Hello Folks,

I thought it would be nice to write this post to encourage everyone who works hard and to assure them that it is possible to get a job as a programmer in the blockchain industry (even now, when the market is very rough). As the title suggests, I have finally landed my first job in this amazing industry without previous experience as a developer! I'm also self-taught; I did not study programming or anything similar formally. I started learning with Patrick's course for Solidity and Python. Then, I finished the JS and Foundry versions, completing all the challenges and exercises actively helping community and even improving courses repositiories.

Regarding searching for job, it took me a veeeeery long time (compared to my regular job searches where one application usually equaled a new job for me). I was programming every single day for a minimum of 2 hours (usually much longer because I truly love it). I quickly began to create my own projects from start to end, which evolved into more advanced projects for a few Chainlink Hackathons or for my friends, and I learned tons, including diving into frontend development!

I sent a lot of applications (over 200-300, hard to tell exactly), and I mostly received only a few responses from recruiters who didn't even know how to code. After some time when not getting any responses for blockchain positions I started to applying for regular programmer jobs (it was everything really backend, frontend, fullstack literally anything that matched my stack a bit), but it failed as well as all of my projects were web3, so it did not worked for regular positions and I was not as good lets say in frontend as I was in Solidity for example. After continuing to learn and improve my CV while sending more applications, I received only three invitations for technical interviews (with breaks of about 1-2 months between each invitation). I was scared as hell because we all know how hard and stressful technical interviews can be, but to my surprise, I did really well. The first interview failed because of my long notice period, the second one failed because the founders of the project didn't want a programmer without previous experience (even though the programmers who interviewed me wanted to give me the job). Finally, the third interview went very smoothly as well, but this time successfully and I beat over 70 other candidates for the position, landing my first job as a blockchain engineer!

Advice for Everyone Who Keeps Trying:

1. Build Cool Projects: Focus on creating amazing projects. It's better to concentrate on one outstanding project than on several common ones.

2. Pursue Your Interests: Focus only on roles that genuinely interest you. If you like frontend development, go for it, but don't mix it with other areas if you are new. Employers prefer specialists over generalists who know a little about everything but are not experts in any single thing.

3. Enhance Your Profile: Keep refining your CV, create a portfolio website, update your GitHub profile README, talk to other developers, participate in hackathons, and contribute as often as you can. Show your activity on GitHub to demonstrate your ongoing engagement and skills.

Thank you, @PatrickAlphaC!!!
I hope that you might consider filling the gap with courses for Solana (Anchor framework) blockchain programming I would love to dive into it more :) You are amazing and keep doing great stuff!

I hope this motivates everyone who works as hard as I do to reach their goals!