John: Hey, this is John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
So I’ve got another question for you today.
This one is about—it’s kind of for you
newbies out there that are wondering how to
get started in the field.
This question is from Alex and he says, “Good
day, John.
As you suggested in my previous email I'm
sending you a couple of questions so you could
do a video.
Thanks for your help.”
He’s actually got a couple of questions
here.
“What would be the first steps for a computer
science student or just graduated to find
a job in the field?” and then “Is there
any opportunity to find a job that is not
an internship for young graduates or in the
process of graduating?” and then “How
to fight not having experience in your resume
when it’s almost always a requirement?
Those are my concerns.
At least this can give you an idea to go deeper
into the topic.
Thank you so much.”
There are 3 separate questions here but they’re
all really the same question.
It’s basically this question of how do you
get a job without any experience just graduating
or getting ready to graduate, a real job not
an internship.
Obviously there’s always this catch 22 is
that you have to have experience to get a
job and you have to have a job to gain experience,
so how do you do this?
I’ve talked about this actually a lot in
different videos and in different ways but
the biggest thing that you can do is, again,
I was just talking in another video about
how we’re moving to this entrepreneur type
of civilization where more and more people
are being entrepreneurial.
You can now, especially with mobile apps,
this is one of the cool things as a software
developer is you can build your own mobile
app company or even web app company and just
build one or 2 apps.
You don’t need a whole team.
You don’t need a huge thing to build a company,
right?
You can actually build your own job and gain
experience.
If you’re in college right now, if you’re
in university and you’re studying computer
science and you want to be able to get a job
when you get out, well, start creating a job
for yourself now.
It’s not going to have the same kind of
prestige as working for maybe a bigger company
but start your own company, build a couple
of mobile apps or build a web app.
Have some kind of app that you’ve built,
some kind of software that could potentially
make money on its own.
There are going to be multiple roads here.
Maybe you’ll build some kind of app and
it will do really well and you won’t even
have to work for someone else.
Maybe you’ll be able to build a whole business
out of that and that would be awesome, but
even if that doesn’t happen because it’s
less likely to happen especially if you’re
doing this part time, what will happen is
that if you graduate from college and then
you have experience you can say, “Look,
if you go to website, I built this application
and I’m selling it for $33/month” or whatever
it is or you can say, “Oh look on the app
store and you can see this iOS or this android
app that I built.”
You can go ahead and show that to an employer
and they’re going to look at that and they’re
going to say, “Wow, you actually have experience.”
You’re going to get past that catch 22 because
you will have experience.
Yes, it won’t be experience working for
someone else’s company but does it really
matter on your resume?
Do you even have to report who’s the owner
of that company?
I mean you could literally just put on your
resume this company that you’ve created
and you could be working for that company
part time or whatever it is.
If you have a legitimate company because you’ve
built a legitimate product then that might
not even really matter.
At least you’re going to look a lot better
than all those similar college graduates that
don’t have any experience.
They’re just totally green.
They don’t have anything like that.
It’s going to take some time to build up
that experience and build up that resume but
this is a great start and plus, like I said,
you’ve got this added bonus of maybe you
can go an entrepreneurial route.
Maybe you don’t even need a job for someone
else especially if you’re just beginning
in college, maybe by the time that you’ve
gone through your 4 years of college you’ve
built an actual business for yourself by going
this route using your skills.
The biggest fear that an employer has is that
when they hire you you can’t actually write
code and there’s an amazing number of software
developers that come out of college with 4-year
degrees and they actually don’t know anything.
They can’t actually write code.
They may have learned a lot of book knowledge
but they can’t actually write code.
If you can actually demonstrate that you can
write code and good code that’s shippable,
a shippable product, that’s going to give
them a lot of confidence and it’s going
to alleviate a lot of those fears.
That’s the big thing is just how can you
build up experience on your own.
You don’t need someone else to do this.
Today you can create a company easily.
You could put apps in the app store.
You can sell things online.
I mean it’s amazing how easy it is to take
payments with payment processes like Stripe
and Paypal and all this.
It used to be hard.
You used to have to go and go to the bank
and set up a merchant agreement to be able
to swipe credit cards and all this.
It’s so simple now.
Anyone can do this kind of stuff so you should
be doing it if you really are serious about
getting out there and getting a job right
away when you get out of college.
Well I hope that is helpful to you.
Best of luck and hopefully you get a nice
job that’s not an internship when you get
out of college.
If you have a question for me just email me
at john@SimpleProgrammer.com.
If you feel like this video might benefit
someone I’d appreciate it if you’d share
it and don’t forget to subscribe to the
channel.
Take care.
