I recently left my job as a QA manual tester to pursue a role as a developer. The main reason why I left is because I was told I would be able to get involved in the technical side of things, and that never happened. I’m a self-taught front-end developer and have been doing projects from before I even got the job as a tester. It’s been two months since I left my job and although I am getting interviews I haven’t had an offer yet. It is really frustrating but I’m not sure what to do… Any advice would be helpful 
Well, getting that first job is insanely difficult.
We know nothing about you so it is kind of hard to give you some input. You might consider posting your resume and portfolio here (redacting any sensitive information). A link to your github might be nice.
Another piece of advice that I have is to ask at the end of the interview, “Hey, thanks for your time. I’m still trying to learn this process. Do you have any advice? Things I could do better, what I should work on to make myself a better candidate?” Not everyone will take the time, but some will.
If you’re getting interviews but not offers, then it may be that your materials look good, but that you are struggling with the interviews. That could mean either that you’re not good at the process of interviews, or that your knowledge level isn’t what they are expecting. I would recommend practice interviews and some coding challenges. Or it may be that you are nailing them but it’s just the law of averages - they have 50 candidates so 49 are going to be disappointed.
How do you think things are going in the interviews? Do you feel that you are communicating well? Do you feel that you are giving off a persona of someone they would like to sit in a cubicle next to? Do you feel you are nailing the technical questions? (And just to be clear, not all interviewers are expecting you to nail the questions perfectly. Sometimes they deliberately put in difficult things to see how you handle stress and work the problem. My first job was one where I couldn’t solve the last problem - though I did say how I’d solve it if I could remember how to use bitwise operators - better than nothing.)
At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I once wrote up a doc with my thoughts on getting the first job.
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Thank you so much for taking your time to reply to my post, I genuinely appreciate it. My GitHub is here aminatakabba (Aminata Kabba) · GitHub and my portfolio is here https://www.aminatakabba.com/.
I often times get past the first stage but coding tests in the UK are very different I think. One of the interviewers asked me to do a Whack a mole game, another told me to build a Terminal game using a Google Books API, another told me to answer a couple of JavaScript questions, I did all these correctly but I still don’t get passed the second stage. I’ll have a proper read through your getting a job repo, hopefully, that will help me.
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to replay.
Cool.
Keep in mind that I am a very picky reviewer.
I don’t have much to say about the github - except that I would not advertise yourself as “self taught” (which should be hyphenated anyway). For many people that might have a negative connotation - why make that your first impression? When they see your education, they’ll figure it out.
On your portfolio…
Landing page…
It looks pretty good. A few thoughts.
Again, “self taught” - maybe. And proof read - " A self taught web developer with the hability to make your dreams come true" - “hability” is not a word. OK, there is a word “hability” but it sounds very old-fashioned, and most people don’t know it so they will assume it is a typo. (I’m assuming that - I don’t live in the UK, but my spell checker flags it.)
What are you hoping to get. You have a few seconds to get information to them. What type of position do you want. I would want to get that in the first line, something like “I am a React developer looking for an entry/junior level position. I am open to relocation and remote work.” or whatever.
The About section …
I guess if you have to discuss “self-taught”, then this might be a good place to do it. I wouldn’t emphasize it, though.
“uptodate” is not a word, should be “up-to-date”.
The icons for your technologies - there is some funny business around the edges, like on the HTML one, some white around the edges. I would convert those to transparent. I would list more. I would list every library with which you are comfortable. I might expand it to have a text label and the icon. I might more this to “Education” or create a “Technologies” section - this is one of the most important pieces of information they want. I might even move it to the landing page.
The Projects section…
I like it for the most part.
I would make the spacing between rows more consistent.
I would round the corners of those boxes a little. Not much, even a few pixels will make things look unconsciously less “brutal”.
I took a look at the Instagram app. Make sure you change the default app title and icon (on the window tab).
I took a quick look at the code - I didn’t see any red flags.
You don’t need to tell them what you are working on. They only care about what you have finished. To me that just gives the impression that you don’t have confidence in what you’ve finished, that you need to tell them what you will do in the future. I don’t think it gains you anything, but possibly leaves a bad impression.
I think I’d want some more variety in the types of apps.
Education…
How are Mechanics and Electromagnetism relevant?
Proofreading - " Scineces"?
I might make this more of a list and mention some of the programming courses. Did you finish any? Maybe you haven’t done anything that organized so it may not work.
Contacts:
I wouldn’t include your address. It’s not even a real address. Unless you are telling them that you only want to work in the that neighborhood. In fact, I wouldn’t even mention Birmingham unless you are only interested in working in or from there.
The menu bar should have a background, or something that keeps it from overlaying the content as you scroll. If you scroll down to where there is white under the menu bar, you can’t see it.
Yeah I had to do a whack-a-mole game for a company once.
Yeah, you often have to go through a lot of these types of things. I probably did these for months and months until I gradually got better at interviewing and honed my portfolio, etc. Try to look at every interview as a learning opportunity.
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