I’ve had a very tough time finding my first position as a junior dev and have been looking into getting a paid mentor to help me out. Someone who can give me a specific, clear idea of what skills I might need to have, refine, etc, as well as some looser guidance and direction after losing my confidence.
Do any of you have experience with services like this? Somewhere like Mentor Cruise or something similar?
Edit: to be clear, I’m looking for my first role as a web developer, ideally frontend with React (which is what I feel most confident in). I’ve been at this for over a year and a half - I do have a portfolio, Github, etc with projects in JS and some basic Python. I’m aware of how to look for a job, but actually getting anyone to look at me has been the hard part, as I’ve only had two interviews that went nowhere. The handful of people who’ve seen my portfolio seemed fine with it and the impression I have is that it is enough to demonstrate my skill level, but I’m still getting very little back.
If you have some questions why not post here? I’m unfamiliar with “services” (places that charge their own fees on top of what the mentor gets) and think it’s probably better to engage someone directly. The thing is, doing it as a business proposition sounds expensive if you’re paying with personal funds. Consulting rates for someone good will be pretty steep.
What are you good at now? What do you want to get better at? What kind of work do you want to do?
I’ve posted in other communities (like on Reddit) and largely gotten vague, very poor, or aggressive responses. My hope with a dedicated mentor is that I’d get someone I can work with over a few months to figure out what the issues are in my search. Although it’s not bonkers expensive, it does cost a decent chunk of change.
I’m mostly interested in webdev right now - my main skill set is in React and Node but I’m much more comfortable in frontend work. I’ve been working on learning C#/.NET since many jobs in my city want it and I find it a bit more intuitive, but it’s been slow going learning a whole new language and framework while working full time at a non-dev job. A longer term goal for me is to move into game dev but I’ve put that on hold because of the hard times that industry is going through, of course.
I see, hmm. Do you hang out on hacker news? News.ycombinator.com. it is an ok place to make contacts. I could help with backend dev but not the areas you mentioned.
Stay away from game dev unless you’re independent. That industry sucks even worse than web dev.