What really matters is your focus. If you decide to go for your goal, it usually takes less than four months to get a job in a completely new sphere. Stay confident and don’t give up. This story shows that motivation matters.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself? When did you graduate?
I’m from Houston, Texas. I graduated at the end of November. I don’t have a computer science degree or any other tech background. My job search started on December 16. I got my first job offer at the end of the first week of my job search, but I declined it as they insisted that I relocate.
After I declined the first job offer, I didn’t get any more for a very long time. I was actively searching for about three months. I accepted the second offer.
Did you attend graduate meetings?
At first yes, but then I stopped when I got the idea and the answers to certain topics. It’s super important just to follow the given steps. In time it will work for you.
How much time did you spend in your internship?
Maybe a week or less. It was a great practice that boosted my confidence in writing test cases and bug reports. Now I’m following an onboarding process, and that’s the way I’m preparing for my job.
Tell us a bit about your job. Is it a remote position?
The job I accepted is an $80,000 job opportunity with really good benefits. The interview process in this company was really long but totally worth it. They also gave me the choice between working from the office or home. By the way, their office isn’t too far from my place—it’s like a thirty-minute drive—but I’ve chosen the 100% remote option. And no, it didn’t make any difference to my salary.
The company I work for is involved in a lot of different projects. I’m working on an app for oil, gas, and chemical factories. It’s a unique product. They don’t have any competitors on the market, so it’s a unique and quite difficult solution. If someone knows how to use AutoCAD, I think it’s twice as difficult as that. They had one QA tester, and I joined the team with one more person. So there are three of us at the moment.
It’s already been four weeks since I’ve started. I haven’t tested the application yet; I’ve just been learning it. It’s a mobile application.
During the teaching stage, it might seem more complicated, but over time it’s getting simpler.
At the moment they aren’t pushing me; they are just giving me some time to learn everything by myself. The other thing in this company is that they do not do bug reports. They only do it when it’s a repeated bug. If I find one, I need to communicate directly with the developer. Different companies have different procedures. Sometimes it can look strange, but it’s okay.
Some of our students may experience problems with applying to a minimum of thirty positions per day, so we offer a job-application service. Did you apply for yourself or did we apply for you?
I applied by myself. I’ve sent around 1,500 resumes in these three months, or between forty and 100 resumes daily.
That’s great! Can you share some interview questions with us if you remember any? What do you recommend your groupmates be ready for?
The same questions we had on the list. They asked me to tell them about myself, my project, etc. Sometimes they would ask for more details. For example, Apple asked for more details on bug reports. I didn’t try to memorize everything from the file we are provided by Careerist. I was flexible, sometimes just joking. However, the most important thing was my confidence. I would tell everyone to be confident in interviews because it really matters.
Remembering my last interview, it wasn’t a full match with my profile. Even the experience I had on a resume didn’t actually work for them because it was a different project, a desktop application, and they used Azure instead of Jira. They were absolutely different tools, but they accepted me.
What should we do so we don’t freak out on our first day?
Just think about what the worst thing that could happen is, and what would you do about it. I just wanted to say one more time your career coach will contact you after you sign your contract and instruct you on the first week at your work.
Alesia, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it, and we congratulate you on your new job. Thanks a lot for being with us and many more thanks for sharing your story. We’ll be waiting to hear from you in the future to tell us what it’s like to be a software engineer.