Breaking into the tech scene
Stand out in the crowd by demonstrating your passion
The hiring processes of top-tier web and mobile companies can be a nuanced and frustrating thing. The bar for a tech screen/interview is a resume that hits on all the right notes. The interview then attempts to determine your aptitude, if the team feels you could handle the pace, would fit into the culture, and would be able to ramp up quickly enough to increase their velocity in time for feature release X...
So, how do you get noticed?
Wear your heart on your sleeve
An apt, creative, problem solver, who is super-passionate about your product or industry is better than a 10x developer who just wants to collect a pay check and go home any day.
Thats why it’s not good enough to just be good enough.You need to make it obvious to the world who you are. What are you passionate about? Snowboarding? Cool. Dubstep? Okay. Doing whatever it is we’re hiring for? Perfect!
“Skinny cooks can’t be trusted”
If I was hiring a new guitarist for Bon Jovi, and you wanted to be that guitarist, you better be able to tell me who your influences are (it wouldn’t hurt if Richie Sambora was on that list somewhere.)
Same goes for web and mobile applications. The easiest way to show your love is to consume a lot of apps and study the way they are put together. Note what you love about different apps, what you would change about them, and what you think their users love about them.
At the end of the day which developer would you take?
- The developer who thought Snapchat’s UI was simple and inviting, but found the product a bit too sophomoric — even though they could see how users find it fun.
- The developer who just didn’t “get it” and that was the end of it.
Start a side project
Tinker. Don’t worry if it’s been done before or if anyone will care, it is only important that you care. Make something that makes you laugh, something that your friends would think was ‘cool,’ or even something super boring. It really only matters that you made it.
The fact is, “Side projects are the new resume.”
If you’re a software engineer, you should be hacking at projects, building apps, websites, and tinkering away at things you love to build outside of work.
If you’re a designer, design your dream product, even if it doesn’t exist yet. Or find a developer and make it happen.
From Side projects are the new resume by @xsvengoechea
I used this to my advantage early on, it works. For every hole I found in my resume I went out and created a small one-off website that demonstrated that technique in an interesting way. Pretty soon I was in…
Share your work & contribute to projects on Github
You don’t have to develop something world beating in order to share your side projects on Github. Just put it up there. This isn’t the space race, you don’t need to hide your secret sauce. It will only draw more attention to your work if someone uses your code in some cool way that gets them lots of attention.
Also, open source libraries often have all kinds of low-hanging fruit on their issues lists. Update their documentation, write a tutorial, make a new logo for the project… there are many-many ways to help out.
This does two things for you. First, it makes it easy for would-be employers to take a look at your code while they’re browsing your resume. Second, it helps build relationships in the community. Actually, being known for helping out here and there on a large project might land you a job by itself…
There are a lot of things you can do to stand out and get noticed. These are just a couple. Be creative, be passionate about your work, and be relentless. Nothing will stop you if you can do those three things.
