Well I got an interview request in my email from company #4. I will write my experience with this interview on Monday but for now I would like to share what I did to get this interview unannounced.
About 1 month into Bloc I felt I needed to start looking outwards at different jobs in Ruby development to have a better idea on what sort of questions and material I should cover with my mentor. I decided to get job alerts sent to my phone from twitter as well as signed up for glassdoor alerts. I eventually stumbled upon Angel.co which is a job site specifically for startups to raise funding and hire employees. I signed up for that site and did nothing with it. I then found another site similar call whitetruffle, where you post your resume and companies find you. Thinking this was a great idea I posted as much info as possible about myself and shared links to my work at the time, but got no response.
Fast forward to 3 months later and post Bloc.io and Ancient City Ruby; I realized I never completed a resume that included all my efforts. I had previously been sharing my current sales resume with some mention of I am actually looking to be a developer. Now that I look back at this I realize how stupid I was to send a resume with a sales focused resume to a company looking for a software developer, regardless I updated the resume by taking out all the stuff prior to my current position and even cut that in half. I then replaced that info with my experience at Bloc and a special section called "Personal Ruby Development" where I outlined the courses, books,tutorials I used. I also added a Github repo section so they could easily find my work.
My resume is nothing special, just a word document with a limited amount info. Just enough info to get an idea of what I have done. When I applied to job #1 I barely wrote to 3 sentences about who I was and why I wanted the job. I just shared links to my blog, it was lot easier than applying for a sales job.
I have applied to a lot of jobs outside of the developer world and I have never received as much response from any resume before as I did this one, ever. Most people in my current industry get jobs because of who they know or their extensive experience in sales. The fact that I received 4 responses with less than 7 months of personal experience and not professional experience gives prove that there is some truth in my tweet. My goal was just to get an idea of what an actual dev interview is like and the experience has been overwhelming positive, so much that I might actually have a job in had at the end of this. Even if nothing works out I have gained more experience by trying, than by wondering "What if?"
If you are also looking for some encouragement on getting an interview. Check out the latest Ruby Rogues podcast. Listen to the whole thing but starting at 21:45 begins the discussion on where to find the Junior Dev Jobs. I probably rewinded the podcast six times for that segment.
If you are interested in getting a dev job don't delay, get a document open and write down what you have done and keep track of it.
Below is a copy of what my resume looks like as of today:
Brian L Douglas
Palm Harbor, FL
Phone ###-###-####
mail@briandouglas.me
Twitter: @brianllamar
Palm Harbor, FL
Phone ###-###-####
mail@briandouglas.me
Twitter: @brianllamar
Blog:
Bit.ly/c000000de
Education
University
of South Florida; B.S. in Finance
Bloc.io
Apprenticeship
Github Repos
Chuych,
Taskoff, Bloccit32, and Postmarks
Work History
Personal Ruby Web Development
October 2013
– Current
Created rails
application learning TDD and Agile development methods.
Learned
Rspec, Capybara, and various Ruby gems to build web applications; start to
finish.
Bloc.io
Apprentice
Dec 2013 - March 2014
12-week apprenticeship
learning the fundamentals of web development. Specializing in Ruby on Rails
and Javascript.
Working closely with a seasoned mentor on programming concepts like TDD and Agile Development.
TD;
Sr. Account
Manager February 2010 – Current
-Conducted sales training
and presentations for TD Inside Sales Managers and select resellers to
increase mindshare within the IT distribution market.
-Serves as Tech Data's expert on the Business Partner's product line. -Executes business plans to uncover new opportunities, increase sales and profits for Vendor Partner product lines and Tech Data. -Performs outbound sales calls to identified target customers/leads in order to quote, provide product information, and build relationships within the Emerson product lines. |
CS Skills
Knowledgeable
and proficient in Ruby, Rails, Python,
Html, Git, and CSS
What about a PDF? Here is my current one: https://i.imgur.com/9ZpA2lh.jpg, though I don't have much on there about my open source work with other random places like seattleRB or JumpStartLabs, my thought was to leave some things off so I had more to talk about if they ask something like, 'what else have you done?'. Good idea, or no?
ReplyDeletelooks great. I do send the file as a pdf, but at the end of the day it is still a word doc. I might spruce mine up before I send out my next round if applications. I like the idea of putting odin on yours and I really need to start contributing to that. ROR development is an interesting industry, it seems as if anything goes. Blogs and tutorials count as experience.
ReplyDeletefrom my experience with recruiters and interviewing, the resume is just the tool to get the first interview. It really depends on the job description you are applying for whether or not to include more or less of the "what else", if they keep saying TDD, Agile, or company culture throughout, then you want to make sure you have examples of that even if its just a book, or leading meetup talk.
You have to remember all company recruiters are not programmers, they might just be looking for enough buzz words to find a good resume. So make sure you have all the buzz words shoe horned in to, like SCRUM, TDD, Agile, etc.. But make sure you can back it up too when asked too.