The 4 Steps to get a $100k Programming Job

there are hundreds of other videos on what programming language to learn and where to learn to code this is not one of those videos we're gonna assume you already know that skip all of it and i'm gonna give you a four part road map to actually landing a full-time coding job so you know what you're getting into here's the four parts feel free to skip ahead part one is knowing when you're ready aka auditing your existing coding skills that you've spent the time learning part two is crafting your virtual presence this means resume portfolio linkedin and other stuff like that part three is the interview this is the big one and the most important part so if you watch just one watch part three number four is the follow through which includes everything from mindset to negotiating offers to getting multiple offers and how to deal with that aaron jack here from fremo by the way we've seen the mistakes thousands of new programmers make in our boot camp and we want to help you avoid them so if that sounds good consider subscribing okay let's get into part one which is knowing when you're ready to apply for a job here is a checklist for knowing if you're ready to start applying or not check box number one have you built a portfolio of personal projects either on a personal website or on github ideally on both as for what qualifies as a personal project rule of the my uses is the code majority yours meaning you can start with someone else's project whether that's from a tutorial or an existing repo but have you changed it enough to make it unique i did exactly this for my old portfolio website aaronjp.com followed a udemy css tutorial and then changed it so it looked uniquely mine check box number two can you solve basic code wars problems for your language of choice code wars is the best site for beginner level coding problems because these are similar to the type of questions you're gonna get in an interview and they're also a way to test your mastery of both logic and the syntax of your language okay now number three this is the one a lot of people skip do you know the meta skills for your language meta skills mean if you learn javascript you can't get a job with just that in most cases you need html css and react because there are no jobs hiring javascript developers but there are a lot of jobs hiring front-end developers which is that whole package different example if you chose python you're going to need databases some back-end systems knowledge and probably at least one framework like flask or django so how do you know what is the full set of meta skills well maybe it's obvious but just look at job posts search for front-end developer and see what set of skills you need for most jobs rule of thumb if you meet more than 60 percent of the requirements you can apply for that job and that 60 applies to years of experience too if it says one to two years of experience that's pretty much as close as you're gonna get to a junior front end developer so just go for it all right we're on to section number two crafting your virtual presence because you're not literally knocking on doors to get a job you have to represent yourself in the virtual world in a way that's appealing to employers let's start with resume because i've seen some absolutely terrible resumes in my day could be its own video so i've left a resume template in the description for you but anyway we'll run through the key points right now and i'll put it on the screen long story short even if you're new to this stuff you want your resume to look like you're a developer and i don't mean lie i mean format it in that way where the hierarchy meaning the sections that take up the most space are about your coding even if you had a different career for 10 years you want to de-emphasize that unrelated experience and emphasize your new skills new projects and so on by having them take up more space that's basically the long and short of it now what about that personal website and is having github alone and some green squares no here's what i'd say bear in mind who's looking at your profile it's not always going to be other developers in fact for bigger companies often going to be recruiters who don't necessarily know what they're looking at on github so even if you're back and only having a beautiful looking personal website is really the way to go and you don't have to build it from scratch you can use a website builder like webflow to spin one up in a few hours as for linkedin which could be another whole video main question is do you need it or not i would say 100 yes especially because it's also not too hard to create and you can use it to cold message recruiters reach out to people you knew in your past who might be able to refer you to jobs and when someone googles for your name they'll find your linkedin all right we're on the good stuff part number three the interview so the first thing you want to do is search on glassdoor and read the experiences of other people interviewing for your same role at that company so if i had an interview on facebook i would search for facebook glassdoor software engineer interviews and people will leave interview experiences even explaining what specific questions they got now this is important because you don't want to over or under prepare because in contrast to facebook which would be a really hard algorithm style interview a lot of front-end jobs out there will literally just test your html css and javascript knowledge with basic problems or even just building a practice project and that'll be the whole interview realistically though across the board you can expect three things which is them asking about your past projects few simple coding challenges and some system design or planning style questions so in terms of talking about your projects yes you did build them but you should practice talking about them out loud i know that sounds dumb but you will sound dumb if you don't do this trust me what's going to happen is you're either going to make it too short or you're going to ramble for too long and you also want to create a compelling story so people don't get bored here's an example so if one of my projects is a tinder clone but the difference is i always get a match then i might even make a joke out of it and say okay for this project you know i was on tinder and you know what the most annoying part is you never get matches so this app was going to fix that but just for me and then i would go on to explain kind of how i built it some of the challenges i ran into and so forth and i would go through that chronologically so i would say okay here was the high level architecture i looked at these other sites to get design inspiration and then while i was implementing it these are the challenges i ran into just so the development seems very intentional and like you know what you're doing the personal project section is often neglected by people they don't spend time preparing for it but this can actually leave the longest lasting impression and it's the most low-hanging fruit so definitely practice your pitch of your project okay let's talk about coding challenges now and my main warning here not to get overwhelmed with the amount of questions on a site like leak code which literally has thousands what i would say is master the data structures first the most common algorithms for each one and then beyond that don't stress too much of course more practice is gonna help but i would say shoot for a lot closer to 50 or 100 than a couple hundred or a thousand now of course getting the right solution is important but what matters even more is having a structured process just like you explained your project and to do that just remember the acronym ioce once you get the problem always define what the inputs outputs constants and edge cases are then you can step through the problem and your interviewer will be on board with your framework so they can jump in and help you and to some degree they are expecting you to get stuck depending on how difficult the question they give you is then don't forget to do the time and space analysis at the end i have a big o video on my channel that's a bit older that you can check out if you want to learn about that now what about system design which is really just a fancy word for practice planning the best way to learn this is to watch example questions on youtube just type in system design and you'll find a bunch and you'll start to notice the common threads system design comes down to knowing a lot of stuff at a very high level like databases apis microservices caching these sort of mechanisms they can discuss the trade-offs between so for example you might draw three different services and the apis that connect between them discuss trade-offs between nosql and sql databases and also recommend using a specific framework and its benefits to improve developer experience what i'm saying now freaks you out just watch a couple of these system design videos and they all start to sound very similar after a while and you do not need to be an expert on this stuff at all to talk about it at a high level that finally brings us to part four the follow through things can go really well or really bad and to a large degree that's out of your control you can't choose who interviews you you can't choose who you're competing with for the role and maybe it's just straight up not a good fit with the other people on the team which kind of makes this whole thing just a mental battle of toughness and persistence here's what you can control though self-reflection i'd strongly encourage you to actually write down how you feel about every part of the interview right after you do it because you are gonna forget everything from parts of a question that you messed up maybe you talked for too long about one of your projects and maybe the vibe was just off with one or two of the interviewers write it all down and by the way i forgot to congratulate you on getting that first interview because once you get one you can always get more you know you can do it anyway so let's say you did get the offer though how exactly do you play it do you immediately accept due to excitement probably not you could be leaving money on the table offers are negotiable at almost all companies you can usually get minimum 10 and i would say to ask for up to 20 more you're not gonna offend anyone you might just get a salary counter offer so for example if you got to offer for 100 just ask for 120 and say you're flexible on how much that gets applied to stock versus base salary if you're curious about tax salaries i also have a video on that or you can check out the website levels.fyi to see salaries at different companies that info is also on glassdoor too as you can see glassdoor is pretty freaking useful if you have multiple offers obviously that's the best you can kind of play them against each other and if you have another interview coming up that you really want to hear back from the timelines can get a bit tricky you can ask for more time to accept an offer but just make sure you're letting them know at every step of the process and not leaving them hanging could create some resentment there so those are my tips hope it was helpful and like i said our mission here is to help you avoid the mistakes that other new programmers make that sounds good consider liking consider subscribing good luck on the interviews hope to see you in the next one

Channel: Aaron Jack

Views: 40,181

Keywords: programming, web development, javascript, react, learn programming, learn to code, coding, software development, become a software developer, software developer, freelancing, freelance developer, coding tutorials

Id: IjE17hlRKlQ

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2022