9 months ago • Comments on a post
Failure is an end point; you're on a journey. A couple of thoughts...
On college: For many, there's no quicker way to crush a coding hobby than to study it via a computer science program. So fucking boring. Software development != computer science. That's where I started and I changed majors after my first year because I wanted to build shit and not write a fucking bubble sort. So I switched to economics and political science and kept teaching myself to code, got a coding job in college working for the university, graduated, didn't know what i wanted to do, until i stumbled into a 3 month "consulting" gig that morphed into my first job, which led to my first real startup job, which led to [on and on].
> And I began thinking about my career as a software engineer. How am I going to find a job?
This will sound petty bc you're at the beginning, but finding a job will eventually prove easier than you might think at this moment. Finding a good job (define "good" as you will) will prove considerably harder. Think of your first job as an internship. Do a great job and view it as a stepping stone to the next stone in your career. Do good work dispassionately. Don't mistake employment for loyalty.
Your parents, respectfully, don't have the slightest clue or context for understanding what it is you're trying do or how you'll make a living at it. It's annoying, but it's fine, bc it's your life not theirs. They really don't need to understand it and you don't need them to.
My advice...
To get good at programming: build something, anything. An idea you have. Don't have any good ideas? Try to build a clone of something else that exists. Also, and everyone says this ad hominem but it's true: contribute to open source. Offer your help. Any open source project of any size typically has quite literally a metric shit-ton of open issues, and not nearly enough people to fix them. So figure out how to fix one. Then do another. Keep doing it until the team makes you a contributor.
One brief note about career and "networking": contributing to open source is a very powerful form of networking. Every time you contribute to a project you are networking with others backed by your work. Don't take this for granted. You should also join discords and slacks and go to conferences when people do that again. I cannot stress this enough: your network is everything, and the more you invest in it the more you'll get out of it.
To get a job: fuck linkedin. Fuck job postings. Get "good enough" at programming (a much lower bar than you think), build a list of companies that you'd like to work for and cold email the founder (founder emails are almost always firstname@company.com). Shower them with praise about how much you love their company and think they're amazing. At the very least 80% will respond to you. There are several people on my team currently who got hired this way. This works particularly well for very early-stage startups; less so for larger companies.
Good luck, keep building, I promise you'll get where you want to go.