5 Month Since Graduating Flatiron Bootcamp and 3 Months since Job Search

Jacky Lin
3 min readNov 8, 2020
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

I graduated from Flatiron June 2020 and have commenced my job search August. I want to share how my journey to land a first job is going. Though it has been only 3 months since my initial job search, it feels like forever.

What I been doing since graduating

1. LEETCODE

Leetcode helps level up your coding skills and quickly land a job. This is the best place to expand your knowledge and get prepared for your next interview.

Leetcode is definitely one of the most effective resources to prepare technical interviews. The idea is that you certainly need a bunch of practice before you can easily solve those problems.

2. PROJECTS

COMING SOON! MY PORTFOLIO.

Since Flatiron has taught me the tip of the iceberg on projects, its always best to touchbase with what you already know and what skillset you want to improve on. There are two options to the projects you want to do:

Either add more functionality to the current project or have your new idea come to reality.

Personally, I like to keep adding more functionality to current project.

3. NETWORKING

I have reached out to all types of Engineer in this field and to be honest, I don’t always get a reply. Understand that, people are busy, you are a stranger to them and its normal to be ignored by them.

Networking is important because we want an insight of what we will be doing when we land our first gig. These are the usual questions I use to ask them

Types of Jobs I been Applying to

EVERYTHING !!!

Full-Stack Engineer, Front-End Developer, Back-End Developer, Solutions Engineer, Internships. You name it, I already applied to it. However there are some limitations to what you apply to. Should I apply to this job that requires the skills that I don’t know?

I have heard many opinions on this question. A lot of people have told me just apply to everything that I see, apply to things you know you are capable of, and don’t apply if you don’t know.

Interviews?

Interviews have been rare for me, however it is understandable that we are still in a pandemic. Luckily, I am a man of patience, I am taking this time to study as much as I can and get comfortable in the new SE world.

I have heard of the interview process. It can either be a take-home-challenge, a one-on-one leetcode question or even white-board question. Taking this time to know because when the time comes, you want to be ready.

Overall

It’s been a long time since I been in the interview process but the grind doesn’t stop because you never know when opportunity will be knocking in front of your door. I know a lot of people are going through the same thing and only time will tell. Hopefully, my next blog will be about how I landed my first Software Engineer Job. Cheers to people on the same boat as me!

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