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?
Latest comments (40)
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.
I had a 3-month internship and a CS degree.
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.
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.
A nice portfolio is always useful 👍💯
Awesome to hear! 👍
Good luck with that 🚀✨
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 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.
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 😉😅
I am still waiting for an opportunity 😅
(Crying)
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
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 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.
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.
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!
one year