4 ms·

I'm one of those six-figure junior-dev success stories. I had essentially no programming experience (and had been making <$40k) until I moved to San Francisco t

I'm one of those six-figure junior-dev success stories. I had essentially no programming experience (and had been making <$40k) until I moved to San Francisco to attend a three-month bootcamp, and within a few months after finishing that I had a $115k job. Today I'm making nearly three times that. What I would stress is that for a first job search, the coding is the easy part. You don't get a chance to demonstrate whether you can code at all unless you get past the resume submission and to the first tech screen, and as you've noticed, that's a very hard barrier when you don't have any experience. Job searching was brutal for pretty much everybody in my bootcamp cohort, even though a great number of them are very successful now, and this was entirely standard - the second half of the bootcamp was primarily dedicated to training people for job searching, and people generally spent 3-6 months job searching full time afterwards before landing lucrative jobs. I have lots of things to say about this, but here's a few factors that I think are important off the top of my head: 1. Given that you have limited experience, you really need to focus on presenting it to best effect on your resume. You maybe have something of a leg up because you have actual work experience as a dev, as opposed to me and my bootcamp classmates, but it needs to sound as impressive on paper as you can make it. (And you need to be able to talk about it in the same way.) 2. Cold-applying through general job search websites like Indeed where you fill out a form is incredibly low-value - you're near-certain to get filtered out that way. There are a number of specialized job search sites for developers, some of which aim to skip the resume step in lieu of an up-front coding test (e.g. Triplebyte). Even better is networking, even kind of crappy networking: I got my first job, at an ~80 person startup, by cold-messaging one of the founders on LinkedIn. 3. If your resume isn't very impressive and so you won't get many tech screens or "onsites", you really need to train to pass those. I won't try to get into how to do that, since that's extensively covered elsewhere, but it's a totally artificial screening process that you absolutely need to put effort into. People have mentioned that salaries are very different in the Bay Area than they are elsewhere, and that was certainly true when I started my SWE career - but given the enormous number of remote roles available, I think it isn't nearly as true any more. Happy to give more info here, but if you want to email me, check my profile for an address.

HNqThrowaway 5y ago
Thank you! Some really valuable advice there. How was the bootcamp for you? Was securing a job afterwords part of the problem? How did you afford room + board in SF? I've considered going through one of the programs that promise a job after the fact but historically I've been hesitant for a number of reasons.
- cipheredStones 5y ago
  I look back at my bootcamp time very fondly. It was very intensive (six days a week, ~12 hours a day, Sundays off for "laundry and staring at the wall", as it was memorably described to me before I started), but the emotional reward of growing rapidly by facing tough but achievable challenges + the camaraderie of everybody going through the same intense experience at once made it really fun for me. That said, I found that I had a pretty strong aptitude for programming, so it was easier for me than for most of my cohort-mates. > Was securing a job afterwords part of the problem? Assuming that's a typo for "program", yes, it was. There was some job search training throughout the three months - doing a toy problem at the start of every day, being tested on your ability to talk about the projects you'd done there as you would in an interview - but the week or two focused on job search strategy and preparation. After you graduated, there were career coaches you could talk to and mock interviews you could sign up for. The network was the most valuable thing of all, IME: recent graduates who stayed close with their cohortmates (to swap advice, support, mock interviews) were markedly more successful than those that didn't, and having alumni at many companies was a big networking benefit, and the alumni Slack groups have been amazingly helpful to me to this day. Until I got my job, I paid $750 a month for a shared bunk bed in a shitty SRO just outside the Tenderloin district. Not great, but I was never there because I was so busy. I also got one of the three-month TA positions offered to recent graduates, so that let me spare my savings while job searching. Going to a bootcamp was the best decision I ever made, but that doesn't definitely mean it's the right one for you. You already know how to program and have a job, so it may not be necessary for you - and they're expensive, and risky, and many of them are not that great. (I can't even attest to how good the program I went to is nowadays, since it's been acquired twice since I left.) But for me, it was enormously helpful for getting my foot in the door of the lucrative tech industry, and once you have even a couple years of experience you're a very hot commodity. (Also, if you do decide to go to a bootcamp, don't go to Lambda School/"Bloom Institute of Technology". They have both a lot of hype and a pretty bad reputation.)

HNqThrowaway 5y ago

Thank you! Some really valuable advice there. How was the bootcamp for you? Was securing a job afterwords part of the problem? How did you afford room + board in SF? I've considered going through one of the programs that promise a job after the fact but historically I've been hesitant for a number of reasons.

cipheredStones 5y ago
I look back at my bootcamp time very fondly. It was very intensive (six days a week, ~12 hours a day, Sundays off for "laundry and staring at the wall", as it was memorably described to me before I started), but the emotional reward of growing rapidly by facing tough but achievable challenges + the camaraderie of everybody going through the same intense experience at once made it really fun for me. That said, I found that I had a pretty strong aptitude for programming, so it was easier for me than for most of my cohort-mates. > Was securing a job afterwords part of the problem? Assuming that's a typo for "program", yes, it was. There was some job search training throughout the three months - doing a toy problem at the start of every day, being tested on your ability to talk about the projects you'd done there as you would in an interview - but the week or two focused on job search strategy and preparation. After you graduated, there were career coaches you could talk to and mock interviews you could sign up for. The network was the most valuable thing of all, IME: recent graduates who stayed close with their cohortmates (to swap advice, support, mock interviews) were markedly more successful than those that didn't, and having alumni at many companies was a big networking benefit, and the alumni Slack groups have been amazingly helpful to me to this day. Until I got my job, I paid $750 a month for a shared bunk bed in a shitty SRO just outside the Tenderloin district. Not great, but I was never there because I was so busy. I also got one of the three-month TA positions offered to recent graduates, so that let me spare my savings while job searching. Going to a bootcamp was the best decision I ever made, but that doesn't definitely mean it's the right one for you. You already know how to program and have a job, so it may not be necessary for you - and they're expensive, and risky, and many of them are not that great. (I can't even attest to how good the program I went to is nowadays, since it's been acquired twice since I left.) But for me, it was enormously helpful for getting my foot in the door of the lucrative tech industry, and once you have even a couple years of experience you're a very hot commodity. (Also, if you do decide to go to a bootcamp, don't go to Lambda School/"Bloom Institute of Technology". They have both a lot of hype and a pretty bad reputation.)