How do you know when you are ready to apply to jobs?

I won’t be ready for another few months but I’ve watched a lot of people on youtube say apply early. I’m curious as to when exactly is early and when is too early?

For front-end, I’d say if you know HTML5, CSS3 (along with: media queries, one of the 3 major preprocessors, and Flexbox or Grid), JavaScript (ES5 and ES6), Node.js/NPM, Git/GitHub, Webpack, Chrome devtools, and one of the front-end frameworks/libraries (Angular, React, or Vue), you’re job-ready.

Basically that should mean you can build a fully responsive SPA (in Angular, React, or Vue) that consumes from an API and know how to deploy it. If you’re not at this point yet, I’d recommend holding off on applying to jobs until you get there.

If back-end is your goal instead, I’d say you should be able to build an API via both REST and GraphQL and know how to deploy it, along with being able to interface that API to both SQL and NoSQL databases.

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I fear there is no precise answer to this topic, since it’s hardly measurable by itself.

The most honest answer I can give you is to make an honest self evaluation and speculate whether someone would pay for what you can offer.

However my personal opinion is that, if you reached a point where you start wondering such things, perhaps the time has come to challenge yourself and start sending out application, as they say:
“there’s no better teacher than experience”.

On this topic, you can find many code challenges and take-home project on github.
You can start looking at some of those and see if you would be able to solve them.

An example after searching “challenge” and filtering for “javascript”:

disclaimer: I am by no means associated with AdaSupport, that was just the first match :slight_smile:

Good luck and happy coding.

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I’m curious… What metric are you using to determine that you are not ready?