Is Hard to Find a Job in Covid as a Junior Android Developer?
Hi all, I’m Begum. I’m a software engineer. I work as a freelancer and in the meantime, I looking for a permanent Android developer position in London.
While preparing for an interview, I’m always googling how can I prepare, which websites should I use, how an interview structure is, and so on. But I didn’t find an article that guides how to prepare for your next Android interview for a junior role so I wanted to write this article to share my interview experience.
What do junior Android Developer job postings expect?
Generally, we should know these;
- Good understanding of Android app architecture and use of design patterns,
- An instinct for excellent app design and user experience,
- Understanding of web services and REST APIs,
- Jetpack components,
- Experience with RxJava, Coroutines, Koin, Retrofit, and Dagger,
- LiveData, Room, Firebase,
- Experience with MVVM, MVP, or similar,
- Unit & UI testing frameworks,
- Code versioning tools (for instance Github),
- Scrum / Kanban experience,
- CI/CD tools,
- At least one app published in the Google Play Store (Some company wants it)
The interview process might differ from company to company they might expect specific libraries.
How I teach myself Android Development?
After I graduated from CS, I started my career on the database development side then I’ve noticed my interest in android app development so I wanted to continue my career on the android side. Firstly, I read Head First Kotlin's book which I love! The language of the book is easy, pellucid, and has so many examples. So I highly recommended it to you all. Next, I started the android fundamental course which is so useful and informative. After finishing this course, you will have learned everything to develop a simple android application. After I completed the minimum required things, I started to develop my own project Popcorn which shows popular movies and tv shows, using Kotlin and Google Jetpack Libraries. I’ve used these technologies in my project; Kotlin, MVVM Architecture, Coroutine, Live Data, Retrofit, Moshi, JUnit testing to learn and practice. During this time I learned a lot of things not just for coding ie. how to start a new project from scratch, what to do when stuck etc.
By the way, I’d like to share the ‘Android Learning Path’.
Which websites do I use to apply for a job?
I use these websites;
- Linkedin (mostly)
- Glassdoor
- Technojobs
- WorkInStartups
- Hired
At the same time, I’ve updated my Linkedin profile like below
And I turned on “open to work” on Linkedin
How do I prepare for interviews?
In my experience, generally, a junior android developer interview has 3 stages;
- HR Interview: Firstly company’s recruiter introduces the company and job briefly. The recruiter asks several questions about you and your experience ie. Why did you apply for this job? Tell me about yourself? Why should we hire you? which are common questions. You could look at this article to find out more similar questions.
- Technical Interview: This interview might be different from the company. Some companies send a project and then if your project passes the stage, they invite you to an on-site interview. Generally, this interview is about the project overview and some technical Android questions. While preparing the technical interview I found these android interview questions(ref1,ref2) which are super useful.
- Product Manager & Designer Interview: For this interview, I looked into the company’s app on the Play store, read the users' reviews as well and then I prepared some questions which are like ‘How do designers and developers work together?’, ‘Does X app support accessibility?’, ‘When you develop a new feature, how do you test in on users’, etc. for asking the team. While preparing I found this article that I liked.
How do I keep myself up to date?
I follow these groups;
- Android Weekly
- ProAndroidDev
- Android Developers
- The Startup
- Better Programming
- Google Developers
- Coding in Flow
- Coding With Mitch
If you wanna make a basic Kotlin practice you can use this website that has lots of Kotlin examples.
What should we pay attention to when get rejected?
As a candidate, We apply for the jobs to get an offer or get feedback to improve ourselves. Both of them are very important things. If you get an offer, the choice is yours. But If you didn’t get an offer you should get feedback to improve yourself. Unfortunately, some companies don’t give feedback, they just sent a mail with one line rejection reason which is not acceptable! Because you spent your valuable time and you must get feedback for future interviews. At the same time, you can understand the company by the interview process whether a company is good or bad?
I’d like to share this part of the article. What should we expect from the company when we get rejected?
Start by highlighting the person’s strengths, what you like, what they do well. You can compliment their work experience and thank them for their passion during the process. Then, provide the criticism, framing it as a way to improve. At the end, round out your feedback by going back to another point of praise.
