Am I Ready To Apply For Software Developer Jobs?

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all right it's late it's uh January 15th it's a Wednesday just leaving the office um I had to stay well I didn't have to stay late but I have a big Presentation tomorrow that I'm getting ready for we got a topic from the comments um this is from Dylan so Dylan wrote hey I'm going down the selftaught route since I dropped at a school I've always wanted to become an iOS Developer and I've been studying and building apps while working full-time post my portfolio and get him awesome okay however I'm having trouble finding out if I'm actually ready to start applying for jobs okay my question is how can you tell if you're ready for an entry-level job in software development I think this is great thank you so much for the comment um let's get going here so the first thing that I got

to remind people to do is if you want your question answered leave in the comments if you have something that's more in depth or you want to be kept Anonymous just uh send me a message message to Dev leader that's my primary social media including my main YouTube channel if you want to check that out for more polished videos but um yeah I'll keep them fully Anonymous and obviously if you have more detail helps me answer um I don't know just because there's more context for me to work with so okay I think there's a couple different angles to look at here um and the reason I always try to frame these types of things in in three different phases because we're talking talking about someone who is trying to apply uh for like sort of like their first full-time job as a developer and

what I'm going to say is like the like I appreciate the you know the extra specifics around iOS Developer I'm going to say like it in this context it doesn't uh iOS Developer or Android developer or um you know website developer or Mac and like all these things like the that detail won't I don't think that's going to change my uh sort of General pH philosophy or approach here um so I always talk about this kind of stuff in three phases and one is going to be sort of the job application part like getting noticed so that you can get onto phase two which is going to be the interview process itself so great your your resume and your job applications are working you're getting interviews how do you succeed at the interview part and then part three is like how do you actually perform

on the job and how can you make sure that you're set up for Success there and that one that one might sound kind of weird to some people cuz you're like hey like if I just interviewed well like duh like shouldn't I be good to go the reality is no uh unfortunately because I feel like all three phases are like unfortunately kind of looking at different things and I say unfortunately because I wish that they were much more aligned and I just think that the reality in a majority of cases they are not aligned and I talk about this a lot in other videos so I'm not going to bore all of you uh by repeating myself but um when Dylan asked this question like how do I know if I'm going to be ready what I would say is like for which part um

because just to I'm G to try to go into this in more detail but like you know super uh super high speed here like ready for being able to build stuff as a software developer well you said you're already building apps and posting them on on GitHub and stuff so like you're already doing the work so you're ready but then if you said okay well how do I know I'm ready for interviewing I would say okay well how good are you at leag code problems and if you said well I've never even heard of that I would say okay you're probably not ready um and then if you said well um no I just meant to actually submit my application and make sure that's ready I would say okay like have you put together a a portfolio sorry this car was trying to merge but

they weren't using their signal and then they just kind of like matched my speed so they were trying to come into the I don't know my Lane which was going to turn into an off-ramp and instead of deciding on picking a speed that's not mine they said if I just go the same speed we'll be stuck in limbo together like an idiot um okay so if you've never put a portfolio together then I would say okay well you got to figure out how you want to do that and how do you want to represent yourself and and uh start applying for jobs and and figure out like what are you looking for when you're applying for jobs so that's super high level but I want to kind of drill into these things right so let's start from the beginning um so for Dylan how do

you know if you are ready to start applying and that's kind of phase one right how are you going to set yourself up for Success because if you're not prepared to do that you're going to be say applying and maybe you don't know the right places to apply to where to look for jobs effectively um how to get your portfolio and stuff structured so like if you I guess number one is like kind of asking yourself like it sounds like you're reaching this point where you're considering I think I want to start I want to start applying and that's a that's a good sign because if you didn't even feel that way I would say like you know uh why why don't you wait until you at least have that feeling or you have that interest but I'm assuming that that's the case okay so

you have the motivation to want to do this the drive to want to do it that's good good starting point and now now you're kind of curious am I ready so when I'm thinking about you going through this process of like okay well I want to start applying like kind of going back to what I said do you know where you want to start looking it's probably something to to consider so you have a bunch of options right like an obvious ones LinkedIn um there are other things like if you know of companies off the top of your head and you're like I'm going to go to their careers page and I want to like there's a handful of companies I want to start applying to like that's great so like kind of where you're going to Source the jobs that's something to sort of

figure out next part is going to be now that you know like where you want to start looking I would say like what does your resume look like what does your portfolio look like to kind of be able to Showcase that um I've made videos on this before so I'm not going to go into all the details about like what projects and and what to focus on but as a super high level if you are an entry level developer um and I am hiring entrylevel developers I know everyone's saying oh but they say they require like 10 years of experience like it's this is part of the filtering part and like if companies are listing that then like I don't know like it's kind of up to them to put whatever they want down um if you don't meet the minimum years of experience or

whatever and you're reading through the job description and you're like I could do this I would just apply literally the worst that will happen is that they'll go you don't meet that and you go okay and then it's their loss right so like you might as well just apply because guess what everyone else is anyway um so might as well do it uh the systems broken so so I I like the idea of being able to kind of like look at the the jobs that you're applying to and then try to kind of go back to your resume and your portfolio projects and kind of think about like what what are you putting there and how is that aligning to what people are after so I know a lot of people get hyperfocused on the well they they listed this Tech stack and like yeah

you might not need the exact same one um I will say this for forever but like all these skills are transferable you will notice that some places have less of a luxury of spending time onboarding software developers and teaching them new things and some situations include like if you're a startup company and you had to hire a developer and you might say like we literally do not have Runway to try and spend like 6 months teaching someone C so if we're going to hire them like they better be ready to dive in and that's like you might not like that and that's fine but the point is like they might need to do something like that to stay alive as a company so just something to consider so you will have some places that are like no we're like hellbent on you must have these

Technologies but um I always share the example that like at Microsoft I've probably had a couple as in like two or three people that are on my teams not like that have been there when I was brought on but I mean that were hired as part of my hiring or after where they knew C so like it it doesn't it doesn't actually matter things are transferable in in the grand scheme of things so hopefully that helps uh and I wanted to say that because if Dylan here or yourself right if you're thinking like well I don't know I don't know all of the the iOS like development stacks and like am I going to be screwed like is that is that the minimum bar I have to go do that I would say like no like absolutely not um is it helpful to know more

sure but like knowing more and not knowing any of them well at all is probably like not necessarily helpful um so just something to think about right you don't have to know everything but um yeah the tricky part is that if you're unable to list it on a resume then it might get filtered out you can't see this I want to call it out there's a person in the far right lane thankfully far away from me with all of their lights off um I don't know if you can see how dark it is outside but it's dark and um this idiot thinks it's cool to not have his lights on or her lights on I don't know but amazing I can't believe that it's like my if you've watched my other videos it's a pet peeve of mine because it's stupid um so yeah you

probably have to do a bit of keyword stuffing um on resumés do I think that's good do I think that you know I I love the idea no um but depending on where you're applying to you may find that like they're filtering that kind of stuff so something to think about as well and what else okay so next let's maybe that helps but maybe maybe you want more I'm not sure on on projects and stuff I would say like again try to think about the projects that you're building cuz it sounds like if you're someone like Dyan and you've been building a bunch of stuff um for me looking at people that are junior like kind of you know first first job and stuff I just I I'm very excited to see that you tried building things and I don't care if you have like

like you know no one's used my thing like I don't I'm not expecting you to have users I don't care like did you go build some stuff and and tell me about what you built because you're going to be building stuff so can you demonstrate that to me and uh you know I think some people focus too much on like what's the perfect uh project to demonstrate that the other bias I have to call out is like I'm I'm the manager I'm not necessarily the person who's doing the first pass on your resume so because of that difference you may have people that are like nope I'm looking for whatever I can't speak on behalf of all those people I'm just telling you what I personally look look for and care about um and I I'd say if you if you can list off some

some projects you think are cool I would love to talk to you about them in the interview that's all um okay so next is going to be the interview process itself I think that's a good segue um and depending on where you're applying to a common interview kind of format is that you'll have um like a coding question or coding questions uh system design depending on your level of experience and behavioral interview questions so again in terms of being are you ready uh I would say you know expect unfortunately that you'll probably have some like lead code style question for your your coding interview and you may have multiple rounds of this um it not every place will ask you like lead code style questions I rant about this all the time I don't think that they're a good type of question to ask in

interviews but it's common uh I think too many people focus on like looking for a trick right like if you don't get the trick in the lead code question then like too bad um and then it's not representative of real life uh from my whatever like 14 years of professional experience so I don't like them but I think you got to practice them uh that'll give you a better opportunity for interviewing at places we have system design um for someone like uh I forgot your name already my God sorry it's been a long day the name I was going to say is the person I was just working with so Dylan sorry Dylan it's embarrassing um if if you are an iOS Developer your system design types of questions may look different right like um system design does not have to be like big distributed

systems although maybe it is maybe they want to talk to you about how your application that you might build is like integrating with backend systems and they want you to have that understanding um it could also just be like architectural right so sometimes system design is not big distributed system sometimes system design is like you have an app tell me how you're going to structure the different parts of the app and how they interact with each other uh and it's kind of architectural um one of my interviews at Microsoft my previous skip level manager two skip level managers ago um he was asking me about a particular scenario and this was this is actually like a a hybrid of like a behavioral question and an architectural question and I said hey by the way like I know you're probably cu about like distributed systems and

I said I have to be fully transparent that I don't have working experience where I built Big distributed systems at scale but based on this question where you're asking about like something I architected something I designed shipped blah blah blah I said I have a different one that's about like you know the software stack that we were putting together and how things were architected is that an okay example and he was like sure yeah like walk me through it so you will have questions like this but uh probably the relevant part here from Dylan is like yeah if you're going to be a mobile app developer you may see less of the like big system design type questions look at this oh you can't see other side this's flying flying um the other types of questions you'll get asked for behavioral interview questions and I

do have uh you know Shameless plug have a course on behavioral interviews um it's co-authored by myself and uh an engineering manager from Yelp we put a couple of chuses together on uh like Career Development and uh for software Engineers but um I would say like if you for Dylan or anyone else if you're like I don't know what the hell a behavioral interview question is um like you know go go look into that and do some homework on that before you start applying because I would expect that this is going to come up um a bit of a tip here is that on the behavioral interview questions many software developers hyperfocus still on technical details and fail to realize that this is one of the opportunities where they're testing your soft skills primarily um and the other sort of tip that I'll mention is

that put some effort into understanding what they're trying to ask about given the question okay so like again there's lots of resources on this you don't have to buy my course or anything like that it's not I put it together to try and help there's lots of resources on the internet if you don't like what I have put together or don't want to pay for it that's totally cool um but I think understanding what your uh what you're being asked is really important otherwise you you basically miss the mark and you spend time answering something that's not helpful so all that said and done if you want to know if you're ready and you're talking about interviewing I would say be ready for coding questions like lead code some type of system design or architecture this may be less applicable as a junior uh it's

totally fine and then the third is behavioral interview questions um and yeah try to try to practice all of those okay third um this is the part I like the most because it's the most realistic is are you able to do the job for real um and I think Dylan in this case has kind of said the like what I expect is mostly like probably pretty good to start um which is like I have put together apps so this is good right because I think some people when they get into programming and I say this because I get asked questions a lot on it like hey um what are the best resources for me to watch tutorials or like what books do you recommend so I can learn how to program and I'm always like it's not it's sort of my opinion it's the wrong

direction not that there's anything wrong with books or tutorials or videos or articles or anything like that um it ends up being challenging when someone and you'll hear it called tutorial hell when someone focuses the um like all of their attention and learning on just following tutorials because tutorials are very guided and a lot of the learning in software engineering happens when you're messing stuff up or you're getting stuck like when you actually learn if you follow a tutorial you might basically be clicking through on things typing a couple lines of code because they've already put it up for you maybe sometimes you copy and paste the code and then you're like hey look it I have something running on my machine but then I like and not trying to be an but I'm like okay so what did you what did you learn because

you might have running code but like did you actually learn anything so there's nothing wrong with like you know getting stuck trying to build stuff like I said I think that's probably the best way you learn so there's nothing wrong with following a tutorial I would recommend though if you reverse the order where like you're stuck on something then you go look for a tutorial after you've been stuck to learn about it and get yourself unstuck like I think that's a very good strategy um but it's kind of like get stuck first and then seek out the thing otherwise I think tutorial hell is pretty common where you go okay like I think I learned this thing and then you go okay well what's the next tutorial and then you follow a bunch of tutorials and then I come along and I say okay Dylan

I would like you to go build me an iOS application that can uh I want to show a calendar of all of my notes that I've taken and um I want to have a way that I can send that to the printer for my phone and then you're like I have no idea I just have no idea like where do I start or what are you even saying to me and your first thought is like what what single tutorial will show me that right that's that's not a good spot to be in um so nothing wrong with tutorials I literally on my main YouTube channel Dev leader I make tons of tutorials tons tons of programming tutorials in C and it would be like misleading of me to say like tutorials are bad like absolutely not I think tutorials are helpful it's about your approach

to leveraging them okay so that's one of my recommendations here but uh in terms of Readiness um I think a good litmus test is like in this case for Dylan if you're like uh I want to build iOS apps okay so if I said like go build I want you to make me a new IOS app if you're like I don't even know how to do that like you probably want to have this feeling like okay I'm going to go to xcode and I'm going like I know I have some idea of like what I would like to use like the last time I was doing iOS development it was uh that's not necessarily to I first started doing iOS development it was was it zamarin which was crossplatform so it was C and then I then I had to do Objective C maybe those

were in a different order but I had an internship with Objective C and I hated it not the internship Objective C itself um and then like was back in zamarin then uh I haven't tried Maui yet but I've only like for my own Development I've only used like crossplatform development so I probably don't make a very good iOS Developer to make like native apps um but I can make iOS apps right so my point is that even even for me right I'm saying I don't really know like a lot of like native stuff for iOS I haven't practice it but my litmus test is if you came to me and said could you make me an IOS app I would be like yeah I can and I could say that comfortably like am I going to be super efficient at doing it no but I

know I can make a cross platform one and that means if someone was like no I wanted to be native I'm like okay I know where I can start looking and getting things off the ground without being like I just have no idea what you're saying so as a litmus test to be like hm I wonder if I would say that's probably a good what I would say is a good gut check um the the more comfortable that feels and the more that you layer on to that so if I said Okay I want an IOS app that can do and then you can think through a couple of different things if you're like I don't know how to do anything once I have the skeleton of an app that might be something you want to spend more time practicing right so if you're like

I don't know how to do any of the the UI layout um I don't know how to do any of the transitions what do they call them in iOS um like I don't know I I think Android was like activities I'm not an iOS Developer I don't know um but basically like switching between and stuff if you're like I don't know how to do any of that like at all um I would just say like maybe spend some time getting comfortable like understanding some of these Concepts and um again use it as a litmus test because the reason I like this this third phase I'm talking about is because it's the most realistic right like you're going to be building so if someone said to you I need you to build something the reality is you're probably depending on your job I guess you're probably

not just like building stuff from scratch probably not at least not all the time so let me change it if I said hey I have an IOS app and I would like you to contribute to it if that terrifies you if you're like I don't know how to go through anyone's code or like you know I've I've only followed the tutorials and like I had to set it up from scratch and it was like two files then I would say like okay like maybe just spend more time build bigger projects so you're more comfortable navigating code um but the reality is if you're like I feel like I could probably do that then I would say you're ready to at least apply um in my opinion the I think you know you end up learning so much when you're actually working on on real things

and it's why a lot of us will say like you know practice building things like build software and you will get better at doing it so kind of a I think that's the way I would look at it in terms of a comfort level and being ready to actually do your work now there's other things to consider that you might want to ask yourself like personally like could I can I work with other people um I'm assuming you know maybe it's sounds contrived or kind of silly right but like um it's worth asking uh doesn't mean that you have to have a lot of experience or anything experience doing it but if the thought of it really bothers you where you're like I don't think that I can work under any time lines I don't think that I want to work on projects with other

people I don't want to have to review someone's code like if if all of these things are just things that you hate like you may want to go spend some time looking into them understanding them and then kind recognizing that probably like almost anywhere you work you're going to be doing these types of things almost anywhere so um again use that as a bit of a gut check but um overall I'm getting close to home here so I wanted to summarize before I pull into the driveway uh but I think in terms of Readiness probably the easiest one to check my opinion if you're ready to at least start applying for an entry-level job um but kind of ask yourself if you feel like you could spin up an app in your in your case or if it's a web application or something if you

feel like you could into that and start building stuff without panicking maybe a little bit of panic then like that's probably a good start and then we talked about of course we talked about like uh your job applications this person's tailgating me like a doesn't make any sense makes no sense at all um job applications trying to make sure you're calling out the right things for the jobs you're applying to and then interviewing right so how are you going to practice and what do you need to practice uh for your interviews I think those are things that I would call out but I tried to cover all those things cuz when it's like am I ready I'm like I don't know which part you're asking for Readiness about so I just I hope that makes a little bit more sense um yeah I wanted to

also add rism parking here um please don't be demotivated if you're failing interviews um or being rejected and I say that because uh the reality is it's probably going to happen a bunch and I don't want you to hear that or experience that and then be like oh I guess I should I shouldn't be applying I guess I'm not ready I guess I'm not worthy um because there are lots of people that are very qualified that are applying and not getting jobs or not getting interviews and all that stuff and they are very qualified and they are very ready so it may feel that way but like a lot of people are going through that too so try not to take that personally and say you are getting interviews or you are getting responses and people tell you like you don't have this experience or

you get your feedback from an interview and they were like you bombed this or like do this better like it's feedback take it keep getting better you will only get better by doing more of this stuff so again please don't you know take um like take it poorly if you're like you know air quotes like failing at some of these steps like we all do and if you haven't interviewed before for a software engineering job that's like saying how can I expect that I'm going to like Ace something I've never done before expect it's probably going to be pretty rough that's cool because the second time you do it it's probably going to be better and the third and the fourth they're probably going to get better and as you're waiting and as you're practicing coding you're probably getting better so you will only keep

improving don't forget that and I wish you all the success that you can possibly have so hope that helps and I'll see you next time take care