👨‍💻[FirstDevRole #4] Are You Good Enough for a First Developer Job?

Have you been working on your programming skills for the past few months/years? Starting to think that you might be job-ready?

In this fourth part of the FirstDevRole series I want to try to help you get to know if you are ready for applying to developer jobs and hopefully give you a confidence boost.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way for someone to tell you this with a 100% certainty but you can get a solid overview of your status by answering to some questions that I think will bring you close to the answer you are looking for.

By the end of this article you should know at least how far you are from a job-ready state if not that you are already ready for it :)

Let's start with the questions:

If given an unknown task using technologies you know, would you be able to solve it?

This might be the question that gives you the most precise answer to the original question in the shortest time.

Can you build something yourself without following a tutorial?

Taking a peek here and there at a tutorial or a course is ok but it's important that you don't blindly follow it.

Have you went through the official documentation of the language you're using?

It's not expected of you to know the whole documentation from A-Z but just being familiar with it should be enough.

Do you have a few projects that you have done by yourself? (projects from following courses do not count)

Having a few projects done by your own hand (brain) means that you are putting your skills to a real use and that you have the confidence to try something alone.

Can you communicate well in English?

This might not be true in some cases but in 90% of cases you will need to speak in good level of English especially as you climb to larger companies.

Are you ready to follow orders from more experienced people?

Having a mindset of a beginner is important when just starting out. You should have no problems getting orders from more experienced people and do as they say but also try to present your ideas as well in a non-aggressive way.

Are you ready to learn A LOT more?

You might feel that you have learned a lot until now but you should know that there is ALWAYS a new ocean of information to learn and consume. This will be your everyday life and you should be ready for it. It's not like you can learn something and it's done. The things get updated, new versions come out, new tech appears and you will be thrown into the fire. Be ready.

Are you arrogant (if you are willing to admit it)

This is an important question that you should ask yourself as it might be a crucial factor that decides if you will get a job or not. It doesn't matter how good your skills are if you are an asshole. If by any chance, you are, then work on your attitude and mindset! This one matters more than you think :)

BONUS

Some things you should be familiar with before considering yourself ready (in my opinion):

Front-End Developer

• HTML
• CSS -JavaScript (ES6)
• React or Angular or Vue
• Consuming API endpoints
• Bootstrap
• Website Responsiveness

Back-End Developer

• JavaScript or PHP or Java
• Spring or any Node or any PHP framework
• SQL and NoSQL databases
• MySQL and Mongodb
• Auth tokens
• ORM (Hibernate, TypeORM)
• Environment variables
• Authentication and authorization

Full-Stack Developer

Everything above plus (ideally):

• Setting up deployment pipelines
• Docker
• AWS

That's it for this one. I hope you got closer to your answer with this article. (I know that the GIF's are related to programming so I hope you enjoyed that as well)

Let me know what's your opinion in the comments and feel free to reach out on Twitter if you have a profile.

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