How an Arts graduate got a job as a software developer in less than 3 months.

Yes, you read it right. I'm currently working as an Associate developer in some service based IT company, and it barely took me 3 months to achieve it.

Where it all began.

While in college, pursuing Bachelor of Visual Arts, I learned about front-end development and how we can build top-notch web apps and websites using it. I was so fascinated about it that I wanted to be a software developer myself, no matter what my current qualifications were. So, during the lockdown in 2020, I did a Python certification from Coursera to get the hang of it and enjoyed that part as well and decided to switch to career after I complete my college.

The Mistakes I made

So fast-forward to October 2021, I just completed my graduation with a degree in BVA and was ready to make the transition of my career from Arts to Computer Science and did some research on the internet about where to start. Found some resources regarding the front-end developer path and started watching some tutorials. The sad part was, I started wasting more time on research rather than doing actual learning. I would start watching one tutorial and after some time, I find some other tutorial I would jump to that tutorial. And I knew that I wasn't alone, and it's the story of many folks around the world because I read in some survey that 85% of the people who signs up for a tutorial never completes it. So what change did reading that article bring into my life? None. I was stuck into that tutorial hell for a very long time and was just watching video after video and wasn't really applying what I was learning in these tutorials.

The day my life changed.

It was just a regular day, and I was watching some random YouTube tutorial on HTML, and the name of the guy in the video was Tanay Pratap, he was working as senior developer at Microsoft at that time. At the start of the video, he taught us a very important thing, Learn-by-doing. He would teach us something, then built something out of what he just taught us. I liked his approach to teaching, and it felt like I was actually retaining a lot more information this way. I started following this method and then started looking for a tutorial which was more focused on learn-by-doing.

I found out about Scrimba.

Unlike many other online learning platforms, it actually focuses more on learn-by-doing, and thats exactly what I was looking for in a course at that time.
So I enrolled in a free JavaScript course taught by one of the founders of Scrimba, Per Herald. I really had a lot of fun learning from that course, I got to learn a lot from that free course. Upon completing the course, I decided to enroll for the frontend developer path offered from Scrimba, and it didnt even cost that much, so I took the yearly membership. Although the entire frontend path was like a fun roller-coaster ride, I found the React course offered by Bob Ziroll most useful, or I would say most impactful during my job search.

The job hunt

Halfway(covering around 70%) through the frontend career path from Scrimba, I decided to build my resume and started applying for jobs on LinkedIn. I used to send around 50 applications per day and got about 4 interviews in the time span of 15 days. I made it on my 4th interview and was really happy about getting my first job as a developer, and that too within the first 3 months of learning frontend development. Turns out, they were going to make me sign a bond for 2 years. And it was definitely a red flag for me, so I immediately refused to join that company.
Now, I again started applying for jobs and within a week, I got another 3 interviews. One of them was impressed with my skills and dedication to learn software development and asked me to come and work for the company for 3 days, and then they were going to decide if I was a good fit to the company or not. They just wanted to know how long it takes for me to learn and apply new things. So they provided me with a Google firebase tutorial video and asked me to learn it, then they provided me a task requiring knowledge of react and firebase. I did my best, but unfortunately I could only complete the task at 80% and was really disappointed with my performance. But the next day I got a call from them, and they informed me that I was shortlisted. I couldnt believe it because I knew I didnt perform that well, but the person who gave me the task told me that the task was indeed challenging, and they were expecting a lot less from what I have performed. Following his call, I got a call from the HR department of the company informing me all the onboarding process details.
So thats how I was able to secure 2 jobs in less than 3 months into software development. And what I believe is that if me, being an Arts graduate, can do it, then anyone can do it.

Key Takeaways

1. Believe in yourself. Everybody can learn to code, dont get discouraged if people say otherwise. I was told by a lot of people that you are just wasting your time, I would just smile at them and just didnt care. I continued to pursue my dream of becoming a software developer.

2. You dont need a degree in Computer Science to become a software developer. Most companies nowadays are just looking for raw talent, degrees dont matter much. Here I am working as developer with background in Arts.

3. Write code while watching the tutorials. If you dont write the code yourself, you arent going to progress much. Understand the value of Learn-by-doing, its one of the best approaches towards learning to code efficiently.

4. Learning JavaScript can sometimes be tricky for beginners, so if you dont understand something, dont get discouraged and just move on to the next topic for the time being instead of lingering around trying to think too hard to understand it. Give your subconscious mind some time to process the information. You can come back to the problem after 2-3 hours or the next day, and you might have a different approach to the problem this time. You will start noticing the patterns after a bit of practice.

5. Write code every day, its very essential that we write code every day to build the required muscle memory.

6. Build something from scratch, challenge yourself. One good project that you have built all by yourself is going to weigh much more than 10 mediocre projects that you have just copied and pasted from the internet.

Other sources you might like:

1. React - The Complete Guide (incl Hooks, React Router, Redux). Get it Here

2. Some great YouTube tutors.

• Web dev simplified by Kyle Cook. Link Here

• JavaScript Mastery. Link Here

• The coding train. Link Here

• Pedro tech. Link Here

Give yourself sincere 6 months, and it can change your life. - Tanay Pratap

Please forgive me for the grammar mistakes. And if I have stretched it a bit longer than it should have been. It's my first blog ever and your feedbacks are going to help me correct the mistakes in future blogs.
Thank you for taking time to read this.