If you could have a 5 minute convo with your new grad self, what would you tell them?

As far as mindset about the job market,

Your peers are probably having issues with the job market, too. Is there anything you can do to differentiate yourself from them? Think for job searching as a funnel. Can you get more opportunities to widen the funnel?

As far as learning as much as possible,

Have a more proactive attitude for solving issues. Instead of just taking tasks, propose actionable solutions to technical problems that you're seeing in your day-to-day. Don't shy away from impactful problems because those are sources of opportunity.

This is such a good question! Anyways, this is what I would tell myself, more or less word-for-word as 5 minutes is so short:

1. Stop being an awkward loner and make more friends - Your career will live or die based on whether or not you have a group of homies willing to fight for you.
2. Keep on building side projects - Companies hire people who can build, and there's nothing stopping you from building. Don't be lazy.
3. Have empathy - Assume good intent and put yourself in the other's shoes. You can never know exactly what someone else is going through. Even someone who seems mean on the surface can have a good heart underneath.

#1 and #2 are huge in this market and have transitioned from "nice to haves" in the prior market to "absolutely necessary for survival" in the current market. #2 is the most actionable, and I recommend this: [Taro Top 10] Building Impressive Side Projects

In terms of what you’re really asking, which is like career advice, I always get scared about butterfly effect things that would mean I didn’t end up exactly here.

In terms of goofy answers: buy/mine as much bitcoin as possible 5 years from now. Sell it in March or November 2021 or wait until February of 2024. It may raise beyond those points in the future, but those are local maxima as far as I know them.

Same with butterfly effect, but getting therapy, leaving a relationship, etc would be good, but I wouldn’t have this life so…

Sorry, this isn’t helpful!

If one were to ask “what would you tell new grads today?” it would be much different. Focus on debugging and fixing production issues, they are harder than writing the code in the first place. Learn an interactive debugger. Do work other people don’t want to. Write human-language documents much more than you think you should. People are more complicated than computers, learn speaking, conflict mitigation, and negotiation. Learn the workflow of the most productive person you have access to. Staying late doesn’t make better code or getting you promoted. Max out retirement savings as early as you possibly can. You didn’t learn to code in college, start learning now on the job or during prep.

Here's what I would say to me after I just graduated & spent a few months trying to find my first job:

Build more side projects that

• Require the product/codebase to be iterated on over a long period of time
• Ship to actual users

Software engineering is fairly pragmatic with judging graduates on what they shipped to real users. Yes internships are the main way, but there's nothing stopping you from building something and getting it out to real users (especially in this day and age it's really easy to learn how to build and deploy software). Leetcode is still building something, but no one really cares about the code that never ships to prod.

At some point of time invested, more time spent applying for jobs is wasted if you can neither get interviews nor pass interviews from these additional applications. Writing more code (especially side project code that you're trying to ship to real users) will generally improve coding skills for both interviews and both on the job, so focus on that for a bit before applying for jobs.

You can't get the perfect opportunties that alumni from other colleges are more easily able to get, but you can create your own opportunties. If you can't code your way into your first job, then it's 100% just a skill issue.

I would tell my new grad self in December 2017, graduating a semester late with no job offers to prioritize mental and physical health, and relationships and hobbies. I would also have been even better served telling my self that going into college or high school but it’s never too late. Life is about much more than maximizing total comp - especially that of your first full time job.

I felt like I had done a lot graduating from college and wondered why everything seemed so difficult given that I had been “successful” with graduating. The point is you’re just a beginner again then as a new grad employee and you have the challenge and opportunity to completely change the companies who interview you and you compensation over the next 5 years from there.

I had no faang interviews after college, but many faang or faang adjacent companies have reached out since, because you CAN trust that if you take care of your self, build relationships, do good work, and get promoted then software engineering can be an amazing life changing career.

Don't wait until you're ready to start a company, since you will never feel ready.

I spent several years too long in the Big Tech bubble, under the guise of "let me learn more, build my network, earn more money" before I start the real thing.

I knew I wanted to do a company, but I wasn't sure how or when. Most of what you learn in Big Tech doesn't apply. There's a big benefit to the network you get from Big Tech (I found my cofounder!), but you need to be careful how long you stay.