The Monday Byte

Welcome to the Monday Byte where I send you 5 things each week so you can improve your English and land a remote dev job.

📖 Word/Phrase - companies market vs candidates market

In real estate, there are two terms: buyers market and sellers market. In a buyers market, there are more homes for sale than buyers so buyers have the upperhand and can buy houses for cheaper.

In a sellers market, the opposite is true. Whichever word comes before market means that group has more advantages.

Well when you're looking for a job, there are two parties: companies and candidates. In the current market, there are more people looking than companies hiring (due to the layoffs) so it's a companies market.

💬 Pronunciation - Bun 1.0 Video

I want you to watch this video because it's a great example for shadowing or chorusing. Why?

• fantastic audio quality

• you can tell they used scripts

• speakers are talking to cameras (easy to follow)

• native English speakers

It's only 9-minutes long too. And, it has a lot of technical vocabulary. This means, if you can imitate them, this will help your pronunciation tremendously. Give it a watch and let me know how it goes!

🗣️ Real World Conversation - Communication is HUGE

The fact that you're reading this probably means this is news to you. BUT, there's a reason I'm saying this again…

There is one thing that keeps getting mentioned during my job hunt as a strength of mine: communication. Why? Companies value it. A TON.

I know I'm not the world's greatest coder. And I never will be.

But there's one thing I can beat other candidates on - communication.

I say this because I want you to imagine this. Imagine a company has to choose between two candidates. Both are non-native English:

• Candidate A is very technical (8+ years) but speaks broken English

• Candidate B is less technical (3+ years) but speaks English very well (conversational in business setting)

Who do you think they're going to choose? 9/10 Candidate B. Why? Because that person communicates well. The technical part can be improved on the job.

🔗 Content - Senior Developer Roadmap 

“Man…I love freeCodeCamp and The Odin Project but I wish there was a similar structure for Senior Developers” I told my friend Tony the other day on Telegram.

Turns out — there is! Here is one example called the Senior Developer Roadmap. It's not perfect. None are. But, it's a great starting point to identify areas you can improve.

💪🏼 Exercise - Practice Negotiating

This goes against the principle of Just in Time vs Just in Case learning but I think negotiating is a very valuable skill. Years ago, I read this fantastic article about salary negotiation by patio11.

It's long. But it has a lot of example responses you can use to typical recruiter questions. I highly recommend giving it a read. After, practice negotiating (either by writing or speaker).

Here's an example scenario:

Hi [your name]!

I have great news. The team had nothing but positive feedback about you during the interview process. That being said, we'd like to extend you an offer to join the team as a Senior Software Engineer with a base of $140,000 per year.

Please see the official offer letter attached below. We looking forward to having you join the team!

Best,

The Recruiter

Bonus: If you write this out or record a video and want feedback, reply to this email. I'll respond to the first 3 people who do this :)

Enjoy the week, we’ll talk again soon.

- Joe