My REAL Jr. Developer Offers & Interviews

yo what's going on everybody so i got more of a chill video for you today where i just want to talk about my entry-level programming job uh interview experiences and my offers so i've had three entry-level programming jobs if you consider my first internship and i'd say for all sakes and purposes for this video we can consider that an entry-level programming job but yeah three jobs i want to talk about to kind of give you a realistic look or realistic idea of what to expect now a few things to keep in mind this was around the 2016 to 2017 area and this is for non-tech or non-fang companies right in the midwest area so because of that these interview experiences and these offers may come off as a little bit surprising to some anyways let's kick it off with my first and my only internship so a quick little backstory while i was in college i was actually part of a program that helped tech majors network with tech companies around the area and one thing this program did is they held mock interviews on campus so you could actually interview with or mock interview with real tech companies to kind of gain that interview experience anyways i took advantage of this opportunity while i was in college and i signed up for a mock interview one day so i showed up to my campus did my mock interview with a tech company around the area and little did i know this was actually a real interview and i'll explain what i mean by that here in a second so this tech company that i interviewed with was just a local software development shop basically clients would come to them and they would make websites or mobile apps for them so the interview process was very straightforward i just got asked some very basic questions about what projects i'd worked on and what i was interested in it was actually a very easy going interview and actually the interviewer and i had a mutual connection which i think definitely helped us connect a bit so that was pretty much the extent of the interview not many behavioral questions just kind of a general conversation and kind of just going over my programming experience at the time which was very limited right and the reason i say it was a real interview and you can probably guess why is because a few days after i did the mock interview that company actually reached out to me and extended me my first and only internship now for the offer so this internship offered me 12 an hour for 300 hours of work i accepted obviously and after the 300 hours was over they actually extended my internship and after that extension was over they just extended me an offer for a part-time job again for 12 an hour so i worked this job part time around 20 hours a week while i was still in college so that was my very first entry level programming job now let's talk about my first uh big boy full-time programming job interview experience and offer so my very first full-time entry-level programming job interview was a lot different from the a whole internship experience and this was for a pretty sizable company in the midwest area i think they pulled in around like a half a billion dollars of revenue each year so yeah pretty large company anyways the interview went like this it was three rounds the first round was an initial phone screening with a recruiter and this was just a very high level overview of my experience with programming things i worked on during my internship and my experience with android development because this was for an android developer role so after talking with the recruiter she actually sent me the job requirements and i remember reading them and it said like three to five years of experience and a bachelor's degree and all i had was like uh 18 months of an internship and i remember being stressed out about these requirements because i didn't meet them at all but regardless we moved forward and we still scheduled a a real interview with the company so the second round of the interview was an in-person interview with three developers and one manager again it started very casual they just asked me about my experience and projects that i worked on and then they proceeded to ask me some pretty technical questions about android development i don't remember exactly what they were but they were in the realm of like what minimum api do i develop android apps for what libraries do i use when making the ui of an app and i think they may have asked me a question on data binding again i'm not sure but it was in the realm of like very geared questions uh specific to android development after the technical questions they asked me just general hr questions and then they asked me like one of those curveball questions that you sometimes get asked in an interview and i'll never forget what they asked me because it called me so off guard but the question was what song best describes me as a programmer and my gut reaction without any hesitation was don't stop believing kind of cringe to be honest but it did make him laugh and i think it kind of like opened the door to just have a more personable connection with the people that i was interviewing with which i definitely think helped me get this job offer anyways that was pretty much it for the second round of the interview the third and final round of the interview was another on-site interview and i remember i only had one suit at the time so i wore the same suit just with a different tie hoping that they didn't notice thankfully they didn't this time the interview was with the cto of the company and it was very behavioral just kind of feeling me out he asked me questions about my career things like where do i see myself in five years what do i want out of my career and kind of just general questions like that and that was the extent of my interview experience and it may be a little bit surprising to you and it's kind of surprising to me when i think back on it but there were no like white boarding coding questions the technical extent of the interview was just uh very specific questions geared towards uh what i would be working on which was android development and now for the offer again keep in mind this was a non-tech company in the midwest area where the cost of living was pretty low i mean you could get a pretty decent apartment in this area for like 800 a month matter of fact my very first one-bedroom apartment was like 780 bucks a month which is way better than what i pay now which is almost like three times that amount so yeah the cost of living was very low now the base salary was forty eight thousand dollars a year with around seven thousand dollars a year in bonuses making the total compensation 55 000 a year also this came with full benefits so like full health insurance a full dental vision for 1k match and 15 days paid vacation and for a 21 year old this was a pretty good offer i was very happy with this offer i know some people especially in the the tech world might not think that's very high but i was very happy with that anyways that's the full interview experience and offer for my first full-time entry-level programming job now let's talk about the last entry-level programming job interview experience and offer that i ever had and this one is a bit different from the one that i just talked about so i had a career fair at my college i met a recruiter that was looking for ios developers at their company i chatted with this recruiter for a bit she gave me her card a few days later i reached out to her and we scheduled a uh a real interview for this company so this interview was around two to three hours long it was a single day multi-round on-site interview the first round of the interview was very behavioral i gotta ask like just the general hr questions questions like tell me about a time where you didn't meet a deadline or what's your biggest weakness or tell me about a time where you had to pivot just like general questions like that so that was about 30 to 45 minutes long after that i had a more technical interview with two other developers so during this round of interviews again it was just you know i talked about my experience i'll never forget it my phone actually went off during this interview but i was able to kind of just play it off because the reason why i brought my phone in was to show them apps that i worked on so really wasn't that big of a deal but i'll never forget like my phone ringing and like being the anxiety that i had when that went off during that interview but after i showed them the apps i worked on after we talked about my experience they then slid me a laptop and this is where i was like oh okay this is about to go down so they slid me the laptop they had a xcode playgrounds open i think and then they asked me to create a class in swift pretty easy i was able to do that in a few seconds after creating the class and swift they said okay now add some variables to the class okay i did that again pretty easy took me a couple seconds and then after that they grabbed the laptop they looked at it and they said okay looks good and that was literally it that was the extent of my technical interview and i remember being like i was so freaked out about that so after the technical interview they gave me a tour of the campus and i was on my way so i did that interview end of march of 2017 the recruiter actually reached out to me she said that the interview went well and that she was just waiting for approval to extend me an offer and then over the course of the next five months i got multiple emails from the recruiter saying that she was still waiting for approval to be honest i think they were either on the fence about me or they were waiting to staff me on a project not really sure anyways uh august of 2017 so about five months later they actually sent me an informal offer via email so the offer was sixty thousand dollars a year with a two thousand dollar relocation bonus and benefits i'm not really sure what the extent of the benefits were because i actually ended up saying no to that job just because i had already accepted the the previous offer from the first job that i talked about but anyways that's pretty much it that's the extent of all my entry level programming job interviews and my offers now i may have gotten lucky by not getting asked a very hard technical questions it's really hard to say why the interview was so easy maybe it was because these weren't for like top tech companies or maybe it was because i was still entry level again not really sure but i can definitely say for every job ever since for higher level roles i've gotten some pretty in-depth uh technical interviews so if you're interested in hearing about those interviews let me know maybe i'll make a video on that if this video does well with the exception of the company that i'm currently at anyways that's pretty much it for me today if you enjoyed the video make sure you like and sub leave a spicy comment to help with engagement and i'll see you guys in the next one peace you

Channel: Kenny Gunderman

Views: 19,771

Rating: 4.9774556 out of 5

Keywords: jr programmer, code, coding, programmer salary, programming interviews, tech interviews, software, software engineer, software developer, tech salary, technical interviews

Id: rVNdMj9dtTY

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021