Starting My First Engineering Job After Coding Boot Camp

Starting your first software engineering job after coding boot camp is intimidating. After months of painstaking preparations (classwork, projects, studying every data structure and algorithm imaginable, publishing and polishing your online portfolio to perfection) and attending endless hackathons and networking events, you are faced with demonstrating your fledgling “new fawn in the meadow” skills to a group of seasoned software engineers, most of whom are male, and earning your place on the engineering team.

This was the situation Harmann Bajwa found herself in earlier this year when she took her first job as a software engineer at a startup in San Francisco. In this blog post, Zett Stai interviews Harmann Bajwa about her experience.

Zett: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to a a career as a software engineer?

Harmann: After graduating with a degree in Finance from the University of Colorado at Boulder and completing several internships, I started my career in software sales for a large company. I realized quickly that I would rather create the software than sell it. I enrolled in a coding boot camp with a campus in Silicon Valley. They trained students in multiple web development stacks to help them break into a new industry.

Zett: Do you have any advice for women who are trying to break into the industry? What would you have liked someone to tell you when you first started?

Harmann:

Know your value.

The technical interview and negotiating workshops I led and participated in, I noticed the women constantly undervalued themselves.

They focused on preparing for answers to possible red flags about themselves, such as employment gaps to raise their family, lack of experience, and/or a non-technical background.

It’s up to you to bring focus to your relevant accomplishments in the engineering field. Make a list of all your relevant past and current achievements. Then, learn how to communicate that to employers.

Women are trained to be modest, self-effacing , and avoid at all costs being seen as proud and assertive. That is why it’s important for you to practice bragging about yourself to your friends/family. Eventually, you will gain a sense of pride that will help you understand your value and how your talents and skills can be used to help others.

Last but not least, remember that there are not many women in the engineering field. When you are applying for a job you aren’t only a software engineer, you are a female software engineer.

You are a rare commodity, you bring a very unique and diverse perspective.

It’s important for you to recognize that you are valuable. Be able to communicate that value.

Harmann offers the following tips:

· Go to hackathons and learn and meet people. Don’t be afraid to attend hackathons because you feel like it would be a painful and embarrassing experience. Hackathons a great opportunity to showcase your skills, peer networking, learn new industry skills, and work efficiently with a team. All valuable skills you can bring up in a job interview.

· Take advantage of career services — if you graduated from a boot camp, online course, or any degree take advantage of the career services they have to offer.

· Learn new frameworks. Knowing multiple stacks is a big advantage, but dedicate time to be focused on one language first in depth. Maintaining more than one language is hard.

· Join communities that encourage you and make you feel good about yourself. It’s important to part of supportive and positive environments to help you through challenges and roadblocks. Women Who Code, CodeNewbie, and Girls Develop it are organizations that dedicated to helping new/experienced programmers.

Zett: What were your greatest worries and fears? How did you overcome them?

Harmann: That I was just lucky and I’m not as intelligent and competent as everyone deems me to be. I had imposter syndrome but you have to remember even people with years of experience have doubts about themselves. This is not just a problem for women and it is not a gender issue.

I overcame my imposter syndrome by growing my knowledge base by educating myself on challenging technical topics that would give me confidence and foundation to build off of. I changed my mindset when it came to the challenges I was faced with. Instead of running away from challenging technical topics, I looked for them.

My confidence grew and overtime it became easier to tackle any difficult challenges.

We are often our toughest critic and the last one to praise ourselves. I quickly realized when comes to imposter syndrome you are your only roadblock. Change your mindset and embrace the challenges that come with self doubt.

Harmann: It’s important to have enough data and do everything you can internally first to solve the issue on your own, but if you get stuck, don’t be afraid to say something.

These tips are important so that we do not isolate new engineers and make learning the ropes harder than it has to be. It’s important to find companies and nurture companies that really support the growth of their engineers.

Harmann now shows empathy when new engineers are hired at her company. She offers help before they ask. She found that when introducing yourself it makes you more approachable if you say something like, ‘If you have any questions I can help you.’

Harmann can be