From Being A Recruit At Coding Bootcamp To Speaking Professionally At Career Panels
Medium · Work & Ambition · 2018 · 667 words
Visa profiles a coding bootcamp graduate who now speaks professionally at career panels and shares his journey and advice.
From Being A Recruit At Coding Bootcamp To Speaking Professionally At Career Panels
Once the rookie hire on the ReferralCandy engineering team, Jared is now someone people turn to for career advice!
My colleague Jared was invited to speak at a General Assembly panel yesterday, titled Career Fast-Track: Learn To Code And Get A Job As A Web Developer. I thought I’d chat with him to learn more what he’s been up to.
“I saw you were speaking at a panel yesterday! How did you end up there?”
I was at the General Assembly Meet and Greet career fair where I met GA’s Marketing Manager, Gabriela. She mentioned that there might be opportunities for ReferralCandy to speak at GA events.
She also pointed out that as a GA alum working as a web dev, I was a particularly good fit to speak to juniors about how to learn to code and get a job.
“How did you decide that you wanted to speak?”
First of all: ReferralCandy is hiring! For engineers in particular.
Second, it was a chance for me to give back to GA and the Developer community at large while practicing public speaking. Learning from the other amazing panelists was invaluable.
And lastly, I think a lot of senior engineers at large companies tend to scare junior developers off with their evaluation of what it takes to succeed as a web developer. While they’re right that CS fundamentals are essential in the long run, I think it was helpful for me to share that there are ways to start working as a junior developer while learning the CS fundamentals on the side.
“Tell me more about the actual experience of being on the panel. Did you have to do any preparation?”
It was a blast. The other panelists were very knowledgeable about the industry and forthcoming about what they did to succeed.
As the most junior developer on the panel, I did feel the pressure to prepare — and I hope it showed. I dug up a few of my favourite podcast episodes to remind myself of what it was like to start out, and revisited this answer from my hero Harry Roberts: https://github.com/csswizardry/ama/issues/33
“Do you have any specific memories about anything that was talked about? what was the most interesting question? anything surprising?”
Here’s one: Melanie, the moderator, asked for advice on getting started as a web developer. Lei Lei, from Garena, said something really insightful: that most people may not actually want to be web developers. They may simply want a website or workable web apps, in which case there are many third-party tools and services that they should turn to instead.
Web Development as a career choice requires constant learning and deep dives into abstract fundamentals… it’s not to be taken up lightly. So I learnt that clarifying your goals beforehand is a really good disclaimer that I should include more often when giving advice about learning web dev.
If you’ve read the above, and you’re still sure that you want to be a web developer, Grab’s Front End Guide is a fantastic overview with beginner-friendly links to get started understanding (front-end) Web Dev in 2018.
“In closing: How has your personal journey been, overall? You were a GA student a while ago, and now you’re an actual professional web dev. What’s that like?”
It’s been gratifying to get work done and see customer impact. It’s occasionally terrifying to discover how much more there is to learn. The imposter syndrome is definitely real, but it can be kept at bay by focusing on the work and talking more to peers (and juniors!).
Looking to progress in your own web dev career? ReferralCandy is hiring!
From Being A Recruit At Coding Bootcamp To Speaking Professionally At Career Panels was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Originally published at https://bytes.referralcandy.com/jared-755ebf39c807.