Job interviews are cool when you're not a junior anymore

If you're still a junior with no commercial experience, it's quite tricky to land a job.
- You have almost nothing to put in your resume (at least you think so).
- The competition is damn high.
- You probably have to complete a test task before a technical interview.
- You can be sure that you'll be asked many technical questions, so you have no choice but to prepare for everything*.
- When it finally comes to the interview, you feel nervous: shaking knees, sweaty palms. I know, I've been there. The only way to beat this feeling is to pass more interviews.

Everything changes once you've convinced yourself that you're no longer an immature junior.**
- There is no water in your resume because you now have an experience you're not ashamed to talk about. Like, "I've developed several apps from scratch, here're the links to them. Implemented this and this. Here is my tech stack."
- No test tasks anymore. The choice is rich while the competition is pretty low, so you can afford to decline companies that require you to do a test task.***
- The interview looks more like a pleasant conversation rather than an interrogation. If you've been preparing for interviews being a junior dev, you're probably ready for all these techy questions. Some people won't even ask you these questions - they are more interested to hear about things you've done, technologies and approaches you've used.
- You have a bit of experience in interviews, so you know that you should be able to talk about yourself and your projects for 2-4 minutes, prepare questions for the company, etc.
- You finally have an answer to the question: "What is the most interesting/challenging task you've been working on?"

*Language, framework, libraries, OOP, basic CS things, algorithms, and data structures
**You probably have to work for 1-2 years before doing this
***If you're interested in a particular job, then go for it, do whatever it takes

#career #thoughts