HACKER Q&A
📣 JohnCapilary

Self-taught dev, how to improve my job prospects in 2-3 months?


People at my company are great and the work is okay, but I am not growing my skill set. I will have some extra time for the next 2-3 months. How best can I improve my job prospects? My dream would be to work at a company that is a technology fist company (aka FAANG), but any improvement would help.

Some options I was thinking about include:

  - learning a new language (Rust or Elixir)
  - a new technology (block chain or Docker)
  - a new framework (Akka/the actor model)
  - contribute to an open source project
  - practice data structures and algorithms (leet code)
Currently, I am working at an industrial company managing a team of developers. Most people around me are not passionate about software engineering and I rarely have intellectually stimulating conversations about technology. I don't want to spend the rest of my life working on boring projects and tell myself that it is okay because it pays the bills. I enviously read blog posts from companies like Netflix or find myself looking up api design tips from Stripe.

Any advice?


  👤 itqwertz Accepted Answer ✓
- Leetcode all day erryday day - post on LinkedIn about tech topics and set your profile to actively looking. Recruiters will come after you. - apply to every FAANGMAN company and ramp up on JavaScript and Java - take more risk at your current job to get more responsibility (I.e try out Jenkins pipelines or React apps)