A tale of navigating the job hunt during the pandemic and the holidays — 2 Months post course, what have I been up to and what have I learned?
By: Kathleen B
Tags: Career Change, Software Engineering, Codingbootcamp, Codingbootcampgraduate

A tale of navigating the job hunt during the pandemic and the holidays — 2 Months post course, what have I been up to and what have I learned? Kathleen B Nov 23, 2020·7 min read

Wow, where has the time gone? It’s been two months since I graduated coding bootcamp, and since my last check in things, have slightly gotten a bit better. Rejections have slightly been coming in a lot less frequently but that could probably be due to the holidays, but the good news is I got a couple of technical screens and code tests the past month and have gotten a phone interview or two.

So, a couple of lessons/things I have been up to!

Unsure about something? You miss 100% of shots you don’t take, just do it.

Okay, sometimes this isn’t the best advice, but just hear me out.

At the end of September, in one of the Slacks I’m in I check the job board to see if there is anything of interest for me to apply to. Lo and behold one of the admins of the Slack posted “Hey *insert company here* is hiring, and they hire a bunch of bootcamp graduates, its a great company to start your career at!

The lightbulb went off in my head because I’ve often seen job postings for this particular company and there is always a GPA requirement to apply. Seeing that there wasn’t this time I decided to take the leap of faith and apply.

A month passed and I completely forgot about it, and then all of a sudden on a Friday night, I check my email.

“*Company name *— Phone Screen — Software Engineer”

I was freaking out, I didn’t know what to say or do because I had gotten a phone screen for a well-known company. I scheduled my interview a month out so I can prepare for the phone screen effectively because unfortunately based on what I’ve read and seen they have FAANG level type phone screens and even FAANG level type interviews.

This gave me confidence that “okay, maybe I’m not that bad of an engineer if I somehow managed to get a phone screen with this company”, if I hadn’t applied for it, would I have gotten a chance at this interview? No! I’m incredibly happy I applied for this position and that I got a phone screen with them, and I began to prep for this interview….but soon I learned something the hard way, which I’ll bring up in my next point..

There’s nothing wrong with taking a break

So around the third week or so of October, I was getting sick of seeing rejection emails flood my inbox, then one morning I check my email to see by surprise that I got a code test for an apprenticeship that I applied for. Needless to say, I was giddy. Then later that night, I got an email for the assessment for my dream company’s apprenticeship program and was even more giddy, but unfortunately I was rejected a month later, couldn’t match me to a team, I guess…. Then the phone screen email that I mentioned from above? I got that 3 days later from those assessment emails.

So the day after I got the assessment for that first apprenticeship, I woke up went to the gym as usual then went back home and started the code test. I’m still mad that I had the correct answer, just not in the correct data type. (I had an array and it should’ve been an object)

Then my bright self decides, “Hey I’m going to do the next code test so I can get it in quicker and pray that I’ll get a phone screen after”. Needless to say, that was not a smart decision. That code test in particular was 3 essay questions + 2 code questions. It took me a good 1.5 days to do it, and on top of that too, my answer for the first question wasn’t optimized because it failed 5 out of the 14 tests *shakes fist angrily at Big O notation*. After the first day of me doing that test along with the other code assessment my brain was fried.

By the time I started prepping for that phone interview, I set a schedule for myself to get on track for it, unfortunately 2 weeks into that schedule, I was burnt out. From all the algorithm practice and I guess the fatigue was catching up to me from the gym too and I was like 5 days out from my first lifting meet, I didn’t even want to stare at my computer and look at code. Also, during that time a video game I had wanted had just came out, and I decided to take a break from studying to actually play it and enjoy myself. No lie I felt kinda guilty about it, but now when I look back at it I’m glad I did, because the week after, I had a clearer mind and was able to retain more of the information I was studying/reading up on.

Balance things out, don’t forget your portfolio projects, and other small projects and networking

When I got that phone interview, my priorities immediately shifted from building projects to learning algorithms. Again, going back to my second point, studying algorithms is very tiring and also, not a lot of fun. After grinding through Algoexpert and Colt’s udemy course, the past few days, I really wanted to do something different.

I decided to build a mini-project/mini-portfolio project called “I want to lift in NJ”, which I built in React and utilized the React Mapbox GL library which maps powerlifting friendly gyms in the state of NJ. I ended up coming up with this idea when one of the people I follow on instagram began complaining about working out in a commercial gym, and also when I was complaining about working out in a commercial gym.

I built it out in the span of a weekend to get it to the most minimum viable product possible. While not 100% done it is functioning the way I want it to, the next thing I plan on adding is geolocation and for it to show the closest locations to a person based on where you’re at. I enjoyed it, it reminded me of how much I loved to code and that the grinding through the Algos and data structures is only temporary but an unfortunate and necessary evil, until I get that first job.

Be Patient, things are slowing Down

Last point, as I’m writing this, the holiday season is about to start up.If you know anything about my history, I was working in the food industry last year and I really wanted to break into tech but I didn’t have enough skills to. So I applied to a position working in the food industry doing QA on their products. It wasn’t a lab position, it was more on working on like their databases and stuff like that with their products. I started that interview process around this time of year, went in for 2 in person interviews, with one of them I was shadowing them for the day.

After the final in person interview, they straight up told me that I wouldn’t hear back until the second week of January. So I was anxiously waiting for Christmas and New Years to pass, only for when the time came I get a rejection because they promoted within.

As I’m currently navigating through the process right now I know that the holidays are slowing everything down, even if something works out for me, I won’t end up working until at the earliest, January. Though if it doesn’t work out, I’ll probably be getting a rejection right away. Point is, during this holiday season, if you are reading this and are in the same boat as me, don’t stop applying to jobs, networking and skill building, and also to stop and smell the roses this holiday season.

Sure its different due to the pandemic situation, but this is the time of year to be thankful for what I have and what I was able to do, which in this case is that I got an opportunity to finally learn the skills to take a deep dive into software engineering, and I sincerely hope and wish as a Christmas present I’ll finally be working in the tech industry come January. :)