Occasionally, I have young guns reach out to me for advice on how to get a career started in tech. Usually, I refrain from giving out any sort of advice, especially regarding education, careers and matrimony, because I only have my experiences to shape my thinking and I wouldn’t want to impose those onto someone else. But I also realise that oftentimes people are confused, intimidated and looking for a little bit of guidance before they are able to take some action, so I’m going to note down all of my thoughts here around a career in tech over time.

Today, I’ll start out by offering some guidance to freshers (recent grads or senior students in university) who are just looking at starting out. I’m assuming these freshers have at least a technical diploma to signal to the industry that they have some skills that prepare them to embark on a professional journey in tech. Unfortunately, This piece of paper is still a necessity, mostly for signaling purposes to the industry. Don’t skip it but get it with the bare minimum effort required because once you start your professional endeavours, it will have an exceptionally short half-life.

At the start, have a number of skills that you can clearly demonstrate. Indian technical institutions focus very narrowly on these skills, like the currently in favour MERN stack or Android app development. However, it’s very important to be able to have at least one skill you’re very good at - 95 percentile for your peers - to make you stand out from the crowd. This can be any technical skill that you find fun to work on which others consider hard work. Go as deeply as possible so you can clearly highlight the fact that you’re one of the best with this skill in your resume. You should have publicly available code, prose and community involvement in this skill. Spend as much effort here as possible, but don’t be overcome with analysis paralysis. Just pick a skill and start chipping away at it – this is just your ticket to get your foot in the door.

Label yourself clearly with this skill when you’re searching for jobs and only apply for jobs have a hard requirement for this skill. Don’t apply to 100 job applications if you can narrow down to 5 using this criteria. And then, this is very important, accept the first job that pays decently well but might have learning opportunities for you. Don’t think too much about career plans or compensation discussions on the internet. Just. Start. Working. This is a proxy for getting paid to learn and future career branches will start presenting themselves to you more clearly, once you have momentum.

When I graduated in 2010, for me, the skill was being a full stack developer. I was quite good at backend development (tool of choice: PHP) and I was OK with server administration (tool of choice: Ubuntu) but I was also skilled in frontend development (tools of choice: jQuery, FireBug), which a lot of graduates back then ignored. I was able to get a VPS provisioned, get Apache with PHP working on it and then create a decently interactive form on the front-end using jQuery that could be a simple “full-stack” app. This sounds quite trivial today, but it was quite a valuable skill in a graduate almost 15 years ago. I’m guessing a high number of graduates today would struggle with this as well. I also had a Computer Science degree from Monash University to help. My onsite interview was a 3-4 hours coding challenge to create a CRUD interface which I was able to clear by delivering everything functionally (with a couple of security vulnerabilities though 😅), but others had failed to get the whole thing together at all. I accepted my first role as a full-stack developer (Debian/Perl/Nginx/PostgreSQL stack, with YUI on the frontend) at an annual salary of AU$40000, which was nearly half of what was being offered to other graduates (because they had permanent residency or citizenship). But I knew I was going to be the dumbest person in the room at that organisation, which made it a great deal!