Advice for landing entry level software gig

Get into Web development. That has the lowest barrier to entry and there always are job openings. She cannot be too picky initially. Get anything as long as it is Web Development. She knows Python already ? Great. Tell her to learn Flask or Django frameworks and start looking for jobs.

Try to find jobs at agencies or smaller companies in the beginning. It is easier to talk to decision makers and possibly get a gig. It may be low salary but once you get a break, you can then look at many options. The 1st one will be tough unless you got lucky and got your dream job.

My first thought is to work with the employment office at the university. Typically, universities have staff dedicated to finding jobs for graduates.

Also, talking to professors and instructors in the department.

CS is just like any other field, it is mostly who you know with a strong dose of fitting the expected social background...e.g. the fat part of the distribution of new grads.

People tend to hire people who have similar backgrounds. Sometimes they hire people with expected backgrounds. People who hire people with unusual but unexciting backgrounds are rare.

Good luck.

Hey, I'm like 95% sure that I know who your wife is, if she is who I think it is, I would gladly refer her to the company I work for. We're hiring and I know her to be very smart.

If her initials are J.B., let me know and I'll message her on LinkedIn

My experience is from a different country but some tips may still apply: * The first job may be the hardest to land, and may take months, be strong, it's often much easier after that. * Very important: there are two stages at landing a job, being called for interviews and succeeding at the interviews, if the first is the challenge she may want to improve her CV, if the other she may want to improve her interviews skills. Assuming the first stage is the challenge, maybe her CV and LinkedIn aren't optimized, don't contain the right keywords, etc. You or someone you know may be able to ramp up her CV, probably someone with experience in the industry, often while interviewing her to add any relevant experiences: if she'll try to remember, there may be experiences and projects that can contribute once written in a suitable lingo, now is not the time to be humble, if an experience had programming then it's a 'developer experience', etc. At the end of the process her CV should be visually satisfying, contain the relevant buzz words, and hopefully have more rows of experience than before, with more suitable and impressing work titles (if you aren't a CV guru or don't know one, someone online may help). * If a long time has passed since her graduation, it may become an issue as well (there's a fallacy that talented people are hired fast) so don't emphasize it by writing the exact date. * She should probably send her CV to several dozen places each day * Consider a CV for every job type (one for ML, one for C++, etc.) * Stackoverflow has remote jobs, this could enlarge the amount of jobs available * Time to call friends and family members and ask if their company is looking, many places have a referral bonus so they'll want to help too. * Not sure if it'll work in the Zoom era, but it may be good to attend Meetups and technical gatherings, sometimes people use those as recruitment platforms, and mingling may also create leads. * Time to call the friends who learned with her, did they get a job? How did they get it? Is their company looking for people? * Join online/mail/WhatsApp groups of people looking and offering jobs * Did she try talking to Placement Companies? * She can take the QA gig, and try to automate it as much as possible to create experience. But she will want to keep sending resumes and attending interviews while doing the gig. * She can join open source projects, hackathons, etc. It may enrich her resume and provide networking opportunities. * She can also create open source projects, e.g. if she had ML experience, a simple project with a few lines of code may still look good on her CV with a cool project idea and a link to the repository. * Is she a part of an organized social group? time to ask them if they know of jobs. * Not sure if partial/student jobs are easier to land, but if they do, it may be a good opportunity to enter a company and search for a full time position from within, or just using the job to enhance the resume and get some money while keeping on sending CVs.

I Hope some of those will help, be strong, taking a lot of time for the first job happens to a lot of people (maybe even to most people), it's not her, just the way the market treat the 'new folks', something that happens regardless of how talented she really is.

Is she hearing back from companies initially? If not, she might be applying to the wrong jobs (old, not actually hiring, wrong skills or experience level, etc). She might need to fix up her resume, LinkedIn profile, etc.

Does she have at least one decent looking publicly accessible project? That can help.

She should consider blogging about technical things to demonstrate she can communicate about technical things. 5-10 posts is all you need. That can help.

She should network. Get referred to jobs. Meet people by participating in organizations doing events (online and or in person), volunteering e.g. Code for America. Do informational interviews. Etc.

Then there's the phone stage, the pair programming stage. Each stage has its skills to work on.

She'll find a job if she engages with the process. Job searching is a grind. Find a support group.