So my school had a career fair, and I went.  It was a near surreal experience for me. It felt like a singles bar, but instead of drowning in the smell of axe it was the smell of semi washed bodies.  Instead of top 40’s music blasting out my ears it was the dull roar of a couple hundred really nerd conversations buzzing barely outside of intelligible.

Beyond the novelty of the whole experience, there was this underlying continuous feed of “learn x from this” playing over and over in my head.  I laughed and I cried (not really) and I learned some things about myself (that one for real).

To start, I am BAD at cold conversation.  From the opening “Hi my name is …” to selling myself and interacting with the recruiters about their product.  I very rapidly got the hang of this as I warmed up to the experience, but there were some definite bombs. Sometimes the recruiters even helped me along to avoid me falling too hard on my face, and that was definitely welcomed.

I developed a bit of a flow to the conversations.  Start with introductions, of course. Ask about their tech stack and try to ask some sort of question about what they do and how/why they do it.  At this point if it’s clearly not for me, aka that one security company building software in C for a network switch, I would politely thank them for their time and move on.  Failing that I would then move into my experience and what I was looking for. If they engaged here, and most of them did, I would try to explore a little about the employee and see what they found enjoyable about the workplace.

When typed out like that it looks so easy.  But jeeze it doesn’t capture the level of anxiety and stress I felt at, what was essentially, chatting up total strangers.  Even if there was a very clear reason for the whole interaction it’s still strangely nerve wracking.

Lesson two is simple.  RESEARCH. Look these companies up.  Generally these sorts of things will publish a list of the companies.  Go through that and give each one at least a minimal level of googling.  The few times I’ve been on the companies side of the hiring table it’s nice to know that the candidate cares enough to put some minimal effort in, as well as getting to avoid the whole nuts and bolts of what your company is about is a nice time saver.

It’s a GREAT way to practice the openings of an interview, and I’ll definitely be doing it again as soon as it’s offered.

Have resumes!  I had mine in fancy little cases, and I’m not sure if that was a positive or a negative to be honest…

It’s the career equivalent of a singles bar, so just get out there and enjoy that experience if you get the chance!

Welcome back!  Last week (TODO INSERT LINK TO FIRST WEEKS POST HERE) I talked about my 10,000 foot view of the plan.  Now we’re back to make that more useful and less of a nebulous dream.  So lets get right in to it.

To keep this focused we’re going to do that thing that motivational speakers are always saying. Set goals, and not just any goals, but SMART goals. There’s a whole wikipedia article here if you need the whole break down, but the idea is to make goals that you can accomplish and know when you’ve accomplished them. The short version is:

• Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
• Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
• Assignable – specify who will do it.
• Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
• Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

This isn’t a complicated system. It’s pretty easy to see the goals and advantages of using this as the lens through which you view the goals you set. Though assignable is pretty laughable in a one man show. The biggest struggle I see is definitely the measureable. How do I say when my resume is done? When is my portfolio project ready for prime time? When am I done with leetcode? None of these have clear cut answers, and honestly I don’t have any idea how I’m going to handle them.

In any case let’s get into the nitty-gritty of going forward, and ignore the unanswerable questions for now.  Here are the big bullet point goals as such. In more or less the intended order of intended achievement:

• Portfolio project
• Resume (latex?)
• keep weekly posts on this blog
• Improve face to face under pressure
• grind CTCI/HackerRank/Leetcode

To paraphrase a very smart 6 year old “Oh this is easy, I only have to do 5 things”

So let’s get specific…

The portfolio project needs to be more than just one monolithic app.  Though that’s definitely part of it. I have a piece of productivity software that I’ve been working on to help me keep myself focused on the important tasks, and getting that through to a 1.0 type version is goal one.  I want to have that done by the end of April. This is about a month later than I originally planned, and I don’t love that. But here I am.

I also want to make small things.  Just small proof of concept stuff. I’ve previously seen Jennifer Dewalt’s 180 websites in 180 days project and I loved that idea.  I don’t want to get that crazy with it, but definitely something along those lines would be great.  I have a very surface level understanding of react, and I would like to expand that to have some more breadth and depth.  There’s clearly a lot going on in the library, and honestly the whole of JS for that matter, that I just haven’t had a chance to play with.  

So I have through until the end of April to get through the productivity software, which is going to be a good thing, as I’m going to need about that much time.  Then finishing up the mini projects for May.

S: Get a completed sideproject to present.
M: Get the productivity software to feature parity with Trello so that I can switch to it.
T: By end of April

At the time of writing this I have a job fair coming up in two days, so the first pass of the resume is done.  However I do want to come back to this, and possibly hire a resume writer to get me something that is all around better.  Right now it’s definitely amateur and that’s a little sad.

S: Improve the look and feel of the resume.
M: Seek feedback publically (reddit/SA) and if it’s negative hire a resume writer.
T: By the end of April

Now for the really hard part.  I want to maintain a 1/week posting here on this site.  I have a slew of topics in mind, but honestly this sort of writing is a challenge for me.  Expecting myself to burn through a post in a week is definitely ambitious. However the more I type into my little word document here, the more I find I can do this.  Though I may end up taking a page out of Hemingway’s book for this particular step of the journey. The other major challenge here is the fact that I’m categorizing this time as the same as time to spend on personal projects, or CTCI, or whatever else

Though now that I say that I’m considering splitting it up into one pomodoro of each.  Yeah actually I like that idea a lot. I will definitely be switching to that after this term is up.  

S: Create content that shows that I’m engaging mentally, and how I think.
M: Maintain 1 post every 1-2 weeks here
R: Maybe not on this one, but I want to try.
T: Indefinitely

Cracking the coding interview and then the ensuing hackerrank grind is easy to set a goal for, hard to follow through on.  The goal is simple: Work through all of the CTCI problems, by the end of May, and start working through hackerrank problems starting that same month, maintaining ~30 minutes a day indefinitely.  Doing the thing is easy, doing the thing every day, that’s the hard part.

S: Get “interview ready” with DS+A questions
M: Work through CTCI by the end of may, start working on hackerrank every day starting in may.
T: Starting in may, indefinitely.

Social goals are basically impossible to quantify the actual skills.  I can’t say
“Hit relationship level x with y difficult person” and be able to watch that gauge as it grows over time.  I can’t just give someone a turnip every day until they have a blue heart for me. Thus I think the only way to make this work with a measurable goal is to set an effort in goal.  Perform x toastmaster speeches, go to y improv classes. Something like that. And of course, as the last one, this is by FAR the most terrifying to me. I’m not even to the point where I’m seriously looking at this and it clenches my whole being with anxiety.  So obviously this is going to be one of the hardest. Which makes me want to scale the difficulty down considerably BUT then I, again, lose the ability to maintain measurability.

All of this to say, at the moment I don’t know how to set a good (smart) goal.  I need to not crack under pressure in an interview, and I need to feel more confident in my skills in this area.  But I have no IDEA to do that right now.

S:  Be comfortable under pressure in interview situations
M: ????
R: see above
T: ?????

I’m going to have to come back to this, as unsatisfying as that is for a post.  Because I really don’t have any idea how I get through that in any way.

But overall this doesn’t look too bad.  It’s just small steps every day. Lots of small, doable, steps.  I hope you’ll join me on this journey going forward.

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.