How I landed a job as a college dropout /u/optic5808 CSCQ protests reddit

Hi everyone, I’m Asiqur, a 23-year-old software engineer currently working at Codédex.

As the title mentions, I’m a college drop out who managed to somehow land a job. Not during covid but in 2023 when the job market was almost as bad as it is now.

TLDR: Prioritize connections over anything else and just ask for things.

I dropped out of college after a semester. I wont get into the reasons why but it’s something I have 0 regrets of doing. After dropping out, I went the route of self learning, I didn’t attend any bootcamp or programs during this time. Instead I learned everything off of Youtube and creating projects. Not your todo list projects but projects I wanted to actually use myself and turn into a business. You can look through my post history to see the ones I’m talking about. This was during the beginning of 2020.

I did this for almost 2-3 years, creating different projects and seeing how much I can grow them. Most of them were fails but some of them had moderate success. During this I wasn’t really looking for a job…to this day I still dont have a proper resume. Then one day, I received a message from Sonny (founder of Codédex) through Linkedin to check out a project he was working on. I took a look at it, found it interesting and joined the Discord they had. I was lurking in their for a month or two, only interacting for somethings. After two months, I decided to send him a message through discord DM’s. That message was a pitch to let me work on Codédex, the pitch basically went like “Yo you dont have to pay me but lemme just help build this thing and see how a startup is ran. Then if things work out we can see about actually being onboarded”. My thinking from my personal side was, “I’ve been doing this for two years, and none of my projects have really blown up. So lemme see how a actual startup is ran and what I can get from it”. But long story short, the answer was yes, I then moved on to full time (Jan 2023) and it’s been two years since then. I’m now considered a founding team member. So a lot has happened.

But the question is why was it a yes to a frankly dumb pitch. This all happened because prior to this I actually knew Sonny. Not well but through a early career internship. In high school I was in a program that gets students internship during senior year of high school. During this I was put in the company he was working at the time as a high school intern. After the internship, I added as many people as I could from that internship on Linkedin. This was in 2019. Through that connection, almost 3 years later, I received that initial message from him because of that connection.

Because of that connection and asking (even though I knew it was a dumb ask but I still asked lol) I managed to somehow land a job.

Hi everyone, I’m Asiqur, a 23-year-old software engineer currently working at Codédex.

As the title mentions, I’m a college drop out who managed to somehow land a job. Not during covid but in 2023 when the job market was almost as bad as it is now.

TLDR: Prioritize connections over anything else and just ask for things.

I dropped out of college after a semester. I wont get into the reasons why but it’s something I have 0 regrets of doing. After dropping out, I went the route of self learning, I didn’t attend any bootcamp or programs during this time. Instead I learned everything off of Youtube and creating projects. Not your todo list projects but projects I wanted to actually use myself and turn into a business. You can look through my post history to see the ones I’m talking about. This was during the beginning of 2020.

I did this for almost 2-3 years, creating different projects and seeing how much I can grow them. Most of them were fails but some of them had moderate success. During this I wasn’t really looking for a job…to this day I still dont have a proper resume. Then one day, I received a message from Sonny (founder of Codédex) through Linkedin to check out a project he was working on. I took a look at it, found it interesting and joined the Discord they had. I was lurking in their for a month or two, only interacting for somethings. After two months, I decided to send him a message through discord DM’s. That message was a pitch to let me work on Codédex, the pitch basically went like “Yo you dont have to pay me but lemme just help build this thing and see how a startup is ran. Then if things work out we can see about actually being onboarded”. My thinking from my personal side was, “I’ve been doing this for two years, and none of my projects have really blown up. So lemme see how a actual startup is ran and what I can get from it”. But long story short, the answer was yes, I then moved on to full time (Jan 2023) and it’s been two years since then. I’m now considered a founding team member. So a lot has happened.

But the question is why was it a yes to a frankly dumb pitch. This all happened because prior to this I actually knew Sonny. Not well but through a early career internship. In high school I was in a program that gets students internship during senior year of high school. During this I was put in the company he was working at the time as a high school intern. After the internship, I added as many people as I could from that internship on Linkedin. This was in 2019. Through that connection, almost 3 years later, I received that initial message from him because of that connection.

Because of that connection and asking (even though I knew it was a dumb ask but I still asked lol) I managed to somehow land a job.