5 Creative Ways To Get a Coding Job

in this video we're going to talk about five ways to work smarter and not harder when you're trying to land a coding job EA conventional tips video like look through your network go to meetups and do networking there just grind it out and don't give up now this is creative ways to land a coding job that are not only going to get you in the side door with less competition but showing a little creativity and initiative when applying is also going to give the company that hires you more confidence you're going to be good in that role so without further Ado let's get started with number one which is cold Outreach networking so in the past I recommended making a LinkedIn profile cold messaging people that you add something in common with who also worked at a company you wanted to work at and trying to offer them some value whether that was getting them a coffee or just straight up saying hey I think I would be an awesome fit for this role maybe you get a referral bonus I'd love to talk but I want to give you a Step Beyond that when it comes to actually number one finding companies and number two a higher Effectiveness form of Outreach so when it comes to finding companies what I would humbly suggest is looking at lists of recently funded companies it means this company just got a massive influx of cash so they're looking to scale and they need to hire people rapidly to deploy that Capital now there's different repositories online to find these list of funded companies that can give you a really good starting point for them going to LinkedIn and finding the specific people who work there so you've found a handful of companies maybe you've put them in a spreadsheet if you're organized how do you reach out to them well rather than applying through the company's contact form it's recommended to directly contact either the recruiter for the company the engineering manager or even the CEO now the number one way to do that is by emailing them directly and the way I suggest doing that is finding even just one person's email at that company and then emailing one to two people within that company and here's what you send them record a video of yourself giving a personal pitch one minute long maximum using the loom software what you can do is show off your portfolio say something about that company so it's personalized and then say why it would be a great idea to interview you now just taking this initiative without even showing any technical skill it's going to be impressive and it's a great way to get your foot in the door both for freelancing and for full-time jobs let's move on to the second way and I want to subvert expectations here because most people would say go to conferences or meetups which we finally have again and after two years of lockdown what I would put a level above a conference though is a hackathon reason being programmers are super awkward when it comes to networking I include myself in that category too and a lot of times if you don't have a reason to talk to someone then it's going to feel a bit forced however hackathon really solves that problem by having a shared activity that you're doing with a team now if you go as a solo person oftentimes you can join a team and many of the people there are going to be industry software developers and this is an amazing way to actually prove yourself in an action-based environment and if you're nervous about your skill level just be forthcoming about that say I'm on the more Junior side so I'll take something a bit more simple maybe doing these pages on the front end you'll come out of this with not only an awesome project but some new connections who can not only potentially refer you but maybe even become your Mentor or introduce you to even more people even if you have to travel to go to a hackathon I would highly recommend trying one out here's the next tip that I hear some people give but they're not specific enough about how to do it so number three is to create or contribute to an open source project so people often draw blank when it comes to what to actually create so I will just throw out a couple ideas that maybe can give you some inspiration first you can create a simple UI component library for example by aggregating svgs of progress or loading Spinners and then deploying them to download the code Snippets directly or as an npm package you can write an SDK that is a standard developer kit that wraps an API I would say the majority of rest apis do not have sdks so you can create an unofficial one and then publish it on GitHub you can also create some npm package that does a subset of what a different one does and and the important thing here is no idea is too small so literally just something that formats numbers which is more or less what the popular Library moment.js already does what I'm getting at is the important part is just to publish something and then you can always grow it over time I promise just by coding you're going to come up with SDK and package ideas and even if it's already been done before you can do it too why not let's quickly touch on contributing as well because most people feel like there's no way they can contribute as a relatively new software developer but here's how you do it when you're using a package or looking up some bug that you're trying to fix chances are you might run into the GitHub issues tab which is a list of challenges problems or bugs that people find in any given open source repository now the way you can start contributing even if it's not by code is you can answer questions especially if let's say you had the same issue and then figured it out the next step after that is if it's an issue that a lot of people have you can even create a pull request fixing the actual open source code now of course that's more advanced but even if you write a really bad pull request the owner is just not going to accept it but if you can manage to do this then you can actually say you're a contributor to a large project which is super impressive number four is you can freelance on simple jobs which I also call learn and earn I'll go through this one pretty quick because I've already talked about it a lot in my other videos but here's kind of the way it works first you just make a freelancing account on upwork just do it even if you're brand new and then just start to make a habit out of browsing through newly posted jobs and remember to search by worldwide you shouldn't be afraid to focus on easier Tech Stacks like e-commerce Shopify WordPress Squarespace because while you might be using the visual interface a lot knowing code is also going to help you cover those edge cases and bust out JavaScript or css when needed in the real world a lot of the internet is not coded from scratch and if you want a freelance you gotta face that reality now once you make a routine of browsing you can normalize applying for jobs here and there you got to grind it out in the beginning and then once you gain Steam on your freelance profile you can bring this to Future employers and say hey I've already done a lot of professional work and we also like to say that compounds meaning it makes future freelancing jobs easier now finally tip number five I hesitated to include this one because I don't want people to take it the wrong way but it is content creation whether on Twitter Tick Tock LinkedIn or YouTube Here's why I hesitated to include it because people are very tempted to go on and start making tutorials pretending like they're an expert and giving out advice when they're brand new themselves please don't do this you're just going to lead people down the wrong path and people are going to see through it who are experienced and call you out but the good news is beyond tutorials and advice there's many other types of content you can cover Tech or programming news about new Frameworks that are coming out and you can simply use primary sources to construct your own narrative which I've been experimenting recently with if you've seen my over employed video I've never personally been overemployed myself but I found it interesting so I did a bunch of research wrote an essay and then posted a video on it as a content creator I'll tell you the secret of content creation is seeing what other people are doing that works and then making your own version of it so if you see someone's video that says how I learned to code with a gender studies degree maybe your version of that can be how I learned to code with four kids how I learned to code after getting out of jail mine would be how I went from broke English teacher to software developer what is your version of that the last thing I'll say on content creation is this the best part about it is it's an asset when you do all the other strategies so let's say you're at a conference or hackathon if you have a good social media presence you can connect with those people and then stay in touch with them better because you'll have this gravity on social media I can't tell you the amount of times that I've connected with someone on YouTube or Instagram and that's immediately given me more credibility now with that being said I don't want to get too off topic here so let's wrap this one up but let me know if you want to know more about any one of these strategies let me know which ones you've tried and also what you would add to this list because I definitely didn't cover everything with that said I wish you luck getting a little bit creative when it comes to getting that first job [Music]

Channel: Aaron Jack

Views: 35,010

Keywords: startups, technology, coding, programming, software development, coder, learn coding, learn to code, faang, google, coding tutorial, javascript, typescript

Id: PLF3_pMDmc8

Length: 8min 38sec (518 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022