I read @orta’s excellent article about how to get your first job as an iOS developer, and that made me think a bit about the process through which I got my first iOS job.
In 2013, I took part in the Google Summer of Code as a member of the City of Bloomington organization. My task was to work on their open source iOS app for non-emergency issue reporting. If I remember correctly, that was the only proposal I sent, because I really wanted to work as an iOS developer and that position in the City of Bloomington organization was the only one that interested me.
Before that, I had some very basic iOS experience: I watched some of Paul Hegarty’s course at Stanford on iTunes U and my bachelor thesis project was an iPad app. Besides that, I also had a pretty solid background in Computer Science. But the GSoC experience was when I actually dived head first into iOS programming. At the end of the summer, I had 3 months of iOS experience, some pretty good open source contribution, a nice thing to add to my iOS developer portfolio and 2 recommendations from my GSoC mentors.
After GSoC, I started looking for a part time job as an iOS developer in Copenhagen. Now, good iOS developers are hard to find, but in the autumn of 2013, not many companies were interested in a junior iOS developer who could only work part time because he wanted to finish his MSc studies. Looking over the article, I realize now that I went through almost all the phases described there, so I can take them one at a time.
Readiness
I knew I didn’t have much experience, I knew I still had a lot to learn, but I had worked on 2 apps before, I could find may way around Xcode, I had a good background and I could learn fast. I also wasn’t afraid to admit that I don’t know something and I showed a genuine interest and curiosity about the things I didn’t know. With that in mind, I tried not to create false expectations.
Lookout
There are some job sites in Denmark, but there weren’t many iOS developer positions advertised there. Also, they were all full time.
I was told that in Denmark, the practice of sending unsolicited applications is quite common, so I gave it a try. I started looking for companies that were doing iOS development and sent unsolicited applications to the ones that interested me the most. The problem with unsolicited applications is that they take a lot of time to be replied to. I once got a reply 2 months after I sent the application. This whole process takes a lot of time. I didn’t want to have too many irons in the fire, so I started by sending one application to a company, and then waiting for it to reply. I got a reply after one week and I was invited for a coffee (which I mistakenly confused for an interview). The meeting was scheduled for the next week and, since they didn’t have an available position at the moment, I was basically at the same place where I started, but 2 weeks later. After that, I started sending unsolicited applications to 2 companies at the same time, so I could hopefully speed up the process.
Intro email
This is probably where I didn’t do enough, and it could well be the reason most of my unsolicited applications didn’t get any replies. My emails were quite short, I didn’t want to bother the reader (I still consider this a plus), but they were mostly about me. Somewhere along the lines of “I am a student, I did an iOS app in the GSoC programme, I want to work part time as an iOS developer”. Not much or nothing about why I sent this email to that company. And that’s a pitty, because I actually didn’t send an email to all of them at once, but I had a list of companies, with pluses and minuses for each and I had them sorted according to my preference for them. If I had done this the right way, probably I would’ve got more replies.
Coffee
The idea of getting coffee ☕️ with potential employers was new to me. So new that I actually considered an invitation for coffee to be an interview, which made me quite disappointed when I realised that there were no positions available. It all makes sense now, but back then it didn’t. I got invited for coffee with 2 different companies, and I actually enjoyed meeting people that do what I also wanted to do. I had some great meetings and I had hopes for a potential job interview with one of the companies, either in January or in the spring of 2014.
A “coffee” was actually how I found my first iOS dev job. But since this is Denmark, that “coffee” was actually a beer 🍺. I was participating in the weekly NSCoderNight meetings, some casual get-togethers for iOS developers. That’s where I met Kasper and Johnny, who are now my colleagues. They were looking for a senior iOS developer to join them at Nodes. I had actually seen the job announcement for that position, but decided to ignore it since they needed a full time senior developer, while I was a junior who could only work part time. We talked a bit, each of us about the projects we were working on at the moment, I remember I showed a small demo and also a bit of code, and from there, things moved very quickly. Next day, Kasper contacted me saying that they talked to their CTO and if I was interested, they were open to a part time position as well. I was interested, I had an interview the following day and I started on Monday of the following week.
Interview
The interview went on really well and the process was faster than I expected it to be (but that was probably a one time thing). First they told me about the company, then I told them about myself, about my background, studies, experience and current and future plans. I don’t actually remember being asked anything technical, but I suppose that’s because we talked a lot about code at NSCoderNight.
A couple of hours after the interview ended I had been offered the job. I was probably lucky, because the company really needed to hire developers, but I like to see it as the universe’s way to make up for all the months of sending unsolicited applications with no reply 🙃.
Conclusion
It was a happy ending for me, because I still work there (full time now) and I really enjoy what I’m doing. But this thing took a lot of time: I started my job on March 10, 2014. Between September and March, I sent a lot of unsolicited applications, I’ve been to some coffee meetings, I’ve been to a couple of interviews which didn’t really work out, I went to a few meetups and I met a good number of the iOS developers in Copenhagen. And most importantly, I kept working on my own small iOS projects in that period and I kept learning.