Ask HN: How long did it take you to get your first dev job?

[nerd]

Been hunting for a month, probably 10-20 applications. 1 interview, haven't heard back yet.

Am I being too impatient? How long did it take you to get an offer for your first full-time position in dev? What should I expect?

Edit:

Thanks for the feedback so far!

- I'm applying for work in Vancouver, BC

- I have friends in tech; one works at a company that's aggressively hiring and he gave me a reference. Unfortunately not even an interview from them

- I have some internships/student work experience in dev, but they're lower tier (unheard of companies)

-Been going to meetups/hiring fairs. I've had good discussions with engineers there, hand them my resume, but probably gets lost in a pile/black hole of HR

[RandomSeeded]

3 weeks from (cold) apps to offers, with somewhere around 140 apps. My approach may be mildly unusual, but I think there's a bunch of very good reasons to play it like a numbers game. Off the top of my head:

- The more interviews, phone screens, etc. you have, the better you get at them. Better studying than studying.

- Having a competing offer, even if you don't plan on taking it, is going to make companies you DO want to work for process your application far more quickly...and maybe even be more likely to hire you.

- It takes longer to figure out you probably won't want to work for a company than it does to do the minimal amount of research necessary to whip up a cover letter and send it in. Worst case, they want to interview you, and you get additional interview practice. No point doing the rest of the research on a company until you're at least to a phone screen.

- You'll be surprised at companies you thought you wanted to work for that you don't, and companies you'd never heard of that you fall in love with.

Good luck

[joshavant]

This has always been a difficult challenge when job hunting for me, and I'd be curious to hear how you dealt with this in your application process.

Nearly every job offer I've encountered expects a response within a few days. In practice, I'm usually interviewing at multiple places and at different stages of the interview process at each.

When engaging with so many companies, how in the world do you synchronize all the offers + interviews?

For nearly every offer I've received, I feel that the company might take objection or even not allow me more than 3-4 days to decide on an offer.

Also, how do you manage other companies sensing that you're 'playing the field' with them (which can easily become apparent, when you're employing these tactics)? That's generally not positive for goodwill with someone you might eventually be working directly + closely with.

[exolymph]

I also endorse the high-volume strategy. It's good to have a mostly prewritten cover letter in which you swap out a few things. Fire that off repeatedly, and tailor it more for jobs that you're really interested in.

[quaunaut]

I'd say a few things will move you up the pack extremely fast:

* Do open source. This doesn't necessarily mean "Contribute to some huge project"- I mean, do ANYTHING, commit that to Github, and use that as part of your advertising process.

* Attend local meetups. Doesn't matter how unrelated they are. Is it for designers? Who cares, go and meet people. People throw away resumes, they have a much harder time throwing away a handshake and a smile, especially if you tell them what you've been up to.

* Don't be afraid to show passion for whatever it is you're working on. It also will make you stand out greatly over the other applicants.

I know this is going to be hard advice to take, but learn to be self-sufficient in your development work. Don't know how to get a site online? Learn how to deploy. Pick some technology that seems neat and learn it inside and out- I did this with Docker over the course of 2 weeks and immediately was able to put it to use when talking to employers.

Also, follow up with those Engineers you talked to. Be a squeaky wheel. Especially for the ones who are doing something interesting.

[paulsutter]

How firmly are you set on Vancouver? There's a massive difference by city (EDIT: commenters getting a job in one week are probably in one of the top listed cities)

  Venture-Capital Investment by City

  Rank	Metro	Venture Capital Investment (millions)	   Share of Global Venture Capital Investment
  1	San Francisco	$6,471	15.4%
  2	San Jose	$4,175	9.9%
  3	Boston	        $3,144	7.5%
  4	New York	$2,106	5.0%
  5	Los Angeles	$1,450	3.4%
  6	San Diego	$1,410	3.3%
  7	London	        $842	2.0%
  8	Washington	$835	2.0%
  9	Beijing	        $758	1.8%
  10	Seattle	        $727	1.7%
  11	Chicago	        $688	1.6%
  12	Toronto	        $628	1.5%
  13	Austin	        $626	1.5%
  14	Shanghai	$510	1.2%
  15	Mumbai	        $497	1.2%
  16	Paris	        $449	1.1%
  17	Bangalore	$419	1.0%
  18	Philadelphia	$413	1.0%
  19	Phoenix	        $325	0.8%
  20	Moscow	        $318

From http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/global...

[hibikir]

Sure, but venture capital investment in not necessarily related to actual open programming jobs, and how easy it is to get them. A whole lot of jobs are at huge firms whose main activity is not to make software.

In my experience, San Francisco is not the easiest place to go look for a job, or even close to the best idea: Living expenses are very high, interviewing processes are often very selective in ways that have little to do with job performance, and, in my experience, do not even have that great an average of quality in programming practices: Heck, I'd tell a new grad that, unless they landed in one of the very top employers there, that they'll be far better off in a different city.

(Full disclosure, I currently work remote for a SF company that is pretty popular in HN)

[dboreham]

Write code. Spend as much of your time as possible doing that.

I'd ignore recruiters and fairs. Go to techy talks, meetups etc. Don't hand outo a resume. In fact you don't need a resume except for HR filter purposes (you need one, but it won't be the reason you get a job --- not having one or having a poorly written one can get you nixed by HR/management). Engage in discussion with technical people you meet who look like they have hiring influence. Talk about your project (see above: write code). Also ask them about their projects. Get their email and ask if they mind if you connect on LinkedIn. If you are lucky one of these contacts will decide to promote you as a good hiring candidate in their organization. Follow up via email to keep them warm. Don't ask for a job. Ask some plausible follow-up question from the initial discussion or perhaps ask if they know if any company in the area hiring (this is code for "I want a job" but much more polite).

Also: write code.

[probinso]

It will likely take you more than a month.

I believe that my first job out of school took about three months.

It's important to remember you are likely not qualified for any job that you applied to. Of the companies that are most likely excited about new college graduates, many list job openings specifically for new graduates.

This should not discourage you though, it is probably in your best interest to only apply to jobs that you are not qualified for.

Also the way that you find companies can dramatically impact your hit rate. If you look at primarily sources like job posting boards, then you will have a very high signal-to-noise ratio to defeat.

try to come up with new strategies for finding companies that interest you.

Also, as other people have said, I believe that it is a good idea for you to get professional feedback on your cover letters and resumes. Both of these must be completely understandable by both a technical lead and an HR representative. This is a non-trivial goal to meet.

[mydpy]

Post your resume for feedback. You need to "sell" yourself. It didn't take me long, but I applied to a lot of positions that I didn't really qualify for. And I got offers at places I didn't think I would qualify for, but I have some name recognition on my resume that helped.

[jsdev123]

About 200 applications over 3 months. This resulted in: 15 phone screens -> 10 coding challenges -> 6 onsite interviews

I'm a bootcamp grad in the Bay Area that made a career change from mechanical engineering. The interview process for the job I ended up taking consisted of a phone screen, a coding challenge, an online live coding session, and then an onsite interview. The entire interview process took about 3 weeks.

The best way to get an interview is to get an internal referral from someone at the company.

Interviewing is just like any other skill, the more you do the better you'll get at it. So try to do as many interviews as possible. The job search is a grind, good luck!

[CM30]

Took me about half a year or so, over here in the UK. That probably also meant a good few tens of applications.

But the answer here honestly varies based on a lot of things:

1. How much practical experience do you have? You mention internships and work experience, but what languages? How complex were the tasks you performed in said languages? What sites/apps/programs/whatever can you show people?

2. What types of companies are you applying for? If the companies want more experienced engineers, or have a lot of people wanting to work for them, that could be affecting your chances.

3. What sort of feedback have you been getting? You say no interview in regards to one of the applications, but how about the rest?

Give a little more information, and people here will be able to answer your questions a bit better.

As for practical advice? Well, don't be too disappointed if you don't get a job at a large technology business as your first/one of your first roles. Be willing to start somewhere smaller (perhaps for less money) in order to get experience.

Send out as many applications as possible. It's basically a numbers game to some degree, so you need to keep trying till someone inevitably says yes.

Show practical examples of your work if possible. Open source is good, but so is a website, app or other project made in your free time. Especially if it's making a bit of money or getting popular.

[jmunsch]

It took me about 7 weeks, in that time I submitted upward of 90 applications, as I was okay with moving. And had interviews/emails trickling in at the 2 week mark. My resume was groomed, and edited by some career development minded folks, I did a lot of reading on resume formatting and word choice. Practiced white boarding, reviewed and felt comfortable with the base data structures and algorithms.

I would say if you can speak to your relevant experiences and are able to tie that into the position, most times the 2-3 years of experience or BS in CS or engineering is a soft requirement.

That being said shoot for doing 4-5 applications per day, and if an interview goes poorly, brush it off, and get ready for the next one.

I created categories, or staging points for each application in asana, and treated the job search like work. (Applied, emailed, follow up thanks, phone screen, phone interview, onsite, etc)

Depending on who is doing the hiring the process could take an hour or it could take 3wks+ if its a big organization.

Edit:

Also reframe any "problems" as challenges, and instead of making negative comments try to pull out the positive from any given situation when asked about something.

[hnruss]

You're not being too impatient. It sounds to me like there might be a problem with your resume. Get some other developers to help you with it. Maybe have them give you mock interviews to make sure that when you do get an interview, you nail it. It also helps to think outside the box and apply to smaller companies, which are often more desperate and might even provide better experience.

[robin_reala]

50 odd applications over 6 months. Eventually I applied for a QA position as I at least could do everything the ad asked for. Got told there was a dev job going too at that they’d interview me for that first based on my CC. Landed it and never looked back. Just took perseverance in the end.

[anexprogrammer]

20 minutes, 0 apps, 0 interviews. The guys running the C course I did offered me a job at the end of it!

Include as many skills as you can on your cv - so much depends on automated search.

As you've got friends in tech, have you got them to rip your CV to shreds? If not, you should. It's a sales document, not just a statement of experience, treat it as such.

Treat your first 5 interviews as "just practice". You'll forget to mention something, make a silly mistake or three, give a bad answer or two. Don't stress, just learn from them. You'll relax more if you view the first 5 as practice, maybe enough to get an offer from one of the practice meetings!

Do all you can to sidestep recruiters and apply directly. Small companies are usually much more interesting and won't be using recruiters.

It's a numbers game, so along with lots of applications, bear in mind if you have 3 of 5 "essential" skills you should probably apply anyway. You'd be surprised how often those essentials aren't - it's a numbers game for the recruiting company too.

[jzwinck]

I went to a major US university which was a recruitment center for a number of companies. I got a job at one rather by chance, as a good friend was applying there and told me I should too. But this happened several months before graduation.

In cases like that, at major US universities, some big companies (each of whom can hire dozens of students every year) are in a race: they know that they will overlap in which students they want most. So they offer early, and they play games like the "exploding offer" we have discussed here before.

With those companies, recruitment of a spring graduating class will be complete before the start of winter.

After graduation, things should get easier once you have 2-3 years of work experience (i.e. one industry standard job lifetime).

Small companies may be more flexible and/or random, because they are less systematic and probably only hire one person (or no one) each year from most schools.

[liamcardenas]

Reach out to companies. Don't just hand them your resume. Show them that you are passionate about their technology and product. Show that you are determined to get this job.

Here is an idea: Take whatever they are doing-- let's say it's a social network-- and re-create a very basic version of it using new hot technology. Then send it to them and say, "Hey, I made a basic clone of SocialNetwork with an Elm front-end and Rust microservice backend on Docker utilizing Neo4J and Elastic Search."

That will grab their attention! The ultimate engineering employee is one who is passionate about working for the company and takes the initiative to go above and beyond what is expected of them. (Notice I didn't say that the smartest/most accomplished person is the best employee). Your goal should be to appear to be that ideal employee.

[gayprogrammer]

I have also been appling for developer jobs and waiting more than a month for more than rejection responses.

For anyone who came here to share advice about my resume, here's a link via my VPS: http://162.243.149.58/Resume.pdf

[munin]

one quick piece of feedback: resumes about stories. namely, your story: what have you done? how did you do it? what impact did it have? there's a hint of a story in your last internship - there was a proposal? you proposed it to management? you wrote some java code for hadoop? what did all of that do? but it's hidden amongst very low calorie things like "ssh key management" which is basically just copying blobs of text around. I don't care about your skill at catting two files together, I had someone write a program to do that. but there on one line is "Java software development for Hadoop." What was that about? I have some Hadoop, I have some people write Java code for it. could you do that? I have no idea, so, on to the next resume we go.

here is what I would write if something had happened to me:

"Working with my intern mentor, I developed a research proposal to discover previously unknown relationships in users of our web site. I designed a scoring function to be implemented in Hadoop, presented the design and motivation to management, implemented the scoring function, and ran it over our data. It improved costs in the business by %5."

who - you and someone else

did what - came up with an idea, pitched it, implemented it

why - because you saw a business use case

so what - it helped the business

way better story! and nothing in there about managing ssh keys.

[joeld42]

The resume lists mostly sysadmin and supporting tasks. Dev tasks (like "developed web-based email search" or "Shipped working code") are too vague.

The layout (especially the "Knowledge and Skill" section) look like you're trying to pad things out to fill a page.

If you do more admin stuff, maybe you are applying for the wrong jobs. If you are looking for software development jobs, be concrete. Give examples of projects you've built or contributed to: e.g. "Implemented significant features for in-house helpdesk ticketing system (Python/Javascript/HTML/CSS) supporting 35 users and over 2700 tickets/week." Enumerate the "working code" that you shipped.

[ivraatiems]

I've just graduated, and I have a job. I interviewed at six companies, and had four offers. My coursework is good but not stellar, but I have lots of work experience, an in-demand skillset (full-stack web dev) and a solid history of projects with strong results. I went to an upper tier university (private non-profit with a strong reputation that companies recruit from).

The total time it took varied by company, but was generally one-two months. Most companies moved quite quickly, regardless of their ultimate decision. The longest lapse was between the initial contact and the first interview, usually. Of the companies I interviewed with, two were big Silicon Valley names, one was a small consulting org, one was a big insurance corporation, and the other two were fairly large private software companies (but not Valley companies). I went with one of the last two. Three of the companies I interviewed with actually contacted me first; interestingly, all of them made me offers.

I have a good single-page resume, and a personal site with more detail on it. More importantly, though, I'm good at the non-technical side of interviews, which helped me everywhere except the companies that do nothing but demand you regurgitate rote CS knowledge (read: Google). One trick I did was a short (<5 minutes) live demo of a personal project while in interviews, sometimes with a (very brief) code walkthrough. Not everyone cared to see it, but usually if they did, it was well-received.

But me talking about me won't help you. Let's talk about you. You're anonymous on here, your profile doesn't link to any identifying info, so be real:

Are you a student or recent grad, or are you self taught? What's your story? If you're a new grad, what was your GPA? If <3.0, can you explain why? Any red flags on your transcript? If not a new grad, what's your past experience? What do you do to demonstrate your abilities? What does your resume look like? What do you mean by "lower tier" jobs? Have you studied up on basic CS for those awful algorithms questions? Can you show some good past projects? Are you following up on these opportunities, or just waiting for someone to get with you? Are you being upfront and forward with your HR contacts? Why do you have to be in Vancouver? Would you move if the price was right?

What I'm getting at is you need to take a hard look at your networking/interviewing practices and see where the gaps might be. If you put the answers here, I am sure people will help you. Do post your resume as well.

[maxxxxx]

It would be interesting to see your resume. Imagine you are the hiring manager at a company and read your resume. Would it make you interested? I see a lot of resumes that list a set of skills but there is nothing in them to hook me.

[azurelogic]

Given that many people come from larger cities, my story is an anomaly probably. I was working on my MS in CS and Applied Math at a local university when I started going to a local meetup. I got to know some people there who were in hiring positions at a local company that had a number of dev teams. They invited me to interview for an internship and ended up hiring me as a contractor instead. My next job after that came from meeting the CTO of a local consulting house at the same meetup. It's all about networking. I haven't gotten an offer from a place that didn't start with a warm intro.

[mcdevhammer]

I didn't go to a big name university. I did a 3 year college diploma that had coop. I had a job lined up before I even finished school and a few months later had 2 competing offers (one from a company I coop'd at). I think the key thing that helped me was being able to put work experience on my resume from doing coop.

Also I put a lot of effort into making my resume the best I could. Don't neglect this. It is the #1 most important thing you need to do when searching for a job.

You mentioned your intern experience being at 'lower tier' comonies. Are you maybe being too picky in where you are applying?