20. Becoming a Junior Developer

Chris Castle sits down with Shirley Xu, who went through a coding bootcamp, and Eric Chen, who is a recent graduate, to talk about their journey into their first programming jobs at Heroku. For both of them, the experience of programming in a day-to-day role is vastly different than what they experienced at school; namely, rather than analyzing algorithms, they were exposed to Ruby, Rails, and entire groups of people involved in shipping features. They recognize that they went through a period experiencing imposter syndrome, before realizing that every developer, no matter their status, shares those same feelings.

Certain soft skills were also acquired. Eric learned how to move past his fear of looking ignorant and just ask questions whenever he didn't know a term or a process. He felt that this made him into a better engineer and, besides which, no one had ever refused to explain a concept. Shirley discovered that in order for her to achieve her goals, she needed to express them clearly to her mentors and manager. For example, after she expressed that she would one day like to become a technical lead or manager, her mentor was better able to develop a long term plan of the concrete steps that Shirley would need to take to get there.

Tech moves fast, and a portion of this episode is dedicated to how everyone keeps up with the latest trends and terms. All agree that the breadth of knowledge is simply too much to consume, and it's okay to not know everything. That doesn't make you a better or worse developer: it simply means your expertise lies elsewhere.

The episode concludes with some advice for anyone not in software development, but is considering a change. Eric suggests keeping yourself motivated, with time blocks in your schedule dedicated to simply learning. Shirley provides a long list of resources, as well as a six-to-twelve month timeframe to go from a neophyte to your first job.

Links from this episode

Several coding bootcamps and online tutorials were mentioned as possible starting points for those interested in transitioning into a career in tech:

• HackBright
• CodeAcademy
• PluralSight
• L'Ecole No 41
• freeCodeCamp