Become a developer: getting started

Getting Started in Tech:
Building a great career
April 2017 - Los Angeles, California
http://bit.ly/tech-la

© 2017 Thinkful. All Rights Reserved. 2
About us
We train developers and data
scientists through 1-on-1
mentorship and career prep

About me
Zac Carter
Thinkful mentor
10+ years as a software engineer

About you
Why are you here?
Do you want to work better with developers?
Do you want to start working in tech?
Do you have an idea or company that you want to
build?
Programming/career experience?
First lines of code yet to be written?
Been self teaching for 1-3 months?
Actively searching for work?

Why are we here?
Traditional career building:

Why are we here?
Traditional career building:
Junior sales
/ SDR
Account
executive
Sales Manager
VP Sales

Tech is weird
Career trajectories are far more varied
Tech isn’t one industry. It’s every industry

Tech doesn’t ﬁt traditional career building
Full stack developer
Front-end developer
Back-end developer
QA developer

Front-end developer
Back-end developer
QA developer

Front-end developer
Back-end developer
DevOps
Product developer
Growth hacker
Reliability engineer
QA developer
Architect
Manager / team lead

Front-end developer
Back-end developer
DevOps
Product developer
Growth hacker
QA developer
Architect
Manager / team lead

Front-end developer
Back-end developer
DevOps
Product developer
Growth hacker
QA developer
Architect
Manager / team lead
UI/UX Designer
Product Manager

Tech is everywhere
MLBAM (advanced media) -
digital arm of Major League
Baseball recently valued at
$3B, about as much as the
New York Yankees

Tech is everywhere

Tech is everywhere
“Goldman Sachs is a
Technology Firm”
- Lloyd Blankfein, CEO
9,000 out of 33,000
employees are on tech team

Goals for tonight
Understanding the different careers paths you can take
Freelance career
Full-time employment
Q&A session

6 steps to becoming a freelancer
1. Build in-demand skills
2. Take care of business
3. Prepare your “marketing materials”
4. Market and sell your service
5. Deliver exceptional value and customer service
6. Stay current

Building skills
You can build your niche with any set of technologies,
but we (Thinkful and our network of 350+ engineers
around the world) found the following to be
particularly in-demand:
Vanilla JavaScript
Node.js for server-side programming
React
React Native (everyone needs a mobile presence)

But take that with a grain of salt, but also don’t.
Building skills

© 2016 Thinkful, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL21
Building skills

© 2016 Thinkful, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL22
Building skills

Building skills
http://stackoverﬂow.com/insights/survey/2016

Taking care of business
Many get into freelancing because of the lifestyle and
are surprised to ﬁnd they now run a small business:
Incorporating and getting an EIN (taxes)
Working with an accountant
Using invoicing software
Accounts receivable and negotiating contracts

“Marketing materials”
Doing research on a potential client? They’re likely
doing research on you at the same time
Building your portfolio
Preparing your Github

Market, sell, keep ‘em happy
Who makes for a good ﬁrst client? People who need
websites that are fairly simple:
Small businesses looking to reach more people
Non-proﬁts who have websites built 10 years ago
Retail companies that don’t offer online purchasing
How do you reach them before you have a reputation?
Meetups
Recruiters

Staying current
Technology advances relentlessly. Grow with it. A few
resources we particularly like:
Thinkful
Youtube videos
JavaScript
Meetups!

Finding your ﬁrst job and
Planning for your second
Dan Friedman – December 2017

Goals
Effective mindset through the search
Use data to guide how you manage your time
Exposure to opportunities beyond the starting point

First jobs: Front-end Developer
What: Skills & Tools
Building the parts of a
web application that
people interact with

First jobs: Back-end developer
Writing the business
logic and handling
data storage and
manipulation

First jobs: Full stack developer
Build features front to
back
+

First jobs: QA developer
Write software tests
and conduct manual
tests to catch bugs
before they’re shipped
Unit testing
Regression testing
Breaking software

Planning + Prioritizing
Location
Industry
Company size
Compensation
Technology
Training
Role

Materials
Resume/Linkedin/AngelList
Github proﬁle
Personal website & portfolio
https://robbykim.github.io/portfolio/ — doesn’t
have to have a wow factor
but if it does, make it clean: equimper.github.io/
thinkful-portfolio/

Soft assets
Develop your personal story (elevator pitch!)
Catalog your network

Zen and the art of applying to jobs

Referrals
The single highest-converting channel
50-80% of jobs are never posted

Applications: Golden Tickets
Create something that demonstrates your skills and is
applicable to the job
Litmus test: will it make the person reviewing your job
application smile and want to share it with their team?

Pop quiz
What % of applicants get an interview?

Pop quiz
What % of applicants get an interview?
Low end: 5-10%
High end: 30-35%

Wild (or not so wild) card: Recruiter
Tech recruiters serve as your agent
They reach out to companies on your behalf and
arrange interviews
Their business is to ﬁnd you a job
Overall highly valuable — they have connections and
help keep your expectations real

How Thinkful alumni ﬁnd jobs

Most common funnel
Phone screen
Take home tech challenge
In person interview
Some tech (sometimes algos, usually follow up to take
home)
Some personal

Interview tips
Ask for context before an interview
Discuss your work
Become deep in one set of tools, and conversant in a
broad list
Don’t focus on being new

Pop quiz
What % of opportunities go from in-person interview to
offer?

Pop quiz
What % of opportunities go from in-person interview to
offer?
>50%

Mindset
Put yourself in a position to have a positive mindset:
Continue to line up your next interview until you’ve
signed on the dotted line
Every opportunity is perfect and no opportunity is
perfect

The ﬁrst job leads to the second

Moving up: Senior Developer
All previous duties and
to estimate your work
accurately, handle
challenging problems
with less support,
support junior
colleagues
The tools don’t
change*
Your ability to use
them does

Moving up: Engineering manager
Mastery of technology
used by your
company. All abilities
and skills of a senior
developer, plus the
ability to manage a
team
Soft skills,
management ability

Coding Plus Product: Product manager
Take business goals
and turn them into
product requirements.
Work with developers
and designers to
deliver. Measure
success. Repeat.
Customer development
User stories
Wireframes
Analytics

Coding Plus Marketing: Growth Hacker /
Technical Marketer
Run experiments to
drive new and repeat
users, usually at
startups
User acquisition
Analytics
Fast prototyping

Coding Plus Community: Developer Evangelist
Build community
around a technology
by helping customers,
creating content, and
participating at events
Speciﬁc technical
expertise
Teaching
Customer support

Coding Plus Sales: Sales engineer
Sell complex technical
product by helping
customers understand
how it works and how
they’ll use it
Coding
Communication

Coding Plus data: Data scientist
Use statistics and
programming to
answer questions with
data
Statistics
Machine learning
Programming

Getting there
Hard work…

Getting there

Getting there: the right way
Skills
Brand
Network
Also, most importantly, succeed at your job

Getting there: Skills
Side projects
Newsletters, online communities (HackerNews,
technology subreddit)
Ask to work on new projects at work

Getting there: Brand
Speak at conferences at meetups
Blogging: articulate the journey
Find your niche (and then blog)

Getting there: Network
Make time (and ﬁnd budget)
Be helpful
Talk to people (online or ofﬂine)

More about Thinkful
You’ll learn concepts, practice with drills, and build capstone
projects for your own portfolio — all guided by a personal mentor

Mentors have, on average, 10+ years of experience
Our mentors

Independently veriﬁed results
Job Titles after GraduationMonths until Employed

Try us out!
Try the program for two
weeks, includes six mentor
sessions - $50
Learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript
Option to continue onto web
development bootcamp
Come talk to me if you’re
interested (or email me at
noel@thinkful.com)

Become a developer: getting started

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (9)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (17)

Similar to Become a developer: getting started

Similar to Become a developer: getting started (20)

More from Thinkful

More from Thinkful (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Become a developer: getting started