I speak here {^_^}

An experience that might help you!

March 06, 2020

I thought I should share it here. It might help someone like me. :)

Oh no, I’m not saying you’re not smart enough to get a job all by yourself, I just meant for someone who might be stuck because of some missing help.

So, I am pasting here one of my replies from the Outreachy zulip chat conversations.

3:18 AM

Hi, I missed the chat. But I have an experience to share.

So, it was in the Outreachy internship period itself that I was trying to prepare a DevOps-centric resume, in order to start my search for a full-time job Outreachy.

(I had several resumes before and I knew that my current resume was not good enough to land me into a DevOps job). But I was quite confident that I had a good fresher experience in my domain. The only thing I needed was to present it well.

So, I started by creating a plain text (markdown) resume with a Latex template, highlighting all sort of sys-admin, infrastructure and DevOps related work that I had done by the time (Mark that it was all self learning, no professional experience so far, but I had most of the projects either hosted live or documented in blogposts). And I cared to mention all my open source contributions as well.

The next thing was to get it reviewed from the maximum people possible.

I sent it to all the people in my network:

  1. Who were in one or other way, into some hiring position,
  2. Or who were working in the related domian
  3. Or few others that I felt might connect me to the right people in their own network.

Everytime I sent the resume, I left a short note for them, explicitly asking for what kind of help I was seeking from them. Also, asking each one of them for helping me to connect to some other people in their network if possible. Besides, mentioning that “I will be starting looking for jobs in quite near future”.

I received replies from almost all of them, therefore, I gathered some really-good set of advices. But that was not really enough. My network was too short with the DevOps people.

So, I (after procrastinating for a week due to hesitation) finally decided to take the hard step. I added my resume into my blog first, then posted it on Twitter, and later LinkedIn. I kept retweeting/reposting it for a period of a week and half.

This time it was definitely useful. I got a few DMs (with some help and appreciation), few more likes and retweets and a whole new set of people who are actually working into DevOps domain. Now, that these people are in my network, I see my feed filled with rich relavant information and resources.

Also, by this time I had a good set of reviews on my resume too. Thus, the next step was to decide which suggestions/advices were actually worthy and useful to be applied. So, I decided to choose the ones which were

  1. Quite obvious in sense.
  2. Given from the people, whom I might contact again in near future for a job itself.
  3. Or Which were the most common amongst.

Voila, here the first step was done.

I then started applying for jobs. To my surprise, I got responses from almost all the places I applied to. Later I started interviewing with them, solving their challenges in all my free times, giving interviews on weekends.

By the last week of january, I had 2 job offer letters in hand with a quite decent salary (in my local Currency) for a DevOps Engineer position. (finally \o/).

But this is not the end. Though I’m joining one of the company soon after Outreachy, my long-term goal is to work as a remote full-time employee in an open-source project.

Thank you jasonbraganza, for being the best mentor.

Want to read more of his own words? It’s here.

As he says

They are free, but definitely not cheap :)

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