Recent Success Storied

What I've been seeing is a strong demand for senior engineers, and decent demand for mid-level engineers (1 to 3 YOE) that have worked at pretty solid companies for a few years. I've seen people with experience but not necessarily full time strong experience (i.e. they might have contract work, large resume gaps, lots of job changes, or are bootcamp/CS grads with no experience) get pretty good jobs that in the boom-times, graduates of Codesmith, Hack Reactor, Rithm etc... (i.e. the top bootcamps) were getting - i.e. 100 to 140K great junior positions. So my advice to top tier bootcamp grads at these top bootcamps is to not try to sneak into those 120K entry level roles that 2021 and 2022 alumni were getting and to aim for apprenticeships and internships. e.g. start with [apprenticeships.me](https://apprenticeships.me). NOTE: I'm sure I'm going to get some people commenting on here that they just graduated from Codesmith or HR and got a $130K job so this is bad advice. While these cases aren't insignificant edge cases - they are a minority of cases - and if you want to go all in on this strategy and luck hasn't been on your side, I suggest additional skill building to be more competitive than any bootcamp currently makes you. If you are a bootcamp grad at not a top bootcamps, consider: 1. Volunteer work, e.g. Hack4LA 2. Working as a contractor for free/stock/stipend 3. Going on Upwork and trying to get some contracting jobs 4. Contribute meaningfully for 4+ months to a large open source project that is run by a large company and has contribution and release infrastructure similar to a large scale company. (OSLabs doesn't count) 5. Doing tangential jobs: 'Customer Support', 'AI Labelling', ''Product Analyst', at top tech companies and keep training and look to convert internally by doing so awesome.

I've seen both small and large projects be impressive and the key is that their most memorable ones solve some kind of unique problem or do something uniquely interested aligned with a passion. Some examples: 1. Walt Disney World itinerary generator 2. Machine learning sheet music generator based on a classical composer producing printable sheet music 3. A iOS game that was like guitar hero but had a novel mechanic If you forced yourself to do any of these they likely wouldn't be impressive because what was impressive was the creators hit walls that only someone super passionate about those areas would hit and tried many solutions inspired by this higher level of knowledge.

Open Source is a bit tough because it's so intimidating to contribute to giant projects. As it should be - because they are codebases similar to top tech companies and if you joined Google tomorrow it would take time to navigate the code. So if you plan to contribute over 6 months and longer, you might be able to make some small contributions to large project, but you'll learn a lot. There are a set of smaller projects, like MUI, that are run and maintained by tiny company of a few people. These are easier to contribute to and get something on your portfolio and still fairly legit. But harder to find. Another option here is to start a company with friends and make a startup that does something legit and gets some users and has a bank account, state registration, etc... For free work - startups. Ping YC startups before demo day and hope you get paid when they realize money. Or do projects on Upwork for ridiculously low prices.