| First off, two things; 1. You can do this and you are not alone! I look good enough on paper that I get a seemingly endless number of job leads. And I still cant make it through the hiring pipelines at seemingly anywhere. I know people way better than me that cant either. The creator of homebrew? Max Howell? Yep, that guy. He couldn't make it through the hiring pipeline at Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102 It isn't you, remind yourself that it is not you. Just keep going forward. You will get there. You will make it. 2. But is going to hurt. The hiring pipeline in this industry is broken, completely utterly broken. It will not be fun. Until you make it, it will be rough. It is just the way it is. There wont be any saving grace or magical advice that will make it all better. It will be rough, it is that simple. Most people outside of the right stereotypes and demographics wont make it. If you don't fit the right demographic you will have to work 3x as hard and suffer 3x the stress and anxiety as others. But the good news is it can be done. You can do it. First step; figure out what your weakness is and begin to work on it. You can pinpoint this by figuring out where in the pipeline you are continually failing. Then work at getting a job the same way you worked at learning to program. Getting a job is a skill, don't let anyone or yourself convince you that just because you can code a job will happen. They don't just fall into your lap. You must tackle getting a job with the same motivation, and dedication to self-improvement that you have when learning a new framework or programming language. If you cant get your foot in the door at companies, if you cant get them to respond to you, then your problem is you look crap on paper. Go and find people that look good on paper, look up the thought leaders, the people whose work you see constantly. Then copy what they are doing. Make open source projects, contribute to their projects, write articles. Eventually you will look good and the leads will start flowing in. Now here is where it gets harder. If you are failing screens, you haven't learned to talk right. Practice learning how to talk about your work and answering questions (and asking them). Start asking after the screens for feedback. You will eventually learn what you are doing wrong and then you can work at getting better at it. If you are failing the whiteboard challenge phase of hiring, then get good at them. Go to HackerRank and solve solve solve until things get easier. Recognize that they are puzzles, they are not programming. There is no shame you suck at them, you aren't trained as a puzzle solver, you trained as a programmer. But you have to practice the skills they are testing, and they will be testing you to see how fast you can reverse a singly linked list. Recognize it is silly and stupid, but get good at it anyway. |