Starting a tech career is more challenging than ever and if you're a new grad you might feel hopeless about your prospects. In reality, this field is abundant and anyone can get into it.
A friend of a friend got in touch recently asking for advice on how to get started after college. I've generalized that advice and put it here in short-form! Keep these simple things in mind and you'll land well.
How To Do College
Don't hyperfixate on what there is to do in college, instead, focus your mind on the negative space.
Strive to do reasonably well in your college courses. Most employers aren't going to care about your GPA if you have other achievements to talk about. Keep up with your coursework but don't go above and beyond unless a class or project is highly relevant to your career (or very interesting to you).
That might look like doing the bare minimum to pass your language requirement and that's okay.
The negative space in college is your free time. Aside from the regular good-to-have pursuits like friends and romantic interests, squirrel away some time to hack on coding projects - preferably with friends.
At best you can turn an idea into a startup. At worst, you learn how coding is actually done when it meets reality. This alone puts you very far ahead of most CS grads who largely have theoretical knowledge.
Grad School?
Nope*!
* With two exceptions...
- MBA at Stanford GSB, Wharton, or HBS. Getting an MBA outside of these programs will cost you a lot in student loans and won't meaningfully accelerate your career past your peers who learned on the job.
- You're going to pursue a Ph.D. in a field that hires a lot of Ph.D.s and compensates them well.
There is no reason to get a Master's degree unless it's to pursue #2.
Ignoring me on the above is gonna end in one of two ways: you end up a butthurt middle manager with a second-rate MBA who still thinks they can be a CEO someday OR you end up teaching as an adjunct part-time lecturer at Oshkosh Community College mad at the world because it doesn't pay you for being smart (and to a degree you'd be right).
If this sounds particularly condescending, I almost ended up as that adjunct lecturer but admitted to myself that I made some bad decisions and changed course. It's never too late but if you're in college, just take this info up front and avoid the heartbreak!
Resume
Most senior engineers are clueless when it comes to putting together a resume. If they're clueless, new grads are hopeless!
Get your resume looked over by someone that does hiring for tech companies. Reach out on my Contact Form with an anonymized resume and I'll do this for free on my YouTube channel. You need another set of eyes because you have no idea what hiring managers are looking for yet.
Bonus points, if the person reviewing your resume thinks you're worth your salt they might refer you to companies in their network.
Flexibility Advantage - WLB, Stack, and Location
When you finish up college you'll be, at best, a shitty engineer. That's where we all start from.
What do you have that the staff engineer with 15 years of experience doesn't have? You have youth and all of the benefits that come with it. You can take an absolute beating in your youth and come out okay. If you're competing with people that have families and other constraints on their time and energy, you have a huge advantage.
Some specific advantages you're likely to have:
- WLB: You can work stupid hours in your twenties and you should at the beginning of your career.
- Stack: It's not like you're extremely virtuosic in any given stack yet so the world is your oyster, you'll be learning something on the job so why not try a new one?
- Location: You're likely pretty unattached which makes it very easy for you to move anywhere, especially high-opportunity places that are hard to live with families like NYC.
Don't Get Exploited Though
Consider the first 5 years of your career as paid grad school. Here's the contract for your early career employers:
You
- Move across the country
- Grind insane hours
- Learn new technologies really fucking quickly
Employer
- Gives you excellent, marketable job experience
- Treats you with basic human dignity
- Tosses you an interesting/odd-shaped problem every now and then
- Gives you benefits, pays enough for living expenses, savings, and a bit of fun
You honor your side of the contract but also hold your employer accountable for honoring theirs. You are not slave labor nor should you be treated like it. Instead, you are receiving part of your pay in knowledge from what you're learning on the job. This is a temporary arrangement until you know enough to bring more value to the table at which point your should be compensated primarily in cash and secondarily in learning.
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