Hey everybody, as you can tell by the title, I got an offer for a paid internship in web dev! My apologies for the sloppy writing - I’ve got a lot to learn before I start this internship and I am going to write this quickly so I can get back to work.
A little background about me: I am a mid 20’s college dropout who has spent the past 7/8 years working low paying, unfulfilling, unengaging jobs. At a certain point I knewI simply cannot live the rest of my life working like this, and decided I was going to try and learn to code. Before I learned about FCC, I decided to teach myself Python (which I really enjoyed - I will be returning to Python after I’m settled in at this internship), but after a bit of research, I decided to try out web dev, and stumbled across FCC. After I signed up, I got straight to work and spent as much time as I possibly could working though the curriculum. I’ll estimate that I spent about 20 hours a week coding for ~6 months. Okay, on to the good part.
I have a friend that had told me the company he works for was looking for a few interns and that I should apply.
Fast forward a week or two, and I am sitting in an office where the walls are made of white board and I am speaking with the lead developer.
Interview was pretty short and straight forward, lasted about an hour, and he asked me questions about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Some I knew, some I did not. He knows I am new to web dev and was very understanding if I didn’t know something - he even taught me a few things too. After that, we went on to the algorithm challenge, which was incredibly simple. Took me about 30 seconds and 4-5 lines of code. Turns out the part I was most worried about was the easiest part. After that I showed him some of the projects I was working on.
Honestly I didn’t think I did too well in the interview. The interviewer definitely found some holes in my knowledge, especially in CSS, and we had to skip an entire portion of the interview because I was not at all familiar with the subject matter (he was asking me questions about cookies and databases). I thought for sure I wasn’t going to get an email back because of this, and I walked out feeling defeated… but sure enough, I just got an email saying that not only was I accepted, they are also going to pay me!
Now I feel I should mention that I know a lot of the people who work at the company, and I would regularly see the interviewer as I am friends with his co-worker. Sure, you can make the argument that I only got the offer BECAUSE I know a lot of people in the office, but I think this is a classic example of “Its not what you know, its who you know”. Networking is just as important as your skillset, and my experience is proof of that.
Not only do I have a gig, the company I currently work for asked me to redo their website the very same day I got the offer! 6 months of running through FCC challenges and working on my own personal projects are finally starting to pay off. While I did not actually finish all of FCC’s curriculum(in fact, I only completed 500-600 challenges and only 3 projects - but I have a ton of other things I’ve built outside of FCC), FCC has been a MASSIVE help and opened my eyes to the world of web dev. FCC - thank you.
Happy holidays everybody