@uybinh I’ve tried bidding on freelancer.com and upwork.com , but It’s really hard to get works there. Those places are so crowdy and full of experienced developers.
I’ve tried bidding on freelancer.com and upwork.com, but It’s really hard to get works there. Those places are so crowdy and full of experienced developers.
Yes, they are crowded and full of crappy developer bidding on crappy jobs. But if you keep at it, you can find something. Just keep at it.
@Gilbert1391 I thought that when I finally learn React I’d be ready to apply for jobs again, now I just realized that React is not enough and I need to get more skills.
That depends on what you mean by “enough”. If you know React, there are places that will hire you. I got an interview for a React position with no real professional React experience. When they found out I had a tiny bit of React Native experience, they funneled me to that job because they needed it more and I eventually got the job.
Is that typical? No. But it does happen.
Look at it this way - when you started you chance of getting a job in the next three months was pretty much zero. If you were an amazing dev with lots of experience and a great portfolio with great references and monster interviewing skills, then your odds would be pretty high. Most of us lie somewhere in the middle. The more skills you learn and portfolio pieces you build and the better you get at interviewing, the more your odds will increase.
Your goal is to just keep building and learning and eventually what you are offering and the job market and luck will intersect.
It is true that there are a lot of blogs and bootcamps saying, “Just learn these 5 things and you will get an amazing job!” That’s BS. You need to keep learning. Even after you get hired, you need to keep learning. This is a job where you will always need to keep learning.
I can’t stress interviewing skills enough. From my cubicle, I can hear them interviewing people in skype interviews. And I hear them talking about people after the interview. You would be surprised how much emphasis they put on confidence and likability. I recently heard them decide to pass on a fairly qualified dev because he wasn’t confident in his skills (even though the interviewers rated him pretty well) and because he just sounded “boring” on the phone. They are going to have to spend 40 hours a week with this person. They will spend more time with this person than their wife or husband. Yes, they want someone that is competent, but they also want someone that will be easy to work with and has a good attitude and sounds like an interesting person around the office. I’m becoming more and more convinced that interviewing is a key skill holding a lot of people back. YMMV. I had one guy who called me back and said, “Sorry, you didn’t get the job but I just wanted to call to encourage you, that you’re on the right path. And it was so nice to talk to you.” He went on to complain that many of the people he interviews, it’s like trying to talk to a log.
Practice interviewing. Look up common interviewing questions and answer them. Not just a vague idea in your head, but actually answer them out loud. Use good vocal inflection and sound excited. Practice with friends. You don’t want to sound arrogant, but you want to be confident in what you can do and eager to learn what you don’t know, and maybe confident that if you work hard you can learn it. In some places there are meetups just to practice interviewing. There are online groups for that too.
And when they ask you how much you expect to get paid, don’t undersell yourself. For a long time I was wishy-washy in my answer to this. Then I researched the market. I then answered, “When I look around I see that most of these types of jobs are getting $xxk per year. But the opportunity to learn and be a part of a good team is more important to me than the money.”
And at the end of the interview, a great question to ask is, “What could I do better in the interview? How could I better prepared for a job like this?” Not only does that show that you are interested in improvement, but I got some great feedback from that. Some guys were more than happy to talk to me for 20 minutes with career advice.
Sure I could just go ahead and apply for jobs randomly, but I find that a very exhausting experience which relies a lot on luck and I don’t want to rely on luck.
I didn’t apply randomly, per se. I targeted Node, React, and React Native because those were areas where I felt I was specialized (if not as experienced as I could be.) I tried not to target things that were clearly out of my range. I searched locally. Then I realize I should expand out and try some other geographical areas. It wasn’t easy, but I eventually got a gig.