Lots of people asked me how to get a job at JPL, so here is my brain's vomit. Hopefully this helps.

The first thing is getting the interview

And for that I have no fucking idea what to tell you, except to just apply. I think I got really lucky and the job description was a really really good match for my skills and interests. Which I think is generally how you want to think of this kind of stuff. How do you get hired at a place doing exploratory, wild, interesting technical work? Do that work on your own. For this job, I was purely hired based on my hobbies and interests and my demonstrative projects that I built out of passion or interest, not because I wanted the job. This is generally how I've seen success with this kind of stuff, never aim to work at an outstanding place, aim to be an outstanding and passionate human. Those are generally the ones they recruit, anyway.

But yeah, I think JPL or any mission focused company like this really really cares about the passion of the person. I think they want you to shoot for the stars and have JPL be the vehicle, as opposed to JPL being the goal. But, I digress.

<aside> 💡 To get the interview, you need the skills they want, and you need to show passion in the field they'll put you in.

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How do you get those skills? Easy. Just look at their job description and work accordingly.

Now that you know what they want and now that we know the rules of the game, how do you get there? Now that we've defined the rules, we can just hack and optimize our route to achieve exactly what we want. I'm not sure about other fields, but in CS especially, you can just learn the skills and take an online course or two and level yourself up to be the ideal candidate. It's actually so easy. People think its incredibly hard to learn programming languages or put out projects, but all you literally have to do is buy any decently rated Udemy couse for $10 and sit down for 20 hours and do the work. It's spoon fed to you basically. Each course will give you 3 high quality personal portfolio projects, and a teacher teaching you the material, often times wildly accelerating your learning and motivation.

Think about what the recruiter wants to see. You want to craft your resume so that if the recruiter reads your resume and then the job description, there would be absolutely no way they don't offer you a job/interview. You want your resume to be an exact match to what they are looking for. If you actually want the job, cater your resume to it. How do you do this? Hit every bullet point/sentence in the job description as if it was a checklist. E.g. "Preferred experience in react + redux" then just go build a project or two in react + redux. Look up react + redux course online and in a weekend or a single day, you'll be an infinitely more appealing candidate. Not hard, just follow the checklist put the work in. That's exactly

<aside> 💡 Make your resume a no brainer, a 1 second decision for the recruiter

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