How to land a software engineering job

For a long time I’ve wanted to become a dev but I took a lot of wrong steps. Today, I got my first offer and I want to help others land an offer too.

1. Personal Projects

While personal projects are a lot of fun they are just that, personal projects. Don’t get me wrong, personal projects are great ways to develop your skills and make useful stuff for yourself. But they won’t help you land a job, most go unfinished and, since you’re still learning, your code will be a mess which doesn’t bode well for you.

Make them if you want to make something cool for yourself, but not to land a job.

2. Angel.co

What do you want to do? What languages do you want to use? Look at the job requirements for your dream jobs and see what development stack they require. Angel.co is a great website to find software engineering jobs, it’s how I landed mine. Personally, I did Python with a leaning toward automation, so tools like Selenium, and the requests framework, a little bit of Javascript.

3. Open Source

Now that you’ve figured out what development stack you need to learn for your dream job, contribute to open source projects on GitHub that use it. The bigger projects will tell you how to contribute properly, how to format your code, how to do everything you need to do and, if you don’t know, ask.

4. Apply

Contribute to open source projects as much as you can and be consistent. Consistency is key, after 6 months of consistent contributions you can start applying. Don’t be selective, apply everywhere.

Conclusion

This may seem pretty obvious, but it wasn’t to me. I spent a lot of time working on personal projects and designing apps in sketch. Also, don’t just take any offer, vet the company first. I know it can be exciting but you don’t want to work in a bad environment because you weren’t patient.

Try your hardest, be patient, consistent, and persistent. You’ll land it.