I’m feeling so grateful ! I started coding when I was 8 years old (C, Pascal, Assembly). There was no CS schools, I was supposed to enter an astrophysician cursus. 2 problems : I don’t like astrophysics, and I’m good at maths, but not that level. And that’s how I went on a literary carreer.
18 years later, I discover FCC, and I decide to go for it. 3 months later, I’ve got my front end certificate. Well, I intended to go for data visualisation and back end, when I realised that my LinkedIn profile started to be seen very more often. 2 weeks later, I had 7 interviews (I declined 4 of them, because I live in the west Indies and not in France and didn’t want to move). Some days and 3 succesful interviews later, I was hired as a Drupal Lead Dev in the biggest agency of my island. Quincy Larsson : if you were a woman, I would have kissed you !!! Instead I want to thank you again, and all my fellow campers who were ready to support me to enter american companies. This community is now like my family and I will always stay around !
Thanks to all, @username1001 here are some of my humble advices : LINKEDIN NETWORK : FCC EX STUDENTS EVERYWHERE
About LinkedIn, I talked about it in another post, but here is what I can tell from my own experience ;
Get value of what you learned in FCC, translate it in keywords in the “skills” section (for example : bootstrap, react, jquery…) each technology you’re good at, you should mention. Why ? Because I found out recruiters use scripts that react with the keywords. So choose them carefully !
Every project you built on FCC (your portfolio) must be in your resume and your LI profile.
Writing relevant content in a constant way (you may post once a day, or once a week, but stay constant, this shows some commitment in your domain).
Don’t forget to mention your open source contributions
AND THE MOST IMPORTANT TIP : whenever you get your certificate(s), chose in LinkedIn the places you’d like to work and you’ll see all companies hiring devs and for each of them how many fellow campers were hired. Just kindly write to the FCC fellows that work in the societies you’d like to, and ask them how is the ambiance, the objectives, the salary etc…
ABOUT ENTERPRISE CULTURE AND SELF TAUGHT DEVS
Actually I realised tech enterprise world is made of 2 main streams
Companies that hire only people with CS diplomas. Those companies definitely don’t want to hire someone who didn’t learn all the stuff in a physical school. You may prove them you’re worthful, it doesn’t matter, they still see you as a lucky amateur.
Companies that prefer hiring self-taught people, because they’re fed up with students that don’t become autonomous.They prefer people who learned how to learn and never stop learning new things. This is the kind of companies that proposed me an interview. But you will have to face a technical test. I was afraid of the whiteboard exam, so I practiced hard for that; but finally they gave me 24hours to code a Drupal Module in PHP & JS, and to explain my choices and my coding practices.