Most of us have seen or heard about exaggerated requirements for entry-level positions, like 5 years of experience on the 3-year-old framework.
I wonder how experienced were you when you got your first dev job and if you remember how well did you meet the requirements for the position?
None. Well, I had a degree in Software Engineering. I was really lucky that I got a job 5-6 weeks after finishing my degree. Right place, right time kinda thing. All it asked for was an understanding of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS. They didn't use a framework as such, but had their own for their own product.
I worked for them for years. It was a great product, and I'm glad the company is still doing well. The down side was I never really got exposed to "proper" frameworks until about 7 years ago, so it held me back a little bit in some areas. It does give me a big advantage for software planning though. My thinking is not constrained by the standards of specific frameworks.
When I am looking for an entry level developer, I want to know if they know some of the language, can think for themselves, and follow instructions. I don't care about framework knowledge, degrees or whatever mad requirements jobs have. Frameworks can be learned. Degrees aren't for everyone. Experience comes with someone taking that chance. I don't mind being that chance. Afterall, someone was there to take a chance on me once (and a few jobs since).
That's really good and I'm happy for you 👍💯
You are a good person, I really appreciate your willingness to take a chance on people. The standards for entry-level developers are getting higher by the second and it is really comforting to see people like you.
I think a lot of companies want people with so much experience because they think it will lower their costs. What they forget is
experience !== good. A lot of experience but no direction might get the job done, but it might also bring in a lot of bad habits. Especially in a junior role.I got one directly after my degree, it was a graduate role, so they expected someone that would need shaping and more mentoring than a more experienced developer.
The general interview was centred around knowing some C, the basics, and then some general problem solving elements.
Did you work with them as an intern before (while studying), so they took you right away after graduation? Or did you apply to a brand new company?
I applied directly to the company, they were looking to take on new graduats. They had an established intern format by the time I left (some 8 years later after working across products and working up to a team lead.) and then generally employed the interns but when I joined this program was in it's infancy.
I was very lucky (or they saw something they liked).
Awesome to hear 👍😉
I am learning development for a year now and no recruiter/company would care enough to read my resume. So, it is a really interesting question and I would love to read comments from more experienced devs.
Exactly, thus the discussion 😉 Together we learn 👍
A nice portfolio is always useful 👍💯
Awesome to hear! 👍
Good luck with that 🚀✨
1.5 years of "experience". I got my first part-time dev job through my internship.
During my 2nd year of college I was required to do 20 weeks of internship. At the end of my internship my supervisor offered me a 0-hour contract as he was so impressed by my progress. During this time I did HTML, CSS, PHP and jQuery (this was 2012-2014)
By the time I left that company to do exams I had over 1 year of experience in the field.
What's a 0-hour contract?
A 0-hour contract in the Netherlands is a type of contract where you're not given any set hours and you can just come in and work whenever you want, can or are called for it and you get paid for the hours you did work.
Very nice!
Directly after graduating from college. I had been an intern there for around a year before getting a full time position, and had also helped launch a tech startup while I was still in college, which was amazing experience.
A whole lot of none! I was lucky and got recruited pretty fresh out of bootcamp. The company that hired me was pretty good at being aware of my skill level and gave me tasks that were challenging, but I could handle. The seniors were also great with helping me out if I didn't understand something or got stuck. My love of C# did give me a good leg up - it's much easier working with a language you know than lots of brand new stuff!
It was 2 months after I finished a coding boot camp and I had been learning by myself for 6 months before that. To be fair though I met the company recruiter at a job fair and was able to bedazzle him with my wit and charm 😉😅
None - I have no College degree what so ever. I was in law enforcement for 10 years and wanted career change. I went to Fullstack Academy and got a job as a software engineer shortly after completing that boot camp.
Commercial experience, none. I got my very first job first year into my university. Basically front desk at internet Cafe but also involved networking and Linux security. Before that I had about a year writing game cheats in assembly during high school and some basic c++.
Same job got me started in basic web development and following that landed my first gig as a webdev
Wow, from Assembly and C++ to Web dev 😮 Must be piece of cake now 😀😀
Well, i never did any serious work, just basic cheating tools, mainly modifying memory locations for running games or altering saved games just before disk writes. Simpler times back then :) it helped a lot in college though
I started programming at a very little age, about 12 years old, I'm not sure if I can count all of those years as experience but for sure it's helped me to get my first job 3 years ago. today I have about 3 years of work experience, in the fintech and cyber fields
I get my first job almost 5 years ago and I'm still on the same company. I remember I entered by a kind of "bootcamp" for people who had no experience before, so I choose the "javascript" specialization between 2 options the were offering (the other one was java/BE).
After I could enter in the company, I worked with Durandar (a framework based on KnockoutJs, RequireJs and JQuery) for 3 years until I changed the account I was working and started with Angular (that time we worked using v4/5)
I don't regret having worked with durandal because we managed to get a good project following what we belived were "good practices" related to folder structure and how to handle data.
I started into development in January of 2015, with what felt like no actual professional experience. I had helped make old websites, I had done automation work for a year or two and understood that process pretty well, but development wise I felt like I wasn't ready.
My first programming job was actually a position change. I worked Quality Assurance at a company as a tester and automation script writer for 2.5 years and when I asked about the position as a programmer they said "you already know our products really well, so you'll be a good fit." I was so happy to have the chance, but was not ready for how much I had to learn. College taught me desktop application development in mostly VB.net, and then some basics in Java. I went into this position with school experience, and started writing web applications in Java with the Grails framework. (Version 2.4.3 if i remember correctly)
So did I meet the requirements? No. They were willing to teach me, and that's the only real reason I got in. Now I've switched jobs and moved up and I try to mentor as many people as possible because I know coming into a new company, a new field, or any big change is hard.
0, and I think I was quite OK. To be fair need to mention it was a guy hiring an extra dev to help out on PHP project with sys administration (it was not DevOps then). Built vanilla JS HTML and CSS with PHP scripts automating some sync processes and admin dashboard. Next job was real after about a year with previous job.
I started with an internship (no grad here) and transitioned into a one year contract, before finally getting a permanent position. I only had a few months of c# experience and javascript prior to the internship.
Ive been at the company since 2018 now, and still love it. I have also recently more or less been appointed with most cloud and devops related tasks within my department (12 ish devs)
I had a software engineering degree, two Udacity Nanodegrees, two mobile apps and a number of smaller web projects under my belt, and still had a rough time landing a job! I'd say my 'experience' was a little more than a year when I got my first job.
I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering and landed my first job designing a 53 parallel processor system for processing music call the Muse Console. My only experience was that I designed my own computer in 8th grade and wrote the operating system (as a TIL) in 9th grade and blew it up in college (I didn’t understand the need for a voltage regulator on my power supply. I found out quickly).
Only seen this now, 2 weeks late. I started as a technical content editor and learnt some coding from that. The company I work for gave me a chance to learn dev work and took the time to support me through the learning process. I worked hard for my first year putting in 12+ hour days at times to learn all I needed to learn but it has been worth it.
In London there are schemes for young people called Apprenticeships that help them get into the industry without the headache of technical experience but with the education needed to talk into an interview and later on education through work. So my level at 19 years old I had was maths, english, 2 weeks of codecademy (HTML, CS, JS), and an ecommerce project (PHP, JS, HTML, CSS, MySQL) I built with treehouse that I showed off in interviews with my computer. It took me 4 interviews to get my technique right for expressing desire, confidence, and problem solving.
I am still waiting for an opportunity 😅
(Crying)
My situation was, I have a degree in Electronic/Electrical Engineering + Computer Science. In short, I am a Software Engineer developing firmware for electronic applications. I also learn Web Development creating libraries and frameworks for frontend. UI Design as well.
When I get my first Web Dev job, the job only needs my few percentages of my experience. It was an easy job, to be honest, but very tedious workloads. I learn how to use Kanban to organize and keep tracking my tasks more efficiently.
one year
I had 5 months experience of teaching myself and doing some freelance work online.
I did an IT engineer graduation and then found my first dev job. It's funny because I worked with technologies not even mentioned during graduation.
I had a 3-month internship and a CS degree.