Entry Level SWE
I invited my long-time roommate to Blind, but realized he doesn’t have a job yet... :( He graduated from a state school in Comp Sci with a good gpa and a couple internships(albeit in cybersecurity) and is still struggling to get a job in SWE. He’s pretty down and has been working for months on personal projects to bump up his experience. Any advice for him? P.S. job market is SoCal
I have several side projects. One is an npm package. One is a telegram bot that uses a private api of an app to retrieve information faster than the official app. One is an electron app I use daily that scrapes a website and displays an RSS (sort of) One exploits some design of a website and retrieves information you are not supposed to see. They are mostly in JS and some Python, have proper tests, CI/CD, good documentation and comments (JSdoc, python docstring) They do absolutely no help. I have sunk hours, I enjoyed it too but was expecting more use. Your friend should at most have 2 projects so they can talk about “a side project”. Other than that, LC and networking.
do interviewers not ask about those projects though? are they purely just to put on the resume so that you can get the interviews?
Thats why I said 2 projects to talk about. I use almost all of them. I have never got an interview because of my side projects. Recruiters ask and I talk about them. But getting experience through side projects and/or improving your resume via side projects is not a real thing.
Move to a better job market
Entry level is a bloodbath right now with all these bootcamp people offering to do the work at a fraction of the cost. Is he getting phone screens? Is he passing them? Is he getting on-sites? Why is he failing them? You need a deeper analysis
To add more to this: No phone screen : resume sucks or lack of referral No on-site : terrible phone screen, either lack of leet or communication No offer after on-site: luck, lack of leet
Are there statistics around bootcamp grads taking lower TC? I agree that it's a bloodbath but with the transparency in pay for SWEs, I doubt they're taking lower pay compared to a college grad at the same level. There are tons of bootcamp grads that are great engineers.