After CompSci

It’s now the end of the school year, you have either graduated or you’re on summer break. Either way, you are looking for an internship or first job. The Big N companies closed up applications for their summer internships months ago, and they might have some internships open for the Fall, but that’s months away. If I was you here is where I would look:

• The School Job Boards, see if you can get into the job boards of other local schools as well.
• Local Startup hubs or incubators
• Local Non Profits
• UpWork or other job listing sites
• Ask your network on LinkedIn, Instagram, FB, or wherever you have access to people.

School Job Boards(Handshake)

Your school should have a job board; lately, many of them have been using handshake. Remember companies post to these because they are actively looking for folks to hire, that means it’s at least a warm lead for you. You can filter out jobs here by your major and possible skills that you can already bring to the table. The companies posting here know that they are attracting candidates that are just entering the job market. In the past few months I had a friend do some hiring this way and it worked out great for him and the student.

When I was going through school I took on three jobs this way. One was an internal listing for the schools IT department, it was a good experience of learning about things I don’t want to do forever so I was there for a couple quarters. I still hate printers after my time there.

The next job I took was for teaching a kids coding class which was interesting. Teaching kids allows you to learn about people’s different learning styles and how to better communicate concepts to folks just starting out. The people who ran the kids coding classes ended up working on an ecommerce business as well that I had heard them talking about. After asking them about it off an on for a quarter I was able to transition to that afterwards just by asking them about it every couple of weeks. That ecommerce business is where I discovered DevOps practices and learned a lot from one of their senior developers.

Then one summer I ended up getting another job through the schools job portal, this time it was at a local hedge fund. I had no clue that I would ever get to work at one of these but luckily there were some alumni of the school who thought to post a job for a summer intern on their school’s job portal. The main thing that got me in was some small Java experience and the Linux/networking background I had from a previous apprenticeship. The main take away is that your experience will start stacking and it can let you get into place that you never thought you’d end up.

Local Startup Hubs and Incubators

Go to your local startup hub, incubator or entrepreneur center at the school. If you can’t find this either Google it or find a Business Major who goes to hackathons, they’ll know where it’s at. Chances are if you go to one of these that there is going to be someone looking for a developer to either build out an app or website for them. These folks might not know how to build out an app or they may just be looking for some extra hands to help get projects along. Usually these places are a little more flexible and they can work a bit around your schedule which is helpful for when school starts back up. There’s generally a bunch of different types of companies in these offices and you can meet a lot of them if they host tech meetups or open houses. Go to these meetups and start networking to see if anyone has jobs or see if there is a listing of the companies for a space like this. Get that list and start trying to email the company if the other approaches fail.

With these companies try to make sure you actually get paid and not just equity unless you already have a way to cover your bills. In small startup land there might be cheaper budgets but you get to work on a lot of things that someone with little experience normally wouldn’t. There’s usually some trial by fire in these companies and projects where you might be in over your head, this is a great time to grow though and see what you can stretch and do.

This could be a great opportunity if you can find a consulting company or agency in one of the startup hubs or incubators. Like a startup, these companies will throw work at you that no 20-year-old would get otherwise. It can be challenging but will level up your skills faster than anything else.

Local Non Profits

Non profits usually need some tech help. Whether it is doing some IT tasks for them or updating their website or creating a simple app there is usually a need. A lot of them don’t have a dedicated tech staff but they do have tech needs, that’s where you can fill in. Like the startups they may or may not have listings for these roles open. If they do not see if you can find an email for the company and start asking if there are any tech needs they have. If you already have some IT skills or web dev knowledge you can highlight those skills in your reach out emails. By outling any of the underlying skills that you currently have and highlighting a need that the company might have will increase your chances of a reply or job. Remember, the companies don’t care that you necessarily know a specific tool or language but that you can fix their problems at this level.

Upwork

Upwork is a job and project listing site. Here you can find people who need all sorts of developers. There’s a chance for you to spec out and build jobs which becomes very important as you go further in your career. The jobs can be hit or miss but you can learn a lot here. The lessons aren’t just in pure engineering skills but also in how to communicate well and set expectations for projects. The project values can be a little light as there are people who try to find cheap help on these sites but sometimes those are the gigs you pull in the beginning to build out that portfolio. Use this as a learning experience, if you do well though you can build a reputation on the site and start getting traction for higher paying jobs. If you can learn to run projects here then you should have little trouble getting larger projects done with companies and people outside of Upwork as well. Work like this transitions well into consulting as managing both the project deliverable and customer expectations is key. A piece of advice here would be to make sure that you have a strong list of requirements for the deliverable and to see if you can get some payment up front and the rest of the payment paid out for different milestones. Doing so will help mitigate your risk of a client bailing out on you.

Your Network

You likely have at least a few friends or connections on various forms of social media. Ask if anyone needs some tech help or a site or an app. There’s a high chance that people who know you or that you have connected with in the past don’t know that you are currently looking to work or what skills that you have. Now is the time to remind them and possibly score some work and learning experiences. This approach can lead to a mixed bag of results. You might end up hearing from that crazy uncle or aunt that always tells you they have the next app idea that will be Instagram and that you need to work for a sliver of equity while they just chill. This is also a way that you can pair with old connections to work on interesting new projects that you didn’t know about that they are working on. Between a mixture of networking events and this I ended up working at a startup that an acquaintance from my school was building in the gaming space. You never know what folks might be working on since some of them work in stealth mode for a bit or are just starting out.

Build your own thing!

If you don’t have a job from the above and you are able to cover your bills start building out your own thing. If you can’t cover your bills with a tech job from the start find something to cover your bills and start working on your own side projects. Find something that interested you or an interesting piece of tech and jump right in. You won’t know everything to do at that start but that is part of the fun in our field. We get to explore new bits of technology and work with these tools to create value or just some cool shit. If there’s an idea you have run with that, if there’s not follow this:

• Find some data that interests you, think movie data, game data, crypto or sports.
• Scrape the data and store that in a databases such as Postgres or SQLite.
• Create a backend in your language of choice and start querying the database.
• Create a frontend to display that data in a framework of your choice, use React or just right some vanilla html/css/javascript if you want.
• Push that code into Github, create some Actions in Github to run that can build out your code and deploy it.
• Get a domain and a cheap server on Digital Ocean to host your new web app.

If you can figure out how to do that and show a company what you used to create that web app you should be good to go for any entry level Software Engineering jobs. If you can do that well you might be at the point of a mid level job. And at the end of this you will have encountered some problem or idea that you want to solve. During dev work like this you always come up with new ideas for tools or businesses, write them down or run with them.

Best of luck in the job search and thanks for reading!

If you have any questions head over to the After CompSci Discord server. For those looking to learn some more real world engineering skills to help get that first job take a look at the After CompSci course as well.