Landing your first developer job is hard. Perhaps not a very popular statement, I know, but it’s the truth. The industry can be elitist, and there are more newcomers every day. That’s not a bad thing. It just means more competition for those who don’t have prior experience.

However, facing occasionally elitist attitudes or having to compete with many others doesn’t mean it is impossible to get your first job. I mean, we all started from somewhere, right?

In this post, I’ll give you some advice on how to stand out from the crowd and make yourself noticed. If I could go back in time and give myself a few tips to save me some time and sweat, I’d definitely send myself this guide!

So, here are the seven most important things that I wish I knew when I started applying for my first job.

You Know Nothing … Jon Snow

The technology industry is vast. Remember that we are building upon over a century of inventions, discoveries, research, and development. Trust me, nobody “knows it all.” I’m pretty sure that if I asked Elon Musk a simple trivia Javascript question, he would shit his pants because, of course, that’s not his area of expertise.

I felt intimidated looking at those developer roadmaps online, and when your finger scrolls more than two times to see all the stuff there is to learn, you get scared and depressed. Don’t worry, I know there is a lot, but with discipline and time, you will get there. Some of my friends often asked me, “Is it hard to learn to code?” and my answer is always the same: “It is not hard; it just takes patience and practice.”

Your goal is to know enough to get your first job, and boy oh boy, I wasted time trying to dip my toes in every flashy library I came across. Stick with something and don’t deviate. Sure there will be stuff that you’ll miss, but you don’t want to become a jack of all trades. That will lead you to being the “master of no job.”

My point here is that it’s OK to be ignorant about a topic or a subject. We only need enough to build something. Building stuff is the key to knowing stuff. This might sound contradictory, but as usual, practice beats theory.

When theory may get you started and give you the unknowns, practice and the research that comes with it will teach you how to really code. This is the main reason why a lot of people get stuck in CourseLand; they just move from tutorial to tutorial, just mimicking and copy/pasting, and never truly understanding what’s going on.

Now, remember, it has to be practice and the research necessary to overcome the failures and solve the problems that will emerge along the way.

Online Courses Teach Just the Basics

Maybe I’m being too absolute here, given the fact that I attended an online Bootcamp that despite being overpriced, turned out to be fairly elemental.

I tried them all: YouTube, Codeacademy, TeamTreehouse, freeCodeCamp, Udemy, Pluralsight, you name it. There is a considerable content gap in the programming world from beginner to intermediate that nobody is addressing, and that’s because it is your work to do it.

To get out of the “newbie sandbox,” you have to learn how to learn. That is, you have to learn how to integrate your knowledge, see the big picture, and be able