Here’s how I’d answer your questions about making a career change into tech
Hi, I’m Rachel. I’m a software engineer, a former reporter and a coding bootcamp grad. I know how it feels to try to break into the industry or job search and to seek advice and connections. So I always want to help when somebody reaches out. But the requests come frequently enough that it’s not exactly feasible to schedule all those conversations. It occurred to me that often the same topics come up in these chats, so maybe I could write up those questions and answers as a way to still offer guidance. Please let me know if there are any other topics I should cover and I’ll attempt to add to this.
How did you make the transition into tech?
After working as a reporter for more than 16 years, I attended the Grace Hopper Program, an all-women coding bootcamp that is part of Fullstack Academy, in early 2017.
What was your bootcamp experience like, both in terms of learning software engineering and the job search?
The program was one month part-time remote, then three months full-time in person. My cohort had two instructors and four teaching assistants for 19 students. It was tuition-deferred (as in, you didn’t pay until after you got a job — nine monthly installment beginning once you’d been working for a month).
My own bootcamp experience was positive and productive. Learning so much information so quickly was intense and certainly at times a bit overwhelming, but I always felt as though I was in a supportive environment. The program offered valuable job search advice in areas such as how to format an engineering resume and practice tech interviews. I was mostly on my own in terms of finding jobs to apply for and submitting applications, but there were staff I could reach out to for advice.
When I graduated, I felt comfortable implementing common patterns used in building a fullstack web app with the technologies taught in the program, but beyond that my knowledge was a bit shaky. I still had access to all the educational materials from the bootcamp, and I found that going back and redoing workshops, reviewing readings and rewatching recorded lectures was highly helpful to fill in gaps and shore up fundamentals. I was even pleasantly surprised to discover that with those refreshers, I remembered and understood more than I thought I did as many concepts that had felt fuzzy at the time clicked into place.
It took me about 3 1/2 months after graduating to receive a job offer I was interested in (which seemed to be about average for that program at that time). While the job search of course feels quite stressful while it’s going on, I’m glad in retrospect I had that extra time to reinforce my knowledge, because I was a much more confident and capable engineer when I started my first job than I was when I graduated (especially since my first role used almost all the same technologies as what I learned in bootcamp).
Do you recommend doing a coding bootcamp, and if so which one?
It’s been long enough since I graduated that I don’t have a good sense of what they’re like these days. I have heard from people who’ve attended these programs more recently that class sizes have greatly increased, so it seems as though it may be a very different experience now from when I attended. The best advice I can give to someone considering a bootcamp is to seek out recent graduates of any programs you are considering to hear about their experiences. If you’re completely new to coding, here are two free resources that could be a good starting point.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known then about the post-bootcamp job search?
I remember how overwhelming it could seem to contemplate all the different tasks you supposedly needed to do while job searching. You hear the advice to attend meetups. And practice algorithms. And contribute to open source. And work on side projects. And on and on. All good advice in a perfect world, but I know I certainly couldn’t do everything, so in retrospect there wasn’t much point in feeling guilty.
It’s not like there’s any single magical approach to getting that first job. So, to take one frequently suggested example: If you’ve got a side project you want to work on, totally go for it, and at the very least you’ll sharpen your skills. But if you’d just be doing a side project for the sake of doing one, you’re probably better off spending the time on other tasks. To be honest, one area on which I spent very little time during my post-bootcamp job search was practicing algorithms — I just couldn’t motivate myself to do it. Proof that, yes, you really can get a software engineering job without algorithms.
One particular challenge was striking the balance between cold applying to a large number of jobs and networking to try to get an in at a smaller number of companies. It’s the quality vs. quantity tradeoff. No doubt that networking can make a huge difference, but I also found it was important to keep up on sending out a steady stream of cold apps. If nothing else, a high volume of applications means more interviews, which means more interview practice.
There’s no way around it: The first job search is stressful. Companies are often reluctant to hire entry-level engineers (which, in my experience, is very short-sighted, but unfortunately that’s the reality). There’s a lot of rejection. I don’t have an exact count of how many jobs I applied for, but it was definitely over 100, out of which I got three offers. For the vast majority, I didn’t even get a phone screen. People were consistently nice when I reached out to network, though there were a lot of coffee chats that went something along the lines of, “Would love to help, but we’re not hiring any junior engineers right now.”
And then there’s the technical interviews. I can definitely now vouch for the fact there’s very little correlation between the skills that make for success in a tech interview and the skills that make for success at a job. But at least the thing about skills is they can be practiced. I know it often didn’t feel that way in the midst of the job search, but looking back, each interview I did made me better at the next one. It’s easier said than done in the moment to view a bombed interview as a learning experience, but that’s exactly what it is.
That first job search is tough, but fortunately there’s only one first job search. Once you get even a little bit of experience, companies suddenly view you very differently. I know people who found themselves needing or wanting to look for a second job only a few months in, and they found it much easier even then. And certainly in my own experience, once I hit the six-month mark at my first position, it was noticeable how many more messages I started getting from recruiters through LinkedIn, and there was another bump at the one-year mark. In tech, it’s generally considered acceptable to change jobs fairly quickly, so it can be comforting to know that if your first role doesn’t wind up being the right fit, you’ll be in a favorable position to move on.
Back up… you can get a software engineering job without studying algorithms?
Yes, you really can. While not as many as there should be, there are companies that don’t use any algorithm questions in interviews. And in my experience when I have been asked them, they mostly haven’t been the kind of data structure problems you tend to think of; for instance, I’ve never come across a binary search tree in any interviews across two job searches. This comes with the caveat that I’ve mostly interviewed for front-end-leaning or full-stack web dev roles, and I’ve never applied to the FAANG companies. I have received a good number of recursion problems, and I’ve also repeatedly encountered the genre of question in which the brute force solution would be exponential time complexity, but it can be solved linearly using a hash table.
Do I really need to write cover letters?
During my first job search, I did write them for any opening that requested one, even if it was listed as optional. Not sure it ever helped, but I figured it wasn’t worth the risk of being hurt by not having one. I did try to keep them fairly specific to each posting; the one trick I found was that after I’d written several, each subsequent company or job description generally had some similarities to at least one previous application, so I could reuse pieces of earlier letters.
Any other advice to share?
One good piece of advice I received was positions that are specifically listed as “junior” or “entry level” receive a huge number of applications, so it’s especially important to apply for those right away when they’re posted. That also means staying on top of job boards. Another good piece of advice I’ve heard is to subtract three years from the years of experience listed in a job description. In other words, if a posting says the company is looking for a candidate with 1–3 years of experience, it’s a decent bet they’d actually be open to an entry-level applicant.
Speaking of job boards, here are some I found useful (the first three also have mailing lists you can sign up for that send out a lot of networking events):
