Hi Guys,
I wanted to ask about something that I was thinking for the past couple of days.
I have been looking for a junior front end developer job for some time now.
I was able to get to a couple of interviews.
The problem seems to be at least in my country that there are a lot of candidates for one junior position.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of things I could improve and I note down all of the questions I can’t answer. The community here was also great at helping me land more of those.
The thing is, in my region at least, there are around 300 people for one junior front end position. And the requirements seem to get a bit ridiculous for a front end position at least. That is to the point that they will require Java knowledge to apply or technical education.
One day (It seems by mistake) somebody has invited me for junior full-stack position thinking I know PHP. I do not know PHP at all. The front end questions were easy and the PHP test (they gave me the test despite the fact I told them I do not know PHP so I still tried to complete it) I was able to google and find quite quickly. I started to search for those kinds of " junior full stack/web dev" offers after that and it seems there are a lot more of those in my region (in past 1 month there were 4 junior front end positions and I can see there are around 3 web dev ones posted daily).
Do you think I should stick to my guns and master front end, or maybe just give in to market demand
and learn PHP. I was going to start with react right after I finish copule more of my vanilla.js projects, but if there are simply not many job offers in my region I am not sure if this is going to help me fins a job.
Was wondering if any of you had similar thoughts.
Thank you in advance for any advice.
Kind regards
Dawid
The first job is always the hardest and unless you know someone it always seems like you will never get into the work force as a developer. The requirements are always crazy: Junior Front End Developer who has 3 years exp. with JavaScript to include Node, Express, Angular, React, and Vue. Usually its just someone who thinks they know what is needed but actually has no clue. The best thing to do is make yourself stand out, that’s hard to do sometimes. What really helped land my first Dev job was making applications that I used at my job prior. This showed that not only did I know kind of what I was doing but people were also using my stuff. So I had others who could talk about my work ethic and methods to solve a problem, of course they didn’t know what I was doing so it was usually just ‘Yeah he’s great at this’, which I most definitely was not.
As for PHP, I know a little bit about it but I mainly use Node and Express. If you have a good knowledge of JavaScript it is definitely easier to learn another language. But I would focus on one language at first, then focus on transfering that knowledge into another language. Once you have a good grasp on JavaScript look into a framework, since they are used everywhere nowadays.
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Ye you are probably right. I will just focus on the JavaScript and try to master it.
The idea with doing apps concering your current job is also good I will think about what would be a good fit.
Thank you for your advice on this.
My last job, before I got a Dev job, I made a few things but the better of the projects was a daily agenda app. So my team could just walk into the office and see what needed to be done instead of asking my boss what had been done and what needed to be done. It was definitely not the best thing, she had to change out the items through the HTML. Looking back at it now there are about a million and one things I would change about it but it worked and I could show it off.
I think setting a goal of “mastering” Javascript in a few months is a bit tough. Even if you live, eat and breath it, it’s not something you become a master without years of diligent hands on experience.
Instead it’s a very excellent goal to work with the full stack, slowly and surely pushing yourself to do something beyond your scope daily. Also it’s an excellent idea to go full stack but then apply for front end. Unless they require Graphic Designer/UI skill (in which case you’re better off looking for fresh grad dev positions) the bar is slightly lower to do html5, css, and front end js.
My next piece of advice is after fcc, go udemy and find a stack/framework you’d like. Top choices are Angular (difficult), React (much more intuitive), Vue (very popular with beginners, very flexible). If you prefer to do everything in JS and skip frameworks and bootstraps that’s actually great to have under your belt (you’ll learn to skip bootstrap, jquery, etc).
This would then be your bible. https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS
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