Hello ,

Last year I had the privilege of working with a brilliant young lady, who quit her job as a sales representative for brands in Nigeria to pursure a career in tech.

After studying for 12 months non stop, and learning technologies like React, TailwindCSS and NextJS, it was time to prepare for the job hunt.

Within 6 months, she landed a ~ ₦ 360k full stack engineering role at a top fintech company in Nigeria, which was triple her salary as a sales representative.

Here's how she prepared for her journey.

Step 1: Preparing for the job

She implemented my number 1 principle for crushing your career in tech: Evidence driven career development. She spent 6 months creating evidence to demonstrate that she was a capable and talented full stack software engineer.

Take a look at her Github

✅ Contributed to 2 open source projects actively for 6 months. This not only helped her create evidence for interviews, but trained her in the art of contributing to a real world code base.

✅ Developed portfolio website called heyme.io, a website that video records a message and sends it via email at a scheduled date.

This project demonstrated her Tailwind, React, NextJs and Postgres knowledge, to be used in interviews.

✅ Developed a personal website with technical articles, list of all projects and open source contributions, to make a good impression to interviewers.

What are you currently doing to create evidence for your skillset ? Do you have enough evidence in 2024 ?

Step 2: Hustle for the job

6 months into evidence development, she found this job on the Twitter timeline, and 900+ people had already applied.

Of all the 900+ applicants, I strongly believe not up to 5% had packed evidence like she did. But she didn't stop there.

She needed to hustle behind the scenes so that her application could at least be seen or noticed.

So she sent a cold email to the CEO, in charge of hiring interns:

✅ Created portfolio of evidence for job hunting.
✅ Used back channels to get her evidence seen and impress the interviewer.

That's how she landed an internship, and in 3 months landed a full time offer as a full stack engineer at Mono, a company that has raised $17 M in funding from top VC firms in the USA.

In summary, build your career using the evidence driven career development strategy, and hustle your way into opportunities, using as many back channels or unconventional strategies as you have access to.

Read my previous newsletter about hustling your way to success in tech

I hope this gives you a boost of motivation to know that you can forcefully create success for yourself by applying the right strategies over time.

Thank you for reading,

Until next week,

Frantz.