If you are a student, check if your school has a career center. Finding a job is a large topic, but many people just get lucky.
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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Let your mentors know you're looking for work, and how many hours you can work per week.
New programmers provide negative value, so there's not a lot of demand.
I'm very good and studied hard, but my first couple of programming roles I got entirely because a mentor of mine recommended me to someone who took a chance on me.
Also keep adding code to your public GitHub. Two of my top developers today I originally hired directly away from their retail roles. One had a ton of academic coding experience and had just not yet landed the right job. The other was just getting started, but posted a ton of low quality homework code to GitHub so I could read it and know who I was hiring.
Edit: In contrast, one of my other top developers has one of the top CS degrees in the world. So that works too.
And more than one of my top developers have IT help desk experience. I have had excellent luck when hiring folks with IT Help Desk experience.
Edit 2: As someone else mentioned - your long term goal is to connect with an IT Recruiter that you trust, and work with them to get your resume, and GitHub, and/or binder full of code you wrote into shape. I've hired more than one candidate who admits the simply presented themselves exactly as their recruiter coached them to. And I've hired candidates I would have skipped, because their recruiter was someone I trust and they asked me to take a second look at a candidate who made a poor first impression.
Edit 3: Since this is for newbies, some information about recruiters: we pay the recruiter in addition to what we pay you. The recruiter's typical pay for a rookie hire is around $50,000.00, if you stay for a full year. Half up front, in case you don't stay.
A few things you should know about recruiters: they only need to make a few solid placements each year to earn a living. As a rookie, you're the hardest to place, and the lowest layout when placed. But, programmers that are easy to place don't move often, so recruiters may still have plenty of time for you.
The recruiter is probably mainly placing you the first time in hopes that you come back later when you're worth big money. The initial payent is nice, but the real payment will be if/when you have 5 years experience and still work exclusively with them.
Hiring managers like me have recruiters we trust and reuse. If you can get recommended to a great recruiter, they will get you interviews at better places to work.
In contrast, there's lots of mediocre recruiters out there. Don't be afraid to switch to a new recruiter, if you have the opportunity, and your current recruiter isn't getting you interviews.
Edit 3: Since this is for newbies, some information about recruiters: we pay the recruiter in addition to what we pay you. The recruiter’s typical pay for a rookie hire is around $50,000.00, if you stay for a full year. Half up front, in case you don’t stay.
On top of that - where I work it takes about six months for a new hire to start carrying their own weight. Until that happens, you're paying other people to spend time helping the new person find their feet in the company. It's not just coding either, a lot of it is little things like "who do I talk to when I when the VPN stops working?"
The loss in productivity during that time is often worse than if you'd never hired the person at all. And most new people don't last six months, so it's generally a bad investment. One that is only done because if you don't hire people, you'll have no workers at all since established employees can't be expected to work for you forever.
Hiring people is a big risk. Anything you can do to mitigate that risk (evidence that you're someone they should hire) will increase your chances of being hired exponentially.
Hiring people is a big risk. Anything you can do to mitigate that risk (evidence that you're someone they should hire) will increase your chances of being hired exponentially.
That's a great summary. Well said.
As usual with those posts, basic information such as country of residence / spoken languages are missing. Finding student jobs in Germany is trivial, but I doubt those contracts can be done for non-residents
Wdym?? Is the internet not US only? /s
Linkedin is your best resource. And there arent any part time programming jobs, that just doesnt work. Try internships.
A part time programming job is called a contract.
Are you not referring to a fixed-term project rather than part-time? I'm making the assumption that the reference to "half-time" is describing a reduced-hours term of appointment, as in working 18, 20, 24hrs, or whatever per week rather than 37 or 40.
That's certainly fairly common in the UK - especially for those with domestic commitments or for those on double decent incomes.
Yes, thats what i mean
Part time programming jobs are exceedingly rare and companies generally don't want to hire junior people for remote work.
Those are both excellent points.
Interesting! This is totally not the case in germany. There are a lot of part time positions, especially for software engineers. In addition everyone has the right to reduce working hours after 6 months of starting a new job. May I ask about which country you are talking?
Can confirm, in the US it is very, very rare to find a part-time job and it sounds really awesome to have the right to reduce working hours
The US. What you described sounds nice...
Step one - do some open source work in various commonly used* languages.
Step two - apply for jobs, include a link to your open source work specifically highlighting projects that might be relevant to the company you're applying for.
Step three, while applying, keep improving your open source projects. Don't spend all your time writing code - spend at least half your time on planning and documenting your work - such as discussing issues with other people in the issue tracker (this is obviously easier if you're contributing to an established project rather than a new one that you've created yourself).
It's not enough to have knowledge. You have to demonstrate that you have that knowledge. Also you need to demonstrate that you are able to work in a team environment which is a very different skill set to actually writing code. If you don't know how to schedule/plan/budget a project... learn that skill.
(* Rust is a popular language but it's not a commonly used one. It doesn't even get a mention on GitHub's lost of the top languages when you count code being written, though it is the fastest growing language according to the same source - I recommend you learn JavaScript, Python, C#, C++, bash scripting... build a decent understanding of all of those. And learn some common non-programming languages too - such as SQL, HTML, Markdown).
Does that actually work? I don't think any technical interviewer has ever mentioned my github, and the most difficult part of getting a job is to get HR to forward your resume, and those obviously don't know a thing about code.
Point it out explicitly in your resume. Don't expect them to figure out your github activity on their own.
It's definitely better to have open source experience than no experience.
Obviously, but you don't answer my question. Do people really get interviews thanks to their open source work? OP is more likely to land a job by networking than by contributing to open source, is what I am getting at.
Contact a recruiter
The best place to start is talking to people you know and checking if they have the in with any good jobs. Then if that doesn't work, apply directly for jobs you find by checking with individual companies, ideally speaking with the hiring manager first. Jobs listed on job boards are really difficult to get. You're up against everyone, and they have filters that accidentally discard a lot of qualified candidates.
Contact people in the industry and roles you think you are interested in and ask them about their job and company. Ask them to share your resume with anyone they know is hiring.
Keep in touch with them over time.
LinkedIn has been very useful for me. But there are probably also various career websites specific to your country.
Find out if your school has partnership programs for internships. An internship is the easiest way to get a full time job. A lot of places will hire you full time after an internship once you graduate, if you are actually useful.