Hacking Away Into a Tech Career: Interning, Networking via Freelancing, and Job Search

For a fun size version of this article, check out Hacking Away Into a Tech Career: Fun Size

It’s been a month since I landed my full time role as a Developer Advocate, after finishing a year at Lambda School. I was fortunate enough to land a job that fits both my skills and interests pretty quickly, and since then I have had friends, other developers, and data scientist, in the community reach out for advice.

I’d like to preface this article by stating that as a private person, this is the first and probably only personal, opinion related, piece I will every write, and if there will be another like it in the future, it will be for the same reason and intent, to help others.

Helping Others

“Looking back at all of the baby steps that I took before landing my role, I noticed that they all came from a place inside me that wanted to help others.” — Me

Also check out Garry Tan’s insight into this here.

Interning

At Lambda, I began helping other students debug projects and dissect what we had just been lectured on by hosting open zoom sessions while I was still a student. This not only helped me cement my own skills, but it motivated me in a way that helped me build confidence in my skills, and even build the confidence that came along with saying “I don’t know this yet, but let’s find a way to figure it out.”

I feel like it was because of this that I landed the Team Lead internship role that was offered at Lambda the time, where I was responsible for groups of 8–10 student developers and data scientists.

In this role I was essentially doing the same thing that I was doing before, but for money this time, in addition to managing and delivering projects with stakeholders, and getting real world development experience.

Networking via Freelancing

When I first began my TLship, I was very afraid that my students would be overwhelmed with the level of difficulty and amount of things they needed to learn in such a short period of time. An old mentor of mine once told me that,

“As a leader, your employees don’t work for you, you work for them.”

This holds especially true for any teaching related roles. My students were not my employees, but they still came first, and I wanted them to excel in their learning, so I took an extra step and began writing technical articles with my students in mind. Using analogies in explaining things like how propagation is like the flu virus and .stopPropagation() was the medicine that stopped it from spreading.

Helping my students learn through these technical articles helped me land my freelance role as a technical writer through Medium.

Medium: Publications and The Partner Program, Networking via Freelancing

Since I was writing weekly at the time of my TLship, I enrolled in the Medium Partner Program as a way to maybe make a little bit of money off my writing.

From there I was approached by various publications who I began to write for, my favorites being JavaScript in Plain English, and Level Up Coding by gitconnected.com.

Little did I know at the time, that the editor of Level Up Coding was also an engineer at Postmates, which as a junior developer is an awesome connection to have, and a pretty cool person to work for.

Helping these publications grow their portfolio of valuable articles, helped me land my next role at another YC backed company, Career Karma. Well… this and something else.

More Networking

As I was working my way through getting endorsed at Lambda School, I had more time to network. I learned about Career Karma when one of the co-founders reached out to me on Linkedin, asking me to write a review on my Lambda experience.

After doing so, I visited their site and learned about all of the amazing things they are trying to do, and the impact they have already had on so many lives, so I decided to sign up for their workshop on Portfolio Project Masterclass, which coincidently, was hosted by the same co-founder.

I honestly did not even need help with my portfolio as it had already been endorsed by Lambda. I attended to get a feel for the community and to see if I could learn something that I didn’t already know, which I did.

At the end of the workshop there were open discussions and Q&A, where I offered to help a student with his resume and exchanged emails. We ended up zooming immediately afterward and I felt like I geared him in the right direction.

The next day I thanked Artur, the CK co-founder and host of that workshop, on twitter, and he offered me a job as a Freelance Technical Writer after noticing that this what I was currently doing.

Artur liked that I was able to help another member of his community in the job search. His exact words were “That’s good #Karma.”

And good karma it was. Not only did he offer me a job, once I started working, he also offered to mentor me. One meeting on my personal job search with him helped me land my role as a Developer Advocate at Dwolla, another amazing startup.

Job Search and How I Found Dwolla

Searching during COVID was a bit challenging, so I took what I knew about the current state of the world, tech, and business, and hacked my way into an advantage. I knew that I needed three things:

1. A remote job, at the very least during COVID-19:

Even though job postings may not say “remote”, given the state of the world, they probably are, so I applied anyway and passed on companies that wanted to interview me onsite.

2. To decrease the number of people I was in competition with:

At the time, and probably still now, so many people were fleeing the bay area, a place where the competition for a tech job (as a junior dev) is like an Olympic sport. I was not going back there.

I started to think about all the start ups moving to Florida, Texas, and the Midwest, so I began to filter my search to these locations, as some of these also have a more difficult time hiring.

3. To search broadly in job title

There were so many jobs that required the knowledge and skills I gained at Lambda, Software Engineer was just one of them. I used my non technical skills and paired them with my technical skills in order to find more roles which I could qualify for. Some of which were:

• Developer Advocate
• Support Engineer
• Support Engineer LATAM
• Solutions Engineer
• Solutions Engineer LATAM
• Web Developer
• Technical Writer
• React Developer

I interviewed for all of these roles at some point during my search. In total I had three offers, and accepted Dwolla’s. Before getting into tech I was in banking so getting into fintech felt right to me. Working as a TL at Lambda also gave me the “student developer advocate” experience I thought made a fun fit.

One of the three offers was from a FAANG company before I had even graduated. This was for a Technical Writer role which I turned down for personal reasons, but I’d like to highlight that if it were not for my work with the Medium publications, it would not have happened.

I hope what I shared will help you on your road to the tech job you desire. If you are already in your tech career, please feel free to comment and share your hacks with the community.

For a fun size version of this article with extra nuggets, check out Hacking Away Into a Tech Career: Fun Size.