HACKER Q&A
📣 Karsteski

Advice on entry level job search for someone self-taught? [ON, Canada]


I'm a Chemist that has been self-teaching programming for about 2 years now. I'm full committing to switching careers now, and I'm based in Ontario, Canada. I had an interview in March through a connection I made in the C++ community but the company decided to go with someone else. Also too I just had an interview for an internship at a startup but I failed one of the technical questions (It was based on a doubly linked binary tree). Hence I've started doing a leetcode question a day, since it's clearly something I need to work on.

Is there any more I can do to improve my chances of getting interviews, or getting through them? I'm also having my friend mock interview me every now and then just so I'm fully prepared for next time. I've been doing what the person in the thread below did but I've only gotten 2/30 responses so far lol...

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/ogc2kj/just_landed_first_junior_software_development/

I have a few projects on my GitHub (GitHub.com/Karsteski) but with practicing Leetcode and doing job searching, I barely have time to work on my current project, which is an OpenGL rendering engine. Makes me sad.

Anyways, here's my anonymous resume as well if you'd like to critique it.

https://imgur.com/a/1S9lMyo

Any feedback welcome, thanks in advance :)


  👤 yuppie_scum Accepted Answer ✓
You should add a personal statement/goal section to the top of your resume explaining that you’re intentionally looking to make this switch. If I saw this resume come across I’d think you were just shotgun applying to every posting you can.

Also consider removing detail from your chemist job description, because frankly no hiring manager for a software job will care about it.