I was talking to couldn’t see that at all.
Craft Academy is the first bootcamp in Sweden, and we’ve only been around two years. The market wasn’t ready for us, I was thinking, even though there are tons of openings in tech here. I’m somewhat convinced this is still the case. People haven’t seen bootcamp graduates here, so they are wary. They’re used to hiring CS grads, so they feel comfortable spending resources on them. But bootcamp grads are an unknown quantity. Only seven months in programming? That’s crazy talk. The people we normally hire have four years… of university education in theory. The market will change, because we can see it in the states. But it’s a slow process. And it requires a little more heartache on the job trail than perhaps others experience.
The “Technical” Interview that wasn’t
One of the more promising leads from the Chalmers career fair was a small consultancy firm who wants to expand their web development department. I liked what I heard then and I wasn’t sure what to make of them from research: it seemed like they did a lot of stuff.
The first interview went really well, even though it was short. We spoke for about half an hour, mostly about me. Fifteen minutes in, the founders started talking about where I might be of use in the company — different projects I might be good for. That sounded promising! They wrapped it up before I really had a chance to ask any questions myself. We scheduled a technical interview with the developers.
When I came in the next week for the “technical” interview, I met with the two in-house developers, both of whom were on the junior side (maybe a year or two experience for both). We talked quite generally about coding and things like databases and testing, but they didn’t look at any code or ask me any code-related questions. The three of us didn’t overlap on any languages, so maybe that had something to do with it. Still, I thought it was odd that the “technical” interview was so chatty. I left not really knowing too much more about the company, even though this time we talked for an hour and a half. I got the impression they are looking to grow and will just move into whatever the people they hire can do. Not the best.
Anyway, that was weeks ago and I have yet to hear from anyone at that company. Maybe they’re interviewing a bunch of people and don’t want to tell me no until they are sure they don’t have someone who is a better match, skill-wise? Either way, I knew it wasn’t the right fit for me.
The interview where I probably sent the wrong blog post
I’m jumping over one, but only by a day. I met this person during my “hell week” (or “awesome week”, depending). I had no fewer than three interviews in a row (when it rains, it pours). This was my last and another one of these “coffee chats” so I didn’t dress up (ok, much), I didn’t put on my guard (I mentioned other interviews I’d been on) and generally was just looking to get advice about joining the industry. Except, after my “tell me about you” spiel, she starts talking about “if you came on board”. So then I was interviewing again.
She asked me to send over some work examples, which I did. I don’t have much public Javascript work. Though we have been doing a bunch of JS stuff here at Craft Academy, it’s all in private repos. Everything I did in Javascript in the bootcamp was pretty rudimentary so I preferred to send more advanced Ruby / Rails stuff than JS.
I also managed to send over an article I’d written that got a lot of attention. It’s all about Javascript, but about how I had learned so much from a tutorial. I knew it was exposing weakness and making me vulnerable, but I went for it anyway. The article included this quote:
But my home base is in Ruby. With Javascript I’m less solid. Maybe there’s more to know, or maybe I just haven’t spent as much time with the beast. I’ve probably spent twice as much time writing Ruby code as Javascript code.
Maybe that had absolutely nothing with the “no” I got from her a while later, but I have my suspicions. Either way, I also don’t think that was going to be the best fit for me, so it’s totally fine.
The great interview
Finally, the great interview(s)! I am torn about mentioning the actual company, since I am going to work there and no doubt you will hear lots about them. But since I kept all the other guys anonymous, seems about right to do so for them as well.
I had three / four interviews with this company. The first was with one of the founders and the CTO. It went really well. They seemed to like me and my approach. I also very briefly met the CTO at a tech meetup so I am going to officially count “networking” as part of my success.
The second interview was also just chatting, this time with both founders. They asked me harder questions about my values and whatnot. In this interview I managed to literally say: “It’s not about the money” (facepalm), which is just typical oversharing on my part. Harder questions but I’m still the same person so I think this one went really well also. Plus, they told me immediately afterward that they’d contact me for the technical interview, so I didn’t have long to wonder if they liked me.
The technical interview
The technical interview was a few days later: 3.5 hours of pair programming with the developers! I was so nervous but it was actually kind of fun — that’s what happens when you enjoy your work, right?
First we talked to another colleague about her feature request. She wanted a new button on a view contact form that would give that contact a new “state” in the database. We entered the feature into Pivotal Tracker (seen that guy before!) and got to work. I’m very happy to report they use test-driven development, at least on the back-end. So the CTO wrote a test and I was tasked to make it pass. Rails APIs are my wheelhouse, so this wasn’t so hard to figure out, once I got down the rabbit holes of all the helper methods and constants and such. The hardest part was figuring out we were running the test wrong. Once that blocker was cleared, it was pretty smooth sailing.
Then we made a PR (this all felt very comfortable, to be honest) and I bumped over to the front-end to implement the button in React. This went well enough, but I don’t know React so I was 99% just copy-pasting. It was really low-pressure though, my interviewer explained the React component — provider — container — reducer — store thing to me and very much showed me where to copy-paste. We hit another road block — the problem was on the server! — and then, boom, we were done.
I was pretty sure they were going to offer me a job when the founder said to me on the way out: “I’ll call you tomorrow and we can talk about the future.”
Update: March 25
See, how can you write a blog post about landing a job when you haven’t signed yet? Between getting an offer at the “great interview” place and actually hearing any salary details, the very first place (the “out-of-left-field interview”) finally got back to me! They wanted to bring me in for a full day of pair programming.
So I stalled the last company (we’ll just call them Company #1) and went in to “explore my options” with Company #2. The pairing was pretty great, the atmosphere there was reserved and polite, everyone seemed really helpful. By the next morning, I had a job offer there too!
I spent that whole morning before my meeting with #1 (yes, I had a meeting that same day where we were supposed to finalize negotiations) talking to everyone I know in tech who was awake at that hour, making pro/con lists and googling. My pro/con lists revealed what I already knew: both of these options were great. If either of them had come up in isolation, I would be thrilled to land there. Coming to a decision was very difficult. I decided not to decide that day (Friday) but give everyone an answer after the weekend.
When I went into the meeting with Company #1, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Actually, I was probably leaning #2. But you know what, it just feels good at #1. All things considered, I think I’ll have more fun at #1. I think I’ll have a more pleasant environment day-to-day. And I had considered all the things — there were huge benefits to working at either company and very little downside. So I went ahead and used my gut after all.
In sum and advice for other job-seekers
Those 58 days were rough, y’all. At first, I was optimistic. There were tons of jobs to apply to and I was very confident about being a fast learner. Plus, I had that kick-off coffee / interview thing that made it clear at least one company thought I was interesting as a candidate. I got an interview almost immediately after starting to look for jobs (actually the “disastrous” interview was the first place I sent an application). But that first you-are-too-junior blow was a big one and put me in a dark place for a while.
Job hunting is an insane emotional rollercoaster. When you get a response, you are elated. When you are preparing for an interview, you are nervous. If you get a rejection, you can deeply doubt yourself — your education and your value. The best advice I have is the main thing that kept me moving on: learn what you can from failures and keep playing the numbers game.
It also helped so much that a former bootcamp graduate had recently landed a job she loves. Without Lucia as my example, I would have found it much harder to just carry on and keep my chin up. Lucia went looking with a few months’ less coding skills than me, so if she could find a job, I could find a job. I relied on her a lot during this process — both to learn from her experience and also to bounce ideas off her and to use her shoulder to cry on. Thank you Lucia!!
The advice in sum:
- It’s a numbers game. Apply everywhere.
- When you are rejected / ignored, try to learn from the experience. If you can, ask follow-up questions to those who reject you and try and find some action points you can take to make you a better candidate at the next place.
- Talk to people. Go to meetups. Try to have informational interviews. The more people you meet, the more likely you will hear about an opening or become interesting for someone.
- Have someone review your CV and cover letter. Preferably not your spouse, unless they are in tech.
- If at all possible, tell your boss you are looking. It makes arranging interviews and pair programming sessions so much easier and bonus: no lying.
- Emphasize your ability to learn and your passion for the work. Your skillset is not going to be impressive; your motivation, dedication and focus will impress. If it doesn’t, that’s probably not the right place to land anyway.
- Not every job is the right job for you. Apply everywhere at first, and use the interviews to gauge the company. Ask what the actual work is like. Talk to the developers if possible. Don’t be afraid to use the process to find out what kind of work you want to do — most of us coming out of bootcamp really don’t know what it’s like to work as a developer. Your exposure to all these companies can help.
- This may be the hardest part, but be patient. You’ve heard over and over that the industry is hungry for developers. It’s true! But not everyone is in a position to hire juniors. And of those who are, many are not receptive to bootcamp grads. And of those, many have woefully inadequate onboarding programs (or haven’t bothered to think about it at all) and it would be difficult for you to thrive there. The good position is worth waiting for, if you possibly can.
And that’s it! This was a huge blog post, but I wanted to keep all the hero’s-quest + woe-is-me job hunt stuff together. Best of luck on your own journey! Now I’m off to go build some stuff.
