Landing your first dev job in Tokyo after Le Wagon

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Le Wagon Tokyo

16 min readSep 10, 2019

So you’ve decided to join Le Wagon to become a developer? Good on you! Being a dev can be very rewarding, but the journey to get there takes time and effort. With more applicants for junior positions than openings, your goal lies in distinguishing yourself from the others by as many means as possible, so that the company will choose to invest in your development.

This article is meant to provide you a time-stamped step by step guide on how to land that first job as soon as possible. It’s aimed at those looking for a dev job (as opposed to project manager, product owner, or UX/UI designer, where the situation is a bit different) without prior experience. It also assumes that you will participate, or are participating, at Le Wagon in Tokyo.

I’m sharing all the advice I got plus the stuff I figured out personally, which combined led me to land 6 job interviews (over the period of a month and a half), and in the end get 3 job offers for my first position. My advice is to read this article once from beginning to end (ideally before you start the bootcamp) and then return regularly to follow up through each step.

Guide cheat sheet

[Before Le Wagon] Understand what to expect
[After Le Wagon starts] Take it seriously
[After Le Wagon starts] Go to meetups
[4 weeks before Demo Day] Do the optional OOP app challenge
[3 weeks before Demo Day] Prepare your CV
[3 weeks before Demo Day] Start job hunting
[On Demo Day] Make the landing page mobile friendly
[On Demo Day] Network
[After Demo Day] Polish your CV and the landing page of your projects
[After Demo Day] Boost your online presence
[After Demo Day] KEEP CODING

Before Le Wagon

Understand what to expect

If your expectation is that by joining Le Wagon you’ve found that golden ticket, then I have bad news for you.

As a junior dev fresh off school you are looking at a salary between 2.6–3 million yen. You’ll probably earn more as an English teacher. That’s because in Japan devs are many times seen as just little more than assembly line workers on their 10 hour shift, who need to sweat out as many lines of code per minute as physically possible without care for quality or efficiency.

Another thing is that you will be compared with the army of fresh college grads who inundate the job market each year on 3 criteria: language, knowledge, and experience.

With language, if you don’t have at least daily conversation level in Japanese (N3), then most of the doors will be closed. On the other hand, business level (N2) or higher will prove an advantage, because you can draw on the vast knowledge from Stack Overflow in English and translate it for your colleagues (so make sure to emphasize this point in the interview)
Knowledge will in most cases be a net loss, as most HR recruiters will not consider a 9 week bootcamp a proper education when compared with a 4 year CS degree (despite your knowledge being much more practical and ready to use from the get-go)
Experience is where one would expect the same situation for a college and LeWagon grad (after all, neither of you have worked as devs yet), but it’s actually the best place to gain a competitive advantage. Working on projects will get you green squares on your Github page, and the more you keep at it the better impression you’ll give recruiters.

In general (Japanese) companies will tend to favour the fresh grads, as they will see them more easily integratable than an older foreigner with less education, so it will be up to you to go the extra mile and convince them otherwise.

In terms of time, the interview process can take between 2 to 4 weeks to complete, as there are many rounds (including meeting the CEO). Your first paycheck will come 2 months after you join a company, so you have to account for all of this when budgeting for the bootcamp.

Of course, all that was described above is just the most common situation, and you could get lucky. More than a few companies will check your skill with coding assignments before even screening your CV, and you’ll be well equipped to deal with those. Also, many companies do actually value their devs, and will be willing to offer you a higher salary. And even in the worst case situation, you only need to hang in there for a year or so before a world of better paying opportunities open up to you.

After starting Le Wagon

Take it seriously

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: give it your best and then some. Don’t stress out about that one guy in your batch finishing all the optionals while you are still stuck at the third exercise, but do make the most of the course. Don’t copy the solution from Stack Overflow, instead talk with your buddy, or open a ticket to your teacher and, of course, be active in the live code…

When the day is over and you’ve finished your flashcards, download the solutions of the exercises that you struggled with and see how they solved it — you’ll understand it better!

2 weeks into the bootcamp, you should also register on Codewars to keep up with Ruby exercises. You’ll keep yourself fresh and get great insight on different approaches you might not encounter during the lectures (I’m looking at you #inject method).

Also on a side note, if you are commuting to Meguro get a 3 month commuter pass (rather than buying one each month). It will save you money down the line and give you the motivation to keep going there after you’ve graduated (see below).

Go to meetups

Japan is a relationship based country, so who you know is often much more important than what you know. So go out there, make yourself known. The more they’ll see your face at different places, the more open they’ll be to consider you. Even if the only thing you know in Ruby is how to puts “Hello World”, still go to meetups. This is also one of the best ways to distinguish yourself from college grads and to reach more international companies.

For those of you who, like me, hate networking, here are some tips to make it less painful:

Find someone who is alone (i.e. pouring himself a drink or getting some pizza) or a group of people standing in an open circle
After a brief introduction ask him if he liked the speech, or which part of it he liked (e.g.: “Hi, my name is Paulo”, “Hi, I’m Matt”, “Nice to meet you. So what did you think about the presentation?”)
Now that you have a common base, follow up with a question about what they do (you’ll get their company and position)
When they ask you in return, tell them that you are studying Ruby full time at LeWagon, and that you are looking to become a developer once you graduate. If you’ve already done a couple of weeks you can tell them about the syllabus, people are usually impressed by what you get to learn.
Don’t forget to get their business card! Collect them so that you can invite them to the Demo Day or follow up once you are ready to enter the market.

The best one to attend is Tokyo Rubyist Meetup, even if it’s probably the only one you have to pay for — the talks are very interesting, many of the participants will publicly say that their company is looking to hire, and there is pizza! I got some job offers by networking with people here.

In any case, Doug will share a whole list with you on the first day. You should also befriend Sylvain on Facebook as he often likes other events, so you’ll get a good idea of what is happening in the city.

In general I’d advise against attending job related meetups until you have a CV in hand (see below). These events work differently as they are more straightforward (“are you a match for what we are searching for right now?”) and there will be much more competition.

4 weeks before Demo Day

Do the optional OOP app challenge

At this point you’ve gone through Ruby, Object Oriented Programming, databases, and “front end”. This week you’ll see the magic of all of that coming together via Rails, and you’ll also build the first web app that you can put on your CV (rails cocktails). On Friday Doug will challenge you to build another similar app, and I wholeheartedly advise you to take it and give it your best. Not only will you get to practice building a rails app from scratch and the concepts of OOP, but you’ll have another app to add to your CV.

In my case, it was the first app where I decided to take the frontend aspects more seriously (not just CSS, but also javascript listening events), and it eventually landed me a job offer. An important thing to note at this point is that the words “back-end” (BE) and “front-end” (FE) that you kept using at Le Wagon don’t mean what you think they mean. If you are like me, you probably ended up with the image that FE is this soul draining part, where you spend hours trying to decide if your stupid Submit button should have 16px or 17px padding, while BE is the fun part, where you use logic to implement cool features without caring how it will look like, like solving some puzzles. Turns out that in the world of work, the aptly named “CSS Hell” is usually left to designers, who work with Figma or other similar tool, which then generates all the pixel perfect CSS, ready to be passed to the FE devs. FE is actually a lot about logic too. From CSS you might work with flexbox, grid, and responsiveness, but you’ll end up using a lot of JS for all the DOM events. On the other hand, BE is not just about feature implementation, but there is a lot of setting up and dealing with databases — a thing you very much gloss over at Le Wagon as Heroku does most of the heavy lifting. If you want to get a better picture of what you might expect and prepare yourself for a concrete role, I’d suggest you look up React and Vue for FE, and AWS S3 and Docker for BE.

And if you are curious about the project that landed me the offer, this is the page ;-)

3 weeks before Demo Day

Prepare your CV

This will probably be the biggest shocker. “I haven’t graduated yet, I’m not even building my final app, how can I start writing my CV??” Well, you already have 2 apps, know the url and topic of the AirBnB app you’ll be building, and know which app you’ll build in your final project and when it will be presented — that’s more than enough to get you started.

My suggestion is to go for a 2 page resume. On the first page put the following (in order of appearance):

Personal information: name, picture, address, visa status, closest station
Intro: 1–2 paragraphs about your background and what you are looking for
Education: Le Wagon bootcamp plus any certifications you might have from CodeCademy, Sololearn and similar
Projects: name, url, and short description, with your most complex projects listed first. For your final project’s url mention that it will be presented at the Demo Day and write the date (this gives you also an opportunity to invite the potential employer to the Demo Day)
Programming skills: Ruby, Rails, JS, Heroku, and any particular concepts you plan to use

On the second page put all your other related non-programming education and experience. It might not be what interests the recruiter the most, but it’s good to show them you have other skills you could bring to the table. In my case my previous marketing experience is what helped me land my first dev job, as I could share some insight while on a break from programming tasks.

If you are low on content (e.g. because this would be your first job) it’s better to remove content and make the CV only one page long than to pad it or leave a lot of empty space.

You’ll might want to update your LinkedIn at this point, though there is no need to go wild yet. Just make sure you have Le Wagon as your education (not your work experience! You are studying there, not working for them :D ), let recruiters you are available in the jobs/career_interests tab, and copy paste your intro from your CV there.

Start job hunting

With your CV in hand, it’s time to get out there on the market! Remember, the process to land a job is quite long and you want to shorten it as much as possible. Other than going to meetups, which you should already be doing, the most straightforward way to find a job is through recruiters and job boards. You’ll find that for most positions they search for are aimed at developers with 3+ years of experience, but don’t let that discourage you from applying — you’ll find that in some cases they might have something more appropriate for your level which they hadn’t published.

Here is a list of some job boards:

And some recruiters which should be taking juniors from time to time:

You will be overwhelmed with all the work for your projects, but be sure to dedicate one weekend to to go through all the links, and then check all the boards periodically for new offers — either 15–30 minutes each day or 1–3 hours once a week (Monday and Tuesday is when most offers are added).

At this point you should also start attending job related meetups, so make sure to stalk Sylvain on Facebook ;-)

On Demo Day

Make the landing page mobile friendly

Congratulations! You’ve done it, you are on your last day. You worked tirelessly the night before to implement the important feedback you received, and so now you are pretty much done and it’s just a waiting game! BUT in all your crunch, you’ve probably overlooked your landing page. If people have a good impression of your app, some of the participants might ask you for the url to check it later, and if they open it on their phone and it’s all messy, then their opinion of your app, and you will immediately be lowered. So make sure to not hurt your chances with employers!

Network

Here comes the main event! If you are pitching, practice a bit more but don’t let it stress you out too much :-) A good trick is to find one person in the audience and tell them your story as if you would be telling it to a good friend. In any case, don’t forget to mention who contributed to your project so that they can get some recognition.

After the pitches you’ll be tempted to celebrate with your classmates, but hold on to that until the after-party. Instead try to approach as many strangers as possible, or at least make yourself available so that they can approach you. There might be some recruiters or company owners among the audience, and most of them will stay only 15–30 minutes after the pitches, so make sure you catch them before they are gone ;-) Once you are at the after party go wild and enjoy what you’ve accomplished!

After Demo Day

Polish your CV and the landing page of your projects

With the bootcamp finished, change your CV to reflect that — put in the url of your final project, add some of the skills you’ve picked up while working on it, maybe change a few things based on the feedback you got.

Now recruiters and companies might check your projects to see what you’ve actually built (and you might want to share that with your friends too ;-) ), but if they haven’t been to the Demo Day then they’ll probably have no clue what it is about, so make sure to make it easy as possible for them to do so:

Add a short description of what your project is about on the landing page
Record your screen as you go through the user journey and add it to the page (alternatively post the video from the Demo Day, but that won’t come for a month or more)
[Optional] Add a link to the GitHub repo or your portfolio page (and put the GitHub link there, more on that later) — this is a risky move as it will make your app look less like a (proper) service and more like a one-off (hobby) project

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, connect to all your classmates and TAs on LinkedIn, endorse them for the skills they picked up at the bootcamp, and if you are feeling particularly generous, write them an endorsement.

Boost your online presence

What do you want the recruiters to see when they google your name (because they are going to google it)? Your Facebook account with the pictures from that party one time, or a page that shows all the professional work you’ve done?

Your first task should be to build a portfolio page. This should be a static page that showcases who you are and the work you’ve done in a way that displays your character. You’ll receive more details from your TAs about how to build it and deploy it, but you should keep in mind that this will be the place where you’ll be directing all the web traffic. You’ll want this page to be the first result of a Google search, so put your name in the url, title, meta tag, h1 tag, and a couple of times in the text.

Next set up a blog. “What?” I hear you asking, “what does this have to do with landing a job??” Well, remember that your goal is to distinguish yourself from all the other candidates, and contributing back to the community is one of those things that will give you an incredible boost . Normally it’s in the form of pull requests to open source projects, but since it might take a while to get there, write a blog. Or if you are better with a mic and camera, set up a vlog. If you don’t know what to write about, the easiest articles to do are guides written to your future self: did you struggle with the setup of a particular gem, or got some really weird errors when working on a project that got you searching over several pages because the documentation sucked? Write down the process that helped you crack it — it might help someone else, and it will definitely help you.

Finally make sure to link all your social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub…) and all your blog posts back to your portfolio page. Links are one of the key factors how Google ranks pages, and the more “doors in” the better (which also means you should be careful with putting links there, as it will rank it down).

KEEP CODING!

This is the. most. important. advice, that I can give you. It sounds obvious, but you’ll be surprised how hard it will be to keep coding once you’ve graduated. Your team will be gone, your project finished, so you’ll struggle with figuring out what to do, but each day, each hour you don’t code will make it 10 times harder to pick it up later. So here to make sure that it doesn’t happen coordinate with your Tokyo based classmates to keep coming to Impact Hub. You’ll still have almost a month left on your commuter pass, plus you received a monthly membership so going there won’t cost you anything. Being at IH surrounded by familiar faces will help you focus much more than if you try to keep at it from home. That will be doubly so if you will work on projects together with your classmates — few things motivate you as much as knowing that someone else is working hard to deliver while you are being a lazy bum :D

As for what to code I’d say to divide your time 80:20 between new projects and Codewars. You might think that it would be best to just keep working on your existing projects, but onboarding a new member into a project that’s been running for two weeks and is full of ugly patches and weird code is going to be very difficult, and a couple of extra commits on the project aren’t going to impress the recruiters. Also if the only projects you’ll have on your CV will be those created during the bootcamp, you’ll give the impression that you’re someone with no initiative who can code only when told so or when he has help.

So start a new project. But what project? Well, maybe the project that you pitched a month ago wasn’t picked, so you could try that. Perhaps a classmate’s project sounded really cool, or one of the gems discussed during the AirBnB week were cool, but they didn’t really fit your project at your time, so you could try to build something around it. For FE you could try something that incorporates React or Vue, for BE look into AWS S3. What’s important is that you build the project in one week. Define one user journey and deliver that, give it some decent design, a good looking landing page, then record the user journey and add the project to your CV and portfolio. If you underestimated the amount of work involved, give it one more week, but then take whatever you have, stop there, and move on. This is an important practice that you need to follow as it:

Teaches you the concept of “fail faster”
Allows you to get in the spirit of Agile and sprints
Fills out your CV with projects

But while building new projects will help you landing interviews, it won’t help you much with the technical interviews themselves. That’s where Codewars comes into play. In most cases the technical interview will look very similar to solving the exercises from the first weeks of Le Wagon, and that’s exactly what you’ll get to do at Codewars. Just make sure to start each exercise by writing some tests — this is something that will help you during the interview too.

— — — — — — — — — — — —

And that’s all from my side. Did you like it? Think I’m missing something or disagree with some of my points? Tell me in the comments below or shoot me a message here. Also share with me your success stories, I’d love to hear them!

Also, when you manage to land an interview, check out this article with some key concepts for your technical interview.

Now there is nothing left for me to say other than to wish you good luck on your hunt, and hope to hear from you soon!