In this episode we'll talk about the 3rd key to getting a job as a coder…

How do you stand out from the crowd?

You put in all this effort to learn how to code. You likely have a plan, you follow a curriculum, you seek help and learn. You practice and you struggle… but what about when it comes time to find a job?

Do you have a plan for finding a job other than: “I'll apply to a bunch of openings and make sure my resume is great!”

Most people don't. Let's talk about that.

Episode Transcript

All right, my fellow coders. Welcome to this next episode of the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me, as always. And today, we will be diving into as I'm sure you're well aware by now, the third key the third sort of secret that will allow you to unlock your future career, if you will. This is the the holy grail of, you know, achieving your goal of ultimately becoming a full stack paid web application developer, right? Well, we'll see what we'll get into the third sort of key that I talked about, that's important to know about to to achieve your goal of getting a job. So before I dive into the key itself, I want to sort of talk a little bit about, let's call him James, this is a real story. The names of three people have been changed to protect their identity, no, I just haven't reached out to James to officially get his permission to share his story. I'm sure he would be fine with me sharing it, I just am apparently not only a lazy coder, but a lazy podcaster. So I never reached out. So I won't give his last name, but I'll call him James.

So this story might be one that resonates with you, you might have one a story similar to this one. But if not, then just know this story is very common. it's by no means specific to James, but James was actually fresh out of university. So he got a college degree. He was you know, super, super proud, super happy that he had done it. But as time went forward, as he was, you know, further and further out, from his official graduation, from university, he could not get a job, let alone even getting a job interview. He was, you know, sort of living in his, you know, parent with his parents, maybe it was in the parents basement, who knows, but he was still living with his parents, and, you know, now in his sort of, you know, early to mid 20s, I guess it would have been sort of mid mid ish, 20s. And, you know, he's living with his parents, and he's tired of living with parents, he wants to, you know, begin the rest of his life, get out and get out there and get a job and, you know, get his own place and, and start to, you know, be a real adult, you know, get off of the parents pay roll and onto sort of his own. But he couldn't do it. He was he was struggling, he could not get a callback for an interview, and he was frustrated. And he didn't know how to solve this problem, right. Until one day, he stumbled upon a stranger on the internet. And the stranger on the internet was talking about this thing called boot camps. And lo and behold, he was sort of sold on the idea. So he, you know, talk to his parents about it. And his parents were a little bit skittish about the idea of, you know, you know, investing a bunch of money in a intuition again, in another program. But after, you know, I being the stranger that he found on the internet, after I spoke with his parents a little bit, I set their minds at ease. And I said, Look, you know, this is something that's very common, you know, students graduating from university still struggling to find a job and needing some extra help and guidance. And really, you know, everything that you've already heard me talking, talking about on this podcast, again, it's, it revolves around a couple things. One is a gap in their knowledge, not realizing that, you know, there's so much more that they don't know about, that they need to know in order to get a job as well as a bunch of other things. But I've talked about these already. I don't want to go into them again in detail. But he was struggling from this exact problem, and he needed some help. I spoke with him and his parents and convinced them that James should join the boot camp. Let's fast forward through the story of him being in the boot camp, obviously going through a boot camp is intensive. But six months later, he graduated from the boot camp, and he received his offer his first actual official job offer for you know, $60,000 starting salary as a Java developer for sort of an international company that has clients everywhere around the globe. And so yeah, it was a great job and he was completely he was actually unsure he thought it was a scam. This job offer he thought it was a scam. I had to set his mind at ease. I said, James, this is like, I've researched the company, job offer sounds, you know, right, right on it sounds very apropos or whatever very, you know, on par with what you know, is expected. Yeah, he had such a good thing in front of him that he couldn't even recognize it. And he was so hesitant to get excited about it. But ultimately, he accepted the job offer and started working at this place and is now as happy as could be so. And like I said, this story is, you know, this is James's story, but this is not a unique story. Okay, I've seen so many students now come through my doors, in this exact same spot, university graduate, can't get a job needs help need some guidance needs, the, the gaps in his knowledge filled or their gaps in their knowledge filled, as well as obviously some hints and tips and tricks and whatnot. But I want to dive into some of those tips and tricks right now, right? This, this sort of key number three that I want to dive into, is how you can achieve an unfair advantage. Okay, so this is all about the unfair advantage that you can get in today's marketplace. So it's how you can ensure that you actually stand out from the crowd, then ultimately increases increase your chances of actually landing that job because that's, that's what we're what we're doing this for, right, that's typically speaking, what everyone is learning how to code. For, that's why they want to do it. Sure. It's fun. Sure, it's cool. It's challenging you level up, it's a mind altering type thing, changes the way you think it's really a fun process. But hey, at the end of the day, we want to get paid, right? And that's what this is all about. So you got to make sure that how can you arm yourself with the greatest opportunities and tools to ultimately get that job. So it's all about the unfair advantage. So step one, and getting yourself an unfair advantage is you need to make sure that you are actually learning the right stuff. Okay, this is obviously not something that should come as a surprise to you. But oftentimes, even though you know this intrinsically, even though you know, this, you know, at your core that you Yeah, you need to learn the right stuff in order to get a job. People still get this, you know, look, squirrel type situation an activity, and they'll go off and get, you know, attracted to some shiny object. thing that's that's happening LIGO and learn a different technology that ultimately is not going to help them in the real world.

This also happens a lot in university, I spoke about this before, in university, you go a mile wide, on subjects, but an inch deep. So you don't you learn all you learn a little bit about a whole lot of topics. And that's just the wrong way to do it. You don't want to go a mile wide and an inch deep. You want to go a mile deep and an inch wide. If you know what I mean, right, you need to focus on teaching yourself the right stuff, and on teaching yourself exactly what it is that employers want you to know in the real world. Okay, I call this the five, the five pillars, I spoke about this already. But the five pillars of the front end the the thing that connects the front end to the server side, the server side, the thing that connects server side, the DB and the DB. Okay, DB being database. So you have the three pillars, the two pillars flanking each side, and the one of the middle front end server side database. And then the two pillars connecting those together, which is typically an MVC type framework, like model view controller connects the server side of the front end. And something like an ORM and a relational object relational mapping type thing, like hibernate or something like that, or JPA, more specific or more generically, that's a fourth pillar or the ORM layer that that that connects the server side to the to the database. So a front end connects to the server side with MVC, and server side connects the database with an O RM. So that those are sort of the five pillars, and you need to make sure that you are learning the right technologies in there. So this gives you an idea of how you can focus your knowledge, make sure that you are focusing on learning a server side language that's popular, make sure that you focus on learning, probably a relational database, those tend to be the most popular in the real world. Most jobs require you to learn a relational database. So yeah, make sure you're focusing on a popular server side language like Java, a popular database, relational database, like MySQL or something. And then make sure you're focusing on a good front end stuff, you know, HTML, CSS, maybe JavaScript in general, you can dive into a JavaScript framework as well, but I won't get into that here. But yeah, you have to make sure that you're learning the right stuff. That's step number one to gaining your unfair advantage. Step number two, to achieving your unfair advantage is and again, this doesn't come as a surprise. I've talked about this before creating a portfolio you need to make sure that you have a portf