5 Tips For Your First Software Engineering Job Search

I want to introduce myself since you probably don’t know who I am. I’m a former actor turned software engineer. I wrote my first line of code in November of 2020 with no prior experience. I didn’t hang out with software engineers, and the extent of my knowledge was copy and pasting in CSS to change my Xanga layout (true millennials will remember).

Now, I’m going to be starting my job as a full-stack software engineer soon. What this post is, is a collection of some thoughts I had about my, admittedly and luckily, 6-week short job search.

There are some tips I want to impart. These are a mixture of thoughts from my Career Coach from Hack Reactor (the boot camp I attended), my mentor Ocean, countless engineers, and my own experiences.

First, I want to say that, yes, it’s possible to graduate a boot camp and land a job as a software engineer. Y’all out here saying whatever and whatever is a scam. Well, I’m living proof that it can work (of course the mileage may vary)! 

At Hack Reactor, we had class six days a week, 12 hours a day for three months. I was legitimately eating, breathing, and smoking code every waking moment. This also doesn’t take into account the studying I was doing prior to starting my boot camp. Overall, I studied about 7-8 months before landing my first software engineering role. It wasn’t possible to study that much without some sort of schedule. My boot camp provided that for me, and a rigorous one to boot. This leads me to my first point about the job search:

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1) Create A Schedule:

Studying and building applications is a beast of a task. The job search is a whole different behemoth. Imagine having your day structured out for you and then being dropped off with all the freedom in the world (high school, college, and boot camp grads all feel this). It’s super important that you create a schedule and that you hold yourself accountable to that schedule. 

There are only so many hours in a day and if you’re going to land a job, competing against other boot camp grads, self-studiers, and college grads, you’re going to need to be focused on building your skills as well as job search tasks (outreach, applications, research).

I actually had a part-time job 1 pm - 8 pm Monday through Friday, so I had to create a tighter schedule to get in what I needed.

Here was mine:

• 6 am: wake up

• 7 am: gym/shower

• 9 am: AlgoExpert/LeetCode

• 11 am: side projects/applications

• 12 pm: lunch/meetings/applications

• 1 pm: work

• 8 pm: unwind/whatever/applications

• 10 pm: sleep

I should let you know that I’m not really a type A personality. schedules have never been my thing, and I’d be lying if I said I followed this to a tee. But, it’s the effort that counts. If you have a schedule, you’ll be more likely to follow it than if you don’t have one. I did do most of the things on this schedule every day if not most days.

This accountability will keep you on track to ensure you’re hitting your goals. Everyone’s schedule will look a little different but this will also depend on your individual goals. If you want to work at a FAANG then your schedule will maybe look pretty different than someone who isn’t explicitly shooting for a FAANG.

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2) Be Kind To Yourself and Take Breaks

Now, I know I just had a whole section about having a schedule and holding yourself accountable but the job search is tiring and hella stressful. If you’re feeling burnt out or tired? Take a break! The world won’t end because you didn’t do algorithms for a day or two. No one will reach out angrily that you hadn’t talked to them yet! So take a breather.

The job search is a cruel 800m race that threads the line between a sprint and a distance event. In junior high, I was a sprinter who sometimes ran with the cross country team in the winter. Somehow this leads to me being assigned to run this actual apocalypse of a race on the track team. 

Anyway, that’s the job search. It’s frustrating because you’re working on so many different things at once and you want it to be over as quickly as possible, but you need to pace yourself so you don’t burn out.

On top of prepping yourself for the long haul of studying, interviewing, and applying, you will be hit with rejection day in and day out. I used to get about three rejection emails a day. Someone once asked me if I apply for a company again after they reject me. OF COURSE. One time I got a rejection and instantly saw a different job posting at the same company that I thought I fit and applied right then and there. 

I was talking to my career coach recently about the timeline of my job search and it really only took six weeks, but it felt like months.

All this to say, it’s grueling and no matter how well you take rejection, it may start wearing on you. When that happens, take a break, maybe change up your schedule, and just breathe.

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3) It’s Not Madness, It’s Iteration

Yes, iteration, building iteratively. I’ve heard that phrase so much over the past three months when referring to engineering work. But it’s also true of your job search. As Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So, stop doing the same thing over and over again!

If you’re finding that the ATS (applicant tracking system) is filtering you out, focus on outreach through LinkedIn and connecting with others in the industry. Fun fact, every single pipeline I was in, save for one, started with a referral. If you find that you are failing take-homes, double down on your algorithms and data structures study. If architecture and design questions make you nervous, watch some videos and study. If recruiters don’t like you, work on the STAR/CAR method for behavioral questions.

Be able to look back and effectively judge these processes so you can identify the bottlenecks and grow from them!

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4) Build Your Support System

I don’t really have many people in my life I talk to about this software engineering stuff. None of my friends are in this industry. They’re all actors, so I don’t even submit the same type of resumes they do. I’m lucky enough to have had a career coach, a mentor, and fellow Hack Reactor alums to help me along.

My career coach and I worked on restructuring my goals week by week. Sometimes I would be spending too much time on cold applications, so I would switch gears and limit myself to one a day and focus on outreach and setting up meetings with engineers. When I was falling off my schedule, I worked with him to hold myself accountable.

My mentor played a huge part in showing me that even though I’m in this pivotal moment in my career, I should keep enjoying life and spending time doing things that make me happy. He also was a driving force pushing me to negotiate and getting more confidence in my self-worth. Honestly, sometimes it’s nice just to talk to someone you get along with well.

And being in contact with others who are taking the same journey is invaluable. These people are with who you can share struggles and knowledge. It feels good to know that there are those just like you, just as clueless, doing the same thing.

Like I said before, this is a marathon. Surround yourself with a team that is there for you!

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5) Outreach, Just Do It

I’ve never been a shy person. I’m lucky in that sense. But even stronger than that, I have no shame. I will reach out to anyone and everyone, and that’s exactly what I did. Crazy enough, most people would respond.

I looked for anyone with a mutual connection, sometimes I reached out to people who had NO mutual connection, and I would ask them if they could meet in the next few days.

NOTE: This is actually something I learned when asking people out on dates. It’s not as great to be vague, “Would you like to go out sometime?” It’s better to give a very specific timeframe. It requires the other person to be specific and you find out very quickly if they want to meet or not. So, for a date it would be something along the lines of, “Are you free this Saturday to grab a drink?” Same thing when outreaching, I would ask if someone has time in the next few days, they would either say yes and we would make it happen, or they would say no and either follow up with a different date or just let it lie. I’m also single so maybe take or don’t take this advice.

Every engineer I talked to gave me great advice on how to approach the job search and their experiences as well. Before starting my job search, I thought that I only wanted to work for companies like Netflix or Spotify—entertainment-based companies. But as I talked to more engineers, I started to realize that many of them found joy based on a specific company’s culture, or the team, or the specific application they were working on. It is because I talked to so many engineers that my mind expanded on where I could be happy and what I wanted to work on.

Funnily enough, the job I have now is at a company my roommate (who had finished a different boot camp) got a referral for, but then the interview didn’t quite work out. I asked him if he could share the contact information of the person who gave his referral. I chatted with that engineer and got a referral myself. Like I said, no shame, baby.

Also, this was the most enjoyable part of my job search. Meeting others who have been where you are and who are happy to chat with you.

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Overall, the job search can be overwhelmingly difficult. Be sure to work hard and keep an eye on your health. Before you know it, you’ll be an employed software engineer making a bazillion dollars!