This shows some light at the end of the tunnel, thanks!
How does one find the “employer with senior talent happy to train some junior talent over 2yrs.”?
I’m in a similar situation than OP, but I find myself in the IT Operations side of tech, not software where I want to be.
I know I will devote myself to any project they give me and turn 1% of mentoring into loads of progress, but I can’t seem to arouse the HR filter enough and I don’t have contacts in the software world to get through the personal route.
I do have a somewhat big (viewed from my junior point of view at least) project I’m working on and it’s constantly updated in GitHub, but I don’t think anyone even gets to look at it.
Going from software operations to software engineering is a bigger leap, so go for it and good luck!
I have thought about it less, and we have never took on such a candidate, but we are small and scrappy . Some thoughts from discussions with bootcamp students looking for their first job:
- Become a maintainer / trusted committeer of an open source project popular with companies and they are likely struggling on. You will get professional mentoring on your PRs and they will come hunting for you.
- Lean into a niche, esp that uses your background. Ex: If you are great at ops, specialize in something like k8s, or even more niche. We are looking for someone doing k8s for our infra to help our users turn their GPU knob to 100 without feeling the pain. If we had someone mid/senior on it already, would have been inclined for person #2 or #3 to be junior just b/c their enthusiasm on doing the basics. It's niche enough to expect to have to train on, and you ops experience gives you an advantage over other junior candidates. If you run your own k8s (or some oss/volunteer groups) for a year and are an accepted k8s ecosystem contributor , that means you are doing it right . DevOps lets you transition to other Python jobs, and has some lucrative niches, like security automation/engineering.
How does one find the “employer with senior talent happy to train some junior talent over 2yrs.”?
I’m in a similar situation than OP, but I find myself in the IT Operations side of tech, not software where I want to be.
I know I will devote myself to any project they give me and turn 1% of mentoring into loads of progress, but I can’t seem to arouse the HR filter enough and I don’t have contacts in the software world to get through the personal route.
I do have a somewhat big (viewed from my junior point of view at least) project I’m working on and it’s constantly updated in GitHub, but I don’t think anyone even gets to look at it.