How to Get Your First Programming Job
You’ve completed high school with high grades, attended a mid-tier college, and all the sudden you set foot out into the world awaiting to land your first programming job. You know everyone is going to be dying to hire you for a programming job the second you get that diploma, right? That’s what every counselor has ever told you said.
The media published numbers about how easy getting a programming job is. You go into the phase of submitting your resume to not only one, but possibly as many as three programming employers of your choosing, knowing you’ll have the cherry pick of the programming offers when it comes to your first job.
Weeks go past, and all the sudden you wonder if for some reason your resume got lost. Worse yet, maybe you didn’t get that programming job because your phone number changed. You begin to panic wondering why your phone isn’t ringing off the hook with programming job offers. More time passes and you move back in with your parents to play Halo 3 while you wait on your first programming job.
Everyone assures you that it will all be fine and you’ll land a programming job that is going to make you wildly rich any minute. Feeling a tiny bit of nervousness, you begin applying for even more programming jobs online. You may all the sudden find yourself approaching businesses you previously considered below you in hopes of landing this magical first job.
Then it hits you, right after you walk into BestBuy and you are looking at video game accessories. Chances are good the teenage looking boy may very well also have a programming degree. So what’s missing? Why is it hard to get your first programming job you wonder. You open the paper and look for the first time at real paper based classifieds. You see a lot of programming jobs, but they have this little phrase in small print at the bottom of every ad. No, it’s not the fax number.
It’s the line that says “3 to 5 years experience.” During this point of trying to land the first programming job, many fresh graduates get discouraged and begin settling into mediocre careers and jobs in middle management or other necessary evils to pay back student loans. Just because the door gets slammed on you many times, don’t lose hope for landing that first programming job.
Realize that many times the most sought after programming jobs will take into consideration extracurricular achievements. If you have been involved in any impressive projects on Sourceforge.net, or completed any work-for-hire on sites such are RentACoder.com, you can use these sorts of achievements towards landing your first job. Even contributions to sites such as PlanetSourceCode.com can be fluffed up into legitimate programming experience with many employers. And let’s face it, why shouldn’t they count real programming experience through nontraditional venues?
Just because someone has had a job title with an employer in some IT field at some other desk, doesn’t mean that the candidates most likely at the front of the line for getting jobs programming actually know any more than you when it comes to solving programming problems.
Beyond hackney approaches to getting a first job, it may be necessary to lower your standards and seek out alternative programming jobs. Unlikely places exist beyond the realm of Google jobs and they include businesses such as manufacturing plants and industrial warehouses. These less prevalent employers often need programmers direly, and are willing to live with substantially less experience when it comes to extending a programming job offer.
Using a combinational approach of online resume sites such as monster.com and the foot approach when coupled with being willing to pay your student loans while building some form of experience may be the secret to opening the door to your very first programming job.
Yeah, the first job is hard. I’m currently looking for something in London to get away from Salzburg and it’s quite hard, even though my nickname is more widely spread than every company I apply at
But I didn’t finish university and my resume doesn’t look as awesome as others.
Sitting at home, playing games is definitely the wrong way.