Location: Bay Area BS CS from unranked state school My 1st job out of school was SWE at Apple as a contractor. Spent about a year there working on terrible projects, very little coding, and bad tech stack. Java and really nothing else. Basically learned nothing and did not improve my skills at all. I constantly asked for actual coding work but there was very little to go around. Problem is that I have nothing of value to put on my resume except little bug fixes and enhancements. Interviewers are going to ask about my work exp and what I have accomplished and I will have very little to say. They will consequently be extremely unimpressed that I have 1 YOE without anything to show for it and likely reject me. It feels like my only hope is companies like Amazon that hire generalist SWEs and focus on LC, OOD, SD, etc rather than your past work exp. But even then, I will likely fail LPs because I do not have enough impressive stories. I honestly feel like I am in a real hole here that I might not be able to climb out of and my career is in danger of never actually getting off the ground. Has anyone else recovered from an awful 1st job where they did nothing? How did you do it? I want an actual SWE job, can be at what you all call a "bottom-tier" company, I am fine with that. TC: 0 No visa issues or financial issues due to living with parents.
If you find your self in a situation like that u must code on the side to keep your self engaged. I’d just lie and inflate the work u did at work.
I am focusing on LC if that counts lol. Or do you mean actual side projects? I really want to inflate the work that I did but I am worried about what will happen when they dig deeper or ask for specific design/architecture/technology details. My inflated work would have to be very well thought out to get away with that, and I am not sure if I can pull that off lol :/
Did you learn anything about the app you were fixing bugs for? If you had to redesign that app how would you go about doing it? Use that and it should help you out. If you didn’t bother learning the nitty gritty details about the app I would suggest doing so.
That is not too uncommon an experience for a first job out of college, don’t sweat it Keep your experience vague on resumes, & be careful not to trash your previous job too much in interviews as that is a bad look
That is a relief. Yeah i won't trash this bad 1st job, instead I will focus on how "there was limited room for growth so I am looking for more challenging opportunities" or something like that. That way hopefully they will not look at my bad experience too negatively as they can see I didn't want to get stuck in such an environment and am trying to improve myself for the better
Are you going for an sde 1 role at Amazon? For sde 2, the team I interviewed for required scalability experience in your background. If they ask you, I’d suggest lying and saying you do, maybe just say a small project in your school and describe that project based on a “grokking the system design” script. I told the truth, as I didn’t have any, and got rejected on the basis of not enough experience.
Yea SDE1, hopefully the recruiter would set me up for that given my low YOE. Damn that sucks, i thought if you dont have enough system design exp you just get downleveled to SDE1 instead of flat out rejected. There was some work with load balancers in my job, maybe that is enough to count? I would have to study up on that hard though
I guess there wasn’t a headcount for SDE1 for that team. Load balancing experience should be good enough, be sure to study up on it.
If u dont mind me asking, this sounds a lot like IS&T...
Isnt that where all the tech-related contractors end up? Saw a lot of happy people in IS&T which is contrary to what I have read about it, but the work sucks for sure
Not necessarily, a lot of orgs contract, but seems is&t is a whole diff story. Sorry to hear about your experience there. I committed career suicide being here, so leave as soon as you can. Praying for you.
I’m sorry. I know how you feel. I was in the same position but for another tech role not SE where I was getting paid for not doing much at all. And I wanted to learn and find a position where I’m constantly challenged and learning new things. I joined a diff company soon after and the role didn’t turn out to be what was mentioned. So, I def recommend that the next role you pursue try to figure out the learning curve, more about the team you’ll work with, what challenges they face, and what tech stack they use. I strongly think that’s important for you to grow and good luck buddy! Wish you the best for your interview. Good times are coming; just do bunch of mock interviews too on Pramp or join fb groups and ask if you can do mock interviews with people.
Thanks a ton for the advice!
Hey OP, where are you now? How'd the story end/what'd you do/you have any advice? I'm in the same situation, maybe even worse lol
In that case I would recommend to only apply for job at your current level. If you jump and get selected for higher level it would be difficult for you to ramp up and show results
I am definitely going for the most entry level position possible. But such jobs are usually reserved for new grads. All other jobs are like 3+YOE. I am aiming for any software engineer 1 type positions that I can find that are not explicitly looking for new grads. Unfortunately they seem to be quite rare