How It All Started

Back in 2017, I was fresh out of highschool, not a dollar to my name. I had just signed up for the first semester of college as a CS student when disaster struck my family. Mom and dad both lost their jobs and became deathly sick to the point that they were unable to work. As a result, we became homeless and had to move in with some family friends.

I was working at a barista at Dunkin Doughnuts at the time, my day would consist of waking up at unglodly hours of the morning to catch the bus before the sun came up for my morning shift. After work I would study coding online and work on my college classes. One day I came home and got the call that my mom had been admitted to the hospital because she was minutes away from having a stroke and her lungs were filled with blood clots.

I knew it was either make money or bust, so I started applying to hundreds of coding jobs while studying on sites like pluralsight to prepare. After hundreds of submissions, I finally got a callback for an interview.

I was nervous, stumbling my words, I had to write a function that checked if a word was a palendrome. After an hour of coding, I got it to work. I went home, and recieved a callback the next day with an offer for the job.

There I was, a 19 year old homeless broke kid who had just landed his first real job in tech.

Thank you God.

How It’s Going

That first job payed me a salary of $35,000. I’ve since been able to work at FAANG (or MAANG now) level companies and scalled my income to well into the six figures (the highest of the past few years I was grossing half a million per year). I haven’t been had to work in an office since 2019 with the rise of remote work, which is especially prevelant in tech. And I’ve developed skills that will allow me to provide for me, my family, and to jump into entrepenuership in software.

First Things First

There’s a few things that I did right and wrong, I want you to learn from what I did to make your tech job search an easier process.

1) Pick a Niche and Master It

You need to pick what field of tech you want to get into and tailor everything that you do to that. There are tons of people in the market, and employers are looking for the person who is going to best fit their particular business needs and tech stack. Research what kind of tech jobs are available in your area/market and then study that with laser focus. If there’s a lot of front-end developer jobs in your area, but not a lot of back-end, you know you should be studying HTML, CSS, Javascript, and front-end frameworks instead of learning how to load-balance a back-end server. You want to become an expert in domain knowledge of whatever niche you decide to pick. Don’t be a jack of all trades, but a master of none. If your not sure what specialty you want to get into yet, I’ll leave a readmap resource bellow, along with some learning resources:

2) Balance Learning With Expereince

Your going to be tempted to watch a bunch of tutorials thinking that it’s going to make you an expert and land you a job, well your wrong. Employeers are looking for both education and expereince, and so your going to need to demonstrate that either through previous employment history working with the technology, or by working on side-projects that you can use to demonstrate your expereince with the technology that they need. If your’re just starting out, your trying to gain skills as quickly as possible. Exchange your time for skills rather than money, this is the best way for you to gain the skills to earn a higher income. Offer to build websites or an app for a family memeber, friend, or a local business for free. They get a good service and you’ll get great expereince, and possible even your first few future customers.

3) Leverage Your Network

In a global job market where it feels like everyone is competing for the same jobs, having a contact on the inside is your absolutle best way to stand out from the crowd. I’m currently working a job I got through a long time friend who I helped get into tech, his reccomendation was key in landing me the position. Most of my past jobs that I’ve worked in software have been through a recruiter who has already built a good relationship with the company. After developing your skills and building a good resume for yourself, focus on getting conected with tech recruiters online to help land your next role, I highly reccomend using LinkedIn as this is where most of mine have come from. The premium membership on LinkedIn is also worth purchasing if you really want to boost your chances of getting connected. LinkedIn also offers a service called Sales Navigator that you can use to find recruiters for the specific job your looking to land.

4) Establish Credibility

The more credability that is attatched to your name/personal brand, the easier it is going to be for you to network, build relationships with other people in tech, and to even land job offers. Something I highly reccomend is building your own personal portfolio website and getting connected in tech spaces on social media. Getting into content creation around your particular tech intrests is also a great idea, as having a tech blog, even just making videos documenting your learning journey will pay dividends in terms of helping you to establish credability.

Next Steps

If you follow the tips above, you’ll be well on your way to landing a lucrative tech job. The process requires discipline and dedication, it’s not an overnight process, but it’s well worth the effort it takes. I help people interested in learning how to get into tech because I want to see it change other people’s lives the way it changed mine.

If you found this helpful, follow me on social media, subscribe, leave a comment, share it on social media, and feel free to reach out to me if you want to chat more in-depth about how to land a tech job.