2-3 months of light work (it was the summer), in Toronto circa 2011.<p>I had zero professional experience, and bad grades. I knew that for my first job coming out of school, a lot of places would ask for a transcript...so I pointed most of my energy at places where the HR process seemed lax enough that I&#x27;d get to talk to developers (who could advocate for me) before I had a conversation where grades would come up.<p>At the start of my search, the Star&#x2F;Globe had an insert with &quot;Canada&#x27;s Top 100 Start-Ups&quot; - I cold-emailed all the ones in there which seemed interesting. A few got back to me, and one of the ones that did is where I&#x27;m still working.<p>As someone on the other side of the table now (at a ~25-dev shop), some things I think about when I&#x27;m considering new grads:<p>* I&#x27;m looking at passion, which I use as a proxy for long-term potential upside. You likely won&#x27;t be a valuable contributor for 6+ months while I get you up to speed on my domain and what real-life professional programming is like. Some new grads can have an immediate impact, but most of those will have already been hired by Google&#x2F;FB&#x2F;etc. before they even think of my company. Convince me that you&#x27;re the one I should be placing my bet on.<p>* If your CV talks about a mobile app you built, have it installed on your phone so I can play with it. If you talk about a web app, have it bookmarked and walk me though it. If you have one of those you&#x27;re not excited to show me, I&#x27;m going to assume it&#x27;s bad or you didn&#x27;t finsih it (so don&#x27;t mention it). If you don&#x27;t have one of those and you&#x27;re a new grad, I&#x27;m going to wonder why not. These don&#x27;t have to be sophisticated; what you&#x27;re showing me is that you&#x27;re excited about technology, and can apply it in a non-academic, non-forced context.<p>* Show that you can communicate well. We&#x27;re going to be spending a lot of time teaching you stuff, so I&#x27;m going to be probing to make sure that you can absorb it all (emotionally and socially).<p>* Don&#x27;t focus that much on your specific tech stacks, aside from enumerating them. I&#x27;ll assume your experience is of limited&#x2F;academic depth only, and that you don&#x27;t have much real-world experience. Don&#x27;t boast that you know Scala when you used it for a project and a co-op term; focus on selling that if I need you to learn OCaml, you&#x27;ll be a quick study.<p>Lastly, re: meeting engineers at meetups etc. - don&#x27;t forget about follow-ups. Maybe the person you had a positive conversation with was just being polite...but it&#x27;s more likely that they just forgot about the conversation. Send them an email a few days after to remind them you exist.