The pain of not being able to find a software job

the tech industry is kind of a mess right now it's becoming increasingly hard for people to find jobs in Tech and it's particularly hard for any software Engineers trying to get into Tech right now like boot camp grads or recent computer science graduates all of this made me think of a time in my life when I was struggling to get a software engineering job where my happiness my direction in life and my sense of self-worth were at an all-time low this is the story of the pain of finding my first software engineering job my journey through it and my advice to anyone stuck in the same situation to get a grasp of the situation we have to get a small glimpse of what I was like in college depending on which version of Kevin you encountered during his college Years you would have found vastly different mindsets during my first year of college I was primarily career focused my main goal was to get a job at Facebook by the time my fourth year had rolled around though my priorities had shifted significantly laziness and procrastination those were the themes of my fourth year of college my attention was all over the place and I didn't take time to plan my post-college life instead I was distracted by other things like socializing or making friends and I actively put off thinking about the future until it was too late I didn't have any real software internship experience I didn't know any web Frameworks I didn't know how to interview for software companies and I hadn't studied a single question of leap code or cracking the coding interview this lack of foresight it all came back to haunt me on the day of my graduation for most people graduation is a moment of Triumph it's like the culmination of years of hard work and moving on to the next stage of your life but for me that day was the saddest moment I had experienced up until that point in my life looking back I realized that I had barely changed since the first day I walked onto campus my work ethic was still terrible my social skills were terrible and I hadn't achieved the goals that I set out to achieve and worst of all I was not ready for this next phase in my life and I knew that I was about to be forced into a deep dark time before anything got better for me personally or professionally I moved home from college about three months after graduation and at the time I had not even begun to understand the weight of the position that I was in I had no job prospects lined up and even worse I hadn't even made an effort to secure one my resume unimpressive to say the least but I remember hearing about the intense demand for software engineers at that time and all the years previously I tricked myself into believing that my computer science degree alone would be enough to land me a job I mean I spent four years in college right surely that was enough to secure my future a piece of wisdom that I've learned in the past few years there are only two ways people change people either change after deep self-reflection and self-improvement or they are forced to change by circumstance and this circumstance was about to hit my life very very soon at the time I looked around at my friends and classmates and saw them getting jobs at top tech companies and I thought that I could do the same I wanted to work for a unicorn startup because in my head that's where I belonged and it couldn't be that hard to get in could it but as I started applying to jobs I realized just how misguided I really was I submitted like 10 applications my first week to companies like Snapchat Pinterest Yelp thinking that they were easy targets while I worked my way up to big companies and then I waited a week okay so I applied a few more jobs that I thought were in my skill level like Dropbox Groupon into it but again the results were the same nothing for someone who had been so naive so deluded and so used to getting what I wanted this came as a surprise my degree was not enough to get me hired I even remember this one instance two months after moving back home I managed to secure an interview with a company in Southern California and the whole time going through the interview process and the recruiter screens I thought getting the job would be easy I didn't spend any time preparing for this interview and instead I focused on learning how to negotiate my salary and as you can expect I didn't get the job and in fact I wasn't even close I remember hanging out and talking with my friends afterwards we were grabbing a beer I was talking about my interview downplaying the situation talking about how I didn't want to work there anyway and as I wrapped up my story my friends just quietly acknowledged it change topics and then we moved on I couldn't really understand at the time why my friends were so quiet in response to my story but now I can see how clueless and delusional I was and just how badly I struggled with self-awareness and humility I see now how I came off to them here was this kid who hadn't paid his dues in life he didn't have a job he hadn't worked hard or accomplished anything of note and he had a right to complain about job prospects no one was going to tell me how misguided my thinking was it was up to me to figure it out on my own in the next few months my job search became increasingly difficult I was not aware that most companies tend to slow down their hiring process at the end of October in preparation for the holiday season this was something that caught me completely off guard and the true pressure of the situation began to set in it had been nearly five months since I graduated college and I wasn't even close to getting a job I found myself submitting dozens of job applications per day while going through online forums Reddit or just anything to look for advice on how to get a job I was told to study leak code to learn web Frameworks to build side projects to network with other people for referrals and I just began to get completely overwhelmed by the number of things I needed to do to get a software job and I realized there were people out there that studied 10 times harder for 10 times longer and still were unable to get a job and despite me submitting hundreds of applications I received very few responses in the month of December I was able to secure two on-site interviews with startup companies in San Francisco in one of the interviews the interviewer ended my technical screen early probably because of my performance and instead opted into having a friendly conversation with me he asked me the question so what did you do in school I knew what he was asking me failing interviews it was painful but that was nothing compared to seeing the disappointment in my parents eyes I couldn't help but think of the sacrifices they made to immigrate to this country working hard to attend school here to find a job here and to leave everything behind to make a better life for their children and as I struggled to find a job as I submitted 600 job applications to almost every company I could find in the state of California I couldn't help but feel like I was letting them down and at the same time letting myself down people don't change unless they go through a heavy amount of self-reflection or they are forced to by circumstance ironically this whole situation about me not being able to find a job it was jarringly similar to an experience I had just four years previously instead of a job search I was in high school and I was trying to get into top colleges I had spent most of my high school years procrastinating neglecting my grades I had a mediocre at best college application and yet I thought I had a chance to apply and get into top colleges because that's what my friends were doing and when the time came to receive College acceptances I found myself rejected by almost every school I applied to I remember one of my SAT tutors sat me down and told me to never put myself in a situation where I wasn't preparing for the future ever again and while some of that message might have stuck with me for a bit obviously none of it stuck long term people don't change unless they are forced to change I would like to tell you after this point how I completely transformed how I studied like 18 web Frameworks until I became the perfect candidate but none of that happened truly what happened came down to numbers and luck applying for jobs it will always be a numbers game this was no exception I had spent months trying to create side projects to put on my resume trying to learn react trying to read through cracking the coding interview and finally in January of 2017 I received a call from a tiny five-person startup located in San Diego I was lucky enough to be asked technical questions in fields that I had prepped pretty well in the last few months and even luckier this company was looking for a very specific profile of software Engineers someone who was a new college grad someone who could code and figure out problems and someone who was willing to take a low salary and so this was my lucky break in the end so far removed from my original delusions of working for Facebook or some startup unicorn but after the months of failure nothing was Sweeter Than This sense of success I had in the moment sometimes I think of the scenario of if I didn't get that job offer I wonder how long I would have been searching before I finally found one a couple more months six months a year a couple years would I have just given up it's difficult to tell but it was definitely one of the first lessons in my life about how incremental progress every day helps you to reach your goal if I wasn't studying lead code learning web Frameworks applying to jobs little by little every day even this random Stroke of Luck it wouldn't have panned out if you found my story relatable in any capacity you need to be the reason to make a change for yourself in life at a certain point no one will push you no one will say anything to you no one will force you to do anything you will have to do it yourself willingly or be forced to by painful circumstance

Channel: Created By KC

Views: 432,958

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Id: BSmLRK0liVg

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023