Got my first job as a junior dev - it’s mostly luck and being in the right place
Hi everyone!
I just signed my contract for my first ever junior dev role. I wanted to share as it might be useful for you.
This isn’t really a “hacks to get a career in CS”, it’s mostly a story of how I got in because I went in a very roundabout route.
About me: I worked for 10 years in customer support. I also have a degree in music where I did a little bit of Max programming, which got me interested in CS.
One year and one month ago I didn’t even know what a pointer is, but I decided to try my luck with my local 42 school (not a bootcamp, but a free alternative to uni in some European/Asian countries. Mostly C and C++, but now they replaced C++ with Python ). I have to say, the education there was in my opinion top notch, and it’s free!
I don’t wanna shill too much, but the community there is amazing. I kept sitting besides the smartest people in the room and I really tried to suck as much knowledge from them as I could and it definitely helped a lot!
At the start of my studies i got an offer from a local cybersecurity company as a tech support agent. Pay was iffy, but hey, role in IT! I took it, and started doing 70h weeks, 40 at work, 30 at school. It was hell. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I ate badly, had no social life, but I really liked coding, specially low level stuff. For school, I built my own shell, and my own webserver. This is very important: I did not use AI at all. I really struggled until I got it, and I can credit that decision with getting the correct education.
Two months ago I became tired with my role. I had to do a lot of networking, a lot of configuring cybersecurity devices… and all I wanted was to code. Otherwise, I was trying my best, and learning a lot on the job. I was terrible, to be honest, but I tried really hard and I think they were happy with my performance, it was just not for me.
So I used the school’s connection with partners to find a student job to switch instead.
I finally found one and got an offer. It was testing engineering, and I thought shit, things are turning out great! I would take a pay cut, but I’m actually gonna work in development, even if it’s not the most exciting thing for me, as I really wanted to work on low level stuff.
I went back to my current employer. I explain them why I’m leaving, and they take it well. I keep doing my best at work anyways, trying to squeeze some knowledge.
Two weeks ago I get approached by a recruiter from my current employer, just 2 weeks shy of completing my notice period. He says “hey, we got a software engineer role that we are open to taking a junior for”. I kinda shrug it off; I’m not even done with school yet (although I’m close!) but I go to the interview. They ask about threads, about multi-process applications. I’m confident with C at this point, and the job is in C++, so I was honest and said hey, I’m not that good at OOP, but I know multithreading! I know low level stuff! I did pretty good in the interview, but I was sure they were not gonna take me… I don’t even have an internship!
Next day recruiter calls me and tells me I got the job. What the hell? How?
So i rescind my contract with the other company. I’m starting to work in the engineering team on June. I’ll be working on low level stuff. It’s the dream, it shifted my timeline by years at this point. I’m aggressively preparing, doing lots and lots of C++ stuff, reading books, asking lots of questions even if I don’t work there yet.
I worked hard, sure, but guys, this is luck mostly. If I wouldn’t have taken the boring job at tech support, I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity. I need to make this distinction because I feel too many people believe that there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. The market is fucked, it’s a lot of luck in this and I know a lot of people are doing A LOT.
What I can say is that passion helps. Going to school after a hard day at work made sense to me because I was enamored with systems, with learning. I wasn’t really thinking much about the market when I signed up for this (bro I got a music degree, of course I don’t think these things through lol), so the only real advice I can give is to not get into this only for the money if you don’t really feel inherent fascination by this, because, as I said, market is shit.