After Spring term ended in June, I felt ready to start applying for jobs. I had a specific company in mind already that I wanted to work for, and the job I wanted requires SQL and relational database knowledge. I figured it would be best to interview while all of that was still fresh from 340, I had a few weeks off to prep before Summer term started, and I was only about six months away from graduation then. I redrafted my resume about twelve times, and then went ahead and applied.
I really felt like this job was perfect for me – it’s a consulting role, and my first degree is in Psychology. I am a people person, and one of my fears coming into the CS field has been losing that human aspect in my career and getting stuck in a nose-down, full time coding job where my interactions are limited to Spotify and Carpal Tunnel. A recruiter from the company had already reached out to me on Handshake a few months before, and I had a reference from a current employee, so I expected to get a response fairly quickly. I applied on a Friday and then spent that entire weekend and all of the next week going through the company’s Interview section on Glassdoor. I was insanely prepared for the interview.
When I didn’t hear back after the first week, I started applying to more jobs. I added my updated resume to LinkedIn, Indeed, and Handshake and applied to anything and everything I felt even remotely qualified for that allowed me to apply by just submitting my resume and paid over my desired amount. For postings that seemed the most interesting or attainable, I would tweak my resume to cater specifically to that role by adding whatever technology they were looking for to the beginning of my Skills section. If they had personality traits they were looking for, I added those too.
I got many rejections, most just through automated messages saying that the employer had closed the posting, but within a week I got an interview! It was for a fully remote, full stack developer position using technologies I was familiar with, so I accepted even though I didn’t feel like it was suited to my strengths. This was for a very small company that I could find little information about, so I was going in blind with no idea what to expect and feeling underprepared. Around the same time, the first company that I was really interested in got back to me and also asked to schedule an interview. I’ll call the first company Company F and the second Company G.
Company F has between 1000 and 5000 employees according to Glassdoor, and has nearly 800 interviews and 1400 salaries listed. They first asked for a copy of my unofficial transcripts to confirm my GPA, and then we had a non-technical interview over Teams that lasted about 45 minutes. That went well, and a week later, they asked to schedule a 3 hour technical interview over Teams. That began with a 30 minute test and was followed by an interview with 3 current employees – a project manager with 10 years experience at the company, a team lead with 4 years experience, and an employee in the role I was applying for who had only been with the company for 7 months. They asked everything I had read on Glassdoor, I was ready, things went very smoothly, we were laughing and having a great time. Another week later, they called saying I got the job and then emailed me the offer, which I accepted within the hour. I start in January!
Company G has between 50 and 200 employees according to Glassdoor, but only one unrelated interview and seven unrelated salaries listed. It turns out that the development team was actually only ten people, my interview was with the CEO, and the company was recently bought out by a bigger company. I really enjoyed the interview, we talked about the company for a long time and got along great. We did a technical exercise where I shared my screen and was able to look things up and talk through things with him as I completed the task. He asked me to save the solution file and send it to him after the interview, and he emailed me that afternoon asking to schedule a longer technical interview for the next round. It would have been a 3 hour long interview split into 45 minute sections with several different team members doing various different tasks, but I declined the interview after getting the job offer from Company F.
