If you’ve been following what I have been saying in other pieces, feel free to skip ahead to the advice in the next session.

If you haven’t, though, there’s some context I usually provide — and I talk about it more extensively in my career change and stand-out skill articles— which essentially boils down to the following: I recently became a full-time software engineer, switching from a 12-year-career in business/data science & analytics, strategic planning, and reporting. …

At nearly 30 years old, I decided to turn my life around and become a full-time software developer even though I came from a non-technical background.

That became a pretty crazy story that I documented in this article, but the reason I’m mentioning this is that, in spite of graduating in Business Administration, I managed to land quite a few software engineering contracts and had a lot of positive feedback afterward. To me, it was mind-blowing. I had little actual experience building real-world applications, but I achieved it for a very simple reason.

I assure you this is not clickbait…

It’s pretty common for companies to flat out reject your application without giving you a hint on their decision. This time, however, I got feedback for real.

As a fairly new developer, coming from a non-technical background, my learning curve has been very steep.

I was once rejected in a selection process after handing over a technical test. I was asked to create a full-stack application that read a list of 25 sales records and returned a filterable, paginated table (six records at a time).

The main requirements were:

• Create a backend with Node.js and Express
• Create a frontend with…