How Can I Get Employers To Take A Chance On Me As A Developer?

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Hey folks, I am I'm going to the movies. I got to go watch F1 um with a fellow former Microsoft engineering manager. Um he's also a content creator. It's Hassan Hhabib. Uh super cool opportunity to to be able to get to hang out with him. But more on that later. I'm going to talk about something that I got a question about on LinkedIn and it was uh framing from a a post that I left and the post was really around like as engineers like you really can't be expected to know everything and you can't put this kind of pressure on yourself to know everything and then I gave a bunch of different examples in my career where like I had sort of been put into situations where like I absolutely did not know everything and um kind of like had to like part of it

for yourself like battling imposter syndrome like you know you're put into some new challenge some new domain some new type of responsibility and you're like I don't have experience doing that and that's I mean part of part of growing not just as software engineers like in any type of role in life and um you kind of get this imposter syndrome about whether or not you're truly capable of So that's that was part of the post. But um the other thing is like people were taking chances on me, right? So um one of the examples I gave was like when I went to Microsoft, I had only built desktop software. I worked at a digital forensics company for eight years. I had only built desktop software, right? I've never done, you know, distributed systems at scale. um you know I've run servers and things like that but not certainly not like you know uh hundreds of thousands of servers across the planet kind of thing.

So they hired me and they put me as an engineering manager on a deployment team for deploying hundreds of services across hundreds of thousands of machines across the planet. So, um it was just like, you know, here's a bunch of examples of these types of situations like sort of sort of as evidence that um like that's kind of how my career's gone and um you know like there there's some proof that this is how this kind of stuff can look. So, I had someone message me and they said, "Hey, like not that I'm uh you know, not to say that I don't believe you or anything, but uh you know, for especially for juniors, like how is it that we can get people to build up that trust in us, right?

So, if I was a junior developer, how can I get someone to give me that kind of trust to go do this kind of thing, right?" And they said, "I, you know, they kind of followed up with that to say that I again, this is them speaking. I think that, you know, the industry doesn't really favor that for for junior developers and, um, they're right. Um, so I'm going to talk through this, but I I I definitely agree with that. I think that it's very rare that you do have people trusting, you know, junior developers or people I'm going to bucket junior developers into people with uh, less experience in general. And you might say, well, I'm a junior developer, but I've been programming for years and years and years. That's totally cool. I just mean like you don't have years of professional experience necessarily to back up the work that you've done.

Now, you might be able to demonstrate that in other ways and that is a potential answer to this question, right? Like, okay, you are at your first official like uh career, your first job in your career, sorry. and um you're like, "Okay, this is my first time actually being fully employed like this, but like I've built X, I built Y, I built Z, I've, you know, I've done whatever and I have this entire track record." You might have built tons of things, deployed tons of things. You might have stuff on the side where you have customers. Like great, like these are examples that you could use for that, but the overwhelming majority of people that are early in their career simply do not have that. So, yes, that's one potential answer. I just don't feel like it's going to be a helpful one to kind of talk through.

So, that's one way. Um, but I think the reality is that there there isn't actually a shortcut here. So the examples that I walk through in my career, I I kind of said it in the beginning when I was briefly introducing them in this talk, but like some of that is me acknowledging imposter syndrome, right? So I just to give you an example, when I had graduated university, I had never worked in digital forensics, right? Never never got to do that. But what I was able to demonstrate was that I had a really strong C background. This was a startup. They were like, we get that not a lot of people are going to be software developers and have a digital forensics background. That's cool. Like we get it, but we need people that are going to be strong C developers. So I happen to be a very good fit for that reason.

Now in hindsight like kind of ridiculous because was I a good C developer or as good then compared to now like absolutely not but I was certainly good enough that we're able to be successful right not that I carried the whole company but I could be part of that in the beginning to build that momentum. So it worked. Um I talked in that post I talked about an internship where they hired me and I had never built like iOS apps before. I had to go build an iPad app not from scratch to contribute to it. Uh I didn't know Objective C. I don't use Max to develop. But the whole point is that for some of these smaller companies, they were positioned to say, "Look, we don't need you to know certain things. We're looking for strengths in other areas. We got you covered on the rest." Right?

So at the place where I was doing iOS development, they're like we don't care that you've never worked in iOS before, right? I think they were looking at some of the other things like that I was a you know selfarter that I was what whatever I was able to demonstrate to them with my resume and prior work experience. They like that and they were like you'll learn Objective C when you're here. It's fine, right? No worries. Um with the digital forensics company was we'll teach you digital forensics. We know that not many people know that. Cool. We'll rely on your other skills because that's what we're looking for. So, first sort of point here is that you may be able to have a strong set of skills that people are looking for. That's kind of what worked for me in the beginning was certain unique sets of skills that people were looking for and they said we'll cover the rest.

Another like my very first internship, I've told this story before. I worked at this company for two different semesters and the the um the guy who owned the company when he was hiring me this interview that he had set up um he said bring something for show and tell. So I brought this you know 2D game I was making uh and I it was just something that I love to build. I spent tons of time on it. It was terrible. like not a good game, but there was a lot of complex systems that I built into this. And I demoed it to him and I got the offer. And he said to me, "Are you surprised that you got the offer?" And I told him like like based on how the interview went, like not really like it it seemed to go quite well. So, uh it like I'm glad it went well, but I don't like based on that interview, I wasn't really surprised, right?

It's not to be cocky. if he was like in the interviews like, "Oh, I don't know." The whole time, then I would be very surprised that I got the offer. But he said it was an internship position that was supposed to only be for students in their second half of university. So like mid and uh midyear uh mid university um to like final years. And I was in my very first semester. So he had seen that I was very motivated to go learn, go spend time building stuff and he was like great, I have someone that's what I'm looking for. I didn't know Python. I didn't know C. Those are the two languages that we used. I didn't I hadn't really done any embedded development. That's what I was doing there. I was building um embedded software for needleless injectors for for farm animals to help medicate them.

So these were all scenarios where I was able to demonstrate things that people were interested in and they could cover the rest. So when people become very very very general, trying to cover everything and they don't really have like something that makes them stand out makes it pretty challenging. I happen to be very fortunate that I had some things that made me stand out and I got to align them to to positions that I was applying for. Right. It's uh some of it's luck in terms of timing, who I got to talk to, right? The fact that I applied to certain jobs very much, but I was also like I had done prep work. I had been programming for many years. I had been spend I spent time building things. So So that's part of it. But the the next thing that I want to get into here is like I I said it already, but this isn't the kind of stuff that happens overnight.

So you may not be in a situation where people are taking risks on you, right? It's it's competitive right now. Let's take the digital forensics company for as an example. I don't know if they were starting right now, let's pretend, okay? And the job market's pretty uh pretty tough. They might say, "Hey, look, we put a, you know, we're hiring our first engineers. We put a job position up and we're getting tons of applicants, tons." Maybe they would say, "We're going to set the bar higher for C developers." Maybe they would say, "You got to know C and we really expect that you understand file systems. We're just setting the bar higher." And they could do that because there's a lot of competition for it. So you as the person trying to apply, they're they're not willing to take as much of a risk because they're like, "We have so many applicants.

We can be picky, right?" I don't know because I don't have a crystal ball and I can't do the multiverse thing to see how this would have panned out if that company was doing the same thing today. I don't know. But I would imagine that if the there was a lot more um like competition for people applying that they could get away with stuff like that, right? So like I said, for me, luck, but also preparedness. Lucky because of the timing for it, but I was prepared. So you may very well be in a position where it's like, you know, you want like I'm just going to use the digital forensics thing as an example, but like replace it with anything you want. If you're like, "Hey, I'd really want to do that, but I don't have the experience that no one's willing to take a chance on me." Okay.

If it's something you really want to do, spend extra time on it, not related to work, land a job somewhere and build up experience where you can demonstrate accountability in general, right? You want to be able to show on a resume that you were basically assigned tasks. were able to lead initiatives and take them from start to end um without like dropping the ball on it. It's trickier to get that kind of experience when you're more junior, right? But if you can say like every project I was given, I was proactive. I was communicating clearly. Like you're doing all these things that really show that you're accountable. That's the kind of thing that makes people build trust in you and that they will take more of a chance. If people don't feel like they can trust you, that you're going to be accountable for certain things, they're not going to want to give you stuff that's going to stretch you a little bit.

Right? If we think through some of the examples I gave from my own experience, right? A bunch of it was like, "Hey, I'm a a selfarter. I do all of this programming on my own outside of work. I love to do it." If you put something new in front of me, I have already demonstrated based on the years of programming that I had done on my own ahead of time. I will go learn those things because I've had to do that already with all these other things, right? They're like, "Okay, well embedded programming is going to be new for this guy. Okay, he's already demonstrated that he's gone and learned XYZ like on his own selfarter. Cool." Same thing, you know, with Python, with C, with Objective C and doing iOS develop, all these things I was able to demonstrate and kind of build that trust for people.

So again, it's going to look different for everyone, but the general advice, the two things I wanted to say here are really that one, if you have unique skills that stand out, trying to align that to where you're applying to can help tremendously. Um, like I said, for me, I got lucky with like C development because I had spent so long, not not so long, but so long, uh, compared to other people that were like junior, I had years of building in C already. I even more years in VB.NET. So, I had that to go with me. Like, how many years is that? Like five, six. By the time I graduated university, I had two full years of internships and seven no more than seven years of cuz I was 14 all high school four years. I had nine years of programming, right? I had nine years of programming.

That was my competitive advantage in two internships. Sorry, two years of internships. So, you need to go find the thing that's going to help you be competitive. It's going to look different for everyone. That's part one. Part two is being able to kind of say, you know what, people may not be willing to take the risk on me yet. How do I build up experiences where I can demonstrate accountability? And that might mean not taking the exact thing that you're striving for just yet. using something as a stepping stone where you can build the inertia, build the momentum, demonstrate the accountability. Boom, boom, boom. I'm delivering on these projects. I am demonstrating that I can be I'm someone that's uh trusted. I'm accountable. You do this. My camera's all over the place. Um, you do this and then you have more evidence to add to your resume.

So, that's what I would recommend. I realize it's not like a sexy answer, but uh that's that's my advice in this case. Um, okay, I got to get off the highway cuz uh I don't know exactly where I'm going, but we'll wrap it up there. Thanks so much, folks. Remember, if you have questions that you want answered, leave them below in the comments or go to codemute.com and you can submit your question anonymously and I will answer it for you in a video. Thanks so much for watching. See you next time.