New Software Engineer Rejected 357 Times Before Receiving a Job Offer
businessinsider.com
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Computer science background, but I had to get a job really quick post graduation and with no SWE internships, I had to fall back on my experience working part time in my university’s IT department and get an IT consultant job so I could pay rent.
I have open-source projects, I’ve released iOS apps with non-trivial code, I’ve placed top-5 in a dev challenge hosted by a social network with tens of millions of users. I’ve owned production support working for startups while also owning their helpdesk, and I’n general I’ve been able to leverage my background to solve problems that none of my IT colleagues were equipped to solve.
However, this experience with writing software still comes from the context of “IT” and I’ve been struggling to shake that stigma.
I’m not saying I’m not making progress. Just got turned down at the final stage (4/4) of a SWE position for a better candidate, but that’s one of probably a hundred applications I’ve submitted over the course of two months.
Best of luck
A resume is a presentation, it's a communication medium: if you're applying for Software Engineering roles, and you have Software Engineering skills used in a professional context, then that's what your resume should present. My resume is focused exclusively on what I've done and the value I've delivered, my resume makes no mention of job titles. I'd say my application to interview rate is at least 50%... and I'm an idiot, there's nothing remarkable about me.
I'm sure there's a significant difference between us, whether that's the markets we're operating in or our skillsets, but I am confident that with the experience you've described, I could get a Software Engineering job within a week because the market is so desperate for candidates who can deliver. If you've shipped code, no matter the context, you're hireable.
Have you had any sort of feedback / mentorship from people in the industry? Do you have any relationships with Engineering Managers that you can lean on to understand where your issues lie? I'd be very very surprised if the issue isn't entirely with how you're presenting yourself through your resume. The fact that you've got quite far in one process speaks to your suitability as a candidate. If you post your email address here I'm sure some people will be happy to reach out with personalised, actionable advice.
Reading your statement I don’t hear anything about what you have done for other people. Instead of saying I open sources projects, say my open sourced projected were used by X many other people. Or I used my IT experience to cut downtime by 50% so my coworkers didn’t have to come in on the weekends. Maybe tell us why the non trivial code made your iOS app more successful.
It's a great and efficient way to meet people in your area who are doing similar things and have similar interests.
On the flip-side. Since I've had 3 or 4 years of experience on my resume, I've gotten interviews for about 1 in 10 applications I sent out. And been made offers for about 1 in 4 companies that I've started an interviewing process with. With me ending the interview process about half of the time with those due to the company being a bad cultural fit for me (excessive overtime, unorganized group, or low pay).
I have also specifically targeted companies that used the tech stack I had a lot of experience with. And I would say that I typically interview well
When I lived on a sailboat, it was often mentioned in my cover letter just to hopefully stand out. I’d get interviews just because I sounded like an interesting person (what these coworkers said later at company parties) and it would get my foot in the door.
I'd say that the bottom 20% and the top 20% of resumes (that made it past the HR screen) were disappointing during the interview. The best people usually had decent but somewhat awkward or unclear resumes.
It's also a product of my inability to really and truly master interview coding challenges and the pressure of whiteboarding. It's absolutely nerve-wracking and I've choked every single time regardless of how well-prepped I was. At a Google on-site, I was asked to traverse a binary search tree on a whiteboard and then, after doing it successfully, I was challenged to do it without recursion and I was unable to reason about how to do it and I choked completely and utterly. The rest of the interview went pretty well, so I would guess that my whiteboarding fail was the main thing that prevented me from getting hired there.
O'Reilly's interview process did not involve whiteboarding or things like trick questions, toy problems or algorithm stuff. It was a straightforward coding challenge and then a fairly low-pressure conversation about my code, the decisions I made and how I might modify what I implemented if I had more time, or was confronted with a specific challenge.
I think if I now were to enter the job market with the experience I have, I hope that I wouldn't be immediately confronted with things in an interview like traversing binary search trees, or implementing a Fisher Yates shuffle on a whiteboard.
It's definitely possible to find jobs that don't require whiteboarding for their interview process - best of luck when you look again!
They do focus on interviewing skills and the job search in the last week of the program. After that, they offer job search support/counseling for up to six months after graduation.
We had daily check ins with a job search counselor to keep on task and could use the HR support network of instructors and alums for feedback on take home coding challenges and general interview prep. It’s as good as it could have been.
After three months, I would guess about 80% of my cohort had been offered positions. But don’t count on being in that 80%. You’ll need to budget for six months of job searching.
I understand they now have a whole other course just for dealing with the coding interview, but that was not available to me at the time.
The amount I learned in the compressed time frame was everything I needed to do the job as a jr. front end dev.
Unfortunately, the coding interview is a whole other beast and HR spends the last week of the session focusing on the job search and interview skills. They do offer job search support for up to six months post graduation. The job market was competitive in 2018 and I also believe I, a 40-something white man, was demographically challenged in the marketplace. I was also looking for work in the Bay Area, the most competitive location possible - where others of my cohort could be more flexible with regards to location. That, plus my interview skills are weak and I was counting on getting lucky or a fair interview.
Now that everything is remote, I think you can widen your search net to companies outside of SF, leading to hopefully better odds.
I would still highly recommend Hack Reactor but expect your job search may take up to six months (in my case eight!)
Overall, if I notice a company hiring a lot of boot campers, I try to leave and let them have mostly entry level workers. Their product and codebase eventually reflects their staff (inexperienced). If you stick around and shepherd them, you more or less undervalue yourself in the long term. Just let them run wild until the company decides ‘this was a mistake’.
It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. This is a lesson I learned the hard way early in my career where I literally trained my future replacements. Literally went out of my way to train them. This is a seriously amateur move, and a tough lesson to learn since no one wants to be a jaded asshole, but that’s just how the business is.
I've worked with probably a dozen bootcampers over the years and all but one have been great. Some of them were junior at the time, some of them were not. The junior devs were junior devs; nothing wrong with that. If a company is hiring nothing but entry-level/junior devs then yes, they will have problems. But that has nothing to do with bootcamps. And I'm not sure what "try[ing] to leave and let them have mostly entry level workers" accomplishes.
Also, yes, I have a perspective. I think the critique of projection generally dehumanizes anyone’s experience. Yes, of course, this is from my experience - why wouldn’t it be? Businesses drive prices down, create career choke points for anyone involved long term (cost-cutting via capping careers). Now why the hell would help with this?
Parts of the original comment also dipped into reinforcing stereotypes about "bootcampers" that - again - don't hold up in my experience, and could be discouraging to new/potential devs here.
Noobs are cheap but they write noob code. They can be useful if lead by a good senior engineer, but usually when companies start getting cheap, the senior engineers are already half-way out the door.
This literally happened at a start-up I was a foundational engineer at. They started hiring noobs, a year later the entire senior engineering team left after getting stiffed a raise.
They are still struggling to pay off the technical debt.
edit: It might be less sexy to get the A+ cert when you're a teenager and work up from there than to go to a good university and get a CS degree, but we've ended up at the same place but without crazy student debt.
* Pick between high level and low level.
* Low level software appears far more stable and predictable in its hiring with a clearer set of expectations, but it also sets a higher barrier of entry. You can live here for the rest of your life carefully achieving satisfying challenges, but don’t expect any glamour.
* High level software is trend focused. The barrier of entry is low but then so are the expectations and so the work is more about using tools than actually engineering anything. Expect to be aged out of the job. If you aren’t chasing trends and toying with tools your career mobility will erode into nothing.
It didn’t use to be like this, even just a few years ago.
Isn't this to be expected, though? As software consumption becomes more commoditized and de facto standards arise (your basic lookalike business webpage), more and more people are able to easily replicate the feat, and it becomes less about creativity and innovation and more just a matter of rote implementation, like any other manufacturing trade. Interchangeable agencies pumping out cookie-cutter code on an assembly line, with some white-labeling thrown in. Code is just another commodity (you can already produce usable code after a short boot camp, not unlike any other corporate training program).
These days what sells isn't even software engineering excellence, but just advertising bubbles inside walled gardens, driven by divisive and sensationalized content. What little "innovation" there is seems to mostly be B2B-toolchain related, shovel vendors desperately trying to sell to the next big garden, all funded by speculative VC money. It's just another bubble.
On top of that, after COVID, with more companies moving remote, US workers now have to compete with not just each other from different states, but a global labor pool that typically works way harder than we do for much less money. And with income inequality getting worse and privacy concerns growing stronger, there's only so many dollars to be had chasing viral networks of peasants... that well isn't going to run forever.
Like any other maturing business, what gets you the big bucks ends up being charisma, manipulation, and personality... not engineering. Proper "hard" engineering still pays the medium bucks, but most coders aren't like that, just various shades of amateur pumping out mediocre code for other mediocre companies, the same mediocrity most of the world has always run on, no matter their line of work. It's definitely not the 80s anymore, where coding is some elitist white-collar thing. It's just another job.
yes, we do, and we love the USA.
No they don't. Very few US jobs are remote-anywhere.
I'm getting really sick of this cliche. People in the US work their asses off, I've seen developers working long hours at literally every one of my jobs.
Also, time in seat != productivity, and actually time in seat can be extremely harmful to your productivity. We have the research, we have proven this.
Having someone perform "hard work" because:
- They are too incompetent to complete their tasks while also taking care of their health
- They are too economically terrorized to have any power in how much they work
is not a good thing and I am doubtful that it will produce good results.
The Enlightenment was a time of liberalism and leisure, and it was a great leap forward in technology. Hard times do not make strong people, it creates corruption and desperate living.
If "working hard" is such a virtue, why is Japan's economy constantly in the shitter despite their reputation for working long hours?
Manufacturing has gone through the whole outsourcing-to-reshoring rollercoaster, and that's only just starting to touch coding. Give it 10-20 years and it'll be much worse for American devs as domestic competition increases and the rest of the world catches up, all while the advertising bubble bursts and climate refugeeism increases.
I'm not glorifying back-breaking labor, I'm worrying about our future.
Japan is a perfect case in point... that's the kind of society I'd like to avoid, feudalism with perfunctory "pick your favorite lord" days. But as wealth increasingly concentrates in fewer and fewer hands and democracy crumbles, I think that sort of dystopia is unavoidable. Japan got to that point even with deeply entrenched racism and xenophobia, where labor immigration isn't a big part of their workforce... and they still developed those problems. In a society like ours, where capital is free to hire work from basically anyone and anywhere, it's going to be even more amplified.
Bad time to have kids.
"rest of your [professional] life" suggests at least 30 years.
How confident can you be predicting 30 years in the future? Note that 30 years ago was 1991.
30 years ago, in the '90s, the company I now work for developed an important system for a very large customer. It replaced an older system that was developed along with the equipment it runs, introduced in the '60s -- another 30 years prior. My current project is developing a replacement for the current system. It's the exact same system, but written in C to run on a Cortex-M instead of Ada on an Intel.
In another 30 years, we'll probably be re-implementing the exact same system, but written in Rust to run on a RISC-V chip.
Don't expect much in the way of compensation either -- just offers from medical device companies willing to pay about half of what a Ruby Rockstar or Node Ninja makes in the enterprise.