My career growth is based on job hopping, a bit of luck, strong work ethic, visible passion for learning, and sharpened people skills. * Graduated from a Web Dev Bootcamp early 2016. * After 2 weeks, I accepted an offer at my first company for a junior-level web developer position. * After 7 months, I accepted an offer at my second company for a mid-level Front-End Engineer position. * After 4 months, I accepted an offer at my third company for a senior-level Front-End Engineer position.
Details At my first job, I dealt with basic HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, and badly written legacy code. I was able to ramp up fairly quickly and began making significant contributions to my team within the first month. I refactored hundreds of files, reduced our team's time to complete certain tasks from 2-3 hours to 20-30 minutes, implemented better coding practices for my team, found and fixed bugs for fun, and promoted engineering empathy to the higher ups to improve communication between teams. After a few months, my boss told me he could tell I was getting bored. So he secretly advised me to start looking for more challenging opportunities and told me he would have no trouble giving me a recommendation. So I did and got an offer for a mid-level position at my second company.
My second company's team only consisted of senior front-end and back-end engineers with 10+ years of experience each. It was super stressful and I had to spend all of my free time trying to ramp up. After a month, I was comfortable with their tech stack, implemented our team's first testing environment for UI, Unit, and API testing, and got my coworkers interested in solving daily algorithm efficiency problems. They also hired a junior software engineer for me to supervise to help me out with the testing environment. Outside of work, I continued interviewing with other companies to sharpen my interviewing skills and went to meetups to network. Sadly, my company made severe budget cuts and my supervisor gave me a 30 days notice out of respect. Fortunately, I soon received an offer from one of the companies I was interviewing with and accepted their offer for their senior full stack position.
I am by no means naturally talented in programming, but I do love this field and busted my ass off to get to where I am now. While I did acquire a senior position in under a year, I don't see myself as a senior developer because there's a lot that I still don't know. My second and third company hired me based on my previous work, ability to learn, passion for technology, and soft skills.
Advice: - Learn/Practice soft skills. No one wants to work with an asshole or a suck up. - Don't put anything on your resume that you can't back up - Take every opportunity you can to improve yourself and your environment. - Seek mentors and learn from them. - There will always be someone better than you, but that shouldn't stop you from trying. - Know how to admit fault and learn from it.