The Ultimate Guide to Landing Your First Software Engineering Job at a Tech Startup: Online Writing
How and why online writing can help you find your next job at a tech startup.
In this series’s first post, we discussed why open source is crucial to landing your next job at a startup.
I firmly believe that open source is the best tool for landing a job as a software engineer at a startup, but there are other things you can do to build an online presence and increase your chances.
One of the things you can do is write online.
Online writing does not replace open source! Many of you might not like that, but it is the reality. Online writing can improve your chances of landing a new job if you are an open-source contributor.
The reason for this is pretty simple: if you are a painter, I want to see your paintings, not the book you wrote about painting.
What’s your goal?
There are two ways you can decide to start writing online:
Writing with no specific goal in mind
Writing with a goal in mind
1. Writing with no goals
When I started writing this newsletter, I had no goals.
I just wanted to start writing. While writing this post, I still have no clear goals for this journey. I’m just enjoying the ride.
This is, in my opinion, the best way to be consistent.
A goal might come while you write. In my case, I decided I wanted to help people find jobs at startups and enjoy working in such an environment as I did. But this came after two months and more than 40 published posts.
If you want to write without a goal, go for it; it’s great.
2. Writing with a goal
When you start writing to achieve a specific goal, you must always focus on the goal.
Do you want to build a profitable newsletter? Do you want to become a technical writer? Do you want to create a community?
When you have a goal, you can’t write about whatever you want.
You must find something people want to know in order to write and sell that book. If I wrote a post about the kind of apples I like to eat every day, I can’t expect people to read it. If you wish a result, work to get that result.
When you write with a goal, you must focus on that goal.
The goal: landing a new job
When your goal is to land a new job, your approach to writing should reflect that.
Writing to land a new job should express the following things:
You are passionate
You want to learn
Your writing skills
You can work in public
All these three concepts are crucial to increase your chances of landing a new job.
Writers with different goals should focus on finding a niche audience, increasing their numbers, or getting more engagement. If you want to land a new job, all these things might come, but you don’t need them.
You need a link on your resume.
This doesn’t mean poor quality. It means that when someone looks at your resume, they can click on a link and see a few posts. You might think it means nothing, but trust me, it does.
In future posts, I will explain why this is crucial for the interview process.
What you should write about?
1. Write about things you know
You don’t need to be an expert to write.
How often did you learn something by reading an answer on StackOverflow or a blog of an unknown guy with less than ten subscribers while you couldn’t understand the same topic explained in a more known one? The reason behind this is simple: we understand things differently. Explaining the same subject in different ways provides value.
Even if you are not an expert in a topic, you can still write about it and provide value to someone else.
2. Write about what you are learning
Writing about what you are learning can motivate you to keep learning.
When I started writing my blog in 2020, I started from a book. I wanted to read the excellent book Nodejs Design Patterns (affiliate link). It is a big one, so I committed to publish a post for each chapter of the book.
I decided to do that once a week.
I was learning Nodejs then, and writing about it was a great way to improve my learning path. I couldn’t read passively; I had to elaborate on the contents to explain them using my style. I didn’t want to copy the book.
I also had to create code examples and practice the concepts I learned.
Back then, I didn’t write a post for each chapter of the book, but I still finished the book. The good thing about that experience was this email:
You can still find those posts here, even if I have already published an updated version of some of those in this newsletter.
How to start writing online
Read this book: The Art and Business of Online Writing (affiliate link).
It contains everything you need to know, but you don’t need to read it entirely. Focus on the chapters related to the structure of the post, the titles, and how to organize your content. If your goal is landing a new job, you don’t need to read the chapters about monetization and increasing your audience.
There is nothing I can say that is not already in that book.