While I was in High School I looked at the possible options ahead of me. The obvious option was to go onto college, but I was also looking at another option. I wanted to try to get a job working as a programmer and skip college altogether. Given the number of people that have skipped college and made their way directly into the tech industry, I’m surprised at how little there is written about what it’s like to go through the process. In this post, I explain, for people who are thinking about getting a job straight out of high school, what it’s like to go through the process and what obstacles you’ll run into along the way.
The first thing I will say is that it’s definitely possible to get a programming job without a college degree. I did it myself and wound up with offers from numerous companies including Google, Uber, and Dropbox, as well as several lesser known, smaller companies. Second, if you do decide to look for a job out of high school, I highly recommend applying to college and deferring for a year. Deferring will guarantee you have the option to go to school in case your job search doesn’t pan out.
As for actually getting a programming job straight out of high school, there are two main hurdles you will run into. First, you have to get companies to interview you. This stage will be especially tough for you. Second, after getting companies to interview you, you will be put into their interview processes. For most companies, the interview process consists of a several phone calls and an in person interview at the end. In each round you will be asked to solve one or more programming related problems. In most interviews, you will be asked to only describe a solution. In many of the interviews you also will be asked to write code for a working solution. Once you make it through a company’s interview process, you will find yourself with a job offer.
It’s important to emphasize that, for the most part, these two stages are completely separate. Once you get your foot in the door, how well your application looks does not matter. You could have the best application in the world, but if you fail a company’s interview they will still reject you.
Hurdle #1: Getting Companies to Interview You
There are many different approaches you can take to get companies to interview you and there is a lot of surprisingly bad advice out there. Here’s a list of several different approaches you can try and whether or not they work informed by my personal experience. Let’s start with the approaches that I found not to work:
What Does Not Work
Applying to a Company Directly
If you submit an application directly to a company, in most cases your resume will be sent to a recruiter. The recruiter will look at your resume and decide whether it’s worth the companies time to interview you. Usually when a recruiter looks at your application, they will first look for one of two things: a college degree from a well known school or prior experience at a well known tech company. Since you have neither of those things you are almost guaranteed to be rejected before you even start interviewing. You may hope that some company will take the risk and decide to interview you since you are straight out of high school, but as far as I know, no company actually does this.
When I tried applying directly to several companies, I did not get into the interview process for any of them. That was in spite of the fact that I had a Knuth check, several interesting side projects, and had won the Illinois statewide WYSE competition in Computer Science.
Contributing to Open Source
For some reason a lot of advice suggests that if you want to get a programming job, you should contribute to some open source software projects. As I see it, there are two things you can hope to gain out of working on open source:
- It looks good on your resume and you think it will help you pass the application process.
- You hope companies will see your open source contributions and reach out to you directly.
Regarding 1, as mentioned above, most recruiters first look for either a degree from a well known school or prior experience at a well known company. Without either of those, any open source contributions you have won’t matter. Most companies don’t even take a look at what open source projects you’ve worked on.
As for 2, in general companies only reach out to open source contributions if they are one of the core developers of a well known open source project. While it is possible to get interviews this way, the amount of effort you would have to put in is way more than it’s worth. The approaches I recommend later will help get you get interviews with a lot less effort.
As for approaches that actually work, here are two I’ve found that have worked. Both of them try to bypass the traditional resume screen and get you straight into companies’ interview processes.
What Does Work
Applying Through a Company that does Recruiting
There are a number of companies that will take care of the application process for you. Most of the job offers I got out of high school came out of the Recurse Center. The Recurse Center is a three month long program in New York where programmers work together on whatever projects they want. Although helping attendees find jobs isn’t the purpose of the Recurse Center, they do help all attendees looking for a job find one. After my time at the Recurse Center ended, I started looking for a job. The Recurse Center reached out to companies on my behalf and was able to get me straight into some companies’ interview pipelines. Even with the Recurse Center reaching out to companies on my behalf, I still only had ~1/3 companies decide to interview me, but that was enough for me to get several job offers.
Triplebyte is another option here. Triplebyte is a recruiting company that has their own interview process. If you pass their interview process, Triplebyte will then send you straight to the last round of interviews at other companies. If you are really good at technical interviews (described below), you should be able to pass Triplebyte’s interview process. Once you pass their interview, they will make sure you get interviews from other companies.
Networking
Another approach I’ve found successful is networking. If you have a friend at a company you want to work for and you can get them to refer you, they should be able to get you past the resume screen. Unfortunately, since you are straight out of high school, you probably don’t have much of a network so this option probably isn’t viable to you. If you do not already have a network, it is probably not worth building out a network just to get a job. In that case, you should try the approach above and apply through a company that handles the application process for you because it will take a lot less effort on your part.
Hurdle #2: Passing the Interview
Once you make it into a company’s interview process, all you need to do to get a job offer from them is to do well in their interview process. In general, programming interviews today across Most companies are very similar. Usually a company will ask you multiple algorithmic problems and you just need to be able to solve them to succeed in their interview. You may also be asked to write code that solves the problem.
An example of a question you will may run into is “Write a function that takes as input a number N and returns the number of different ways to make change for N cents.”
If you aren’t familiar with algorithm problems and how to solve them, there are tons of resources available. The book, Cracking the Coding Interview walks you through lots of different interview problems and how to solve them. If you want a comprehensive resource that covers everything you need to know, I really like the book Introduction to Algorithms. At over 1300 pages, it is a really long book, but it does cover everything you will need to know to solve algorithm related interview problems.
If you want to practice solving interview problems, the website LeetCode has many different algorithmic coding problems. The easy problems in the array section are about the difficulty you should expect in a programming interview. For any of those problems, you should be able to implement a program that solves the problem and be able to explain its runtime (in terms of big O notation) in <45 minutes.
In general, you should be familiar with the following:
- What big O notation is and how to apply it. Given a piece of code or algorithm you should be able to easily determine its run time complexity and explain why it has that complexity.
- All of the basic data structures (arrays, linked lists, hash tables, heaps, binary trees). For each data structure you should have all of the operations and the runtime of each operation memorized.
- Basic algorithms (breadth first search, depth first search, quicksort, mergesort, binary search) and their runtimes.
- Dynamic Programming. Dynamic programing is an algorithmic technique for solving various algorithms problems. I’m not sure why, but tons of companies ask problems that can be solved with dynamic programming.
There are a few companies that have started to move away from algorithm related interview problems, but the vast majority still ask them. You should mainly focus on learning how to solve algorithm problems and that should give you enough to pass the interview process at many different companies.
That’s really all there is to getting a job straight out of high school. It can all be boiled down to getting good at two things: getting your foot in the door and getting really good at algorithm problems. If you are able to do both of these things, you will be able to start getting job offers fairly quickly. It isn’t impossible to get a programming job straight out of high school, you just need to work for it.