After some time of working as a help desk technician I started to gain interest in web development. I found a job as a web publisher in a marketing agency. My job was to mainly copy and paste stuff to a CMS, sometimes do some minor changes in HTML. After a year the company was looking for new frontend developers so I applied and got the job.

I've just got hired into my first job. Basically what I did was focusing my CV to the company I was looking for. I did not aim to go to FANG companies, they require years of experience. So you have two options. First: apply for internship roles and then you will get hired, or apply for consultancy agencies such as Hays, Between and much others which offer many job position in external companies or apply for companies such as EY, Deloitte, PWC, BCG which always look for many junior people. Step by step you will reach what you are looking for

I started with a paid internship doing ruby on rails
There are opportunities but you have to be patient

A dev 1 position opened up at the university I attended. It helped that I really targeted my way in: I had reached out to some of the devs there via a LinkedIn premium trial and emailed a couples other. Contacted 20 people and received 2 replies about what tech stack they were using and how they landed the job there and I learned that stack. That gave me enough leverage to get myself an interview, and I usually do well with presenting myself as professional and competent using my past experiences as well, pivoting them so they apply to situations that display the good sides of my character. Even when I didn't know the tech they asked about, I always said I was willing to learn.

I'm curious if you are getting any interviews. If you don't get any interviews, you should most likely work on your online presence like resume, LinkedIn, portfolio, GitHub or whatever you use and apply with.

I wrote some good posts about it which already helped a lot of people:

How to write a promising CV

Julia 👩🏻‍💻 ・ Oct 27 '21 ・ 4 min read

#codenewbie #resume #career #help

How to create a professional LinkedIn profile

Julia 👩🏻‍💻 ・ Dec 5 '21 ・ 4 min read

#career #codenewbie #linkedin #professional

How to create a stunning GitHub Profile

Julia 👩🏻‍💻 ・ Oct 24 '21 ・ 4 min read

#career #github #productivity #codenewbie

I hope this will help. Let me know if there is anything I can help you with. Wish you best of luck.

It was 2005, I was at a horrible corp qa job, got myself Python, PHP, MySQL, Ruby and Rails books at a discount and devoured them, shortly after the 1st Rails Conference ever held at Spain happened and I went (faking a sick day because there was no such thing as training days-off at that job) added that to my CV and that got me into the search results of one of the first companies doing Rails. There was no competition, having read half of the Rails book made me the best candidate.
If you are trying to break into tech, there are basically 2 strategies:

• Learn something very popular, get a low paying job (high certainty)
• Learn something fringe, still not mainstream, get a niche job (high uncertainty)

I took a data entry job, my short attention span made it excruciating, so I had an enormous pool of motivation to automate the crap out of all their data entry. Between all the stuff I implemented I cut down the time data entry took to about 1/5 of what it was. I then got an all-expense-paid trip to corporate, had drinks with the Systems Technology manager who was in charge of internal software, and got a full time programming job at corporate, writing internal software solutions and had a huge amount of leeway to explore and contribute to OSS projects that might benefit the company, which helped me build a great portfolio and resume of various tech that big businesses use.

So, I guess my conclusion is that eventually, if you can't find any programming work, there's no shame in taking other jobs to pay the bills, and there's always a chance you can use the connections you make at any job to leverage your way into a programming position.

I was very fortunate that the company I was working for (and still work for) was willing to invest the time and money into helping me learn coding and level up from a technical content editor into a developer role.
It helps if you can find a company that believes in life long learning and gives employees the time and space they need to learn new skills since this will really help you grow as a developer.

A few weeks into my (til then unsuccessful) application process I went to a bar, had a few beers with a friend. He randomly ran into an old acquaintance who he had not seen in years. The guy told us he founded a software consultancy a few years ago. We had a chat and he told me to apply for a position. I did. I had five rounds of interviews with the company and got the offer.
While there was a lot of luck involved the important lesson to be learned here is that it only takes one person who is willing to invite you to an interview and (at least for me) it was easier to convince someone face to face rather than in a standardized application process. Go to meetups, talk to your friends and network, get referrals. Good connections will open doors.
Or just go out for a few beers 😉