- Taking stock of where you are: what have you accomplished this module? What have you learned? Where are you stuck (have you not been able to follow through on outreach? Is your resume not finished?)?
As far as PD goes, I have both wins and losses.
wins
- I feel like my tech stack, and my confidence talking about my skill base in an interview to potential employers, feels much higher than I thought. My foundational status as a developer feels a lot better going through Turing that I ever imagined that it would be. My original expectation was to hit this less within a couple of years. Incredibly thankful to Turing for that.
- My overall flow of the resume and how to write a cover letter feels really polished. I went from feeling incredibly anxious about writing resume/cover letter and taking 3 weeks over the course of Mod 3 to get them ready to having them altered and presentable for an employer within hours. That is a skillset that I think has been under represented as a highly marketing skill in Turing that I would love to see them market more. To me, it felt like it got buried underneath all of the teaching about how to write a resume and cover letter and the long term benefits were lost after it was written and completed.
losses
- I had not done any additional outreach aside from the basics. While I was able to build some good relationships with alumni and the 2 job shadows that we have had through mod 2/3, they were gifted to me through Turing and not found on my own. Missing that drive to put myself out there during this mod makes me wish I focused on it more.
- I fell really far behind on my PD this mod because my support while going through Turing fell through at the beginning of October. It was a really stressful month keeping up with Turing, working on the side, doing more freelance projects and keeping afload while waiting for the next support to solidify. Unfortunately, I made the decision to sacrifice more of my PD time which I am looking forward to making up during the next couple weeks.
- Because of my 2nd bullet point in losses, I had lost confidence in being able to reach out to employers. The reason for this is because I have not have practiced anything regarding interviews, questions, coding challenges or anything. Again something to put it more time over the next couple weeks to keep up with.
- Create plans for 3 different companies you want to target:
- Questions to reflect on here: Why do you like this company? What makes you want to work there? Why are you a good fit for this company? What do you bring to the company? What transferable skills do you have? What do you already know about the company (product, team, culture, company size, location, etc.)? What do you need to learn?
- Steps to take:
- Outreach: look at the company’s LinkedIn page: who could you reach out to? What questions do you want to ask that person?
- Experience: once you’ve made a connection at the company, how could you find out more? Consider setting up a job shadow or exploring their tech stack in your projects
- Read back over the plan. How does it reflect your vision?
- Imagine that you get the job. A year later, what have you gained from this experience? How have you started to fulfill your vision?
Plan #1:
Infinicept:
My plan is to continue reaching out to Andy, who was the person who I did my job shadow with in Mod 3. I was able to attain his phone number after our meeting, as well as email, as want to continue reaching out to him. I think Infinicept would be my first and most logical choice. There are multiple reasons for this; Being a smaller company that is currently experiencing a growth spurt. This tells me there is a lot of time for teaching and growth from within. Their tech stack fits really well with what I know and am comfortable with. Typescript, React, c# and .NET core fit perfectly with what I have learned in Turing, along with my previous position as a junior software dev pre-Turing. We both have a lukewarm relationship from the job shadow and have a more in-depth idea about who they are as a company, their missions, how they work with others, their focus on teachingable and culture positive employees and more. First step is to start picking up c# and .NET on the side again. Staying up to date with this back-end technology will definitely help give me a higher foundation and skillset. Next is to get really good at Typescript and React Hooks. Knowing their current code base structure and where they are currently heading with their code, this gives me time to become a specialist in these areas to make myself a very promising asset for their company. This fits my initial plan of starting from a junior dev position to allow myself to build a really solid foundation to build up into a middle and senior engineer role.
Plan #2:
Livongo:
Livongo hits very close to home with me and is probably the company that would best reflect my pairin qualities. They are in the business to help people with chronic conditions live a better life. This is something that my family and I have had to battle almost my entire life with my mother. Reviewing their tech stack, their engineers mostly focus on full-stack with a good proficieny in both front and back end languages. My tech stack knowledge for their front end, I have confidence with, however their back end languages, Java and Obj C, make me nervous. The job that I would apply for to begin here is their web developer position. It still has a fairly solid pay of 65k, but I think with my experience, tech stack, and some back end knowledge that I could progress into an engineer position very quickly. They are in the business to help people and this matches 3/4 of my pairin qualities. This is the company that I original wrote my Resume and Cover Letter to target. Now it's all about reaching out to their staff that I have researched on LinkedIn and start building relationships.
Plan #3:
oBundle
This is one that came out of nowhere and really surprised me. This is also one that I think is a good mix and match of the above 2 companies I made before. There are a couple of specific passions that I relate to with this company. First, is that they enjoy working with and as entreprenuers. I have a very large passion as a previous small business owner for entreprenuership. Getting back into business for myself in software is my ultimate end goal, so this would start me in a great position for building up essential skills on what will help small business owners most. The other reason is for eCommerce. I really enjoy building eCommerce related websites and find it very fascinating. Unfortunately, it is something that I have not been able to build fully on my own before without using a 3rd party software and would love to attempt this and learn more about the eCommerce industry. Looking at their tech stack, I feel 100% comfortable applying for this company. Their specializations include custom front-end functionality and design, API application development, and data upload and I feel that this is right up my alley with expertise. Initial plan to approach this company will be interesting, as I found it through Indeed instead of LinkedIn. They are a much smaller company, with only around 10 employees. This means that it is possible to reach out to the owner for direct conversations on LinkedIn as they don't have any kind of HR featured job personnal listed on there. It would take some researching and conversations to learn more about their culture as it's hard to get a good idea of it reading through their website. While smaller start ups may be a unique approach that the results may be less predictable, it is also a good opportunity to gain real experience if I notice the other bigger companies want more.
- Make it actionable: rank each plan on a scale of 1-5 for how much your plan aligns with the following:
- Available resources to help you pursue it: contacts, time, knowledge of the company, etc.
Infinicept - 5 Livongo - 4 oBundle - 3
- Coherence: how it aligns with your career vision
Infinicept - 4 Livongo - 5 oBundle - 4
- Confidence level: how feasible does this feel to you?
Infinicept - 4 Livongo - 3 oBundle - 5
- How excited you are about it?
Infinicept - 5 Livongo - 5 oBundle - 4