How to land your first Ruby on Rails Job
The classic chicken-egg problem
When company are looking for new hire they want people with experience. But how do you get the experience if you’ve never had one?
I am going to tell you what to do once you’ve learned ruby and rails and you need to land your first gig. This chicken-egg problem is the same problem newly-graduated student deal with on the job market. So they might find this advice useful as well. Everyone get to their first gig differently, but there is something that all newly hired developer have in common. I will soon explain you what it is but before that I want to show you how the path I took helped me landing my first gig.
The path that took me to rails was the entrepreneur path. I wanted to have a job security and learn skills that would allow me to build things on my own. As I was learning rails I was hit by many ideas and I would always try to build them for fun. I built more than 30 applications with various API and features. So I had to use a lot of gems, I ran into many bugs and deal with various issues. I would often try to replicate apps I admired to figure out how to build similar feature on my own application. One of the first app I released publicly was “Help Me Date You” an app where guys and girls would share advices, I also helped a friend build an app where people would share GIF and I didn’t believe at the time that GIF would get so popular so we shut down his project. This app was dealing with sharing pictures and a cool javascript effect many like to call “The Pinterest View”. One day I read about Zaarly on Mashable and decided to try to build something similar; I tried to build a marketplace where people could exchange items and that was my first experience with a payment system such as Paypal or Stripe.
All these apps I built and the tools I was using while building these ideas were my experience. I ran into walls so many times while building these things that I learned a lot by figuring how to make stuff work. While I was building Railsview (a marketplace for rails theme that can convert html to html.erb) I tried to integrate Paypal Adaptive Payment so that I could directly pay three parties after each sales. I had a lot of difficulties as I was trying to implement it, the documentation was outdated and I was running into a bug and I couldn’t find an answer. When I finally figure out the issue a few days later and wrote the answer on Stack Overflow. People were so thankful that they voted up my answer and it started giving me enough point on Stack Overflow to have access to their Chat! (I was so excited! …even though no one use that). Later on a recruiter contacted me and guess what he asked me? He wanted to see my Stack Overflow. Unfortunately that wasn’t enough for me to land that job. I needed a Github that was more attractive. You never know what a company might ask you but one thing is sure; if you’re a rails developer you need to have a busy Github.
I made my Github busy by looking for the most requested gem and practices in the industry. I learned the skills then implemented them into my apps. I wasn’t just building apps because I wanted to show off, I was building app because I was hoping to build something amazing. I had that passion and energy. Get excited with whatever you do and the result will follow. You’ll want to make it work! As a developer, we are problem solver. Try to build a SASS app with a payment system that solve a problem and with some marketing skills maybe you’ll make a living with that app. But most importantly; that app will give you the experience you need for your first gig. By trying to build your own company around that software: Building the app, Deploying it, Having a staging server, stressing when it crashes as you are struggling to acquire users and so on; You’ll develop basic skills that will become useful for landing your first gig. You’ll have an experience with setting up a server and managing an actual web application as a developer.
Figure out what are the top gems and must know skills for the position you seek. Make sure you know these skills, practice them by building application or script around them. This way you have something to show off if they want to check your skills. Finally, Remember that most companies are looking for team player. Try to build a few apps with a friend or people in the community. When you read someone else’s code and you realize that someone is doing some stuff better than you; you’ll be humble. You’ll learn to handle code critic by working with a development team. As a team player, you’ll be able to say, “I’ve worked with a team before”. Building app will make you a confident developer and working in team will make you a humble one.
You don’t have to wait for companies to hire you to build your experience. Steve Jobs didn’t have to wait for someone to teach him business or marketing. He learned those skills while he was struggling at building a company. The best way to build your experience is by DOING, that the only and the most valuable way. “Doing” is what gave me my first gig. This is what every new hire have in common: They’ve done enough stuff to prove that they have the experience. At someone else company you will be “doing” things too. I’ve done so many apps that one day I went to an interview with so much confidence that when they asked me “What experience do you have?” I just had to open my laptop, go through my terminal and show them my apps folder. I was still a junior but I had enough app experience to build or figure out how to build whatever they wanted me to: The only thing I needed, was to start getting paid for it to make it a profession. If I didn’t get the job I would have kept on building more apps, read more rails book and mesh my skills to become a better developer until I would get hired.
I almost forgot to mention that I miserably failed one of my first job interview. I wasn’t the right fit for the position. I didn’t know half of the things they were asking me about and I thought I knew enough to get the job. The interview started off really well and they really liked me but it then evolved into a Harvard like interview. They started to ask me question about an area I didn’t have experience with at the time. Of course, I didn’t get the job. But that day, I went home more determined than ever and learned every single skills they were interviewing me on, so that I would never be in the same situation again. Today, I am so thankful for that first interview; it helped me land the next job. It’s ironic that this company ended up being acquired by another company I worked for later on. And I ended up becoming one of the lead developer on the exact same application they were interviewing me for back then.
The creative industry has the advantage that you can prove how good you are with what you’ve done in the past. Take advantage of it, build stuff and show off what you’ve done! When you have a stack of well-designed applications, with best practices code and you have the experience using the most popular database or gems. You are making employers an offer that they cannot refuse: They will hire you.
Related Article: How I Trained To Learn Rails
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