For my personal hack story, check out Hacking Away Into a Tech Career: Interning, Networking via Freelancing, and Job Search
“The Secret to Getting a Job in Tech is to Already be Working in Tech” — Me
6 Ways You Can Start Working Today For Money and/or Resume Experience
The following will have a stronger effect in landing your desired full time role if done in the state of helping others. For more information on this, check out the article mentioned above, or Garry Tan’s How I got into Y Combinator video.
- Medium Partner Program. Get your technical writing on today!
- Freelancing in your community: Target people who have a lot of money, and not a lot of time. Check the websites of your local chiropractors, dentists, and therapists. I’m sure you will find one that looks like it was done 10 years ago. Revamp it, show it to them, negotiate a price.
- Freelancing online: Promote yourself and your portfolio on the many freelance sites available on the web.
- Forage: Free virtual work experience from Fortune 500 companies. That was a genius startup idea btw.
- Google Season of Docs. Technical writing again. Yea, it’s in high demand.
- Open Sourcing. How awesome would it look on your resume to have a valuable npm package you created?
Networking
- Your community job training program/bootcamp
- Career Karma
- Dev.to
- Slack workspaces of interests
- Center for Humane Tech
The Resume
- Novo Resume: Resume builder
- Top fold: The first half of your resume should tell the hiring manager that you qualify for what you applied for. Recruiters can decide this in 3 seconds. Make sure you’re showing them the right stuff so they’ll want to scroll down.
- Sections:
- Skills == Tech Stack
- Projects: Should include an embedded link to the site and the git repo
- Publications: Remember Medium?
- Relevant work: The top part of this article
- Other interests: Here you can include your interests as it relates to what you’re applying for (fintech, edtech, blockchain, robotics, etc.)
- Contact & Links: email, number, github, twitter, portfolio etc.
The Portfolio
For an awesome and free Portfolio Masterclass, check out Career Karma’s portfolio workshop.
Job Search Boards
- AngelList
- Work at a Startup
- Hired
- Tech Ladies: (for women)
- Elpha : (for women)
The Job Search
- Location, location, location?: On Linkedin, just filter for United States. Jobs are remote even if they are not posted as remote. Just apply. If they insist on relocation, negotiate a relo package, or continue on with another company.
- Filter for jobs posted within the past 24 hours: Early applicants tend to get a better shot at an interview.
- Send a message to the recruiter after applying.
- Search for other job titles besides software engineer. What you learned is in demand in other roles as well. Some of which may pay even more.
- Solutions Engineer
- Solutions Engineer LATAM
- Sales Engineer
- Support Engineer
- Support Engineer LATAM
- Site Reliability Engineer
- Web Developer
- Developer Advocate
- Front End Developer
- Back End Developer
- React Developer
- Node Developer
- Python Developer
- Database Administrator
- Cloud Engineer
- Technical Writer
You get the gist.
5. Use the prior to tech experience to your advantage. If you were a banker, apply to fintech companies. If you were a teacher, apply to edtech companies.
6. Target the Midwest. Companies here used to have a hard time hiring before everyone went remote. Now that we can work from anywhere, our talent can be equally distributed.
Interview Preparation
- Code Challenge Prep:
2. Interview Prep:
And don’t forget to send the thank you email. I hope this was a valuable read. If you’d like to share your hack or add any resources, please comment below.
