Notes on Getting Your First Tech Job
My notes for Mayuko Inoue's video on how to get your first tech job.
Overview
Here are some notes I took while watching Mayuko’s video on how to get your first tech job.
Social Media
- Stay updated with social media
- When a job opens it usually goes really fast
Recruitment Events
- Go to recruitment events
- Companies put a lot of effort into these events
- Often will automatically get a link for the take-home assignment for the interview
- Recruiters want to talk to candidates who can at least pass the computer science fundamentals
- Big companies can have lots of events
- Check LinkedIn for news about upcoming events by specific companies
- Check the company’s YouTube channel for news as well
- Check Eventbrite
Job Sites
- Make sure your LinkedIn profile is optimized with key words
- Example: Make sure you have the words “Software Developer” if that is the job you are looking for
- Be specific in the About section about the specific type of software engineer you are or aspire to be.
- Doing hackathons counts as experience
- Working on open source projects counts as experience
- Internships
- Projects you have worked on
- Name of the project
- Bullet points
- Your accomplishments
- What you did
- How you got to that point
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Use Triplebyte: Engineer Job Search, Refactored.
- Engineering job search
- Companies pay to source for candidates
- HackerRank
- Hired - Job Search Marketplace. Tech Job Hunting Simplified!
- Remote Tech Jobs
Build Relationships
- Build relationships with people
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Join hackathons
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Build relationships with hiring managers and other software engineers
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On LinkedIn, don’t just reach out to managers, reach out to people who were in your shoes
- Reach out to people who have been in the role you are interested in
- See what you can learn from them
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Preparing for the Interview
- Technical skills are important, but not the only way
- You might still get the job if you demonstrate strong soft skills, even if you don’t nail the technical portion
- Soft Skills
- “Can you tell me about a time that you _____?”
- “What did you do?”
- “What was the end outcome?”
- Not a lot of candidates come prepared for this.
- Students end up sharing personal stories
- Interviewers cannot document personal stories, from a legal perspective
- Interviewers want concrete examples and how you navigated that situation
- Prepare 5-7 examples
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Structure them in a STAR method
- Situation
- Task
- Actions
- Results
- rehearse them a few times
- be prepared for follow up questions
- Do not give hypothetical examples
- Technical Skills
- Need to be able to talk through your approach and solution
- You don’t need to have the best technical answer
- Be proactive about asking good clarifying questions
- Sample Problems are intentionally vague
- Be open to hints and feedback
- How coachable are you?
- Focus on more specific roles for resumes and LinkedIn
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Put the best on there
- Whatever you put on your resume is fair game for the interview
- Make sure you are actually good for the skills listed
- Interviewers will calibrate interview questions based on what is in the resume
- It is better to list one thing you are actually good at than 10 things you are iffy on
- When you don’t have a focus, it is hard for the hiring manager to say yes to you
- They need to know how to best utilize you on their team
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References:
- mayuko Video: How to get your first tech job after college