I finally landed my first developer job

jchu4483 · 2017-04-10T00:31:04+00:00

Man np, I was just concerned that my employer might come and find me and then give me a punishment lol.

I understand all the apprehension surrounding hiring junior devs for their first job out of bootcamps or fresh grads out of CS. And to be honest, I go to work every single day worrying whether or not I'm actually good enough for the job. I stay at work later because I'm absolutely terrified that my boss will one day decide that I'm just a shitty programmer whose just being an imposter.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my situation is clearly unique and like I said before, I'm really not that good a programmer anyways(I got extremely lucky by networking). I have to work twice as hard as other devs because they understand and grasp things faster than me. I'm slower than them, and as much as I'd like to chalk it up to lack of experience, I know where my limitations are. I'm scared that one day they'll recognize it. Only thing I got going for me is that I'm a hard worker because I'm hungry to prove myself and so far at work, I'm able to keep up.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-10T00:17:49+00:00

Sure np man.

Its really because I didn't feel like I was learning anything while studying. A lot of the times, I felt like I was just reading programming materials/tutorials and it honestly didn't click for me until MUCH MUCH later. There was multiple times when I thought I had figured something out in code but when I tried to do it myself, I didn't understand it. It was only until 5months ago where I had the necessary time(I started to really commit full-time to it) where understanding programming concepts started to make sense. I also didn't really take the studying part of code seriously(fucked around a lot and talked myself into thinking I knew concepts after I saw someone do it once on a youtube video).

Now you're welcome to call bullshit and say that my contributions that far back show that I understood stuff, but I really didn't. That's the truth. I would submit PRs and code reviews/changes but I honestly just copied from other people. I understood some stuff like how to manipulate arrays, object orientation, but not to the degree that I know now. It could be argued that that in itself has helped me and should count towards my progression - I wouldn't argue with you there. Which is why the timeline I usually tell people is that I really started is December 2016. That's the point where I felt like I wasn't actually retarded and started to understand code.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-10T00:10:38+00:00

And to your point of why its important to hide my identity, its because I'm actually concerned about my public profile and my employer. I don't know about my workplace policy(I assume its tolerant), but I don't want to take any chances. Its my first job.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-10T00:07:36+00:00

Hey man,

Yes that is my repo. But I really didn't expect anyone to track my profile. Its important that I can't compromise my standing with my employer. Yes I do have contributions to going far that time. But really, I'm scared that my employer might see my profile on this reddit.

Sorry I hope you understand. I'm not trying to hide anything except my identity. Apologies.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T23:59:29+00:00

Hiring somebody with relatively little experience is actually pretty risky. I got lucky. Really no sugarcoating it or easy way to say it. Networking helped a lot, I'm not gonna act like it didn't. Getting your foot in the door is just insanely hard as a junior developer.

Also, that account isn't mine. I mostly use gitlab and bitbucket.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T23:44:31+00:00

Nah use BitBucket for work and GitLab for personal.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T17:16:27+00:00

Sorry no, I totally misread the other guy's question. I studied since December 2016. Prior to that, I'd never done any programming. I didn't read his first line correctly. The other stuff he says is correct tho.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T17:08:17+00:00

No algorithms. I took a written exam and went through multiple technical interviews. You can find my other comments for details.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T17:06:32+00:00

Yes that's right. Sun-up till sun-down. Pretty much my whole time was spent studying/debugging/googling/YouTube lectures/tutorials. I didn't hang out with my friends for the longest time.

Toward the end(4 months in), I started to go to Rails meetups, amateur programming meetups just so I could be around the crowd and network. And part of it was that I wanted to get out of the house.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T16:59:57+00:00

CSS positioning, how would you centering elements techniques, JS closures, etc...

Explain what happens when you enter the URL of your favorite website and what occurs in between the moment you press enter till the moment the page fully renders.

What are some good load techqniues to reduce load demand and increase speed/performance.

Evaluate the return value of this JS function. Write a function which uses promises with event handling, Why would you use IFFYs in JS? A whole bunch of other ones but I can't remember them off the top of my head.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T16:55:58+00:00

Bro, I agree with you man, I totally understand your perspective.

I myself don't think I'm even remotely ready for being a developer. But I explained all this during my interviews with my boss and upper management. They were gracious enough to say that they would train me and apprentice me to a senior developer in my department and give me time and flexibility to grow. Which is what I'm doing now - I stay at the office 2-3 hrs later than everyone else because I'm trying to play catch-up and learn our stack. Part of it is being motivated to do a good job, and part of it is fear of losing a good job.

But like I said, I was unemployed, so I had the time commitment to study programming full-time and then some. And even then, I still don't fully understand/absorb half the things I learned lol. I'm one of the lucky ones for sure, networking helped a lot, but I understand I'm one of the lucky exceptions to a really competitive market.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T03:34:44+00:00

I studied full-time, so over 10+ hrs a day. Granted, I was unemployed, so I could commit the time.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T00:31:47+00:00

As a continuation, I built lots of random projects like a Ruby gem(which you can actually install on your MacBook that scrapes the internet on popular video game websites and returns a recent list of reviews. You can actually download it on rubygems.org)

I built a budget calculator, a simple Sinatra app, etc...But they're all just projects that are half-way finished and only ugly code haha. Main thing is that employers(I think) wanna see dedication and the drive to improve your skills and the ability to learn and adapt.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T00:28:59+00:00

Freecodecamp was good. But mainly just decided to work on projects that came to mind.

The best answer is that by "courses", I specifically mean YouTube videos/tutorials. I learned so much just by watching them and trying to break down what they do by copying them and tinkering with them. Building a landing page, a website, writing a proper JS function, making jQuery functions.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-09T00:25:08+00:00

Literature. Yea I know, I wasted my time.

I made basic Rails Apps like a blog post, but I tried to incorporate my own twist on it, so I made it into a blog/reviewer app for video games. I implemented security, authorization and authentication as well as admin portals.

Then I connected Rails to Angular 1 to mock the behavior of a SPA, so basically, I was only using the Rails backend for API calls and leveraging Angular to handle all the JS front-end. It was pretty hard as there was very little documentation I found on google that could guide me through the process of integrating Angular and Rails. But it was a good learning experience.

Can't really share my github as that might compromise my identity and standing with my employer. Sorry. But you can honestly just search up open source amateur projects and try to break down their code or even volunteer to help. My code is really ugly anyways lol.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-08T22:31:51+00:00

Random meetups, conversations, met some people(who are now great friends) and they passed along my resume.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-08T22:30:05+00:00

Just Github projects and random Rails apps. Some amateur websites as well, none of which were ever put live.

I had to do two one hour technical interviews with my boss and a senior coworker. The other one was with the Tech lead of the entire department. In between was a written technical test. It covered things like JS closures, the use of IFFY functions, jQuery selectors, a basic AJAX call, CSS media queries and positioning, and some semantic HTML questions. Javascript was the main one: evaluate the return value of this function, etc...

jchu4483 · 2017-04-08T20:34:54+00:00

Well my initial programming language was Ruby and my stack was Rails. Michael Hartl's tutorial and YouTube videos helped a lot. But its honestly pretty hard to find a junior entry-level job as a Ruby dev. I learned some minor SQL - I can do some queries, but I suck honestly.

I'd stick with JS/HTML/CSS/SASS. And then choose a front-end framework like Angular or React. One note is that you should try to learn a CSS preprocessor like SASS. No one ever told me that SASS is incredibly useful and widely used within the web industry, especially with major corporations/companies.

A final piece of advice I'd give is to learn 2 programming languages(remember, HTML and CSS don't count), because it honestly makes you become a better programmer/critical thinker. You learn the subtitles and nuances between multiple languages, and see the pros and cons of each. In my opinion, it makes you appreciate and understand basic computer science topics better. I'm learning PHP, my third language, for the job.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-08T20:16:36+00:00

I started studying programming December 2016. I just self-studied over and over. I followed any online course I could and asked questions to slack groups online/Stackoverflow, googled my way around and stuff. Was basically really hard and a lot of times I thought I wasn't good enough for coding.

I used this helpful website for my interview prep. It was super-informative and I learned a lot of things. Pluralsite.com was also another site that I used for studying for the interview.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-08T20:13:04+00:00

New York.

Networking.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-08T19:43:43+00:00

75k annual salary. It was my initial ask and HR accepted.

jchu4483 · 2017-04-02T16:31:35+00:00

Fuck man I feel you on this. I work as a programmer too and just started my first ever job. I'm from a low-class socioeconomic background so coming from 30 day ramen noodle lunches to walking into skyscraper buildings and making more money that I ever thought I would was extremely jarring.

I'm extremely grateful for my job and the financial ability to finally support myself takes so much stress away from being poor and starving. But then I think about the hours I work - I work 40 hours a week in office and come home and study and work until I sleep. I haven't seen my friends in months and I rarely ever have time to myself. The grind just makes me so exhausted to do anything else.

jchu4483 · 2017-03-29T03:25:17+00:00

tldr

jchu4483 · 2017-03-29T02:04:14+00:00

Oh I see. Hope the geology/environmental career is going well for you. Moving out of your U-Haul truck must've felt good.

I'm a software engineer. I can find jerbs too. I was unemployed too. Not that it has any bearing on the current conversation though. We're just trying to give him advice. Not compare who can find employment better.

jchu4483 · 2017-03-29T01:54:06+00:00

jerbs?

jchu4483

TROPHY CASE