I played the numbers game

195 apps

5 interviews

2 offers

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Work on a pet project or two and put it on GitHub. Practice coding exams with something like LeetCode, HackerRank, etc.

I always wish I had better advice for this, papa emeritus had solid advice. I get messages from recruiters on LinkedIn when I've had my profile set to looking for a job or whatever.

I'd look into state and federal, if you're American. I've seen them have internships that are specifically for recent grads. I've worked federal and found the interview much more reasonable there. Any friends from college are a great resource, if they're in industry. I had a guy I did a project with in school message me, and because I know the hiring managers I got him an internship no problem.

I never had to have a public repo, but I may have just been lucky. If you're into remote work, I'd expand my search and apply to rural areas. I know some programmers down here in the sticks that find it very difficult to hire. Even if not listed remote, you could ask.

For my first internship, I found a junior developer at the company and spoke with them to get a feel about what the interview would be like, blah, blah. Much better than speaking with a recruiter.

Edit just to say development and experience is a crapshoot. I'd honestly get my foot in the door somewhere. You could transfer teams or something afterwards if you find a good one you think would be good mentors.

I've been working in the industry for a few years now and had recently been acting as the hiring manager for an open engineer position. YMMV, but here's my experience:

• 80% of the people that get past the initial screening are from a referral, 15% of the people are scouted on LinkedIn, and only about 5% make it who have submitted a resume without a reference. If you're on the other side of that, then you should expect to hear back about ~5% of the time when submitting a resume to open postings with no reference.
• Get someone to look over your resume, but it's not the most important thing. Your portfolio and github accounts even less so. Once you get past the initial screening, pretty much no one interviewing you will have looked at any of that.
• Soft skills are VERY important. During the interview, you will be judged by how much the team wants to work with you. Practice, practice, practice. Be empathetic, show that you have a growth mindset, are willing to work with others, solve disputes in healthy and productive ways. Don't be cocky, don't ramble, don't box yourself into decision making based only on personal preferences.
• Casually mention to everyone that you're looking for a software engineering role. Your family, friends, friends of friends. Mention it to people you volunteer with, play sports with. You can make it known that this is what you're interested in without being pushy about it. People are generally happy to help and take them up on it when they do!
• Joining your local meetup groups can be a great way to get your foot in the door. Look out for hackathons, weekly web dev meetings, women in tech, or any sort of community gathering of tech people. The more people you know and are friendly with in the industry, the more opportunities you have.
• Nothing is stopping you from applying to literally hundreds of remote and local jobs. You can write up a generic cover letter and spam your resume to a bunch of companies. Find any sort of job posting aggregators: LinkedIn, StackOverflow Jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed. Go wild if you want.
• Take care of yourself. Get plenty of sleep. Exercise. Socialize with friends. This process sucks, but it's much more manageable when you're healthy and have the energy.
• It's easier after you have one job. And it gets much easier after having a few. If the gig is shitty, know that you can just start applying again whenever you want. The average tenure for a software engineer at a company is anywhere from 6 months to 2 years. It's valuable for employers to hire engineers with a breadth of knowledge working at different organizations, and you end up getting better working conditions and better pay the more often you jump around.

The entire process to the first job can be draining and defeating, so make sure to cut yourself plenty of slack. Opportunities will open up over time, and eventually you'll get a callback that turns into an offer, or a friend of a friend lands a tech job and helps you get an interview. Good luck out there and keep your head up!

This is actually general advice for any job seeker:

If you have any kind of cover letter, put a section like this into it, like a table with only the center line visible, or something like that:

Your requirement | My Experience

Your requirement | My Experience

Your requirement | My Experience

Your requirement | My Experience

Your requirement | My Experience

You can leave off any parts that you don't have a good answer for.

There are three reasons for this.

• Firstly, this makes it easy to read and skim. Always good
• Secondly, you force the hiring manager to connect your experience with their requirement... It implies that your experience is a definitive qualification rather than something they have to read, stop, process, remember their own job requirements, and then connect the two (something a dumb HR person might literally be unable to do).
• Thirdly, that's SEO baby. When they search for resumes in whatever software they're using, they query a bunch of the same keywords they included in their job description. This way you guarantee that you don't forget a valuable keyword, and your resume now contains various applications, frameworks and shit that you haven't even used. Your resume is basically saying "React? Well I've used jQuery" and getting picked up for the word "React", which might be a nice-to-have.

It's a lot better than writing the keywords in white 1pt font at the bottom of your resume, which is something a techy person is more likely to catch you doing than the 70 year old looking to hire plumbers.

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Go to career fairs. It’s very unlikely that you will get a job through a purely online application. Talk to people face-to-face whenever possible, and hand out physical copies of your resume. If you’re lucky enough to know any people in the industry, ask them to send your resume directly to their recruiters.

Work on some personal projects and upload them to a public git repo, if you haven’t already. Recruiters like being able to see that you’ve made something that works.

do you live in a city? are there clubs or professional organizations you could participate in and get to know some people working in the industry? the biggest advantage university confers in the job market is social connections, but there are still plenty of opportunities for networking after you graduate

You probably won't have to relocate; most decent companies will offer remote positions for developers in this day and age.

What I would recommend is try to find a company that you really want to work for that you think your skill set will match, tailor your resume specifically for them, and then apply on their website directly. That way you're not going through useless middleman recruiters and your application will land directly in HR's lap.

Most companies are dealing with labour shortages right now, and developers are in high demand. Your only disadvantage is that you're a recent grad with probably not much in the world of actual work experience doing development, but that should sort itself out in due time.

Also, make your resume look memorable (and easy to digest by skimming through it). There are some resumes that I've seen that I remember how they look years later. Use Canva , it's free and exceedingly effective, make sure to include a handsome profile pic.

Good luck comrade :fidel-salute:

Would you be willing to relocate to Berlin?