I Failed To Be A Software Engineer For 3+ Years

heyy what's up y'all this is Jeff today I want to talk about how I failed for nearly three plus years to land my first software engineering job I took multiple approaches during that time I tried the selftaught I did a boot camp and all kinds of things in in between I realized that this will be a good topic to talk about because although like many of you I've seen a lot of those videos and that's actually how I got started it right is when I first started doing my research on software engineering way back then I saw the topics of breaking into the industry within 3 months 6 months that kind of thing by either selftaught or Boot Camp or whatever it may be unfortunately for myself that just wasn't the case that just wasn't the case for me and I think I took a much longer route to um be able to accomplish that ultimate end goal of Landing that job and as I've been in the industry for quite some time now the number one thing that I noticed that my story isn't uncommon I figured that it'd be nice to be able to share another side of the coin and just to be able to share an outcome and also because um it was a long journey and I think that I've got got a lot out of it and to be honest those three years were some of the most challenging difficult times of my life that I learned an incredible amount from and I just want to be able to share some of the outcomes and strategies that I ultimately look back on that I feel like I learned to start things off this story actually starts off junior year of college you seen some of my other videos you know I got really bad grades grew up lower income and just didn't have any mentorship was had no strategy but I always was good at math doing engineering type stuff I was always into cars and you know just building right and junior year I discovered iOS development and I fell into it instantly I saw everything was on the palm of our hands and I felt like that's something I really wanted to do was to be able to build mobile apps and so I started my journey uh really late into college and I I tried I bought a little Mac Mini at the time even now right to do the majority of iOS development you need a Mac and so I bought a Mac Mini and the learning curve was just incredibly hard because I had no idea how to code and so after doing more research I learned about JavaScript and doing react native and that's kind of where I realized that oh I can I should actually learn a more fundamental language and more widely used language in the first place and when I figured that out learning JavaScript HTML CSS was had a lot more of a foundational course setup than I in my opinion and that's kind of where my path kind of shifted at that time I figured that I can always go back to iOS fast forward about a year or so I graduated school I try to get data jobs that kind of stuff anything that can get me in the door in programming and of course completely fell on my face because I went to like a middle middle tier School 1.0 GPA nowhere close I ended up actually taking a construction job because I wasn't un I was unable to get a job out of college basically so my idea there was basically to self te myself and that's kind of where like the self-taught era officially begins while I'm working my construction job I'm at my construction job n regular 9 to5 and I would go after work put in probably three to four hours each day and go through corsera UD Demi and try to get those like certifications certificates self- pasted courses and after about a year of that I was kind of I kind of had mixed feelings right on one end I felt stronger as a programmer and I try to apply to some jobs at that time I try to apply to like very foundational webdev I don't know WordPress anything that I can just get my foot into the door type jobs and again felt flat on my face and I almost felt like a lot of those certifications and those quick courses just didn't amount to much and of course Looking Back Now I I remember my resume at the time to apply to those jobs were just all online courses and the resume all the projects of those online courses definitely did not work out for me at all and you know I've already been into my construction job about a year now and I I felt this urge that if I continue to go at this path each and every year that went by the difficulty of just being breaking out of this and just being con stuck in this Loop of doing construction just felt like it was like absorbing me so I made a really hard active decision at the time that I would commit the money to to do a boot camp the boot camp at the time was 20,000 somewhere around there and that was a lot of money for me that was probably my entire half my salary if not more um during that time period and of course I tried to interview for the boot camp right I've already selftaught myself for about a year and failed didn't get anywhere with that from there I try to apply for the boot camps and actually failed three times to be able to get in and looking back right and and thinking back at that time I think that was actually a blessing in disguise because that for the first time ever I had something that I can directly measure some of my my um my skills towards and where I kind of stood and that's kind of the measurement there was that I spent a year trying to do selftaught and I realized that I didn't have any good strategies plans and especially after doing some of the beginner stuff trying to take it to the next step I just didn't have a good strategy and so personally for myself I need I knew I needed some sort of formal education or something like that to be able to do it and when I did the boot camp and failed uh the first two times um that was a really clear sign of my my learning for selftaught was just way too slow and I think that reality check of that I needed to learn way more to be able to land a job um than I originally thought luckily for me at that time I discovered that there's prep courses to get into the boot camp and so I took those and throughout this uh probably about 8mon processes of of or so of studying to get into the boot camp failing multiple times I finally got in and I got in and I was actually the very last person to be able to get into the cohort that I got into man I was so excited right I mean this was two years in of just being a person that doing side work working a full-time job and and I feel like this was kind of like a little bit of a Tipping Point for myself next thing that happened there uh before you can actually even do the boot camp you actually have to do some prep work and so when you do the prep work usually folks get in three months before or so but I only had 2 weeks to do it so and then I spent like 100 hours a week trying to finish the prep work as quickly as possible because that needed to be done before I could join my cohort for day one I was able to accomplish that and that was the point that I was officially jobless essentially fully committed to doing the boot camp when I did the boot camp right it was challenging as you can tell uh someone that failed three times just to get in I would think that personally I felt like I was near the bottom if not you know one of the worst in my class and I one of my classmates even that was kind of a little bit more blunt even told me that she thought I was near the bottom maybe in the middle on my best day in terms of programming skills and a lot of the projects you have to find partners and uh folks get a Pick Part pick who they want to work with and maybe I was a nice person and folks wanted to work with me for that reason but in terms of technical skills I think that I wasn't someone that anybody in the class would aspire to to work with so there was that okay so towards the end of the course we started doing resume building and and very quickly I noticed that they were giving out templates and of how to build your resume and I noticed that every single person's resume was exactly the same and I did some quick math in my head I remember thinking about this and thinking about my cohort plus the five other sessions that are going on now multiply that out by the 10 most popular boot camps and I thought about it there was probably thousands of folks and folks that haven't gotten gotten a job that finished before me there's thousands of folks out there with the exact same resume as I did also along with that knowing that I was at the very bottom of my class or near the bottom I basically made a really active decision that after the boot camp ended uh when I got that certificate that wasn't going to be my learning my the end of my learning experience and I was going to continue to push myself to make up for gaps that kind of thing and um looking back that was one of the best decisions that I ever made for myself so the boot camp ended luckily I made some really great friends during the boot camp and every single day for months on end until we all found jobs we would have our study uh job application plan build outside projects continue to learn how to do the things that um we missed in the boot camp and we kept on pushing ourselves and so day in and day out we would meet up do eight 10hour days have lunch together do algorithms from the very beginning like literally the leak code easys or all the topics then we would apply to anywhere from 40 to 50 jobs a day without say take the interviews that we personally could get luckily for me one of my friends was really into some of the events and recommended that we did a do a hackathon and so we ended up doing a hackathon and we actually won the hackathon which was nothing to brag like it sounds amazing but nothing to brag about it was like a high school hackathon um with some college kids I would say younger folks and we all grown adults I had someone that was one of my good friends was like in his 30s already at that time and we ended up winning the hackathon and my resume throughout that time kept on evolving as I kept on um going through you know that process of getting a job at the end there right took me about 5 months to get a job I applied to thousands of jobs um only got about 30 to 40 hits if you do do the math um it was probably about 1% of return calls um one amazing tip that I got throughout that time that really opened up my process was someone told me once that you should just um apply for any job that you think you can do don't think about the titles and just click apply if you think you can do it and that's what I did and from there that entry level jobs would get a th000 applications within one day of it goinging up onto the job board but third fourth fifth tier companies their senior mid-level jobs would get five apps in a week and those were the ones I was aiming for and ultimately that's kind of where I landed at in hopes that they'll level me down if they liked me enough and just being willing to take the jobs that nobody wanted to get right and so yeah that's overall essentially what happened to sum this up right probably about a year and a half of self-studying uh failing at that recognizing that I just needed to know more couldn't get get into the boot camp so more self-studying with some um prep courses for about a year just under a year then of course doing the boot camp which took about including the the intry courses um and then also getting in that kind of thing another four months five months or so and then took me about half a year to to sign that first offer letter and and I only got one offer letter at the end of all that all right to close this out I think I have a couple really good um points that I wanted to point out in a couple tips that I wanted to share that I learned throughout this process but first I want to be able to acknowledge and talk about the reality that you know doing a boot camp doing the Cs degree especially doing self-taught there are chances that you're not going to land a job right away or there is opportunity that it might not happen I think that's a that's a real fact and and it's mainly because um our career in our profession isn't one of those that there's like automatic job placement um that kind of thing right but I think that's that's okay and I hope that doesn't discourage anybody out there if you're extremely passionate about this I do want to say that me personally I still think that there's great opportunity to break into the industry and there's still great jobs to be had and um this is the risk to reward factor of programming is still huge and this is still a personally Great Space to be in but it's not an easy space to break into right and the things that um the couple tips that I have here to close things off um that I want you to think about is that although there are are folks that don't don't get it I think there are consistent patterns that folks that are successful and that I've seen all carry the first thing is that there's a weird thing right it's like companies want you to be able to have validation from the outside role before they give you a job they don't want to be the first person to be able to take that take that risk on you and they need validation from the outside world that you can do it so for us and for me personally I think that it was an incredible valuable skill to be able to get experience that mimic The Real World experience or as close to the as real world experience as you possibly can and that doesn't necessarily mean having a job to do so right if you can't get like of course tier one of that is like getting an internship that kind of thing but if you aren't able to get those things what's what really helps set folks apart is doing what you can right building those side projects and running them like they are real world projects or letting them out into the public even if they don't get any traction and know of course like for myself doing hackathons joining events that showcase your skills to the greater public I have I also have friends that have pretty great success that contributed to like get help repos get help communities that kind of thing and of course this sounds counterintuitive but I think that this changes The Narrative of how you talk about your your resume and how you communicate yourself out right you then talk about it in a way instead of being um an educational level you can talk about the deadlines and and the pressure and that kind of stuff that mimics The Real World experience a lot more when you approach it in that sort of manner the number two thing that I realize here is that and and being in industry for quite some time now time now there's no Escape in the learning curve of programming and continuing to teach yourself and getting better at programming itself I wouldn't let the Cs degree especially in these stages of your CS degree your boot camp being self-taught being getting that certificate getting that diploma be the last chapter of the learning curve it's very important that you're able to continue to learn and and challenge yourself just keep on pushing yourself as you go through that process before you get that job because when you do that it leads into number one right at the point of getting those big milestone diploma certifications you should be able to contribute back to the open source back to the market and you know although you might not be doing it for for a job or a company again right your next projects your next contribution uh shouldn't be websites for yourself they should be um bigger contributions leveraging the skills that you have and I think that you'll naturally find those spaces if you continue to learn and continue to find interest and have curiosity in what you're trying to do I hope that helps I hope that story at least was interesting and if I look back on this process as as long as it it was essentially if you added in some extracurriculars some electives I think this process took me as long as school going back to school but ultimately I wasn't able to to get a get a software job within 3 to 6 months but the learning experience was amazing and the risk for me versus the reward has been huge and those years were were well spent doing this because at the end I realized that it is something that I was incredibly passionate about and I and I loved a lot and I really wanted to do and so that's kind of where I want to leave this at yeah you might not be exactly where you're at now but just remember that this is like a this is a smaller picture in the larger grand scheme of things right it might take you a while might take you time the market might be a little bit more difficult but if you really want this to happen these moments right here are going to be rewarding and there'll be moments you look back to and realize that they were just small parts of the the larger time frame right I hope that helps um if you want me to break down any of the parts of the video or break down any of the smaller topics I'd love to do so if not I'll talk to you on the next one let just

Channel: Advice From A Dad

Views: 92,460

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Id: b_tWlIyP8dk

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023