Today, I want to share a disturbing truth about finding a job. This may just change the way you think about how you find a job, especially if you are starting out.
You ready? Here it goes.
Don't aim to get hired for a junior position. Aim to get hired for an intermediate position.
If you are looking for a frontend developer role, don't look for a junior role. Look for a normal frontend developer job.
This advice may sound counterintuitive. How can you become a frontend developer if you didn't get enough experience as a junior first?
To answer this question, you want to consider what you want and what the company want when you look for a job.
What you want vs what companies what.
When you look for a junior role, what you want is to:
- Learn something
- Build your skills
Maybe in 2-3 years, when you've learned enough, you want to find a better job.
This thinking blows away your chance to get a job because companies don't do charity. They don't want to hire you just to train you. They want to hire you to work for them. That doesn't change even if they are looking for a junior developer.
See the difference between what you want and what they want?
I'm not saying that every company is unwilling to hire and train junior developers. I'm saying they're rare.
The question is, do you want to leave your job search to luck? To finding one company that helps you and trains you and grooms you?
Or, do you want to decide your own fate, and what job you get?
If you want to decide your own fate. You cannot rely on finding one good company. They're rare. You need to wait for someone to pick you.
To be able to find a job anywhere you want to, you need to stop thinknig like a junior developer and start nthinking like a professional. That means you need to train yourself up. You cannot wait for anyone to train you.
You need to learn the fundamentals. You need to learn CSS. You need to learn JavaScript. You need to have the confidence to build anything you can think of. You might not have built them before, but you have the confidence to build them when you need to—whenever someone ask you to build something, you can say "just give me X number of days and I'll get it done".
If you can, ask why you build want to build this? Why this not that? These questions are you have, and that's the attitude you adopt when you are a professional. When you can do these, I don't think you'll have a problem finding any job.
Learning
You need to be able to learn by yourself as much as you can. There are lots of resources, both free and paid resources. You can learn from either, it really doesn't matter.
What's important is you learn how to learn, because 90% of a developer's job isn't to code something they already know. It is to solve problems. When you solve problems, you will uncover things you don't know. When you uncover things you don't know, you have to learn and implement the new thing.
So you're in trouble if you don't know how to learn. That's true even if you are in a junior role—you still need to learn and implement stuff.
Wrapping up
That's how I think about employment.
Like I said, you're not going to love the message today. It's disturbing. But I believe it's something you need to hear.
That's it from me. I hope this video gives you a new perspective to your job search. Good luck with it.
If you need help with JavaScript, consider joining Learn JavaScript, which is a course I'm writing to help you become a good enough JavaSccript developer—it brings you from 0 knowledge to an intermediate/expert level, where you can build components by yourself without copy/pasting other people's code.
Thanks for watching. I hope this video has been helpful.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below and I will try to get back to them as soon as possible.
If you like this video, please hit the subscribe button below so I can send you more videos like this one every Friday. Or better yet, subscribe over at my blog at zellwk.com and I'll send you one article and one video every week to help you become a better frontend developer.
That's it from me. Have a good weekend and see you next week.
Top comments (2)
I am currently finishing my Nanodegree at Udacity and I have been searching near and far for the coveted Junior Dev or even an intern role for those same two reasons you listed.
I found your article because as I prepare to apply for a Front End Dev role, that's entry-level but still considered an "experienced position", I wanted to see if the Dev community had some tips and I stumbled upon your article and it just really made me see my job search more differently.
For someone who is almost done with their certification at Udacity and I am also getting my certification on FreeCodeCamp, do you have any more tips for someone like me?
Hey Donita, here's my best advice: zellwk.com/blog/get-hired/