What Comes Next? Making the Transition from Software Engineering Bootcamp to Your First Tech Job
Let’s face it: When you sign up for a software engineering immersive bootcamp, you’re making an ambitious decision to learn a significant amount in a short period of time. I commend programs such as Flatiron School, of which I’m proud to be a student, for making computer science and the world of programming accessible to folks who may not have had the means or access to the discipline earlier in life.
As a bootcamp academic, you quickly learn that such an undertaking requires consistency and commitment daily. Whether you’re participating in a lecture, practicing concepts through code reps, planning and building a project to add to your portfolio that demonstrates your understanding, or getting worked up over code tests you can’t solve, the days are packed! That said, it can be easy to slip into a student mindset and keep yourself busy with the most immediate tasks in front of you; this week, however, I pulled my head up and realized that, in a few short weeks, I’ll have officially graduated from my program and will be on the hunt for my first job as a software engineer!
Given that this upcoming experience won’t be my first foray into tech, I’ve decided to compile the following guide for for others novice programmers and bootcamp grads out there who have never worked in tech, and share some of my own insights from my past nine years in tech building teams and working for early stage startups within the world of Customer Success Operations.
5 Books to Level Up Your Coding Skills
Flatiron School’s curriculum is broken up into five phases: JavaScript, React, Ruby, Rails, and a Capstone. As someone who needs to take a break from staring at a screen all day, I’ve compiled the following reading list structured against Flatiron’s curriculum:
Phase 1: Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke
This book was absolutely essential to my success in the first phase of my bootcamp. At the end of every school day, my brain was unbelievably fatigued from cramming so much new material into my head for hours upon hours, and trying to watch YouTube videos or review lecture material in the evening simply wasn’t sticking. Haverbeke’s approach to JavaScript is perfect for newcomers to the language, and takes an unconventional approach to helping readers feel fearless in the face of what might be their first experience writing code.
Phase 2: Learning React by Alex Banks & Eve Porcello
Here’s something I learned quickly when researching books on computer programming: Not all books are made to be approachable to newcomers! It’s important to find literature that matches one’s current level of understanding, so Banks and Porcello wrote this book to instead ease new programmers into the React community. They start out by assuming the reader is unfamiliar with React and its history, and introduce the reader to React components used by Facebook and other companies to contextualize how ubiquitous the language has become for many recognizable names.
Phase 3: The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David Black and Joseph Leo III
Similar to the last two examples, this book is written in an easy-to-follow and colloquial style. What I love about this book is the structure, both an investment of concept reviews paired with exercises to practice your skills along the way. The book covers Ruby foundations, built-in classes and modules, and Ruby dynamics.
Phase 4: The Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl
This book is clear, succinct, and incredibly approachable for newcomers to Rail. Michael Hartl is the type of person who lives for this work and finds passion in helping instill a passion for coding in others. In fact, if you find yourself loving his approach to coding, I’d recommend his subscription service, Learn Enough, a self-paced curriculum with one of my favorite mantras: You don’t need to learn everything, just enough to be…dangerous.
Phase 5: Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
I hate tests, period. Whether the SAT’s, getting a motorcycle endorsement, or a music audition, it all elicits the same performance anxiety in me that is not representative of my capabilities outside of the testing environment. And unfortunately, a coding interview is something I’ll likely be going through at most companies I interview with in the near future. McDowell’s primer on bringing your A-game to coding interviews is ideal for folks like myself who have found a love of coding and are confident in their skills, but remain concerned on jeopardizing that when pressure is put on you in real-time.
5 Tools to Prepare for the Non-Technical Side of Interviewing
Identify your top and bottom Lominger competencies
When I was first promoted to manager at my first tech company, my Director of Operations at the time recommended I explore Lominger competencies as a lens of reference when interviewing and hiring new members to my team. Years later, I’m still using this system as a means to discover and document my own skills. If you’re unprepared to address your strengths or weaknesses during an interview, you may well give a buzzwordy response like “communication” or “leadership” to the dismay of the interviewer
Lominger does a spectacular job at defining competencies with a bit more meat than a disambiguated trait like “team player.” if I’m hiring for a company of less than 100 people, it’s going to stand out if a candidate mentions one of their strengths is Dealing with Ambiguity. If I’m hiring a project manager who will be working across internal/external stakeholders and multi-disciplinary teams, I’m going to be looking for someone who can articulate their Interpersonal Savviness, and demonstrate it through anecdote. This is the other power of Lominger’s list: It makes it easier to connect lateral examples for those without direct experience in tech. If I want to discuss my Process Management skills, I can feel comfortable drawing from my experience as a restaurant server to demonstrate that skill in an environment as relevant as any tech position.
Plan & Prepare with Trello & Evernote
Full disclosure, I use both of these applications religiously in my life for school, cooking, paying bills, planning events, and everything in between. But when going through the chaotic season of life that is interviewing, these two platforms will help you keep your facts straight across multiple opportunities; the last thing you want is to start talking about the wrong company at an interview! Here’s my recommendation:
- Have a separate notebook in Evernote for each job you’re interviewing for. In that notebook, create an initial note and copy+paste the job description (you never know if the company might remove it from their site halfway through the process!), then create subsequent notes for your research, talking points during interviews, and anything else you deem relevant.
- Create a Trello board to keep track of your interview pipeline. Each list on your Trello board should tie to a specific “stage” of the interview process. Apply / Awaiting Response / Research / Phone Interview / Technical Interview / Hiring Manager Interview / Follow Up would be a great start. This structure will also help you chunk out how you spend your time. Maybe on Sunday morning’s, you start perusing LinkedIn and Indeed to then populate your “Apply” List with new opportunities you find, then on Monday you work your way through those applications and go deeper into each opportunity. Coupled with the ability to save comments / files to Trello cards (each representing a potential job opportunity), and set due dates on cards (e.g. “I’m going to set a due date for Friday on this card to remind myself to follow up with the recruiter), you’ll save yourself time and potential headaches down the road.
Practice interview responses using the STAR method
I cringe when I think back to some of my early experiences interviewing; I’d consistently ramble when sharing examples with the interviewer, get lost in my own story, forget what the point of my anecdote was, and miss crucial details throughout my soliloquy. STAR is a technique used by interviewers to gather all the relevant information about a specific capability that a job requires; this is a technique that is core to the interviewing methodology of Amazon and Facebook, and one which you can work in your favor if you can leverage this structure to keep your interview answers succinct, relevant, and memorable.
While the above graphic does a great job at highlighting each letter of this framework, one additional item I want to stress is this: Remember to keep your answer about yourself and use “I” over “we” as much as you can. Sometimes when interviewing, it can be easy to be discussing a team project and start saying “And then we did this, and then we did that, and then we came up with this idea…”, but an interviewer wants to know YOUR contribution, and will be more likely to understate your involvement than overstate it.
Always. Ask. Questions. (If time allows)
Some may disagree with me on this, but my philosophy is that, when presented with the opportunity to ask questions at an interview, always have something prepared. When I’ve been the hiring manager at a company, I’ve found that some of the best and most memorable candidates I’ve interviewed shone the most when asking me questions; even if the interview itself wasn’t exceptional, it stands out when a candidate demonstrates they’ve done their research of a role, are mindful of their own career ambition, and can demonstrate organizational acumen through the questions they ask. Here are some of the questions I keep in my back pocket in case I’m afforded time to query during the interview process:
- Is this a position a new role or a backfill?
- Tell me more about the team structure. How many people are on this team, how is work divided between teams, what other teams does this team frequently engage with?
- Tell me more about the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives the company currently has.
- What are the things keeping you up at night that someone in this role can help alleviate? Are there any organization-wide / department-wide / team-wide goals relevant to this role?
- I’d love to hear more about your background, how you came into your position at this company, and what you love about working here.
- Does this role have a career development path already laid out? Are there examples of other individuals who were in this role that have been promoted?
- What are the qualities you believe someone needs to be successful in this role?
Follow up after every interview
So far, I’ve listed a handful of tips on how to really stand out as an interviewee: continue honing your skills as a programmer, meaningfully articulate your competencies, and ask memorable questions. Yet, one of the lowest level-of-effort tasks that, time and time again, I’m surprised everyone doesn’t do is to follow up with interviewers to thank them for their time. I would say that, across all applicants I’ve interviewed for positions, about 25% of them would follow up after the interview; I’d also say that 100% of the folks who actually got the job were from that pool of folks that made that little effort.
If you’re willing, you can also take this a step further and send a thank you letter by mail after a final round of interviews. As a personal habit, I have a stack of these small thank you cards from Paper Source that I send out after any final interview I do. After all, in that situation you have nothing to lose but everything to gain, right?
Here’s a story that drives this point home. After two years at my previous company, I had gotten to know our recruiting team pretty well. Joe was the recruiting coordinator who helped facilitate my own interview loop at the company all those years prior, and I had never noticed that in all that time, he still had the thank you card I sent on his desk. Even I had no clue that the little gesture has stuck out so prominently! Trust me, the couple of dollars you spend on stamps and stationary is worth the possibility of the hiring decision coming down to you and one other candidate, where the smallest of gratitudes can make you outshine the competition.
5 Tools for Researching Companies while Preparing for Interviews
Let’s face it, Linkedin will be an indispensable tool not only for building your network and finding job listings, but also when doing your due diligence on companies you’re interviewing with. There are some obvious things you can pay attention to when reviewing company information on Linked in, such as their relative company size, online presence, and thought leadership positioning. However, reading between the lines of Linkedin can also be revealing. If you notice that the majority of employees are past employees and current employees on average have only been employed for a year, that could be a good indicator there’s an attrition problem. If a company is branding their main Linkedin profile with a rainbow in June yet maintains their original logo for their international presence, they might not be as focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as they claim.
Google News
I’m always wowed when an interviewee comes to an interview equipped with insight from my company’s latest press release or round of investment, and most of the time that information is only one Google News search away. Reviewing recent news of a company you’re hiring for can help you avoid any companies that are receiving overtly bad press, but also understand the job opportunity better. If you learn that a company just closed a new round of funding specifically for expanding engineering teams, and you connect the dots that the position-at-hand is a direct result of that additional cash injection, you can come to the interview with an informed perspective that will prove itself invaluable.
Crunchbase
First off, I recommend everyone to carve out time to better understand how startups raise money, as this will directly impact your equity and holistically affect your role. Once you familiarize yourself with seed funding, Crunchbase will be your go-to for researching a company’s funding history, list of investors, and other beneficial insights that you as a potential part-owner of this company (a la equity) will be affected by!
While Crunchbase is a great all-in-one for this type of information, I do recommend that you treat the platform as a first stop for data, but also a place where every piece of information you review should be verified by another source. Thankfully, most company profiles on Crunchbase collate press releases or news articles that corroborate the facts.
Glassdoor
Before Glassdoor, it was difficult to get a candid answer from employees of a company as to what it was actually like to work there. Nowadays, Glassdoor should be your first stop to check out anonymous reviews of companies from past and current employees. Of course, it is extremely important to be judicious when using sites like Glassdoor, as with any kind of reviewing site, but insider perspectives from those who know the company can help you avoid working for a company that assures you that there are growth opportunities for you, but conversely their Glassdoor page lists story after story of people leaving because they hadn’t been promoted in 3 years.
Community Groups
Looking back on my time in tech so far, I wish I had spent more time participating in relevant community groups when first starting out. Over the past two years, I have become an avid member of Out in Tech, a group for LGBTQ+ employees in tech. These types of communities are everywhere, and can help you receive job opportunities, find a mentor, engage in hack-a-thons and other events in your city, and maintain a more permanent professional community even as you start new jobs and roles throughout your career. While community groups are beneficial for anyone in the tech world, they can be even more essential if you are part of one or more historically marginalized minority groups in the tech sector, or business at large. If you’re not sure where to start, check out the following collection of organizations and see if any have a chapter in your city!
In Conclusion
Completing a coding bootcamp is an incredible undertaking, but only the beginning of the journey! It can be easy to lose sight and focus after months of intensive training, so it’s important to set yourself up for success when embarking on the job hunt. Hopefully this list of resources helps you consider at least one new resource you hadn’t thought of yet to help you find your professional happily ever after.
BONUS CONTENT: Bootcamps will help you acquire the skills of a computer science degree in an expedited format. I recommend checking out the following books if you’d like to condense a four-year business degree down to the basics that are great to know as a professional in tech!
