Getting a Tech Job in 2024

Any tips regarding getting first internship as I'm senior student and already applied at 300? I got only 30 rejections, 4 interviews, and others just ghost. That's a good question. So I try not to give advice on stuff. If you've noticed, all I really try to give advice on is coding interviews. Even in the clips that I make on the second channel, I don't really give advice. I just give my opinions. But how to get a job slash internship, it's obviously hard. I obviously struggled a lot trying to do this. I guess I'll just give you my perspective. It's not just exclusive to software engineering. But in general, there's two things that really matter to do that. One is you have to be good at what you do. You have to actually have the skills for whatever position you're applying to. Because at the end of the day, people are just trying to hire somebody that's really, really good. That's it. People want people who are good. I would hire somebody who's really, really good. It's just harder to find people that are good than you might think. And the second thing is actually proving it. How do you actually prove that you're good if you already are? A lot of people struggle with both of these. But this is the one that you have the most control over. If you get really, really good, that's something that's very much in your control. But if you're already good, if you think you're already good, you're really good at making software, you're good at making projects, you've done things that are genuinely impressive, then the next thing becomes, how do you prove it to people? If you're somebody with a lot of experience, that kind of is your proof, right? If you worked at Fang for 10 years or something, you don't really have to prove it. People will already assume you have those skills. Obviously, if you're looking for an internship, you don't have experience. If you're looking for your first job, you don't have experience. So how do you prove it? Projects is one thing. But for whatever reason, you can have the most impressive project in the world, and it just doesn't attract people as much as real experience. I think the closest thing to real experience that you can get would be, obviously, people talk about open source. If you can actually contribute to impressive open source projects, that's pretty good. But it's not easy. People go through their resume as if they're just trying to check off boxes. Okay, I got to make projects. I got to do leak code. I got to do open source. That's the new thing these days. I got to do open source, everybody. Yeah, you can do some really basic open source things, like fix a typo or whatever in a repo. Nobody cares about that. You'll learn the workflow of how to make a pull request and stuff like that. That's great. That's good. But you got to do a little bit more than that. So there's that. It's not easy to do open source. Sometimes for a project, you really have to have expertise in that area, depending on what you're working on. The other thing would be free labor. Can you find somebody that you can volunteer to work for? A lot of people are against free labor, and I kind of am too. If you can find a paid position, definitely don't work for free if you don't have to. But at the end of the day, if you end up getting experience on your resume and you did work for free, it can help. The other thing is definitely networking. For whatever reason, I never even think of this as an option, because to be honest, I'm pretty bad at networking. I'm probably not the person to ask for how to do this. But it's very important. Just trying to be friendly, I guess. Be online in online communities. Open source is a good way of networking. Just being in communities. A lot of people think of networking as just going around on LinkedIn or Twitter and asking people for favors. That's not going to get you very far. Probably do the opposite. Try to give favors. Try to help people for nothing in return. Maybe then one day, they'll help you in return as well. All of this kind of goes into just proving your worth. Proving that you're competent. Proving that you're a decent person. Proving that you have skills. You have technical skills. You know how to communicate with people and all that. Again, before you can prove it, you actually have to get those skills. You have to acquire that knowledge. Whether it's technical knowledge or just communicating. Honestly, the best way to learn how to communicate is just communicating. So if you're trying to network, you're probably not going to lose anything by trying to network. You might make a mistake. You might piss somebody off, but you'll just learn a lesson by doing that. Yeah, that's my perspective. I know it doesn't entirely answer your question. It's not super easy at this point in time to get jobs and internships. I think internships are actually harder to get than jobs right now. So don't feel too bad if you're struggling with that. So I have a question for you guys. When it comes to projects, projects are good. And I think the classic thing that people do is they'll make some kind of basic full-stack app. Like something that probably has a React front-end. It has JavaScript back-end, probably. Like Express.js or something. Fine, nothing wrong with that. And maybe it'll connect to a database. Probably a NoSQL database. Probably MongoDB. Maybe Firebase. This may be sometimes SQL. And that's what a lot of jobs are anyway. But I would try to do something a little bit more original. Once you have that down, try to add something interesting to it. I can't really give you a lot of examples for me because I don't do a lot of projects. But on my site, I have a code sandbox. That's unique. That's something the vast majority of people don't do when they're making a full-stack app. Most people just create some crud to-do list type basic thing. You kind of have to get creative. You kind of have to focus on something that you enjoy.