Ask HN: What am I doing wrong?
I&#x27;m one of those six-figure junior-dev success stories. I had essentially no programming experience (and had been making &lt;$40k) until I moved to San Francisco to attend a three-month bootcamp, and within a few months after finishing that I had a $115k job. Today I&#x27;m making nearly three times that.<p>What I would stress is that for a first job search, <i>the coding is the easy part.</i> You don&#x27;t get a chance to demonstrate whether you can code at <i>all</i> unless you get past the resume submission and to the first tech screen, and as you&#x27;ve noticed, that&#x27;s a very hard barrier when you don&#x27;t have any experience. Job searching was brutal for pretty much everybody in my bootcamp cohort, even though a great number of them are very successful now, and this was entirely standard - the second half of the bootcamp was primarily dedicated to training people for job searching, and people generally spent 3-6 months job searching full time afterwards before landing lucrative jobs.<p>I have lots of things to say about this, but here&#x27;s a few factors that I think are important off the top of my head:<p>1. Given that you have limited experience, you really need to focus on presenting it to best effect on your resume. You maybe have something of a leg up because you have actual work experience as a dev, as opposed to me and my bootcamp classmates, but it needs to sound as impressive on paper as you can make it. (And you need to be able to talk about it in the same way.)<p>2. Cold-applying through general job search websites like Indeed where you fill out a form is incredibly low-value - you&#x27;re near-certain to get filtered out that way. There are a number of specialized job search sites for developers, some of which aim to skip the resume step in lieu of an up-front coding test (e.g. Triplebyte). Even better is networking, even kind of crappy networking: I got my first job, at an ~80 person startup, by cold-messaging one of the founders on LinkedIn.<p>3. If your resume isn&#x27;t very impressive and so you won&#x27;t get many tech screens or &quot;onsites&quot;, you really need to train to pass those. I won&#x27;t try to get into how to do that, since that&#x27;s extensively covered elsewhere, but it&#x27;s a totally artificial screening process that you absolutely need to put effort into.<p>People have mentioned that salaries are very different in the Bay Area than they are elsewhere, and that was certainly true when I started my SWE career - but given the enormous number of remote roles available, I think it isn&#x27;t nearly as true any more.<p>Happy to give more info here, but if you want to email me, check my profile for an address.