How to ACTUALLY Get an Entry Level Programming Job 

Don't apply for jobs that say entry-level, or do if you want to, but the point is that even if you don't feel qualified, just apply, I got a full stack developer position a few weeks ago, they wanted a senior developer but hired me just because I showed that I was enthusiastic to learn new things and improve on the daily basis, don't disqualify yourself, just do it, the worst thing they can say is no.

This is an automated comment to display likes & dislikes for the video you're currently watching, since RU-vid decided to disable the dislike count on videos. Views: 127326 Likes: 7221 Dislikes: 111 Ratio: 98.5% Last Updated: Dec-29-2021 RU-vid, please don't ban or shadowban me. I learned how to do this from your own docs. Lol thanks.

Thank You. I always get extremely discouraged when I see all the requirements for some Entry Level Jobs. This was a huge help.

Please don’t take it personally if you get rejected for a dev job. Some of those jobs are looking for a very specific individual.

Think of 3-5 years kind of like a medical residency. A brand new cs or bootcamp graduate is still a risky hire - they have a high chance of not panning out due to not being good enough yet or them quitting on their own. Getting the first job is probably the most difficult, it takes a lot of perseverance, humility, and preparation. You will not have your pick of jobs, you’ll have to take what you can get. If you do get a job in Software, stay employed for at least 3 years if possible. Ideally in the same place. Don’t quit unless you have another job lined up. Learn as much as you can. Keep studying data structures and algorithms. Study system design / architecture. Study design patterns. Database design. Keep building side projects. Get good at writing clean code. Get good at testing your code. Get good at learning how to deploy your projects. After the 3 year mark, suddenly more companies, including FAANGs, will be inviting you to interview to work for them. From here on out, keep your interviewing skills relatively sharp, and you will have more choices on where to work. This has been my experience.

The hardest part is convincing yourself you're ready

2 minutes in and you already earned a like. I have 2 years of experience in a developer position so far. I see a lot of adds that list their entire tech stack and say "we need someone who knows everything in this list". LOL.

Hope you’re family is doing well! I’m good over here! Thank you

There are many videos on youtube with the article like this, but this one makes sense. great job

Thank you! I needed this video as I was recently laid off from my company. I find that having just under 1 year of professional industry experience makes it a bit confusing to know what roles to apply for!

Really grateful for you posting this. Currently working on Python 3 practice after learning HTML & CSS. All of the projects, learning about the job, lingo, best-practices, making portfolios, uffff etc etc. It's a lot, but I appreciate videos like this that make my goal feel way more achievable.

From my experience at interviews the 2 things they’re looking for is what you’ve been working on recently and whether they “like you”

Thank you for the advice I am going to keep trying to learn and not get so overwhelmed

Thank you soo much, this video motivates me to continue pushing!!!

Really needed this, thanks man!

Building your network really stuck out to me. With anything, knowing the right people can help out tremendously. I landed my first software engineering job because I worked at the company for nearly seven years in their warehouse. I was lucky enough to take a Full Stack Dev bootcamp, and then asked my boss if I could transition into the engineering department. I've been web developing officially for about six months now and absolutely love it!

A Real Meme= ""Make Entry Level Job Entry Level""

This was very helpful, thank you!

Thank you, appreciate your work!

I'm a self taught programmer, and I've been applying for tons of jobs without much response from anyone. This video was really useful, I feel more motivated than I did before.

Nah, what you really need is to have few years experience before you even enter the market, somehow. That’s what every recruiter told me. “Your skills look great, but why don’t you have any experience listed?” Like, dang people, I thought it was Entry Level!

Loved your take on (HR written) job postings. As a recruiter I try my best to make any interaction with a candidate a value add....and not sound like an idiot. Would be dope if you had a video about good vs bad experiences with recruiters! ✊🏽

Very helpful to know. Thank you!

good work as always forrestknight

I've been feeling down because of the nonstop rejections. This video was clutch and inspirational

I needed to hear this. Thank you.

I’m from Brazil 🇧🇷 and I’m self taught, actually I’m studying environment engineering, but this year I tried new things and I love tech environment and now I’m studying by myself to become a developer 🥰 Thank you for your video!

There should be a program, feature, or website that helps HR people list the appropriate skills for the programming job they're listing.

Ive been loving your videos and watching a lot of them lately. I’m about to finish high school and am gonna try to get my foot in the door with my non professional experience. I was hoping you would touch up on self taught and non web development jobs.

Thank you so much broo ... you really made it easier for me 🥰🥰

Thank you for the great video!!!

I'm a self taught Front-End Developer and I really want a job. this video has helped me a lot thank you!!!

when I had interviews after graduating, a lot of the interviewers wouldn't care much about my experience as much as they would focus on my excitement to work as a developer and willingness to learn in work

Great video I'm only 6 classes away from finishing my CS degree so this definitely helps.

Thank you!! I was thinking abaut that

Your realy helped me thank you man 👍

I agree with this video. CS or programming job is not to be BS into. Great idea about having a portfolio, I think that maybe my first thing to do....

I get my CS degree in 3 weeks. This definitely helps. I just moved to Houston and I don’t even know where to start.

>don't worry about the skill requirements. >you have to have the skills they ask for. Pick one.

nice now time to start learning!!

Great vids and very helpful

Needed this

The problem with a lot of internships in my field is that they only hire students for them. I'm too old to get most internships and I was an idiot and decided to get a masters instead of a job out of undergrad.

I work as an iOS dev for a fortune 100 company. 100% agree with this. Our job listing says UIKit/objective c/rxswift. In reality we use about 80% swiftui and 20% UIKit/rxswift… and all of that 20% has tickets to migrate to swiftui. We have 0% objective c which we say is a required skill and have 80% swiftui which is not mentioned in our listing.

I've been so hard on myself. I haven't even tried to get internships or even *apply* to certain positions just because I never felt like I knew enough. I'm self-taught, and I've worked on countless personal projects over the past few years with artificial neural networks. I'd like to say I know quite a bit about certain topics by now, so I think all I need to do is make that portfolio and show that I have a strong passion for the subject, can think like a problem solver, and am willing to push limits of AI.

What are your thoughts on using Linode with using Terraform and Ansible to deploy the server then using CICD to push the site onto the server?

"Entry level job" - Bs computer science - 3 years of software engineering experience - High level knowledge: Python, javascript, html, css, sql, nosql, c++, c#. (All Required)

I was listening to this in the background, and when the 5 minute mark arrived and he said, ok, that's it, I was like 'wait, what????' Tabbed to the video and saw the empty 'next video' fields (that he actually edited into the video) and burst out laughing; that was funny. Anyway, I've been learning web dev a few months now an have no idea how to approach the application side of things once I feel ready. This was very helpful, thank you!

FORREST MY MAN!!! You did us dirty right at 5:00. Heh. You harvested that attention though! Thanks for the help brother!

Thanks for what you said about job listings. I'm self taught and considering one final push to get into the industry. I'm already more or less qualified for a junior position but I need to finish up and learn a stack rather than just the fundamentals of a few languages. So far I applied to one job and totally bombed on the interview. Apparently there was a miscommunication about what the job actually was, yet this was not discussed until the 4th interview which was a group panel.

Yes, job postings have become a meme, when HR is really disconnected from what the job actually requires and the hiring employer just neglects the importance of detailing the specifics to HR. It really affects everyone and it's sad.

Nice video man, good tips and love the Josh reference!

Great video, sir!

Great video!

considering graduation is just a month away this vid was posted at the perfect time for me.

Thank you for the video. In a "different life" I programmed a very antiquated language FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslanation), which was popular in the 1960s and 1970s, with punch cards at one time!! (In the version I started in not only did we not have objects - we did not even have records. Hence for each object such as a person, you had dozens in un-associated and poorly named variables.) I found myself totally unfamiliar with the 100s of new "technologies", and am once again trying to get a programming job now that about 6 years of parent-care is behind me. I've developed skills with numerous languages and tools (Java, Javascript, Spring, Vue, Git-Github, Rest, Soap, Eclipse) and familiarity with dozens of others. (Angular vs. Angular JS, React, the MEAN stack, etc.) but find most job descriptions daunting. It's always about how much experience you have - and I regularly have recruiters who ask me to apply for senior level positions. I'd pay the dang recruiting companies for an internship, but they dont seem to exist. (The one I did see, the Junior Mentoring Program "Jump" program, wasnt interested if you weren't just out of college. My degree is decades old.) I was hopeful I'd get an offer after getting the associate Java SE 8 certification (cert) and then the professional Java SE 8 cert, but these did little. My current plan is to get the basic (practitioner) and developer AWS certifications. These seem to be asked about often in job postings and interviews. I do well at certifications and studying books, but am not sure even these certs will help. Any other thoughts appreciated. Is there a good Spring certification?

Nice one!

👋 hey there! thanks for the information, have a great day dude ! 😁

GREAT VID!

I’m a senior in college and I haven’t had any internships before because I actually switched majors twice. I’m really struggling to find internships and it’s already late in the season.

Hey man, thanks for making that video. You touched on a lot of things that I think is going to be very helpful when I make this career change. I’m moving over to software development from sales and marketing. I’m done with running sales offices, and being a babysitter, all day long. Your comments on the internship were awesome, I think a lot of people don’t put stock into the fact that that’s just building your skills and the importance of building a network. Anyways, thanks again for the video. Maybe we’ll work on something together someday.

Thanks! 😁

Hey Forrest! Current software dev student, set to graduate in the Spring. Something I'm curious to get your opinion on: What can I do to make myself feel more ready to go into the professional world? I had a handful of personal projects and managed to land a dev job from that, but I was in over my head and flame out after a year. Went back to school after that, and while I do feel like I know a lot more now than I did then, I don't feel like I have all of the gaps filled in that I expected to by the time I finished up. It still feels like there's a lot of stuff I should know that I don't, so I'm getting very anxious about re-entering the professional world. Thank you for any advice!

Dude you're awesome!

9:00 I never understood the percentages when I was other people's portfolios lol like how do you even gauge that? Otherwise, great video! My mentor kept it short and sweet with me, he said "build things... learn and build something for everything you know". I took a long break from the self-taught journey and am gonna hop back on the train soon because I really wanna work in this field!

Great video ✅ Please what editing software do you mostly use for your awesome videos

Lol, " we want the best." Well thinking that, we should build a website targeting " HR people " and troll them with weird skills.

I graduated from a bootcamp in February, and I've been sending out applications like crazy. One interview so far, but they wanted someone more senior, and I've gotten nothing else back. I've got all the pieces together, a polished resume, portfolio, massive Linkedin network, I'm going to meetups and doing hackathons. I'm not sure why I'm not getting responses other than that they might just be finding better candidates? It's been tough. Thanks for the perspective!

My company hires entry-level developers all the time. I was entry-level and so were all of my co-workers. The company tests for aptitude and trains in whatever technology is required for the role.

I am looking at a few companies, 2 in particular cause for 1: I met one of their lead developers in my apartment complex and a good friend too. That company uses stuff from our company relating to Astronomical data. Which is kinda funny cause they would have never happened if he didn't mention a product the scientists setup. The second company seems to have a need for Mathematica and OOP C++ programming skills and a bit deeper computational science as well. The computational part usually needs a Masters or some certificate. I've been looking at those things

I feel bless while watching you

I believe that, your interest is important, how anxious you are to get started

Remember you don't need to be the best candidate ever. What you actually just need to be is the best of the applicants. Every employer wants a graduate from Harvard college that works for minimum wage, but sometimes a company just need someone to do the work.

The trick is APPLY for everything and hopefully someone will contact you! It happens, sometimes they are flexible because HR has no idea but if you are willing to help and solve problems they might have you can get something, good luck Devs!!

Can confirm, job listings are bs. When i got offered the job im currently at, i went back and looked at the actual listing. And its no where even near what im doing lol.

😂😂😂the fact that I actually closed my RU-vid app at the 5 minute mark because I thought it was over and slept💀💀. Just opened RU-vid now and fortunately it was still on your video 😂❤.

Filter gets me every time. Uni grad with a First Class Honours degree and they still toss me aside. Had one today that said they liked my background, but rejected me.

proper stuff!!

Many thanks 🤙

My company posted an entry level full stack developer position requiring Ruby, Java, Javascript, Python, C#, PHP, C++, and Swift xd

Does the HR dept. in tech companies actually work together with the Managers in what they are looking for in an applicant? It doesn't seem like they do, though.

I was listening to the video while washing dishes and the middle but where he just cut off got me 💀

i absolutely agree to all the words mentioned in this video .. also competition is so high that even best skilled candidates dont get recruited in the first place . Reference building is a must have skill and problem with that also is that either someone recommends your work or you hv an eye catching portfolio to start with.. in all cases, tough luck for freshers😢 My fellow developer friends, keep trying hard and we shall achieve the best😊

I am a computer science student but I feel like all I’m learning is how to answer questions for the course and I don’t understand how to will apply to any actual job if there is any information on this or how to transition what I learn into the “real world” I would love to hear it. Thank you.

Broo nice explanation

When searching for an internship as an Android developer I came across postings that required me to know Python or Node js the thing is I am a mechanical engineer and I'm only familiar with Android as of now so should I apply to these types of jobs/internships?

my very first job fresh out of college was also a senior position. I asked the recruiter "you sure i am the right fit?" and they answered "How would I know, why don't you just try?" ... I did that because I had a "fuck it" attitude and funnily enough not only did I get the job, but the guy who gave it to me, was so fascinated by me that he immediately raises my salary above what I even wanted.

Strategies for self-taught programmers would be a great video

What would you recommend as a good tool to stay on top of your programming education while you job search?

Should i go for an internship if im 1 year post graduation? I couldn't get one during college for multiple reasons, and am having trouble finding actual entry level jobs.

How do you go about switching technologies? If i've never worked with Python, and i wanted to switch to something done in python, should you go back to square 1 and get into a entry level? Can you get hired as a mid level on the expectations that you are a fast learner? (im not saying learn the langage on the go.. but doing a few things at home is different from 2, 3 years job experience with it)

can you make a video on how to move on from your first job and navigating those waters? If he already has a video on that, can someone show me that video? Thanks!

Cool painting in the background there - you an artist / developer too?

So I stumbled on this and it is great! I'm in Programmatic advertising where we use tech and accidentally learn programming (to some extent) - I'd love to collaborate or have you on the podcast!?

Thank you

hi thank you for the information, you look like a musician too.

ur the best MAN!

I'm just curious what helpful extension do you use in your laptop? 🤔

I'm planning to shift from a corporate quality analyst to a programming job. I'm a computer engineer from 2004 and my knowledge is pretty much obsolete at this point. Can someone recommend which languages I should learn or re-learn?

Watching this video while on my job’s lunch break 🥲