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Breaking Into Tech: Resources and Thoughts

29 October 2022

An in-progress and informal amalgamation of resources and thoughts on how to break into tech.

💆‍♂️ Don’t Let This Guide Stress You Out 💆‍♀️

Learning to code—especially when you are don’t have experience with code and are trying to learn it in a short period of time—is an immense effort.

Throw in networking, blogging, contributing to open source, building projects, and meetups (all common advice for folks getting into tech and things I mention below) and it can start to feel really overwhelming.

Don’t panic!

No one does all these things. I didn’t even do most of them, and I got hired. My point is writing this is not to burden aspiring engineers with a huge list of todos, but to put together helpful tips to glean from with the goal of slowly and sustainably rolling small steps into your current workflow.

This is the list I wish I had when I started my coding journey.

LinkedIn Posts and Follows

Following content creators who explain tech and the tech industry can be helpful. But be careful with social media! It can be a big time-waster and can trigger imposter syndrome. You belong in tech even if it feels like everyone else’s latest project or internship or (fill in the blank) is ✨amazing✨ and your stuff is just normal.

Gaining Real World Experience Prior to Your First Real World Job 🤔

* entry level position *

* 1-2 years experience required *

🤬

Because it’s so common for entry level positions to require experience, it’s a good idea to plan how you will gain some form of experience you can put on your résumé and talk about in interviews. Here are some ideas in order of increasing complexity/difficulty/effort-intensiveness. (The higher options may be more impressive to prospective employers).

  1. Personal projects
  2. Real-world projects
    1. e.g. doing a website for a local business or organization pro bono
    2. e.g. submitting a PR/ contributing to an open source project (Tip: contributions to documentation are legitimate contributions, but possibly more suitable to early-career devs. I’ve contributed to the Mozilla Development Network in this fashion and have been able to discuss what I did in an interview.)
    3. e.g. hosting a personal project on an app store or public facing URL to make it more “real-world”
  3. Paid real-world projects
    1. e.g. actually getting paid to create websites for businesses or freelancing on a site like Fiverr or Upwork

See also:

Don’t Sleep on Networking

Don’t sleep on networking. It’s unrealistic to think that you will receive interviews and job offers in a reasonable time frame without it.

And don’t wait to network. Weaving small networking steps into your workflow early on in your coding journey is a good idea.

Here are some general principles to consider with networking:

How I got my current position:

  1. I reached out to a friend in my network.
  2. He let me know about a position for which he knew the recruiter.
  3. I got in touch with the recruiter via email after applying to a position and she connected me with the CXO of the company.
  4. The interview process revealed that I was a really good match for this position, and the rest is history!

Be a Tinkerer

Fool around with stuff. Be curious.

Everything you do with computing contributes to your overall knowledge as a developer, even if it’s stupid as hell or doesn’t culminate in a finished project. Environment variables clicked for me when I was trying to get bat to pull in my terminal’s Dracula theme so I could feel like a vampire 🧛🏾‍♂️. How stupid is that!? But learning about environment variables helped me contribute to the Mozilla Development Network’s documentation… 🤯

Likewise, my half-finished and fully-abandoned projects have still contributed to my career. I didn’t get a shiny new website out of my tinkering, but I got exposure to new tools, experience, and skills that are benefiting me now. Try to finish your projects, but don’t sweat it if you don’t. You probably learned something.

Steer Clear of Bad Advice 🚨

When I was first looking at getting a job in tech, I was too uncritical about advice I saw on the internet.

For example this video implies that three months would be on the long end for someone going from no coding experience to hired in tech. That’s a pretty ridiculous take (see Ray Morrison’s post linked above), but unfortunately I received it uncritically and it resulted in unrealistic expectations.

Another video suggested it was a good idea to try to find non-engineer positions where you could get your feet wet with code as a way to get practical experience and learn on the job. I would categorize this advice as unhelpful. There aren’t too many jobs that fit this description, and the result was that I wasted a lot of time searching for these jobs when I should have just been working on code.

No shade against the YouTubers who put out these particular videos; a lot of their content is great. I would simply advise folks to be critical of the information they take in about the field.

Miscellaneous

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