Junior Web Developer looking for a job

Starshine

Starshine

Jedi Master
FOTCM Member
Hello fellows,

I recently decided to switch gears, and took a Web Development Course at Le Wagon : Web Development course | Le Wagon
As a teenager, that would have been my go-to direction, so it feels like going back to the source, this time.
I say this time, because I can say I changed gears many times so far.

It is a 9-week full-time intensive coding Bootcamp, leading to a level 6 French RNCP certification, which I passed with success! This would correspond to a license degree in the US.
Learned HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript ES6, SQL, git, GitHub, Heroku and Ruby on Rails. Or only scratched the surface, but eager to learn more :D

Now that the bootcamp is over, I need to earn money and keep on practicing!

I was wondering if some of you might have:
  • Leads or contacts for work opportunities.
  • Ideas of projects that would be helpful to the Forum and at the same time be of value in a portfolio.
 
Did you think of picking a specialization? Something having a demand on the market, like React or Vue if you are into programming? Besides RoR the stuff you learned is useful but it's basics and you won't make good money with it.
 
I'm not yet able to say which specialization I would pick. I can say I really enjoyed discovering the RoR framework and philosophy too, even though that's not what's most wanted on the market, the community remains well alive and the idea of compressing complexity is appealing to me. Rails 8 beta got out yesterday and DHH opening keynote confirms that. There are many well-known companies using it.

We took a quick look at Vue during the bootcamp, but we mainly used Hotwire stimulus and turbo to replace AJAX for our projects. I am aware that I need to gain experience and be project oriented. I'm mostly looking for a first professional experience, and the market is contracting, especially for juniors like me, as there are many and companies are mainly searching for mid-level to senior profiles.

For now, I'm still wondering what's the best approach, but I need to keep on coding. The plan for now is to start asking around if local businesses need a website and build a portfolio from there, while looking at job opportunities too.
 
Just learning Javascript, HTML and CSS is not enough. You would like to pick up Angular/Vue and .NET as well.

And Ruby? I thought it went extinct years ago...:lol:

Starshine said:
I'm mostly looking for a first professional experience, and the market is contracting, especially for juniors like me, as there are many and companies are mainly searching for mid-level to senior profiles.
Click to expand...
Look for some sort of apprenticeship in some company. Several months of apprenticeship allow a company to get to know you better, you gain lots of experience with real projects and afterwards they can decide to hire you on a permanent basis. That's how it works at least in Germany.
 
FWIW @Starshine when I moved into software development, I had trouble finding my first job as well. All of the jobs required 5 or more years experience with specific technologies before they would even consider you.

When the .NET Framework 2 was released I saw job advertisements asking for 10 years experience with it, and it hadn't been out for a year!

The same old conundrum - "How do I get experience if no one will employ me ?"

So I settled on taking a job with a small company, and I asked for a really low salary, which they could not say no to. All I needed was a year (at least) of experience, and I was willing to take crap pay to get it.

So yes, I got that experience and from then on I was OK.

For the front end stuff, I personally try to avoid, since it seems every week another front-end JavaScript framework is released that everyone has to get familiar with, and it gets more and more complex every time. The back end and database areas are easier to keep up with.

From what I see, you should get familiar with what you see advertised - At the moment it seems to be Angular, React and Vue.

Anyway, I hope this helps. Good luck finding work 🙏
 
Hi @Starshine, congratulations for completing the course!

I have good experience with LinkedIn in the aspect of job finding. It's worth creating a profile there and start developing a network. If you have an interesting profile, you'll be encountered by the recruiter.

I agree with other members here that the first job is often very little paid; it was true for me too. Basically, you don't need a degree at all, but you need to prove yourself to the employer. I'd aim for a job at some startup, as very often they just need hands to work for a little less money, but you gain the experience of being involved in everything and a glimpse into how the business works because of the flat structure.

Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with what technologies are used in West Europe, and how long they'd be popular. I have heard that large logistics software used in the Rotterdam Port runs on .NET runtime. I personally was involved in rewriting a backend from Ruby to Go because of the performance and lack of workforce for an American client, so I'm not sure if Ruby isn't a technical debt for some of the companies that they want to get rid of. But yeah, so much software has been written in whatever technology you'd even imagine that even COBOL specialists are still very sought for. When you gain experience, you can more easily switch technologies, as there are basically the same concepts for most object-oriented languages. Some folks are even jumping at the Elixir/Erlang ship to learn something new (and Elixir's syntax is inspired by Ruby, so this might be of interest to you, especially Elixir-Phoenix tandem).

I'd add one thing to the technology stack that you are getting familiar with: Kubernetes. Knowing this monster and having a certificate for a Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) could land you a job alone.

Good luck!​
 
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