Yesterday my job search journey came to an end... finally! Although it only lasted 3 weeks, I was already feeling pretty burned out. In this post, I'll go really deep into how the process went and what students coming out of MakerSquare will most likely face from my experience and also pointers to hopefully help people stay sane.
But let's start with my stats:
I probably formally applied to about 30 places (sent resume). This was mostly through Indeed and Angellist. I applied to all types of development: backend, frontend, design, data, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. I mainly avoided languages that seemed old (personal preference... wasn't really interested in .NET, Java, C++). If I include jobs or companies that I expressed interest in (one click on Angellist) that'll probably be 30 ish more.
Interviews
Onsite/coffee: 6
Phone: 11
Codetest/tech interview: 4
Offers: 3
Rejections: 3
Surprisingly enough, networking also helped me a lot both in terms of opening doors for jobs and getting amazing support whether it be about future career decisions or improving my tech knowledge. I got an interview through someone I worked with during Startup Weekend who really liked my work ethic. I became friends with a girl that came to demo day and who I also ran into at a Rails meetup who really pushed for me to get an interview at her company and when that didn't work out, she introduced me to her mom who was also hiring. Contacting people on Linkedin is great too. I got coffee with a Colgate alum the other day that is the COO of an amazing startup here in Austin who gave me amazing career advice and invited me to his company's taco Fridays. I'm now friends with two of the founders of another startup who I also met at Startup Weekend and kept running into at meetups. I've become close friends with someone who I met initially because he was a mentor at Startup weekend. Now we occasionally party together and I drag him to hackathons but he also gives me valuable big data pointers and collaborates with me on my playlist recommendation engine app. The tech community in Austin is so friendly, and if you're friendly back people will like you and will naturally try to help you.
One thing I had to really get used to was to ditch any emotions. I knew I was going to have a hard time dealing with rejection (I overthink things) but you will waste a lot of time and lose motivation if you let things get to you. I had a couple times in which people would express interest in me and contact me but would suddenly stop talking to me (especially recruiters... try to avoid them).
Another advice is to really be able to make it apparent that you genuinely enjoy coding and show passion about your own projects and about tech. On one of my onsite interviews, my blog was brought up and the interviewer said that he felt like he already knew everything about me. He also liked the fact that I was keeping up with tech news on Twitter because I usually retweet like crazy.
Some technical questions that were asked:
- What is object oriented programming? (asked twice)
- Is Ruby a dynamic language?
- What new features were added to HTML5? CSS3?
- How does two-way data binding work?
- What response do you get back from a POST request?
- What is a polymorphism?
- What is a module?
- What techniques can you use to increase time efficiency when running a lot of data?
- What is AJAX?
- Why is it useful to pass in a function within a function in JavaScript?
- Write a method that takes in a number as an input and outputs true if it is prime (What is the Big O? How do you make it faster?) and lots of other algorithm questions similar to this one.
It's also usually not effective to apply to jobs posted more than a week or two before. Most of the replies I got from companies were when I applied to positions that was posted within the past 3 days. Also, out of all the places that responded to me, about 80% of them were places I wrote a cover letter to. I always included a blurb about what I like about their specific product and talked about the specific company's culture. If it were on Angellist, I made sure to add a quick note about why I wanted to work at that particular startup and why I would be a great fit for one of the positions.
And that's about it. I wanted to get it it out of the way, so I took a very fast-paced approach which might not be for everyone (applied to all of these places in a week and a half, and interviewed on average for 2-3 companies every day for the last week and a half). It was honestly stressful trying to study up on each company before the interview. But it payed off in the end because the application process sucks and I'm done fairly early haha.
But let's start with my stats:
I probably formally applied to about 30 places (sent resume). This was mostly through Indeed and Angellist. I applied to all types of development: backend, frontend, design, data, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. I mainly avoided languages that seemed old (personal preference... wasn't really interested in .NET, Java, C++). If I include jobs or companies that I expressed interest in (one click on Angellist) that'll probably be 30 ish more.
Interviews
Onsite/coffee: 6
Phone: 11
Codetest/tech interview: 4
Offers: 3
Rejections: 3
Surprisingly enough, networking also helped me a lot both in terms of opening doors for jobs and getting amazing support whether it be about future career decisions or improving my tech knowledge. I got an interview through someone I worked with during Startup Weekend who really liked my work ethic. I became friends with a girl that came to demo day and who I also ran into at a Rails meetup who really pushed for me to get an interview at her company and when that didn't work out, she introduced me to her mom who was also hiring. Contacting people on Linkedin is great too. I got coffee with a Colgate alum the other day that is the COO of an amazing startup here in Austin who gave me amazing career advice and invited me to his company's taco Fridays. I'm now friends with two of the founders of another startup who I also met at Startup Weekend and kept running into at meetups. I've become close friends with someone who I met initially because he was a mentor at Startup weekend. Now we occasionally party together and I drag him to hackathons but he also gives me valuable big data pointers and collaborates with me on my playlist recommendation engine app. The tech community in Austin is so friendly, and if you're friendly back people will like you and will naturally try to help you.
One thing I had to really get used to was to ditch any emotions. I knew I was going to have a hard time dealing with rejection (I overthink things) but you will waste a lot of time and lose motivation if you let things get to you. I had a couple times in which people would express interest in me and contact me but would suddenly stop talking to me (especially recruiters... try to avoid them).
Another advice is to really be able to make it apparent that you genuinely enjoy coding and show passion about your own projects and about tech. On one of my onsite interviews, my blog was brought up and the interviewer said that he felt like he already knew everything about me. He also liked the fact that I was keeping up with tech news on Twitter because I usually retweet like crazy.
Some technical questions that were asked:
- What is object oriented programming? (asked twice)
- Is Ruby a dynamic language?
- What new features were added to HTML5? CSS3?
- How does two-way data binding work?
- What response do you get back from a POST request?
- What is a polymorphism?
- What is a module?
- What techniques can you use to increase time efficiency when running a lot of data?
- What is AJAX?
- Why is it useful to pass in a function within a function in JavaScript?
- Write a method that takes in a number as an input and outputs true if it is prime (What is the Big O? How do you make it faster?) and lots of other algorithm questions similar to this one.
It's also usually not effective to apply to jobs posted more than a week or two before. Most of the replies I got from companies were when I applied to positions that was posted within the past 3 days. Also, out of all the places that responded to me, about 80% of them were places I wrote a cover letter to. I always included a blurb about what I like about their specific product and talked about the specific company's culture. If it were on Angellist, I made sure to add a quick note about why I wanted to work at that particular startup and why I would be a great fit for one of the positions.
And that's about it. I wanted to get it it out of the way, so I took a very fast-paced approach which might not be for everyone (applied to all of these places in a week and a half, and interviewed on average for 2-3 companies every day for the last week and a half). It was honestly stressful trying to study up on each company before the interview. But it payed off in the end because the application process sucks and I'm done fairly early haha.