So I’m back on that “GET A FULLTIME JOB AT A SOFTWARE COMPANY THIS YEAR” train. It was a New Years resolution I set for myself at the start of the year, and then I traveled across the country for a gaming convention, came back and had the plague flu, and then spent weeks trying to catch up with schooling. Now that I’ve found stable ground again, and can actually see free time in front of me I’m returning to that resolution I made.

As a 26 year old Jr Software Guy™, getting a job seems like a totally reasonable goal to me. I’ve been at this coding thing for over an actual decade at this point. I got my start in web making custom pet pages and user profiles for Neopets back in the early aughts. I’ve been developing professional education software for the Center for Electron Microscopy & Nanofabrication at my school. I have the chops to get an honest to god fulltime position doing web work somewhere, and I know this.

While I’ve really enjoyed my team with the team at CEMN, and have learned a lot, it’s become clear to me that I’ve hit a block in my development of my abilities, and my career. There’s only so much a bunch of juniors green-fielding a very ambitious piece of software can teach each other about best practices, elegant code, and becoming better engineers. We can all code competently but at a certain point (aka right now) it becomes about more than just solving the problem, and turns into solving the problem well.

So this all means that it’s time to find a new job. It means I need to get out there and prove to the world that I can do the jobs I know I’m capable of doing.

So, how do I plan to accomplish this? I’m glad you asked! For starters I’m dedicating to at least one pomodoro per day of pure career development tasks. Whatever I determine as the big task on the docket will be pushed here. Optimally I spend more than 25 minutes a day on this sort of thing, but at a bare minimum one pomodoro will be done. The key thing for me is to turn it into a habit. It’s not quite the “no zero days” principal but it’s along that same line of thinking.

As far as the nitty gritty, in my head I see two big categories of goals here. Getting Interviews is part one. This encompases: resume, side projects, networking, and setting this blog up. The back end of this process is then “Beating Interviews”. For this I need to, primarily, beat my face against hackerrank for a lifetime, until I’m comfortable solving those problems. And while that’s the biggest hurdle, soft skills is it’s own way to get through interviews, as I’ve heard, so I won’t be neglecting those either. Staying calm in the pressure of an interview, talking about my projects in a way that shows my abilities, and just generally being, as cliche as it is, my best self, are all things I want to improve.

So let’s dive more into what each of those big two goals really means.
Get Interviews
I need to more firmly develop the skills needed to do more full featured work, as well as present those skills to employers. Luckily these combine pretty well to start. And by creating a portfolio type program or two, and publishing it to the web I show these skills off well. Furthermore, I’m already well on my way to having a solid work project at a stable release stage, so this isn’t even actually a far off goal.

After that the resume needs to be made. I’ve heard that the way to do this is with latex, though I’m unsure if the effort to learn it will be worth the gains from having a prettier resume. What I have in word may end up being what I end up with layout wise.

I’ve been told that keeping a blog is a good thing, as it shows how you think and reason through problems. This also is a massive boon to how I work through problems, and having my process laid out in front of me will only do wonders for helping me get to a better solution with everything I face. I also can honestly say I’m excited to do retrospectives, where I go back over old work to see how my thinking has changed.
Beat Interviews
The ability to be comfortable in a nerve wracking environment where I’m definitely being judged is something I KNOW I do poorly. I was thinking about starting toastmasters or something performative like that, maybe improv as that’s something I’ve thought about a lot.

Beyond that is the inevitable hackerrank/leetcode/ctci grind. I don’t really think there’s any way to dress this up. I just need to do some to be determined time of work at this every day until I’m comfortable. This will probably get slotted into the aforementioned minimum one pomodoro a day of career development work. I’m definitely not driven to do hackerrank, but it’s a game that has to be played to get where I want to go.

So that’s the 10,000 foot view of my plan of attack. I think it’s definitely doable, and I just need to keep stepping in the right direction every day, and I’ll get there shortly.

Thanks for reading, if you’ve ever made your own “get a job plan” let me know what you did and how it worked for you in the comments. I always love to hear how others got their start, and how I can improve my approach.