I have one word that sums up the journey to getting a job and that would be persistence. I am not writing this article to brag but I am writing to inspire.
I started coding freshman year of high school when I made the decision to take the path of vocational education. Vocational education for anyone that isn’t aware is where you learn a career skill or trade alongside your traditional high school education. At the vocational school I attended I learned all the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript. I didn’t get taught how to build APIs or use Javascript frameworks so I set out to teach myself.
At the start of 2019 I decided that I was going to dedicate every spare moment I had to learning and getting better. This meant that I woke up at 5am everyday to code before school this also meant that anytime that wasn’t spent with friends, family or work I was ultra focused on coding.
By May 2019 I started to pull together my portfolio of a few projects that I made in angular and start to build my resume. I also did some mentoring sessions with a senior developer that really helped me define the path that I would need to take in order to get to where I wanted to be. So from June until September I applied to every single job that I could find on linkedIn that fit my ability (363 to be exact).
I had my first ever technical interview in september 2019, 4 months after graduating high school. I studied for an entire week reviewing JS fundamentals and whiteboarding. Long story short I didn’t get that exact job but I stayed persistent and continued to apply for jobs everyday.
I applied for a job that I wasn’t qualified for just hoping that someone would see my resume and I could tell my story and show my work. Next thing I know I am talking with the head of development for the company and having another technical interview. This interview goes very well and I fly down to check out the office and meet the team.
That brings us to where I am now. I am currently working for a company in Louisville kentucky where I am developing products for the home healthcare field.
Top comments (22)
Congratulations ... :D
Thank you!
Your story is a little bit like mine. Well done!
Interesting! I don't usually hear that often but that's great.
Hey man, love hearing about this kind of stuff. Simply because I also went down that same path. This year actually. I had my final high school exam on the 27th of June and after a few months of hustling for interviews I landed a position at an aerospace consultancy company in Milan. I started on the 16th of September. Now I'm almost at 3 months into a job that I don't plan on leaving any time soon.
I'm currently working on a c#/c++ stack making windows apps for all devices, but I can see I'll likely get to work with react, node and go in the future too.
Self taught for the win.
Keep it up man.
Love to hear it!
Well done.
Your story is of hard and work and persistance.
Im yet to get my first job as a dev, so thanks for the tips u mentioned in your article.
Thank you! Reach out to me on twitter I'd be happy to answer any other questions or chat about development.
Will do so, thanks.
Great story mate, in that precise boat right now.
Reach out on Twitter id love to help!
Well done!!
It was really interesting to read your story.
I had one question, what were the things or thoughts that made you stay persistent? What was your motivation?😁
Thanks so much!
To answer your question about what kept me motivated was that I didn't want to go to college because I'm not the biggest fan of sitting in classes that I am not interested in. So my promise to myself is that I would not attend school but work on learning something new everyday and continuing to improve my skills. The thoughts that I had running through my head were that I could do what I wanted as long as I kept continuing to grow as a developer.
Thanks for answering 😁
In case I want to talk to you in future, how would that be possible?
Follow me on twitter my messages are open
thank you ♥️
yow congrats bro. :)
Thank you!
Congratulations. Keep up the studying and you'll go very far :). One thing you'll learn to love that will help you accelerate in your field are design patterns + algorithms.
Have fun!
Thanks so much! Im starting to get more focused on the quality of code and the the art of writing things a certain way. I’ve also learned that being good at debugging is a very underrated skill that I think more up and coming devs should focus on.
A well-deserved reward for hard work and persistance. Congrats!
Thanks so much!