[Weekend Drop] Coding Career for College Students - Major League Hacking

The Swyx Mixtape

• Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GQjhDBiQ4raGcn4M7eXXuoJ_9VOGSgpd3RcIQ2dyXJ4/edit?usp=sharing
• Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2X-RsCVRas

Timestamps

• [00:00:00] Prepared presentation on Coding Careers
• [00:21:46] If you've worked with junior developers, what's the biggest mistake you see them making and how would you go about solving it if you were in their shoes?
• [00:24:03] What should be the aim when job hunting big companies or startups?
• [00:26:06] Can you expand more on the differences between being a junior software engineer in finance Two Sigma versus tech?
• [00:26:43] If you don't have contacts, do you have any advice in terms of contacting real people or companies to show yourself in the best light possible?
• [00:28:31] How easy or hard is it to change your field?
• [00:29:52] What do you think about product management and how would the graduate set of career path aim towards that?
• [00:33:13] What's the best or correct way of approaching a recruiter slash employee to get a referral?
• [00:34:28] When hiring someone and looking at OSS contributions, how would you rate it from very different projects are more well-known?
• [00:36:29] What's the benefit of a random employee spending the time on you for referral or talk about their job? I feel like it's one sided for the student.
• [00:37:44] How do you ask developers for conversations about their job or guidance?
• [00:38:45] how do I approach about the referral at the end of the conversation though?
• [00:39:52] do you prepare for data structure and algorithms for job interviews? Is there a fun way for that?

Transcript

swyx: I can just get going with my prepared slides. It's going to take me like half an hour ish and then we can do half an hour of questions. Does that sound good? And then, yeah, just like, feel free to pause me if there's any technical difficulties or anything.

[00:00:13]This is something that I never thought I would. Write about or specializing. It essentially was an R com of my blogging and like people really responding to some of this stuff that I've written for them.

[00:00:25]And it's essentially like the meta code stuff around code. Yeah. You've learned as you go along, that nobody teaches you. Like w when you tend to think about coding careers, like your career as a software developer as just about code, when really like it's maybe 25% about code. And there's a lot of other stuff around that.

[00:00:44] So this is what I ended up doing in between jobs. Like I wrote essentially like a list of essays that became a book. And that's the whole idea. And I was invited to it. To do a talk with you guys about it. So I'm going to share what I have right now. And I'd love to go into further detail because there's just too much to go into it with you in 30 minutes.

[00:01:00]So I'm, Swyx I also go by Shawn. I used to use to have a career in finance change careers in 2017, did a boot camp instead of like a proper season. When did you to Sigma? Netlify and now I just recently joined AWS. And we already talked about the other stuff. One of the, I guess, one of my other roles, if you're into front end development at all is that I may react R slash react or Jess subreddit moderator.

[00:01:24] And I think we're about to hit 200,000 subscribers tomorrow. So that's pretty exciting as well. So. What, this is what this attempt is. I just want to situate them this among the other advice that the other books that you've heard about as seen a lot of books are very sort of pointed point in time solutions, essentially like their target, like learn to code or.

[00:01:43] Crack the coding interview or like, solve the algorithm design or like, do you do a great resume or, write about clean. And so these are like just very point in time solutions, but they don't really help you with the transition steps. And so what I essentially tried to do with this book was essentially layout things which Principles, which are basically like always on default decisions, strategies, which are like, which helped to help you decide.

[00:02:09] And based on one-off big uncertain irreversible decisions and in tactics, which are things that you use frequently throughout your career. So that's the way that we're gonna break it. And and yeah, so, so basically like there's four parts to what we so how do I, how I break it down.

[00:02:23] And the first is the career guide. And one of my obsessions is the OSI layer. I think if you're doing a lot of tech interviewing, I think that's one of the first models that used to be. Come across from essentially like the network layer, I'll be out to applications.

[00:02:36] And I don't remember what the other five layers, but I was always thinking like, what if there's an OSI layer for humans as well? So instead of just protocols and and data, we can also talk about how humans form a chain of value from machines all the way to end users. So we have here the entire universe of coding careers going from, I guess, people who work the closest with hardware.

[00:02:57]Operating system devs or embedded or IOT devs all the way up to people who don't actually code technically traditionally, if you think about that, they're they might be considered no-code low-code they might micro settings, which have some sort of conditional logic, whatever.

[00:03:12] Yeah. These are, that's the mental framework. Most of us developers are actually, we're going to live around here between applications for the front end and services for the backend. If you are, if you aspire to be more of a, like an infrastructure cloud person, you might work in the lower layer on the product and the sort of platform level.

[00:03:27]And that's how I split things. You may have a different split. It's good to have a mental model because the way that you interview or a plan your career for each of these levels is very different from each other. So I think that's an also interesting mental model to have when you approach these things.

[00:03:41]Next this is more about the job jobs searching thing. Quite frankly, if since all of you are in the MLH fellowship I don't think this applies to you at all because you're going to sail through your job hunting task. But I think I recommend this book was from where he talks about like the mathematics of job hunting and it's essentially the same.

[00:04:00] As the birthday problem where you don't actually need 365 people in the room to have a good chance of two people having the same birthday you actually need. Cause because the probabilities compound same reason, same reasoning for applications. And because you only need a one job offer out of all the applications that you send out.

[00:04:18] So that's kind of job hunting advice. Well, I know it's very simple numbers matter. Right. The other thing I think to think about when it comes to, when it comes to job hunting, especially for new grads and people who are just like, getting their first experiences without a network is that you can choose a wide range of strategies between narrow and I guess, wide.