It Could Take a While

Friends who are eager to get into a tech company for the first time as developers often overlook how long it takes to succeed. I've worked with brilliant engineers who took a while to get their first job-- unfortunately, with all things, there is an element of luck involved.

In today's job climate, provided you keep improving your resume, it could take anywhere from one to six months to land something after graduating from school or a bootcamp. If you've been building up your resume with personal projects, contract/consulting work, and OSS projects-- and it takes longer than six months-- you should try to identify what the biggest blocker might be.

Past that, it takes about a year to get really comfortable with basic syntax and getting things up and running, and three to five years to deeply understand how software systems/architectures work and make important technical decisions. Though these numbers drastically vary, this is what I've seen anecdotally.