How to Get Your First Job from Software Development as a Junior?

Published in

The Dropout

6 min readOct 23, 2018

One of the hardest parts of your career is nailing the first job. You also want to know what kind of place to look for, to really get to the best positions early on.

Notice. My experiences are particularly from the Finnish Software Development scene, and there may be huge differences depending on the country you work in. Feel free to leave a comment and tell about your experiences in job hunting as a junior!

Getting your first job is the tough part, especially if you start from the zero. You are inexperienced and probably unsure, how to land those interviews. And what then, how to convince employers to hire you? I got you.

I was 21. I had just started the Universty, and my plans were to stay much longer than 4 months, before losing my self to a career. Like, I really thought I would have to be much more skilled to get a job. I was wrong. You don’t need that much of a skill. You need just two things.

A huge amount of motivation, and an ability to learn.

Sounds like a cliche, but it’s true. I had done 2 courses of Java and one broken React-app when I got hired. So I was truly a beginner. With specs like these, how on earth I got a job as a consultant doing mainly React?

I started off as mailing all the potential companies and possibly calling to them if they needed a new Junior Developer. I started explaining my situation, which was being totally inexperienced but willing to learn. As you can guess, I got rejected many times. After every response, I asked employers what technologies they see important, and what is hot right now. That way, even with a rejection, you get something out of them. Salary, location, pretty much everything is now irrelevant. Just show that you are really willing to learn everything from scratch. Ability to learn stuff is much more important than you possibly think. After I landed the interviews, I just made it crystal clear that I’m here to learn, and currently I know nothing. I may not be valuable to company straight away, but after 3 months, I will be.

Of course, I’m not targeting any Big N companies here, so this stuff won’t land you a 10k/month job from Google or something. Rather this is just a way to get your foot in the door, despite being inexperienced and probably undergraduate.

What technologies to learn?

Emails are not enough. You have to know some code. Not much, but some. Field evolves constantly, and you want to be on track, what to learn next. I just jumped straight to the hot topics. I think you should too. Let's keep this short.

React

This gets you to places, it got me too. React is a really popular Javascript library for building user interfaces. it is used in many applications and often React + Redux combo is the one that lands you the job. In my opinion, React is also really easy to get into, and you start to be productive pretty fast.

Redux

Redux is a state management framework for Javascript. It is easy to use and a must have in larger applications when React’s own state becomes impractical.

Java

Java offers a great base and introduction to coding. Java is also one of the most popular languages, and heavily in use, so there is a wide variety of jobs where you need Java.

As you can see, I view things from a front-end perspective, as there is a huge need in front-end, especially in web development. There is, of course, many other great languages to learn, but for the sake of simplicity, I just wanted to list a few. You can learn as many as you want to, and dive as deep as you want to, but these three should be enough. A wide variety of technologies alone don’t guarantee yourself your dream job, especially when your knowledge is limited.

Soft Skills

I can’t stress this enough. Most people think that technical skills are what makes a good developer. Of course, you also need technical understanding, but you want to ice those with good social skills. Especially if you are aiming to do consulting business, this stuff is gold.

Soft skills are skills that are related to emotions, attitude, intuition, and social situations. A person with good soft skills is often pleasant to work with, has situational awareness and knows how to communicate with people.

Mediocre developers with great soft skills get hired faster than superb coders without an ability to work in a team.

Soft skills make a good employee and a good leader. Coding is something you will learn anyway while working. Companies want the attributes they can’t teach you that easily. Mediocre developers with great soft skills get hired faster than superb coders without an ability to work in a team. These are the attributes you need, to get your hands to the good stuff, and to smoothly interact with colleagues and clients, and will get you closer to good and desired positions, where you have more ability to advance, and more responsibility on your shoulders. For some of you, this might sound like excess stuff and something that doesn’t matter if technical knowledge is in good shape. But they aren’t. Soft skills are the difference between good and ideal candidates, and in competitive markets that makes the difference.

Networking

My fellow students often ask me how to get these good job positions I’m talking about? Where do you find them if not actively emailing people, or hunting job advertisements online? One huge thing is constant networking, and just being out there.

Hang out with right people. I believe that almost half of the positions come outside official advertisements, from mouth to mouth conversations. It can happen in student events, co-workers birthday parties, or maybe in a hackathon. Try to get into the circles. These small circles of silent info can lead you to smaller, more agile companies, but smaller companies often mean bigger opportunities to individuals.

It is even better, if you have friends working in the industry, they can help you more than you think. Recommendations are a big thing. Seriously. Recruiters can always ask for a code sample or make you do a coding challenge, but it’s really impossible to know if someone is a difficult person, based on one-hour conversation. Recommendations help with that and offer a great shortcut for recruiters, so ask them if you know anybody who can give you one. It can be a friend from a field or an old boss, it doesn’t really matter.

What kind of companies should you aim for?

I prefer smaller companies. Flatter hierarchy, you get more in touch with business units and HR and you have much more standing in salary negotiations. Smaller companies are also generally faster to adapt to new technologies.

Bigger companies, on the other hand, have often more foundation to train you, and it can offer a much softer landing to the industry. They have more manpower, so they can more easily free senior developers to guide younger ones.

So, is it easy to get a job as a software developer, if we talk from a junior’s perspective? No, but it’s not hard either. Not gonna lie, much of it is being in the right place at the right time. That’s why I emphasize networking and just being out there, over the technical aspects. I believe differences between juniors are not that great, and as I have stated, your learning increases greatly when you start working, and employers know that too. After that, everything just changes. Gain a bit of a movement around you, nail good customers, and soon headhunters trying to reach you on Sundays and you don’t really care because you love your job. That’s how it went for me. I hope you witness the same.