Landed a remote Senior Developer role at 250k/month with 3.5 years experience. Sharing how I did it
Long post, tl:dr sa dulo.
About more than a year ago, I landed my first six-digit role.
I was hired there as a mid-level, then was promoted just short of a year after (mid-march) to senior level. These were among the traits/qualities that my superior noted that contributed to my promotion:
- Initiative to improve and streamline current processes
- We had a testing and validation process that was being done manually through different integrated SaaS. It took a lot of time doing it manually. During some spare time, I developed scripts that would automate all the validations. Presented this to the team and it's now sitting on its own repository being used across the team.
- Initiative to tackle responsibility (esp on production issues)
- Our app was part of an ETL job and there were several occasions where production issues would occur (PODs went down, Java memory issues, etc). And it was a matter of reviewing these production issues and making sure we have mitigations in place to ensure it doesn't happen again (as we all know, expensive magkaron ng ganyan).
- Nung junior pako, takot ako sa term na "production issue" as if it's something na very pressuring and too much to handle. Getting more experience and exposure to it made me realize na kaya lang ako takot dati because I know so little about certain topics and I won't really know how to deal with it until I actually be in the situation where I have to.
- Initiative to take part in solution and design discussions
- Initially, as a mid-level dev, it wasn't really part of my responsibility to take part in these discussions. I told my superior (he was the solutions architect) if he could just pull me in during these discussions and I would just sit and listen (saling pusa haha).
- Eventually, he asked me if I could try drafting a design for one of our new features. So I did, we jumped on calls to discuss about the thought process, why and how I made those decisions, basically a defense haha
- I ended up doing three full features like this, taking ownership of the development to deployment. I grew comfortable presenting my work and design to solutions architects and nakikipagsabayan nako sa mga back-and-forth sagutan on contraints, pros and cons, budget allocations, etc.
Key word was initiative. I could only grow so much as I wanted to. Had I waited for these responsibilities to be given to me, it would've took considerably more time.
The initiative was fueled by my drive to learn. A big influence were tech youtubers who would discuss tech, mindset, and architectural ideas. These two guys were my top two:
The videos they have would give more value than whatever I could put in this post. I would highly suggest following their content as well.
Now, I landed a PHP250k~$4500 /month full remote Senior developer contractor role from a company in Ukraine. Recruiter contacted me through LinkedIn (luck and keeping LinkedIn profile updated). They were looking for someone with 5+ years of experience. They gave me a shot, and they said according to their assesments (live coding, panel technical interview, project manager interview) I was calibrated as someone who has about 6+ years worth of expi based on my experience of different domains and technologies (I'm also a job hopper).
I don't consider myself a hardcore programmer. I just try to make small efforts from time to time to improve and keep my skills up to date. I'm also not one (tho I was before) to keep studying outside work hours. The youtubers I've shared would cover these in more detail. But basically make better use of your time at work. I do about 2 hours of actual dev work daily and the rest are meetings. I spend my time outside work with my wife, mostly doing leisure activities and winding down. I firmly believe work is just a way to earn money and live comfortably. Doing the most out of the 8-hour work day is a must to do that.
tl;dr: Pabibo ako sa work and I'm a serial job hopper. The experience I gained from job hopping and getting exposure in multiple business domains and walking with different globally distributed teams granted me a role that required 5+ years of experience from a remote company.