600 Rejections Finding A Job In Tech | Prime Reacts

Tech world went from paying $75k for bootcamp grads to not calling people with 10+ years of tech experience.

My experience with career fairs were me going to talk to someone only to be told to apply online for the tech role. All the career fairs I’ve gone to have been more business centered and not tech.

I have a 3.9 gpa, interned as a react developer and that turned into a full time job for a year and a half. I go to career fairs. I grind leetcode. I constantly try to improve my resume. I NEVER get any responses from jobs. It’s ALL about getting a referral. Nothing else matters in my mind.

i've had to send 500 applications to get an internship. a goddamn internship. i don't even want to know how many i'll have to send to get a real job

I've have 8 months work experience, have won a hackathon, have personal projects, have a 89% average. I've applied to 105 companies, big and small. Not a single request for an interview.

"When I was 17, my dad didn't know anything. Now at 24, I'm amazed at how much he's learned in the last 7 years" -- Mark Twain

Prime has great advice if someone is looking for a job in 2006

I have 20 years of software experience with techs like PHP, Go, python and cloud environments. The last 7 years at a big SaaS telco with also leading and engineering management roles. Then layoffs happened. I have now sent around 25 applications to various jobs and had over 70-80 different interviews (as it is a multi interview process on every company) and I still didn’t get an offer. I was asking for less than what I was making and even applied on medior software engineer roles while getting desperate. It is wild out there. If you are thinking of quitting your job please rethink about it.

Imagine having to come up with 600 narratives why you would be a good fit for the position, or feigning interest for 600 different problem domains.

The career fairs when I was at uni were mostly just random bars and stores advertising and looking for part timers, not actual tech companies :(

I'm honestly looking at factory jobs and just trying to build a portfolio in the meantime

I think its perfectly reasonable for a university graduate to expect a job in their field. If the university is not preparing people for the job market, then the university is kinda failing.

Most leetcode questions are not what we study in a college data structures class

It took me one year and +1000 resume applications to finally land a state position in tech. However, I had to move +300 miles away from where I used lived to get it. It’s hard, and a lot of work and luck is required. But I had to make the hard choice and move to get a career that paid well. Don’t give up, just get really aggressive every day. Submit 5 resume applications a day, everyday in the morning until you land that position.

College career fairs for the big companies has turned into essentially QR scanning booths. You don't really talk to anyone most of the time

Career fairs are not all the same, bud. Lots of them consist of standing in a long line, handing someone your resume, and answering one question, before they tell you to shuffle along.

That part where he said his mom was just happy him not being drugged 😢 the truest statement ever , I was lost in drugs 2016-2017 and my parents/younger Sister endured so much emotional pain seeing just the shell of who I was.. a couple months clean near the end of 2017 , I realized that my actions of trying to fix my addiction was making my family so happy. Now over 6 years clean, with 2 sons I didn't have or could imagine in 2016

Last career fair I went to was awful. The ratio of companies compared to job seekers is really unbalanced. If you try to take time to talk to anyone a massive queue forms behind you and you get forced to move on. The companies there only have one or two vacancies which can just be found online. In some cases they didnt even have vacancies and are just there to spread awareness. Even if you give them your name and have an interesting convo the representatives of the companies are never people with actual authority and they're talking to hundreds of people all day so nothing will come of it. Waste of a day. It's better to go to coding workshops and meetups if you have access otherwise god help you

Only 600!? I'm at nearly 1.1k with about 8 years of pro dev experience, had about 15 interviews, 5 2nd round, 2 final round, haven't been picked yet though... still holding out hope but I've decided that if I can't find a door, I'll just have to build one myself ;)

Don't worry, 10 million high school students in 3rd world and Eastern Europe ready to work for peanuts are about to enter the field too.