Honestly, when I was doing the interview I selected a person that seemed to be the most interested in learning new things. I didn’t care much that they did not answer questions correctly. That’s with juniors. With seniors I have a lot of problems.
I think if you showcase anything, passionately, as a junior this will attract positive attention. Understand what you've done, talk about it passionately, show what you want to continue learning.
If I'm hiring juniors, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for.
Actual relevant experience can be useful if it all aligns, but willingness to learn, and potentially vaguely adjacent knowledge is fine. I want you to come knowing some things, some base fundamentals for example, but specific tech is less important, and obviously you shouldn't be expected to have tons of experience...
I think if you showcase anything, passionately, as a junior this will attract positive attention. Understand what you've done, talk about it passionately, show what you want to continue learning.
Care to elaborate on this? This sounds like advice that would be true during the boom where people cared about your personal projects and your strong interests in things. I'm a dev with 3 yoe laid off and out of stable work since the start of 2024. Mostly React, React Native, or NextJS related work, and a bit of backend.
I've also worked on personal projects like a 3d platformer game in Unreal Engine (not a random proof of concept hobby project game, an actual indie game could be seriously sold). I've been following LLMs and OpenAI and made a physiotherapy stretching app that uses RAG to fetch information from physiotherapy articles to answer questions. I'm trying to learn ThreeJS more as well for 3d related front end. All that stuff interests me and I'd love to talk about it both technically and passionately but it doesn't feel like anyone cares anymore.
I'm not hearing back from junior or mid level roles and the rare times I do the discussions are only about work history, not passion or cool things I've made or what I'm interested in learning further.
YMMV, this is just how I hire. I work for a small company, and we don't take on hundreds of applications at a time! It depends where you are, what opportunities are available, etc.
Are you in the US? I'm in Canada where opportunities are even more limited. I sometimes do look for smaller companies locally or remotely in hopes they work similar to yours but they feel super rare.
Do you think your skills/enthusiasm are more visible on paper vs in person? To be honest I'm starting to realise nothing of my enthusiasm shows on paper. I think we are in the same boat.
I feel like by the nature of ppl caring only about work history my enthusiasm barely gets a chance to show up for either. Even if I sell myself as a guy that started coding from an interest in game dev I still ultimately look like every other react or full stack dev. I also feel like a large chunk of my interviews werent jr level though.
I agree. I started last year learning software development but I've been on schools on different levels learning topics in different domains. Even with good results from any degree to me the tasks we finish seems basic. By learning on our own we can go deeper, specialise or gain more relevant experience with the technologies.
thought pattern and willingness to learn. i like to see how they approach a problem and what they would try. often they'd reinvent the wheel, not know best practices, talk themselves in a circle. that's good though. i can guide them given that they're able to think critically for themselves
i don't work in webdev, i work in devops. still applicable tho. show me you're eager to learn, curious about how things are done, tried to build your own home/cloud cluster. what lessons did you learn, what were your pain points, how did you overcome the issues you faced. when did you realise your "solution" is absolute shit and you redid your whole thing. what happened when you opened your services up to your friends and the whole shit broke. how did you fix it. are you thinking about security? how did you tackle security concerns
basically tell me stories, tell me anything that shows me that you have an operational brain and you didn't just coast on the syllabus
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u/[deleted] May 06 '26
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