Compilation | Zheng Liyuan
Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
Author Somerset Maugham once said, “Everywhere in life begins, and it’s never too late to begin.” This phrase may be more appropriate to describe Jennifer Bland’s experience.
At 60, she’s a programmer today, but unlike most older programmers, Jennifer Bland decided to enter the tech industry much later: 53 — even less than a year after Jennifer Bland In time, he successfully became a programmer across the line, or retired and re-employed.
According to Jennifer Bland’s personal introduction, she is not only a senior software engineer, but also a Google developer expert. It is even more admirable when these titles are combined with the characteristic that “the 53-year-old officially entered the field of technology.”
So next, let’s take a look at how Jennifer Bland achieved all this in less than a year (note: for a more immersive sense, this article will be narrated in the first person).
I decided: to become a programmer
I retired at 51, but my retirement didn’t last long. A year and a half after retiring, I stumbled upon a book on JavaScript programming in the clearance section of a bookstore—and that’s where my relationship with programming began.
It took me two months to read through the book and work through each example, and then I found myself fascinated by it. The moment I realized this, I decided: I want to be a programmer!
After making this decision, the first question I faced was: How do I get into the booming tech world at 52?
In general, going to college to get a computer science degree is the most traditional route, but it’s not feasible for me, and I don’t plan to go back to college for four years. Secondly, it is a method that has become more common in recent years: participating in programming training camps to learn practical skills in software development.
Personally, a coding bootcamp with significantly shorter time consumption is obviously more suitable for me. So after carefully researching the relevant information, I applied for an online course at one of the top-ranked coding bootcamps in the US, and completed my three-month coding training in June 2015.
Received offers from 3 companies!
Generally, people who participate in coding boot camps will enter the job search stage after the course is over. But actually, I started sending out my resume two weeks before graduating from coding bootcamp.
Also thanks to my retirement and re-employment, my 30+ years of work experience is much richer than other young students who participated in coding bootcamps, and my resume also stands out.
Considering that several large companies in my city only accept candidates recommended by headhunters, I volunteered my resume to three headhunters, who then distributed my resume to various companies they worked with.
From two weeks before the coding boot camp to two weeks after the course, the three headhunters sent my resume to 23 other companies, and I put in 84 of my own for local jobs—that is, In one month, I applied for 107 jobs.
Of these hundreds of applications, I received phone interviews from a dozen companies and conducted offline interviews with 8 of them. Of these 8 companies, 3 of them were rejected in the first round of interviews, and the other 5 were successful in the second round of interviews. Finally, I received offers from 3 companies!
a numbers game
Of the three offers, one company was 25 miles away from me, and the commute was too long to be considered, so in the end I only had to choose between two offers.
Many people have told me that since this is the case, I should explain to both companies that I have other offers, so as to test whether the salary can be raised further. But I didn’t do it, firstly because I don’t like this behavior, and secondly because the salary offered by these two companies is not low in my current city.
When they first went to coding bootcamp, they advertised that the average starting salary for graduates was $105,000, or a six-figure annual salary after three months of study, which sounded really good. But then I realized that $105,000 is just a salary in San Francisco, CA, and I live on the other coast of Atlanta, Georgia — $105,000 in San Francisco is equivalent to $56,780 in Atlanta, according to CNN’s Cost of Living Calculator .
In contrast, the salary offered by these two offers is much higher than $56,780, so even if I don’t raise my salary through that kind of cleverness, I will be paid more than most of the students in the same coding bootcamp.
The following are the differences between the two offers:
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The first offer came from a local startup that has been named one of the top 10 fastest-growing startups in Atlanta for two years in a row, offering higher salaries and stock options.
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The second offer is from a Fortune 100 company founded in Atlanta with an international reputation. Compared to another company, this one offers slightly lower wages and no stock options, but greater benefits in terms of insurance, meals, commuter cards, PTO (personal leave), etc.
After much deliberation, I decided to choose the company with better benefits and a starting salary of $80,000.
In the end, I summed up my experience of finding my first job in the technology field as: 107 job applications, 12 phone interviews, 8 on-site one-time interviews, 5 on-site second-round interviews, and 3 offers. So in my opinion, getting your first job in tech is essentially a numbers game.
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The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN
This article is reprinted from https://www.techug.com/post/at-the-age-of-53-i-have-retired-but-i-really-want-to-be-a-programmer-in-different- industri5a57de6e6b66674e9ea1/
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