How I got my First Job out of College With no Experience
Graduating college is scary, trust me I know, there’s lots of stress about figuring out what you want to do and even after that you must land a job.
This post is mostly intended for computer science and particularly software engineering students or people who want to land a job in that field.
What I’m going to cover in this post is:
- Studying
- Applying
- Interviewing
Anything after the interview my ability is definitely not good enough to make a post about 😂
For the sake of this post, I assume that you already have some basic programming skills and are not a total beginner.
How Much Do You Need to Study
When I was graduating, I was studying data structures and algorithms all the time, I tried to spend time everyday doing Leetcode problems (if you do not know Leetcode here, it’s a common term and website that is used to study coding problems and study coding concepts.). I told myself that I would be prepared for the interview and the only way to achieve that was through Leetcode problems. I believe this topic is blown out of proportion. While, yes, during my interviews I encountered coding questions that I had to solve with hashmaps and two pointers I would say that on the Leetcode scale they were easy questions and can be solved easily. I would say that I even studied too much. This question of how much to study though is very subjective and could change based on the kind of job you are going for. For me I have a job at a standard FinTech company, not at a FAANG (MAANG? MANGA?) company. If you are trying to get a job at one of those you are going to have a different experience to me.
That’s where I think students and anyone looking for their first job in tech and more specifically software engineering mess up. Lots of the voices online are those of people who work at large companies saying they studied for 50 days straight with no breaks before their interview. While this may be their experience do not let this intimidate you when you’re trying to get your first job. My experience shows that even as someone with no experience it’s possible to get a decent job, that’s where the value lies in my perspective. I’m not some super genius coder who breezed through their interview with Apple/Microsoft/Netflix, I’m a regular college graduate who could not even land an internship while I was in school.
What Do You Need to do Then?
Now that we have talked about how studying is blown out of proportion for most entry-level software engineering jobs, what are the first steps you should take?
Well, through my experience I would say the most valuable thing you can do is build a small website, for me, I built this website in my last semester of college. I did this because I wanted to have something to talk about in my interviews. I found that through building something on your own you’re able to learn and gain more understanding of the tools you are using and coding. This can vary for the type of job you are going for, I found it fun to build websites but if you want to build a command line tool or anything else, that’s fine! All that matters is that you do something you like and that gets you excited, it doesn’t matter if it’s useful or if it’s going to make you money just do something!
Applying
To be honest, there’s not much to say here. If you know somebody hit them up and see if they can refer you to any positions, but if you’re like me, you don’t know many people or anyone that is already in the software engineering field. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in the latter; that’s fine. You don’t have to have connections to get a decent job, but you must apply, apply, and apply some more.
Send In Those Resumes
I live in a modestly sized city that has a heathy amount of tech jobs, so I was lucky to have lots of openings to apply for. I applied to around 30-40 jobs when I was graduating from college. I was applying through LinkedIn mostly, and I was also using Indeed.
For this you must make sure you have a good resume, which is a little out of scope for this post and I do not think I’m qualified to judge anyone’s resume when I look at my own. But make sure it’s up to date and looks good.
My philosophy when sending in my resume was: the worst thing they can do is ghost you. I was applying to everything under the sun that even remotely resembled an entry level position. Most of the time job postings are asking for the world, but really you don’t have to worry about that, just apply anyway.
Interview? Now it’s Time to Stress
Got an interview? Now it’s time to stress, right?
Interviewing, in my opinion, is by far the worst aspect of software engineering, it is very stressful. Some people have strong opinions about how useless coding interviews are, but I think they do supply some value.
I don’t have any secret to doing well in coding interviews, but I do have advice. If you are going for jobs at non-FAANG companies, then the interview is, most likely, going to be easier than you think if you look on the internet for interview tips. I was studying using leetcode mainly and watching YouTube solution to the questions that I could not figure out. This was valuable because when I was asked basic questions in my interview, I was easily able to do them, and I knew the tricks to the questions.
If you have not been exposed to coding questions yet, then I would say start with some easy questions on leetcode and go from there. You will eventually see that there are patterns used to answer different questions. Learning these patterns is important to being good at these style of questions. My recommendation would be to learn a few basic patterns, like two pointers and hash map questions because those are the most popular.
Overall
Do not stress as much as you are right now. Junior developer interviews are not as difficult as you have be lead to believe. As long as you have drive and want to become a good developer, you will make it.
I wish you all the best!