Breaking Barriers: Landing my first ever tech interview with a Japanese company as a self-taught developer

I would have never guessed that my first ever interview for a web developer position would be with a Japanese company, but here I am, sharing this story with you.

It was a random day in October 2023 when I got a message on LinkedIn from this recruiter from a Japanese tech company based in Shizuoka. I was feeling absolutely ecstatic reading his message, which was saying that I have to complete a coding challenge as part of their recruitment process. After facing numerous rejections over the course of several months, I finally got the chance to do my best and get a foot in the door.

In a market where even experienced developers struggle with getting interviews, having this chance as a self-taught developer with no previous work experience was a really big deal for me, even more so since the company was offering sponsored visas for relocation to Japan.

There was only one single big problem I was facing: the app they were demanding had to be written in Angular. At that time my experience with Angular was inexistent, making it an exceptionally intimidating challenge.

Despite the lack of knowledge in Angular, I decided to take this challenge as an opportunity to further improve my programming skills.

They even specified that since it will take many hours and it's totally find if I completed only 50% of the app. Since I don't like to do things halfway, I decided to commit to fully implementing everything they demanded in the figma file.

I started from the Angular documentation (since I was a total noob at it), made my way through the figma file and the API instructions, even added the extra features and animations for "bonus points" as they called them.

Some of the requirements:

Small fraction of the figma file:

All in all, I managed to develop a fully functional app that precisely matched the Figma design within a timeframe of less than three days, believe it or not.

You can check out the app i built here.

After submitting the completed app, it only took them a matter of hours to respond: "We want to set up your first interview next week."

At this point I was in complete disbelief that I actually managed to get my first ever interview in the tech industry as a self-taught. Even more surprising was the fact that after hundreds of rejections, the first company to give me a chance was a Japanese one.

Fast-forward to the next week: I got my interview with the HR guy, who asked me some very basic questions about myself and why I want to work for them. It went fairly good, besides the fact that I also got asked about my experience, which was basically 0. I had a bad feeling about this one.

Fast-forward a few more days: I got rejected.

Why, you may wonder.

Well, while building the app I searched for similar project names on github projects and I found quite a few other candidated building the very same app, the only difference being that those guys had some solid experience as web developers, so in my opinion that was the determining factor.

To sum up, while the outcome wasn't exactly what I expected, I consider my first interview a noteworthy achievement.

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Hope to see you on the next one.