I'M DOOMED - Becoming a Software Engineer Late in Life

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hey folks we are going to the YouTube comments for today's question so this says well it's from Omar Nike I'm not sure if I pronounced that properly so I apologize if I got it wrong but the question says what's your advice for people who are starting first job late after being jobless for very long due to personal reasons and I'm going to interpret this question because they do say first job I'm assuming they mean not just a first software development job it's a little confusing because it says after being jobless for a very long time it made me kind of interpret that is had a job then was jobless and then is looking for a job I don't think my sort of perspective on this is going to change anyway um to answer this so I will try my best to give you my perspective

on this friendly reminder if you want questions answered leave them Below in the comments or send a message to Dev leader on social media it's my social media handle and my main YouTube channel if you send in questions I'll keep you Anonymous and that way you can write whatever you want and I'll try my best to answer but okay from the perspective of someone start the kind of two things going on here right starting late and then um maybe this perception of like I don't know two things maybe like on a resume it looks like pretty light and like Hey where's all the experience um and what was the other thing I wanted to say maybe this feeling of like not even from the resume perspective but like I feel like I'm behind so perception outside in and also like this feeling of like what

do I do right so I want to kind of chat through this um I wanted to start by saying like on my main YouTube channel for career switchers at least um I've definitely had interviews with people that are getting into software development late late air quotes like later than what we would consider like someone who was you know going through high school or something and then going hey like I want to be a developer and kind of like proactively trying to align postsecondary education boot camps whatever it is to go get a a a job in software development because if you're doing that you probably are at least starting earlier um because you're trying to do those things as soon as you can but there's definitely people I've talked to that are career switchers that are going into soft development late so 30s 40s um

and for those individuals it was like I mean slightly different because they have some other work experience I realize I I think this person's trying to say I don't have any but they have some other work experience but they say hey couple things are going to happen right I'm going to lean on on the skills that I and experiences that I built up in whatever career or field that I've been in which people I think underestimate there's a lot of value in that I've made videos on this before right but if you're working in teams doing stuff and being able to show accountability and stuff like that like that can go a really long way because when you're doing your first job there's a lot of that stuff that you've never experienced before right like even if you went to college or university it's like

you have assignments you to study for exams but like the building stuff in teams like actually in teams not just like a couple of assignments here and there it's very different being able to work in code bases that have existed for a while um would be very different so if you're someone who's at a company where there were established processes and you're coming into it like these are different experiences that you could carry forward with you into a software developer position even if it's a junior right entry level position it's still like you have a bunch of other experience to bring over so in this case if you don't have any of that other experience to me this just kind of puts you in the spot of like entrylevel developer I think people get very nervous about this because there may be this perception or

they I don't know they they might be creating this like false perception of someone going well you know my a I don't know how old this person is right my age is 26 or it's 30 or it's 32 or whatever and someone's going to be looking at my age on a resume going wait where's all the other experience and there isn't so we're just going to ignore right but when we're looking at Juniors and I should be careful here because I I there's a comment that I literally have pulled up here where someone had commented saying like that I'm leaving out the fact that there are no Junior jobs and I responded to them and I was like in the last 12 months I have literally interviewed and hired Junior developers at Microsoft don't like I understand it's very challenging times but don't tell me

there's none there are because I've hired for them um so I want to be careful as I talk through this because I'm sure there's going to be some angry people in the comments but um in this position where you have not worked before as someone who looks at resumés as someone who does interviews I don't I think if I were to piece together like oh this person is a little bit older and they don't have like work experience written down I might go interesting like that's that's not common but I wouldn't I wouldn't like flat it or something like it doesn't be for me at least it's not a thing of like oh therefore for red flag there's an issue I probably wouldn't even ask about it or talk about it unless they brought it up especially because this person was saying for personal reasons

right that's exactly why I wouldn't it's exactly why I wouldn't ask a candidate in an interview oh like what's the Gap here why are why are you 28 years old or 32 or whatever it is why are you this age and don't have any other work experience it's not about for me at least for me at least it's not about addressing like why are there gaps because when I'm interviewing people my my goal is to try and understand all of the reasons why someone would be a good fit right like let me try to get you to like I want to extract the value during the interview if if there are red flags that come up sure but like not having prior work experience if someone was applying for like a junior role would not be a red flag if someone was applying so in

this situation just to give you a counter example if someone who was starting late had not had work experience was applying for like a senior developer position and was trying to like lie their way through it and then it comes out that they don't have prior work experience and that would be a red flag for me cuz they're just not being honest but like the red flag is not they don't have prior experience the red flag is that they're lying about it that's all right it's like and I've had people or even they're not being malicious about it but they're saying like their skills are at some level and then we're going through the interview and I'm going like based on based on how you're being evaluated like these skills don't line up like if you've heard of fizzbuzz or fiz pop the interview question

right um if you haven't go look it up on Wikipedia it's quite it's fascinating because it's basically like a for Loop in an if statement and then you know uh depending on how you ask at like a modulo operator because you're you usually it's like even odd kind of print uh you print for even and odd to the console but it's like even if you don't know the modulo operator for testing even and odd whatever um it's like very basic stuff for Loop or some other type of loop whatever you want and an if statement and there's like a staggering number of people that aren't able to actually do this in an interview so if I had someone who was saying like I have 12 years of experience and I want this senior role and then something like that comes out in the evaluation I

would be like that's a red flag for me because like there's a very big discrep between what's what experience someone is telling me they have versus like what I'm observing um but all of that to say like not having the prior experience to me does not stand out as a red flag as long as you're being honest about it right if you're not trying to mislead then then so what now I don't I'm not every recruiter I'm not every hiring manager this is just my perspective right this person is saying what's your advice so my advice is that I just treat this the same way that um anyone who's just starting out would try to you know build up their portfolio and their resume right I would say start practicing building stuff so if you don't know and this is going to be like it's

going to be very general advice and if you've watched other videos where I talk about this is going to be the exact same right so figure out what type of software that you're at least interested in starting with is it mobile applications Do you want to build websites do you not know at all like start somewhere and you can change right it's not like this isn't going to like dictate the rest of your career so if you're like I don't know like websites sound cool or I don't know mobile apps sound cool all right awesome like pick something right and if you don't know you can literally go to chat GPT or your favorite llm ask it for some ideas because if you don't know like it's not it's not going to be wrong you just need a starting point because people usually get paralyzed

by this because there's like a million different things you could do and they're going well I got to pick the best thing like and there isn't so then you're stuck trying to make a decision that doesn't actually matter and you could have just been getting started because so much of this stuff is transferable that you might as well just start building the experience like right now so you can ask an llm for feedback about like what are the options for like mobile development embedded programming if you want to do websites whatever and then you can say languages and text Stacks once you're trying to get some more ideas beyond that and just like pick something then from there you can start doing like build a really small project you could ask chat GPT or whatever your favorite llm for more ideas there's lots of like

if you start searching online you can go find like a bunch of different uh templates or starter things to like you know you you get your typical like to-do app or uh calculator app kind of thing some people roll their eyes at that but it's like if you're just trying to get started building something like building anything is totally fine do it practice building stuff you'll have to keep building and iterating to get the skills to be able to build upon so i' start with that okay so you're getting some of that momentum you can layer in like watching YouTube videos tutorials reading articles stuff like that um but what I don't recommend and and courses and on top of that right but what I don't recommend is that you it's called tutorial hell if you're not familiar with the term but um what will

happen is someone will say well I want to be a developer so let me go get a tutorial for how to do something so they follow the tutorial which ends up being that they just copy and paste what's shown in the tutorial till they get to the end and they go great it worked so like so therefore I am a developer then they go well let's build the next thing so they find one more tutorial copy paste like get it running and they go great but the problem ends up being that by doing this they're not actually getting stuck and then they're not learning so you kind of have to get stuck to help reinforce when you're unsticking yourself like that's a learning moment and if you're just purely copying stuff out of tutorials sometimes like on my main YouTube channel people say hey like

post the source code for this and it's like no like sometimes I do other times I'm like I'm just you don't need to copy this there's no value in you copying and pasting my code that's in the tutorial like if you understand what I'm talking about you you don't need to copy it there's no like there's so little value in doing that but it's not that tutorials are bad like I would be very hypocritical my other YouTube channel is literally like almost exclusively tutorials it's just that if that's where you're starting and that's all you're using I think that there's little value in that so I would try to build stuff when you're getting stuck like maybe go look up a tutorial specifically on the thing you're stuck on or ask your favorite l for advice on it get unstuck and then keep building until

you're stuck again okay so I would do this follow this process and then keep doing it let's park that for a moment okay beyond that because this this question is pretty open-ended right like what's your advice it's like well at some point you're going to want to try applying for jobs right so the number one thing I would say is that your competitors the people are applying for Stuff they're either going to be people that have been building software for a while that have projects some of them will have college or university some of them will have boot camps some will have a mix of those um and if you don't have that kind of stuff it's not it's not a problem it's just that you have to consider like what your competition is going to look like right because when you're applying for stuff

you want to stand out so building projects is one way to do that for sure sure people have uh requested resume reviews uh from this Channel and I started posting them on a playlist on my main Dev leader Channel and I've had resumés come in that don't have any projects right it's not like people assume like every developer has side projects and stuff and they're like oh no like I'm screwed but no like some people aren't even doing that and I would say like my take on this is like that's a minimum expectation if considering how competitive it is right now as soon as if you consider that you might have a similar skill set to someone else if they have demonstrated they put together projects and they have a little portfolio of like here's things that I built and you don't have that they're

automatically standing out more than you I'm not saying they're better than you they're just automatically standing out more if their skills and experiences are all comparable experiences being basically zero if you haven't had a job yet so projects are a great way to stand out so if you're thinking about your resume I would say like try thinking about how you can be demonstrating the things you're learning through your projects uh but beyond that what could you be doing I would say networking try to and this isn't for everyone I understand like I certainly didn't take this advice um if I were talking to my younger self I think it would be hard to convince me to do this cuz I'm very introverted but I would say try to get out to meetups right try to get out to local meetups network with people take advantage

of sites like LinkedIn or other places where you can be connecting with people digitally it's not just a matter of connect to spam your resume out to people saying hey like get me a job please refer me nope build meaningful connections this kind of stuff takes time but I think meetups are a great way U I've talked to people that have done volunteer work for uh not for profit um organizations on weekends and stuff so they're dedicating some extra time that's something you can put on a resume you're not getting paid for it I understand that doesn't feel very good but it's experience you can put on a resume um for people that are in college and university uh I've mentioned before like if you have like clubs and stuff like a robotics club or whatever it happens to be there's usually tons of different

options at these places try to get into to that hackathons try to do those to be able to put down some different experiences on a resume for this individual that wrote this if you're not in college or university it's not the end of the world right what I'm trying to do is give you ideas about things that people can do so volunteering you shouldn't need college or university to do that you'll hear people saying um commit to open source stuff same thing you know no prere for that um but if you're trying to like go above and beyond I would say try to find some of these opportunities where you can be I've seen people posting on Reddit that they're looking for like coding buddies and stuff like could you go build projects online with other people right it's all just about creating these experiences

instead of just waiting to say well I don't have a job I can't get a job therefore there's never going to be any experience it's kind of like a chicken in the egg problem start creating the experiences I realize it's not the same as saying like I have some company on my resume that was employing me I know it's not the exact same but you can be creating experience and you should because if you're just waiting it's not going to happen and then you're going to be disappointed but what is in your controls to be creating these other experiences so I'd highly recommend that um but maybe I'll wrap it up there overall I would say from my perspective the um the time you know like being jobless and starting late kind of thing late I don't even know what late means uh I I

wouldn't be concerned personally um I think that let's put it this way the reason I'm saying not to be concerned about that is number one because personally that's not something I give a about that's my bias right I'm not everyone else but the other reason is like that's literally not something that you can even change there's there is nothing that you can do about that you don't have a time machine so you can either be concerned about it and let that hold you back and maybe it's all for no good reason or you just say that's what it is like you cannot change it so I just would not be con concerned about it just focus on the stuff that you have control over which is building experience so hopefully that helps that's my take on it uh I wish this person all the best

um I think that this is one of the coolest Industries to be in because there's so many different domains and uh yeah like I said wishing them success so thanks for the question and a friendly reminder if you have your own questions leave them in the comments or send them into Dev leader on social media and I'd love to try and answer your questions so take care I'll see you next time