I've heard of hundreds of applications with no success, as well as cases with no applications at all thanks to internships or contacts in the field.
Thought this could be motivational for beginners, so could you recall how many applications did it take for you to find your first developer job?
Top comments (9)
It felt like forever before I got my first dev job, but it was probably only eighteen months of applying for jobs after graduating.
I can't remember how many applications I sent out. The main problem was I was trying to stay in the city I went to university in, which at the time didn't have a lot of programming work. In the end I moved away, to get my first job.
I would guess I sent out a dozen or so applications.
37 . I tracked my applications meticulously so I'd know when to follow up. Many of them were for remote jobs and at the time I didn't have any experience with remote work and I was also still a junior developer on the cusp of intermediate, so I didn't have much to offer over other candidates. In the end, I found a (relatively) local company who gave me a shot while allowing me to work remotely most of the time. I learned a ton, made some good friends, and eventually moved on, but that team is still the gold standard against which I measure other teams.
I am a high schooler , i have over 2 years of freelancing exp in MERN stack ,
i coulnt even find an internship that wouldnt underpay me , leave alone for jobs who are asking for masters in tech.
Ofc the internship or job would help me in my college application
Definitively in the hundreds, and I was applying for anything (full time "job" for months). I somehow got an in person interview for a senior position. I didn't pass it for obvious reasons, but they liked me so when there was an opening for a junior position they called me back.
I kept track, I made a chart of 100 squares every time I applied for a job I'd put a sticker on a square. I filled the 100, I think I was somewhere around 130 before I got an offer. Thankfully it was an amazing job and 18 months later I'm still there.
I should caveat that a lot of those 130 jobs were not "serious" applications. I was applying for a lot of jobs through StackOverflow but I've come to view that as a waste of time compared to actually writing a cover letter and trying to network with real people. It's a huge time suck but those were the only jobs I ever heard back about let alone got.
None, I was working as a technical content editor and was doing well at the technical side so I was offered the opportunity to upskill to dev. That first year was rough since I was spending a lot of time outside work hours learning about dev but it was worth it. It is great to work for a company that truly cares about it's people and is willing to help them upskill.
About 50 positions. I only passed 2 coding interviews.
My number was 2. I didn't let the numbers of done project bother me. Just made 2 or 3 projects but did it over and over again.
Sometimes only 1, sometimes not even I have many solid opensource projects at Github. Well... Depends.