I've hit the 100 applications milestone and it's time to do a check in and see what needs to be tweaked on the resume and cover letter process. The counts are currently 108 applications submitted, 21 rejections, 1 interview, and nothing from the rest yet.
I may have to tweak the resume and look at the cover letter to see if there's anything that can be improved. I don't feel that I'm applying to anything ridiculously out of my depth, however I have been using the same resume and cover letter for all the applications so far. I've been applying to jobs in the backend engineering field, mid and entry to mid level positions, with a few senior positions thrown in for good measure.
Because the coding school I attended remotely was intensive and long term, taking me 18 months to finish, I feel that my skills are slightly above what my two years and change of experience would suggest, vs a candidate who went to a shorter bootcamp focused only on React or frontend work. My former coworkers would probably agree with that assessment. I've been told that I'm a quick learner and that I'm good at what I do. I've also been told that I'm a team player and that I'm easy to work with. I know there are areas to improve on both technically and personally and I am working on those areas, and ready to begin with a fresh start and a new team who will be blissfully unaware of my past mistakes!
I'm looking forward to a phone screen on Monday with a company that I really, really would like to work for. I've been following them for a while and I like what they do. I'm hoping that the phone screen goes well and that I can move on to the next step in the process. I'm also hoping that I can get some feedback on what I can improve on in the interview process. I'm always looking to improve and I'm always looking to learn.
Other than that, I've taken a bit of a pause on the Leetcode prep, and may touch some more of those this weekend; instead I've been doing some work on a private repo I have that contains a golang API skeleton that I sort of built on periodically. It's been there for a long time and I wanted to brush up on some things, including adding codegen and swagger docs. The idea is to stay in touch with the language and also have a ready to eat service I can fire up if and when an idea hits and I want to whip up a prototype.
Speaking of prototypes, work continues in the background, albeit slowly, on the top secret project that a few acquaintences and I are building as an MVP. I'm pretty psyched to be building a product from the ground up, and looking forward to seeing where that takes us. I will add that I just wish I had a bit more knowledge of game theory ;)
On a side note, what's up with all the Python jobs everywhere?? Suddenly the entire landscape is just nothing but AI and Python and data science. I get it's the current fad and that's where the VC money is going, but holy cow, it's outta control!