Lucky? You Aren’t Just Lucky | By Joshua Laurence

Getting The Job 
It’s weird. I see dozens of guides and step-by-step tips on how to “crack the coding interview”, or how to “nail a job in tech”. It’s weird because I followed none of these and still managed to get such an incredible opportunity with this Software Engineering apprenticeship. In fact, I didn’t even know these were a thing while I was doing my interviews.

I didn’t have a wide breadth of GitHub projects. I just chucked four old programming builds on there, added short descriptions, listed how they showed a small selection of different skills and drafted up the README.md files in roughly 15 minutes…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not recommending this as advice - I soon fixed these issues by redrafting my LinkedIn and GitHub later on in the process. Leaving it all to the last minute and keeping your fingers crossed it’s going to work out isn’t the way to go. I didn’t even have a backup plan if this apprenticeship didn’t work out. I had a place at a London university, but I was never going to take that because uni wasn’t ever going to be for me, Therefore, to Multiverse I’m forever indebted since they showed me how I didn’t need to go to university to get a  chance to  land a good job.

Rather, I’m hoping that anyone reading this who has come into the apprenticeship in the same way, who might be feeling like they fluked their way in, might be feeling like they don’t deserve it, just know not everyone (myself included) followed the perfect regime of thousands of coding questions and hundreds of hours of revision. And that even with an unconventional path, you can find success in what you do.

If we’re being honest, I didn’t start seriously revising for my first coding interview until 5pm the day before it was supposed to take place

A lot of luck was involved in my process. Sure, I needed to have the technical skill in the first place, but some of it fell to fate. For example, I made a calculation that showed that my savings that I was using to help keep Dad and I afloat (it’s just the two of us living together) would last until October. That gave us about a year, maybe less, to figure out some form of extra revenue stream. 

Then, out of the blue, I remember getting the call after my two interviews to tell me if I got the job:

“I’m sorry Joshua, but we’re going to have to remove you from our internal systems”

My heart sank into the depths of my stomach.

“...because you just got the job!”

It immediately rebounded and sprang out of my mouth.
 
Funny joke, really funny.
 
She informed me of the details and filled me in on what I’d need to do over the next couple of months.

“The position will start in October”. I smiled. See? Luck.

The Beginning of Something
When October finally rolled around, I was verifiably nervous. I was just an idiot who’d spent most of his childhood with his head buried in a computer screen making random stuff he thought was cool, and now I’d transformed that into an actual job. The imposter syndrome was high.

But as with most things in life, things work out considerably better than you think they will. So, to my surprise, everything started to go smoothly. It was as if the path was opening for me as I walked it.

We started with a massive JavaScript bootcamp, and considering the first time I’d ever coded in HTML, CSS or JavaScript was literally one week prior to starting this job (Are you noticing a last-minute theme here?), I worried that I’d screw it up. To my surprise, I didn’t. Things just seemed to fit, and the more I did, the better I got. I must give credit where credit is due - My bootcamp coach Andrew Bolton, made JavaScript, a difficult and sometimes confusing language, seem easy.
 
With the bootcamp over and actual work starting in January, the wave of euphoria I’d been riding from the great bootcamp experience began to fade. I started to investigate the coding language I’d be using, and it looked like gibberish, completely unintelligible. See, I’d be working with Javascript, but also Hack, a relatively unknown language. I’d rehearsed a lot of PHP within the last few weeks of my bootcamp, but although Hack is very similar to PHP, it also differs in a variety of ways. The nerves sunk in again, and this time I was 100% convinced it would take me months to wrap my head around this language. I had a 6-week training course set out for me where I would learn the basics of the internal tools used at where I worked, and then I’d have to learn a whole new language before I could do anything useful with it. Two months, minimum. I worried that my team would think I was slow, that I was useless and a tag along who’s not really adding any value.
 
I completed the training modules in a week and by the end of the next week, I understood the language to a level of competency that meant my manager felt confident he could assign me my first proper, large project.

Success Beyond
Things always go better than you think they will.

What led to my success beyond this point I can pinpoint to two things. The first is hard work, which is the biggest cliche I’ve written down so far. Yet it’s true, if you work hard towards something, really give it everything you have every single day, it becomes a lot harder to do badly. The sheer depth of your work will carry you through a lot of the struggles you have. 
The second is to find enjoyment in everything you do. Realize that you’re here to work, but that work feels a lot less like work if you’re having fun. If something is really getting to you, tearing at your, don’t be afraid to go grab a coffee and chat to a colleague for a while, maybe play a game of two of pool if your office has a table, or do something to replace the rage you are drowning in with some light hearted, joyful down-time. The odds are if you take 20 minutes away from the laptop, you’ll be more productive than if you had sat there for three hours.
 
As things started to progress through the first few months within my new team, I started to accelerate at a rate even I couldn’t wrap my head around. Tasks were flying in only to be completed within a few hours, I was being given new sections to do on my project, with less and less instruction and more and more free reign in how I wanted to approach them. I got assigned multiple tasks and projects at once and my team stopped treating me like an apprentice, they just saw me as another colleague. They began to give me tasks at the same level you’d give to a Junior Developer. My manager even positioned me to work on company critical work with a large group of engineers, something he says is very rare for an intern/apprentice to be involved in. “It’s a lot of responsibility”, he said, “normally it’s difficult to judge whether an apprentice will be able to handle it”, he smiled gently, “but you’ll be fine”.

Just last month my manager took another step forward, allowing me to lead on a business impactful project, where I had to organize meetings with other colleagues, draft up a plan for the project, post it internally to gather feedback from others, iterate based on that feedback, and then implement what the plan stated. I saw it through from start to finish. It was an incredible opportunity for me.
 
If you were to just read the previous two paragraphs, you’d think that everything seemed to set into place, that the imposter syndrome went away, and everything worked out wonderfully. It isn’t quite like that; imposter syndrome rolls around all the time. For example, when I was leading my initial project meeting with a collection of my colleagues, some of them senior developers, I was sitting there, internally laughing to myself.
“How am I the one leading this? I should be asking you for advice”.

I’ll end this sort of directionless stream of consciousness with something I mentioned earlier. You didn’t get this apprenticeship by luck; it wasn’t a fluke or a mistake. You got here through hard work, determination, intelligence and merit. And if that turns out to be wrong, and you genuinely are here by mistake, some sort of glitch in the naming system, then I definitely am too, and we’re just going to both… um… hope that no one notices?
 
Otherwise, we’re both screwed.

Joshua Laurence is a Software Engineering apprentice at Meta based in London, UK.