Unsolicited Advice on Landing A Job In Tech from a Working Class Background

The current technical problem I’m working through is finding employment in tech.

The other grads are getting jobs at startups, or they’re complaining on linkedin about getting called back and ghosted, or complaining about failing technical interviews and realizing they don’t know a whole lot.

I’m not quite there yet. I can’t even get temp agency technical recruiters to respond. I can’t even get to the step where I get ghosted. Not a single call-back.

This, absolutely, is because they come from wealthy backgrounds.

There is no beating around the bush on that.

There’s a lot of wealthier people in the industry with advice on how to break into the industry, but that advice doesn’t really apply to my situation, because they face different standards. A lot of them say ‘you don’t need a degree,’ but none of them are without a degree, and none of their coworkers are either, so it feels like they’re just repeating popular assumptions about getting into the industry without really examining them. They maybe don’t have specifically tech oriented degrees, but they do have degrees.

I looked at flatiron’s breakdown of their graduates and found that less than 1 percent come from a background with only a HS diploma, and 17 percent have “either an associates or some college credits,” which is a weird way of blurring the numbers, but I’m going to guess the lion’s share of that 17 percent are people with an associates. People take degrees for granted or assume that degrees are worthless because they spent some time being underemployed. Anyway all of their advice assumes that there’s no additional obstacles that I’d have to clear.

The first obstacle that I face that I must overcome, which they don’t, is that before a resume gets in front of an actual human being, it likely goes through an automated filtering program. A program that breaks down the content of an application looking for degrees and etcetera. Some people say you can cheat these programs by writing buzzwords in an invisible font, but that gets you blacklisted.

There are a bunch of cheap courses through MIT’s edx website, and they have something called ‘micro bachelors/masters’ certificates. I figure if I go through those programs, I have an excuse to write the words ‘bachelors’ or ‘masters’ and ‘MIT’ on my resume, in the same sentence, in a context that isn’t quite a lie. “Micro Masters professional certificate through MIT’s edx program.” Which maybe possibly gets me past the filter. And then maybe I get a human being to give me a chance. That’s my solution, anyway. I’ve yet to see if it will work.

I never had the money or time to go through college, but I can probably do this much.

Another piece of advice I’ve received is to not worry about being super knowledgeable about everything, because employers don’t expect junior devs to be good at anything, but that’s something I’m also wary of. I think I have to know more than any of the people I graduated from the bootcamp with to get the same chance. I think, while a person with money will be given the benefit of the doubt and allowed to spend a year learning the ropes, I doubt that same standard will ever apply to someone without it.

I’ll get a job out of this eventually. I don’t know about thriving, but I’ll possibly have a little more economic stability for a while. In the end, I’ll either have a roof over my head, or I won’t. And that’s all that there is to my life and my future.