Programming hopefuls can land their dream job by making an extra effort to outshine the competition.
Maybe you're slipping through the 5-figure jobs but you really want that 6-figure job,
There’s a growing need for web programmers as well as an increasing number of individuals gaining the skills needed to pursue high-paying engineering jobs.
Today, thousands of job candidates compete for prestigious jobs at leading companies such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
How do you stand out from the crowd and get a 6-figure job? Watch this video and find out.
John Sonmez: In this video, I'm going to tell you how anyone, yes, anyone can get a six figure job, $100K plus, as a programmer. Anyone can do this, but you have to know how. In fact, I was just working with a coaching client of mine recently, and he was making $60-70K a year, and we just landed him a job making $140,000 a year. He just didn't think that that was even possible. Even if you're a junior developer, even if you don't even have any programming experience, I can put you on the path to do that. That's what we're going to talk about in this video.
I'm John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com, and on this channel we teach you soft skills. We teach you the personal development skills that you need in order to improve yourself and improve your career as a software developer. That's going to result in big bucks and getting better jobs, honestly, and just becoming a better software developer, a better person, and having a better life and better happiness in general, rather than just focusing on technical skills, which are important but not as important as the soft skills. I'm going to tell you kind of a story about a person I was coaching and how we got him the job and how you can apply this.
If you're just starting out, if you're watching this video and you're not a programmer yet, you haven't gotten your first programming job, that's your first job. The advice I can give you in this video is going to tell you from once you've gotten that job, how to get to the six figure developer. But if you never gotten a job before, the very first thing that you should do is get a job. Don't worry about how much it pays. Getting that first job is initially very difficult, so you need to really focus on doing that. Some of this advice is going to apply to you, just not the numbers as far as the salary numbers, but the advice I'm going to give you will apply.
Let me give you this story here. So I was coaching one of my coaching clients. This guy, he, he came to me and he basically was making like $60K or $70K a year, and he thought, “Okay, I can't really improve that. I just have a few years experience, and I've been at this shop for a couple of years.” He just really didn't have much confidence that someone would pay him a lot more money. What I told him was I said, “Okay, well, let me see your skillset. Let me see your resume.” I looked at it, and he had a couple of years' experience. He had a pretty decent skill set, nothing phenomenal, but I said, “Well, what are you specializing in?” He didn't know. I helped him kind of figure out what to specialize in, some specific technology.
Then I had him take his resume, and we went to a resume writer, and they rewrote the resume to make it look very, very professional. It's worth spending money on a good resume writer. Then what we did was we came up with the strategy, right? I told him, here's the deal. Here's what you need to do. It's basically a numbers game. If we look at distribution of the pay that people will pay you and who will hire you, it's sort of like this bell curve, right? What I mean by that is that a majority of jobs might fall into the category of $60, $70, $80K that you're making now, right? But what will happen is that on the extreme end, it's going to be less okay as you increase that salary, but there's still a bunch there. There's still a big chunk. There's still a fat chunk that we can find there. What we've got to do is we've got to find this company.
It's a matter of how many companies you reach out to, because here's the thing. Right now in this world, there is probably a thousand companies that will pay you six figures if you're a software developer right now, regardless of what your real skill level is. If you can write code, there's some company that will pay a warm body six figures. I know this. I know this because I never recruiters, I know the industry, I know that. Now, I'm hoping that you're better than that, that you've developed some soft skills, that you've subscribed to this channel and you've developed your career communication skills, and you've got some good technical skills, but just knowing how to code, there is at least a thousand companies right now that would hire you and you specifically based on your personality, your background, or whatever hiring criteria they're using, and they would pay you six figures.
All you've got to do is find those companies or find one of those companies, right? What it comes down to is a numbers game. Think of it this way is like a sales process, a sales funnel. Essentially, a sales pipeline, looks like this. You have a bunch of leads that come in, okay? Then you have a next step, which is the follow up, and then you have the people that have made it to they've contacted you back, and then you have the next stage, which is the people that you have expressed a positive interest, that you maybe you set up a demo with. Then you have the next step where you have pitched them an offer, and then the next step where they've closed, and then the next step where you've gotten payment or whatever it is, right? You've got this essential funnel. It's more of a pipeline when we talk about sales.
It's the same thing with the job search, right? So let's say that you have a job right now making $70K a year like, like my coaching client did. What I had them do is I said, “Okay, look, we're just going to fill up the pipe. We're going to start tracking the metrics on this, because what we want to know is how many jobs you have to apply for in order for you to get an offer.” Maybe for some people it might be a hundred. For some people it might be 50. For some people might be 200. I don't know, but every single job you need to do the best job of applying for that job.
What you really want to do is you want to figure out, okay, maybe I'm going to apply for 10 jobs a day. I'm going to spend an hour or half an hour on each job application, tailoring my resume to customize it for that job, writing a custom cover letter or customizing my cover letter, researching the information from the company so that I can know, trying to find some people on LinkedIn that I can reach out to that I can say, “Hey. By the way, I'm submitting an application for this job. I just wanted to reach out to you and see if you had any tips or any advice or just make connections with those people.”
Maybe you're only going to do five a day, but whatever it is, but don't just spam, click on Monster or Dice or whatever it is and apply for all these jobs, all right? Instead, you're specifically tailoring it, but you have a quota. If you put five pipes, let's say five jobs in the pipeline per day, then in a week you're going to have 35 jobs that you applied for. Then out of those 35 jobs, maybe you're going to get, let's say 15 callbacks if you do a really good job. Of those 15 callbacks, maybe out of those you're going to get three or four interviews, and out of those, maybe you're going to get one or two offers.
As long as you are applying for the jobs that are within that salary range that you're looking for, you're going to get some of those ones that are going to be six figures, right? To get a six figure job is not that that difficult, but the reason why most developers aren't able to do that if you've been trying to is because they're not looking at enough companies. They're applying for one or two jobs, or they're spam applying for jobs and just seeing who responds to them. The odds, if there's a thousand companies out here that will pay you a six figure salary and you only apply for two jobs or two companies, what's the odds that you're going to hit one of those out of the millions of jobs that are out there?
You've got to kind of expand that. Then once you know what that ratio is, right? So if you've been doing this for a while and you start doing this application and you're doing it every single week as new jobs coming into the market every single week, you're going to have an idea. You're going to say, “Okay, well, for every so many jobs that I apply for that go through my pipeline, that I put into the beginning of the pipeline, I get this many offers.” Then you'll be able to start judging those offers and start negotiating on those offers until you get what you want. You might have to be patient. Let's say that you're at a job right now making $70K a year and you want to get a six figure job, okay? The simple thing that you do it, here's some simple steps that I would do if I were you.
The first thing I would do is I would decide something that I'm going to specialize in. What is my niche, right? Specialization is very important. You will pay a brain surgeon more than a general practitioner. Why? You will pay a lawyer who specializes in criminal defense, if you need criminal defense, more than the general legal counsel. Why? Because they're specialized, So specialization is important.
Number two, I would take my resume now that I know what I'm specialized in, give it to a professional resume writer, and get it professionally done. It's not cheating. This is the smartest thing. If you were running an ad campaign for your company, you would hire an advertising company to make the ad. You wouldn't make it yourself on your fucking cell phone. So many developers that are like, “Oh, I can't hire a resume writer,” it's so stupid, because this is an ad campaign for you. It's your ad, all right? Companies are going to see your resume. That's what they're going to see it. They're going to throw it in the trashcan if it's not good, if it doesn't look good, all right? So you need to do that.
Number three, develop a system for applying for jobs and track that, okay? When you apply for these jobs, apply meticulously. Spend the extra effort, the extra time to do the research on the company to fill out, to change your resume, to alter it so it looks like a perfect fit for that job. Okay? The same thing with the cover letter. Spend some time making contacts. Spend some time figuring out how you can apply for that job in the best way possible and rinse and repeat and track all that.
What you're going to do is you're going to track it over time and you're going to look at your conversion rate from one step to the other, right? If you apply for 50 jobs, you should be getting at least maybe 10 callbacks where you're getting a response from them. If you're not, you need to improve something. You're not applying very well, or you're applying for the wrong jobs, or there's something that you need to improve. You can test that. Then if you're seeing a good response, then you're doing a good thing, right? You want to optimize all the steps along that pipeline so that you're increasing your chances of getting a callback, increasing your chances of getting an in person interview, and then following up all along that line.
If you continue to do that, and then the last thing that you do is that you do this over time and you're patient and you're willing to wait three months and continue this process until you get that job, eventually it's going to come. It's just really a numbers game. Just like a sales process, it really is a numbers game. Now. There's obviously more to it, increasing your technical skills and increasing your soft skills and communication and marketing yourself is a way to get jobs to come to you. Again, I've got a course on how to Mark yourself as a software developer that you can check out in the link below, but that's the strategy. Anyone can do this. Even if you're a new developer, you just need to get your first job, and then you can start applying this. You can use this tactic to get your first job, because you don't really care how much it pays when you're getting your first job. I'll talk to you guys next time. Take care.
Programming hopefuls can land their dream job by making an extra effort to outshine the competition.
Maybe you're slipping through the 5-figure jobs but you really want that 6-figure job,
There’s a growing need for web programmers as well as an increasing number of individuals gaining the skills needed to pursue high-paying engineering jobs.
Today, thousands of job candidates compete for prestigious jobs at leading companies such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
How do you stand out from the crowd and get a 6-figure job? Watch this video and find out.
[responsive_video type='youtube' hide_related='0′ hide_logo='0′ hide_controls='0′ hide_title='0′ hide_fullscreen='0′ autoplay='0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8Xsy81Dug4&t=185s[/responsive_video]
Transcript Of The Video
John Sonmez: In this video, I'm going to tell you how anyone, yes, anyone can get a six figure job, $100K plus, as a programmer. Anyone can do this, but you have to know how. In fact, I was just working with a coaching client of mine recently, and he was making $60-70K a year, and we just landed him a job making $140,000 a year. He just didn't think that that was even possible. Even if you're a junior developer, even if you don't even have any programming experience, I can put you on the path to do that. That's what we're going to talk about in this video.
I'm John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com, and on this channel we teach you soft skills. We teach you the personal development skills that you need in order to improve yourself and improve your career as a software developer. That's going to result in big bucks and getting better jobs, honestly, and just becoming a better software developer, a better person, and having a better life and better happiness in general, rather than just focusing on technical skills, which are important but not as important as the soft skills. I'm going to tell you kind of a story about a person I was coaching and how we got him the job and how you can apply this.
If you're just starting out, if you're watching this video and you're not a programmer yet, you haven't gotten your first programming job, that's your first job. The advice I can give you in this video is going to tell you from once you've gotten that job, how to get to the six figure developer. But if you never gotten a job before, the very first thing that you should do is get a job. Don't worry about how much it pays. Getting that first job is initially very difficult, so you need to really focus on doing that. Some of this advice is going to apply to you, just not the numbers as far as the salary numbers, but the advice I'm going to give you will apply.
Let me give you this story here. So I was coaching one of my coaching clients. This guy, he, he came to me and he basically was making like $60K or $70K a year, and he thought, “Okay, I can't really improve that. I just have a few years experience, and I've been at this shop for a couple of years.” He just really didn't have much confidence that someone would pay him a lot more money. What I told him was I said, “Okay, well, let me see your skillset. Let me see your resume.” I looked at it, and he had a couple of years' experience. He had a pretty decent skill set, nothing phenomenal, but I said, “Well, what are you specializing in?” He didn't know. I helped him kind of figure out what to specialize in, some specific technology.
Then I had him take his resume, and we went to a resume writer, and they rewrote the resume to make it look very, very professional. It's worth spending money on a good resume writer. Then what we did was we came up with the strategy, right? I told him, here's the deal. Here's what you need to do. It's basically a numbers game. If we look at distribution of the pay that people will pay you and who will hire you, it's sort of like this bell curve, right? What I mean by that is that a majority of jobs might fall into the category of $60, $70, $80K that you're making now, right? But what will happen is that on the extreme end, it's going to be less okay as you increase that salary, but there's still a bunch there. There's still a big chunk. There's still a fat chunk that we can find there. What we've got to do is we've got to find this company.
It's a matter of how many companies you reach out to, because here's the thing. Right now in this world, there is probably a thousand companies that will pay you six figures if you're a software developer right now, regardless of what your real skill level is. If you can write code, there's some company that will pay a warm body six figures. I know this. I know this because I never recruiters, I know the industry, I know that. Now, I'm hoping that you're better than that, that you've developed some soft skills, that you've subscribed to this channel and you've developed your career communication skills, and you've got some good technical skills, but just knowing how to code, there is at least a thousand companies right now that would hire you and you specifically based on your personality, your background, or whatever hiring criteria they're using, and they would pay you six figures.
All you've got to do is find those companies or find one of those companies, right? What it comes down to is a numbers game. Think of it this way is like a sales process, a sales funnel. Essentially, a sales pipeline, looks like this. You have a bunch of leads that come in, okay? Then you have a next step, which is the follow up, and then you have the people that have made it to they've contacted you back, and then you have the next stage, which is the people that you have expressed a positive interest, that you maybe you set up a demo with. Then you have the next step where you have pitched them an offer, and then the next step where they've closed, and then the next step where you've gotten payment or whatever it is, right? You've got this essential funnel. It's more of a pipeline when we talk about sales.
It's the same thing with the job search, right? So let's say that you have a job right now making $70K a year like, like my coaching client did. What I had them do is I said, “Okay, look, we're just going to fill up the pipe. We're going to start tracking the metrics on this, because what we want to know is how many jobs you have to apply for in order for you to get an offer.” Maybe for some people it might be a hundred. For some people it might be 50. For some people might be 200. I don't know, but every single job you need to do the best job of applying for that job.
What you really want to do is you want to figure out, okay, maybe I'm going to apply for 10 jobs a day. I'm going to spend an hour or half an hour on each job application, tailoring my resume to customize it for that job, writing a custom cover letter or customizing my cover letter, researching the information from the company so that I can know, trying to find some people on LinkedIn that I can reach out to that I can say, “Hey. By the way, I'm submitting an application for this job. I just wanted to reach out to you and see if you had any tips or any advice or just make connections with those people.”
Maybe you're only going to do five a day, but whatever it is, but don't just spam, click on Monster or Dice or whatever it is and apply for all these jobs, all right? Instead, you're specifically tailoring it, but you have a quota. If you put five pipes, let's say five jobs in the pipeline per day, then in a week you're going to have 35 jobs that you applied for. Then out of those 35 jobs, maybe you're going to get, let's say 15 callbacks if you do a really good job. Of those 15 callbacks, maybe out of those you're going to get three or four interviews, and out of those, maybe you're going to get one or two offers.
As long as you are applying for the jobs that are within that salary range that you're looking for, you're going to get some of those ones that are going to be six figures, right? To get a six figure job is not that that difficult, but the reason why most developers aren't able to do that if you've been trying to is because they're not looking at enough companies. They're applying for one or two jobs, or they're spam applying for jobs and just seeing who responds to them. The odds, if there's a thousand companies out here that will pay you a six figure salary and you only apply for two jobs or two companies, what's the odds that you're going to hit one of those out of the millions of jobs that are out there?
You've got to kind of expand that. Then once you know what that ratio is, right? So if you've been doing this for a while and you start doing this application and you're doing it every single week as new jobs coming into the market every single week, you're going to have an idea. You're going to say, “Okay, well, for every so many jobs that I apply for that go through my pipeline, that I put into the beginning of the pipeline, I get this many offers.” Then you'll be able to start judging those offers and start negotiating on those offers until you get what you want. You might have to be patient. Let's say that you're at a job right now making $70K a year and you want to get a six figure job, okay? The simple thing that you do it, here's some simple steps that I would do if I were you.
The first thing I would do is I would decide something that I'm going to specialize in. What is my niche, right? Specialization is very important. You will pay a brain surgeon more than a general practitioner. Why? You will pay a lawyer who specializes in criminal defense, if you need criminal defense, more than the general legal counsel. Why? Because they're specialized, So specialization is important.
Number two, I would take my resume now that I know what I'm specialized in, give it to a professional resume writer, and get it professionally done. It's not cheating. This is the smartest thing. If you were running an ad campaign for your company, you would hire an advertising company to make the ad. You wouldn't make it yourself on your fucking cell phone. So many developers that are like, “Oh, I can't hire a resume writer,” it's so stupid, because this is an ad campaign for you. It's your ad, all right? Companies are going to see your resume. That's what they're going to see it. They're going to throw it in the trashcan if it's not good, if it doesn't look good, all right? So you need to do that.
Number three, develop a system for applying for jobs and track that, okay? When you apply for these jobs, apply meticulously. Spend the extra effort, the extra time to do the research on the company to fill out, to change your resume, to alter it so it looks like a perfect fit for that job. Okay? The same thing with the cover letter. Spend some time making contacts. Spend some time figuring out how you can apply for that job in the best way possible and rinse and repeat and track all that.
What you're going to do is you're going to track it over time and you're going to look at your conversion rate from one step to the other, right? If you apply for 50 jobs, you should be getting at least maybe 10 callbacks where you're getting a response from them. If you're not, you need to improve something. You're not applying very well, or you're applying for the wrong jobs, or there's something that you need to improve. You can test that. Then if you're seeing a good response, then you're doing a good thing, right? You want to optimize all the steps along that pipeline so that you're increasing your chances of getting a callback, increasing your chances of getting an in person interview, and then following up all along that line.
If you continue to do that, and then the last thing that you do is that you do this over time and you're patient and you're willing to wait three months and continue this process until you get that job, eventually it's going to come. It's just really a numbers game. Just like a sales process, it really is a numbers game. Now. There's obviously more to it, increasing your technical skills and increasing your soft skills and communication and marketing yourself is a way to get jobs to come to you. Again, I've got a course on how to Mark yourself as a software developer that you can check out in the link below, but that's the strategy. Anyone can do this. Even if you're a new developer, you just need to get your first job, and then you can start applying this. You can use this tactic to get your first job, because you don't really care how much it pays when you're getting your first job. I'll talk to you guys next time. Take care.