How to get your first job offer as a developer

The continuous way to stay the best software engineer

First, I think it would be nice to introduce myself. I’m a web developer since 2009 and today I’ve got experience with more than 15 different projects in different companies.
Like all developers, I started as a junior developer, and as I think I understand how difficult it can be to get a first job offer. There are a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t be accepted to a vacancy — lack of experience, your age, sex, etc. Yes, it sounds terrible, but nowadays we still have companies that can reject you by sex or age.

Despite the fact that it was a long time ago, today everything looks the same as ten years ago — good developers are very much appreciated. So how do you become the “good developer” that everyone wants?

Practice, practice, and more practice

Practice is the most important thing in each developer’s career. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you should do it all the time. I know that writing millions of lines of code without any reason sounds strange and how it can help to get a job offer anyway?
Firstly you have to understand that all things you do in programming are practice — pet projects, interview tasks, courses tasks, etc. Practicing, in general, is so useful because the first time you just write some code, not so perfect, but next time this code will be better and better. But to make more advantage of it — share your tries. Just make a GitHub account and push all your code there. It’ll help you to show your real skills to a potential employer.

А samurai has no goal, only a path

It might sound weird, but to get the first job offer you need to have some experience. There are a lot of ways to get things done. You can start from freelance and do small projects or find the local web studio (really it’s not a big difference with freelance projects, but it can help you with finding projects). If you really love programming and want to become a professional — just reorder your priorities from salary to experience. My first salary was about $100 but it was a great job and a starting point for building the real experience.
Another way is an internship in a big company. It can be a local company or any from the top one like Google, Facebook, or Amazon.

Last but not least is the theory

Real-life work is not only practice. Your theoretical knowledge is your base of answers not only for interview questions but also for everyday work tasks. Your knowledge base is the guarantee of reducing the time to find the right answer, so the deeper this base will the better.
How to understand which topics to choose for learning? I think you’ve already chosen the direction for your professional growth, a particular programming language or framework, but if not — you should do that. It’s not so hard to change the direction, but you have to start from some point. Ok, let’s imagine that you already did it.
The easiest way to understand what technologies to learn is to find the vacancies for middle developers of your direction and note the technologies that are frequently found there. It will be your own list to learn and you can start working with it.

Conclusion

In spite of the title of the article, I’m still using these tips to become a better version of myself. Sure, it’s not a comprehensive list for success, but it’s the list that helps me and can help you to get your first job offer. So, be proactive and stay motivated.