Programming

1. Work Life Balance. (that means no overtime without consent)

2. Good work environment like colleagues (you can check this talking to the current employees)

3. Good quality work which will help you grow.

4. Fair compensation/salary.

5. Close to home(this is relative person to person)

6. Fully remote is best.

7. If not remote then there should be option of remote work on emergency situation no question asked.

8. Should have flexible timings. Like if you want to work 8 hours then you can choose the time.

9. Should provide sponsored masters degree.

10. Should provide sponsored certificates like aws, salesforce, mongodb etc.

11. Should have health insurance.

12. Should not have micro management.

13. Should have asynchronous task policy , this is very rare.

14. Should be a company which gives good hikes to the existing employees.

15. Leaves should be at least 36 days and that should be no question asked.

These are all the benefits a company must provide to the employees. I know not even a single company is there in the world which is providing all of the above.

if there are any other benefits which i am unaware of please do comment.

I am a 33 year guy old living in Vancouver, Canada who started his first software job as a react developer a month ago. Before this, I was In HR. I started on this journey in September, 2023 when I enrolled in a full-time Software Developer certificate program at a college here in Vancouver. Here are my learnings-

1. You gotta really love to code / build: The only reason I could get a job was because I love to code and and spent at least 6 hours daily every single day from Sep 2023 to date (barring a couple of days of illness) either learning or building. I was able to detach myself from the fear of not getting a job at the end of the program because I knew that my love of coding / building transcended my insecurities about getting a job.

2. GPT and other AI tools: They are a great way to learn coding. The threshold for the required level of attention to be able to learn to code (or probably anything) has gone down drastically. While earlier I might have overwhelmed myself with forum posts / documentation / books, I was able to save a lot of time getting first level answers and debugging my syntax and logic and setting up dev environment. Having said that, I realised the danger of over-dependence on such tools very early because at the end of the day they have no reasoning capability, they are simply regurgitating stuff that's out there. My first month at work has taught me that a good developer must has strong problem solving skills and should rely on LLM tools to increase productivity by having them write utility / helper functions. At this moment I am not at all worried about an LLM replacing my job. True novelty of approach is what only a human brain can provide. There have been days when I would expect GPT to devise a complex functionality spanning multiple modules only to spend hours disentangling and debugging its code. I discovered that it's better to write pseudo code and most of the implementation yourself and use an LLM tool to figure out libraries, optimisations, syntax for implementation. Having said that, the deeper you go the more you will realise that nothing beats reading documentation. The more complex the use case, the less GPT will be able to help you.

3. Build, Build, Build: You learn faster by building. Period! Start building things that you would like to use. These don't have to be fancy. Just something that will allow you to associate complex concepts with ideas that you love.

4. Soft Skills: Since I was coming from a career in HR, I knew this already but soft skills matter as much in trying to get a job and holding on to it. Team work, empathy, the ability to listen and communicate ideas clearly matter as much as the ability to convert the ideas to code.

5. Bootcamp vs Self-paced / designed learning: I enrolled in a bootcamp-ish program that exposed us to 10-11 technologies (ASP.NET Core, React, Node, Angular, Git, AWS, Kotlin etc.). I paid 12k for this program and never did I have any doubts over my choice. I knew I would learn better and faster in a supervised and structured environment. For someone like me, it's better that way else I end up hopping from tutorial to tutorial not learning much and unable to even set the dev environment up. I chose to focus primarily on React and Node and chose to go deeper than what any of the courses in my program expected me to. I even built a movie recommendation chatbot using Node-nlp simply because it sounded fun.

The market is oversaturated with entry level devs but many aspirants are in it just for money and are probably three years too late. If you genuinely love to code and build and have decent soft skills, do not worry sooner or later you will land that first software job and will be on your way to become a great developer.