How I got a job at Microsoft as a Self-taught Developer in 1 year

Intro

My name is Noel and I was able to get into the Leap Apprenticeship program that Microsoft offers after one year and 4 months of starting learning programming.

Story

About me

I'm going to be short with my story but I'm sure it was somewhat important for me landing that Microsoft apprenticeship because the application was about sharing your story.

I was born in the US in California to be specific. At 3 years old I moved to Mexico with my family, fast forward to 18 I moved back here and I had to learn English because I didn’t know it, like nothing at all. After getting my GED I took a year off school where I only played video games (You can say I wasted a year of my life). After that I went to college for Computer Science and dropped out after a year and a half because I felt like I wasn’t learning much and I had to start working. I worked for about 3 years and a half in a combination of retail and warehousing. I was working at an Amazon Warehouse when COVID hit and in July 2020 I decided to quit my job, later on that year around October I decided to give programming another try.

Programming Story

So I had tried programming before in college and it didn’t go as planed but I had always been interested on it and in computers in general. When I first started thinking about it I googled 'how to learn programming' and I found FreeCodeCamp.org which is a website where you can learn some programming for free. They have a bunch of different sections you can do but I only did the following:

  1. Responsive Web Design Certification

  2. JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures Certification (Although I did not complete the final projects)

  3. Scientific Computing with Python Certification

So essentially I learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and some Python from them, of course just at a basic level. After that I think I wrote like 1 or 2 small programs then I did some courses on Udemy which are the following:

  1. Dr. Angela Yu - Web Development Bootcamp

  2. ZTM - React Developer

  3. ZTM - Data Structures and Algorithms

After finishing those courses I thought I was ready for a job. I started applying for companies and landed like 2 interviews which I failed miserably and I realized I needed to learn more about DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms) and also make more programs to really show that I knew what I was doing.

Around the time I was doing all that one day I was watching Synsation’s stream. She is a Female Software Engineer from Microsoft that went through the same program I’m going through. She mentioned the leap program there and I quickly went and read more about it. The applications weren’t open then but I checked again after about a week a they opened up for the SWE (Software Engineer) role and a few other ones they offer like UX Design and things like that but SWE was the one I wanted so I just applied.

In my application I just talked a bit about my story the same way I talked about it at the beginning of the blog and also about the roles I had in my previous jobs (I basically talked about what I did in my previous jobs). Two months passed and I thought they were going to ghost me but they finally emailed me one day saying that I had passed the first filter and I was going to get my interviews. I only had 2 weeks to prepare for them. At this point I was really scared and nervous because although I had already done some algorithms and data structures, I had not been practicing like I should have so I only knew how to solve some easy problems on Leetcode. So I studied DSA like crazy for those 2 weeks and the day of the interview I was able to solve the 2 problems they gave me. Both were easy level questions from leetcode and I only struggled a bit with the first one because I messed up one line of code, the guy ended up helping me, I honestly thought that was it because I felt like I looked like an idiot in front of him, I thought I had messed up, but... About a week later they called me letting me know I was accepted into the program.

Thoughts

I honestly don’t know what got me into Microsoft. Maybe it was my story and the fact that I showed I could do something by myself like learning English and learning programming. Maybe I just did better during the interviews than others. All I can say is that I’m really happy of where I am today and everything I’ve done for the past year and a half has been worth it.

I used all of my savings so I didn’t have to work while learning programming and I felt like going back to work at times because I wouldn’t land any jobs but I just never gave up and it paid off.

I have linked all the resources I used to learn what I know but I’m sure there are other courses/websites that might be better than the ones I used so always do your research before you start learning from something/someone. I wish you all the best and if you have any questions or you want to talk to me or some advice you can reach me through my twitter. I would be really happy to help someone land their first job in tech or get into the leap program in the future, if I can of course!

Thank you for reading! <3

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