There are many people who have just finished the Computer Science degree or some other "programming school" and have difficulty to find jobs. 😭
These people have no real-life programming experience, but companies usually seek only experience people. 😭
Some of these people will spend months "looking for a job", but during that period they will usually have a lot of free time when they are agonizing on how they will find a job.
Or maybe they are partying 🥳. I don't know.
Some will be ready to invest that time to improve themselves to make themselves more employable.
🤖 If you are one of these and you wonder what could you do, I usually recommend getting involved in an Open Source project and gaining experience that way.
🤖 Others seem to feel that investing time in various "interview exercises for programmers" or "coding challenges". There are plenty of those to choose from.
IMHO Open Source project(s) will give you more real-life experience as you will need to deal with an existing code-base, you will need to communicate with other people,
use version control, issue tracking, etc. Maybe even write documentation and tests.
The "interview exercises" are easier as the tasks are small, well defined, and you write code from scratch. Actually I guess there also "coding challenges" that start out from some existing code and you need to make changes or fix some bug. These are probably closer to real-life examples than the ones where you write the whole thing.
There are probably many communities where people try to help each other on their way to their first job in hi-tech. For example the Maakaf community in Israel.
Do you know other communities where people help each other with the process?
If you recently found your first job, what did you do to improve your employability?
If you are someone who is looking for juniors, what do you think is more important? What should the juniors spend their time on in order to become more employable?
Top comments (1)
Great post - I agree that OSS contributions can )and for me, have) result in a significant amount of professional work. I wrote an article about this: if you'd like to check it out
dev.to/patinthehat/from-contributo...