A few weeks later…
By: Erin Toth
Tags: First Job, Junior Developer, Codingbootcamp, Women In Tech

The last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind (you know, the kind of whirlwind that immediately follows a 10-week long hurricane). Midway through our final week of bootcamp I got an e-mail from a company that had been at our speed-interviewing event (week 7) asking if I’d like to come in for an interview that Friday. I was so excited because they were the company I had the best feeling about during the event — the three people they sent seemed legitimately interested in talking to us and the most genuine in describing what they did and why. So I skipped out early on out very last ever bootcamp lecture 😢 and walked to their very-close-by office and interviewed with a senior dev and one of the founders of the company. Going into the interview I was incredibly nervous, worried that they’d pull out a white board and ask me algorithm questions, worried I’d make a complete fool of myself but at the end of the interview I left feeling like it couldn’t have possibly gone any better. There wasn’t a whiteboard, nobody mentioned Big O notation, instead they asked me about how my final project had gone and wanted to talk about what the technologies I used were and why, and we went from there and talked about some more topics and I answered what I could, and answered followups as well as possible, and when I didn’t know the interest I said I didn’t but passed on what I knew about finding the answer. I walked out feeling like even if I didn’t get the position it was fine because it had just gone so well.

And then Monday I started my “time off” and tried to remember how to unwind while having anxiety that finding something would be rough and that I’d more than likely be one of the people pushing that job-finding window out to 3 or more months from the end of bootcamp. I watched roughly 7 hours of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I tried to relax. Tuesday I finished Queer Eye, and I got an e-mail offering me an internship position at the company I interviewed at. Ahhhh! I accepted it the next day, and the whirlwind started. Because they’re in Fintech and work with banks I had to start off getting a criminal records check so I had to get that ball rolling, followed by a few days of filling out their required contracts and forms and online HR stuff, and finally Monday, April 1 I was able to start.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been so nervous before starting a job, but it’s Thursday of my second week there now and so far things are pretty great. The people are awesome. The first four days were pretty much solidly taken up by setting up my computer and development environments and coming up against access request after access request (AWS, GitHub, etc) all of which require dual authorization followed by finally getting the actual code up and running locally. I’m on a team and hit the ground running learning how their Agile workflow works as well as Jira. I…don’t yet love Jira. Do people love Jira? Will I one day love it? Maybe.

Right now I’m working mostly on adding content to our product, it’s kind of glorified data entry++, but as a result I’m also spending a lot of time inside the codebase and more importantly getting into the swing of their workflow and reading and writing code in an employment environment. I have a plant I’m desperately trying to keep alive. One of our codebases has some vaguely broken automated testing so every time I send code for review I have to keep my fingers crossed and run the tests over…and over…and over…until it passes. But it always does. The Dev lead came over today and I mentioned I was working on getting a big batch of content deployed and he was excited and asked if it was my first and I said, no, I’d already deployed a couple of batches earlier in the week and he seemed really pleasantly surprised, so I’ll take it.

My coworkers are fun and interesting and everyone seems pretty reasonable so far. There are office dogs sometimes, but not always. The COO brought in a speech coach for two weekly sessions to help anyone who wanted to learn how to speak in public more confidently, so I signed up for that, and today we all gathered as a company and sabred bottles of Cava to celebrate two big goals the company met this week! I’m getting used to all the meetings (I’ve never really worked in an office setting before so it feels like there are a lot of them) and to having fourteen conversations on Slack at once.

As it stands right now the job is a 4 month internship contract, but the COO when offering me the position mentioned that there was a possibility of continuing on after that point as a regular employee. I have my fingers crossed 🤞 that we’re on that path and that it works out that way as so far I feel very fortunate for where I landed for my first out-of-bootcamp job.