My game plan for landing my next role

Background

I've been in the industry for about 3 years now. My first role was an Apprenticeship at Microsoft through their LEAP program. My second role was at a company called Clover, and then my third and current one is at JPMorgan & Chase Co. (JPMC)

I have been at JPMC for 2 years now. I have grown so much in this time, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity. I've been now on two teams where I have a ton about Java, microservices, APIs, and team collaboration. I've also been able to use super cool tools that I really enjoy, like Terraform, Jenkins, GitHub Copilot, and the cloud.

Before joining JPMC I had no AWS experience at all, and now I've had the pleasure of using a wide variety of services such as: Lambdas, EC2, S3, Aurora Posgres (I love this thing), SNS, SQS, ECS, and a few others.

I’ve definitely enjoyed my time here. However, I can’t help but feel like my career isn’t growing as much or as fast as it could be somewhere else. Fintech companies have to move slower because the industry is so heavily regulated. Using the latest AI tools is basically never possible, and switching to a completely different tech stack—even if it makes sense—isn't an option.

These companies have their own opinionated tools and tech stacks. Even here, they have internal tools that are mostly wrappers around things like React, Spring Boot, Jenkins, etc. They abstract away a ton of how the actual tools work, which makes things easier, but in my opinion it keeps developers from learning how things really function—and in the long run, it hurts them.

New plan

With all of this in mind, I’ve made a plan for how I want to land my next role. For my previous two jobs at Microsoft and Clover, I got the offers by literally applying to close to—or more than—hundreds of companies. I was basically playing the numbers game. I applied through LinkedIn, Indeed, and company portals, and eventually I got a job.

For both of those roles it took about 4–6 months. This time around I’ve learned a few things that I’m going to apply.

Here is what I want to put into practice:

  • Target and apply to a very small number of companies that I really want to work for.
  • Modify my resume for each job description. (Yes, I didn’t know about this / never did it before.)
  • Create content, contribute to open source, and network.
  • Level up by applying learning concepts I’ve picked up from books like Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley and Ultralearning by Scott H. Young.

I thought about how to find companies I’d be interested in working for. I decided to come up with a few sectors and then pick 5–10 companies from each. Some of them were:

  • Big Tech
  • Space
  • SaaS companies

Once I had a few companies to target in each sector, I looked at their SWE job openings and wrote down the technologies and skills they were looking for. With that data, I was able to come up with a SWE profile that matches what those companies generally expect.

Besides that, I’m also networking and trying to get referrals for each of those companies before applying. That way my chances of landing an interview are much higher.

End

With all of this, I’m hoping to land a new role within ~2 months. Please wish me luck.

If you’re looking for a role, let me know how you’re going about it—and I wish you the best.