6 Tips to Land Your First Junior Developer Job

Career Advice
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6 Tips to Land Your First Junior Developer Job - Click to read full article.

I’m asked this question quite often by new, up-and-coming programmers who are looking to get their foot in the door. Programming itself can be pretty hard as it is, much less trying to land your first junior developer job on top. The majority of companies want one to two years of working experience, which can also be a deterrent to qualified candidates.

  1. ABC — Always Be Coding
  2. If You Aren’t on LinkedIn, You’re Doing Something Wrong
  3. Network With Other Developers
  4. Do Some Recon
  5. Don’t Be Scared — Just Ask
  6. Take an Internship
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This is very…generalistic, i can’t see much value to it. After every single sentence you can add “or maybe don’t” to it.

Code everyday, sure, but if you’re not learning anything new nor doing anything relevant for your portfolio, go grab a piece of cake and watch some movie, it’s definitely a better use of your time than doing a to-do app for the seventh time this week.

If you’re not on linkedin, maybe where you live linkedin isn’t so relevant and you’re just wasting your time, after all the US isn’t the rest of the planet, and maybe you don’t like linkedin’s use of your data. It’s not a necessity.

“Network”, or maybe don’t, after all getting friendships in order to suck them dry of a job is quite the low move.

“Just ask”, but learn to do your research, after all you won’t be able to ask in a deadline.

I know it sounds grumpy, but all of these medium posts about condescending people who think they own the world are most of the time nothing more than self promotion. A LOT of these posts are really good, but an equal amount are nothing more than a person trying to create an online presence for themselves by saying anything that comes to mind. Working is a very personal aspect of life, and with any personal aspect, you have to be careful about it and respect yourself, learn about the industry and do things at your own pace. If you’re good, people will hire you, companies want good developers among them, you don’t really HAVE to follow any silly guideline, it’s not a model contest.

Among the things outside help is valuable, i think tips on making a good curriculum and where to look for work is pretty essential, but advice like “go to conferences, make connections!” is really…shallow, doesn’t mean anything, you can’t force yourself into friendships and it’s not worth it in the long term for most people. “Coding everyday” is good advice, unless you don’t know the basics, then study everyday because you won’t be able to code anything meaningful.

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With any article you have take it with a grain of salt. It might apply you or not. It’s just one author’s opinion.

Yes, I am aware Campers come from all over the world.

LinkedIn is not the defacto for networking with professionals. There are other websites that are geared towards professionals in different parts of the world.
12 Professional Networking Alternatives to LinkedIn

As a Dev, you need to have a network of other Developers to help with technical issues, leads for jobs, etc. I have a network of other Developers who for public and private agencies. You can know everything. This kind of sounds like our FCC community.

Every Developer should be learning something new almost everyday. You might find out you implemented some code incorrectly, or there was a better solution. You won’t know unless you are learning and leveling up.

My opinion, you only get out life what you only put into it.

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I don’t think network means to make friends- it’s more business related acquaintances. Linkedin is a means to do this without speaking to a person face-to-face, which is helpful in very rural (spread out population) or urban (very condensed population). It’s an article that is meant to reach to many people, you may not agree with the tactics- but they have proven effective. People are more likely to hire someone they know/heard about/or researched than someone they’ve never seen before. However, I do appreciate the original post and your response to it, because it shows two opinions on the same methods of how to get a job.