Submission plan — Frontend Engineer at Crypto Startup

Stage 1
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Hey all! Wanted to share my submission plan to see if anyone will come up with feedback. Will provide further updates as I go through the process.

Background

I’m a software engineer working in the crypto space. After finishing the uni I got a job as a full-stack engineer in a very early-stage blockchain startup. After working there for 1 year, I took a quick break and joined another startup as Frontend Lead. I was working there for 1.5 years full-time and then 0.5 years part-time as a contractor. After that, I took a break for about 9 months as I focused on learning and working on my projects. Finally, a month ago I got a new job (senior frontend engineer) and decided it’s time to apply.

I’m applying outside of the UK.

Documents

  • CV (will provide an extended version of my normal 1-page CV, focusing on building a narrative and covering important parts of each project. Will also include some of my personal projects here as they are relevant to the case. Thankfully all my experience in product-led companies so shouldn’t be a problem)
  • Personal Statement (I plan to focus on my background here, as well as provide my motivation to move to the UK and what kind of contributions I plan to make there).
  • Letters of Recommendation
    • 1 — CEO of the startup I worked for before.
    • 2 — CEO of the startup I was consulting/helping. Hopefully, it’s ok that it was consulting, the company itself is product-led, and I was providing a technical contribution
    • 3 — CTO of the startup I’m working on right now. I’m a bit worried since I joined the company a month ago, but I think that given I already made a significant contribution it should be fine?
  • Evidence
    • Mandatory Criteria
      • Proof of my salary/contracts, with the base salary and options included. I also plan to provide a comparison with local salaries since the difference is pretty significant.
      • Projects I made with the links to articles covering it. Those projects are not very big, but since there are a few of them, and there is a public track of those written by 3rd parties I think those are pretty convincing
      • Hackathons I won/finished as a finalist, including links to the hackathons themselves as well as a few media articles covering me personally as a winner. Again, there will be 3-4 of those hackathons.
    • Optional Criteria 2 (activity outside of work)
      • Open-source projects I made/maintain. Again, there are quite many of them. I plan to cover 3-4 most impactful ones (100+ stars, tens of thousands of downloads on npm, has external contributions/forks)
      • Open-source projects I made significant contributions. I think that my open-source contributions are going to be one of the main strengths of the case, so I plan to split it into two evidence pieces. Here, I will talk about 2-3 significant contributions I made to popular open source repositories.
      • Publications. Here, I plan to talk about articles that got published on FreeCodeCamp, as well as some articles I published on my blog and on dev.to
    • Optional Criteria 3 (impact)
      • Main contributions on my first job (featuring equity I was given, some media mentions and the source code)
      • Main contributions on my second job (featuring equity I was given, some media mentions, reference letter, source code on github)
      • Main contributions on my third job (featuring equity I was given, reference letter, source code on GitHub). Again, I’m a bit worried that I started working there only recently. Actually, I want to use it to my advantage, showing how much I made in a very small time, would be interesting to hear your thoughts.

That’s the plan at least. Please let me know if something seems off or requires more clarifications/evidence in your opinion :slightly_smiling_face:

Regards, Timur.

2 Likes
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I think your evidence looks great. You can get another recommender as the third recommender barely knows you. For the optional criteria 3, get a letter from your employer confirming your work. Someone different from your recommender

1 Like
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@Destiner hey, your evidences look great. Did you happen to apply with these or did you modify any?

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Hey @Chaitanya_Bapat,

I did 2 changes to my profile.

  1. LoR #3: asked another person since the person that I initially planned to ask doesn’t know me for 12+ months.
  2. OC 3, evidence #2: split all the facts that I collected into 2 separate documents. I wouldn’t do this normally, but there was a lot of significant evidence, and I had 1 additional document available to me anyway (as you can see, I initially wanted to apply with 9 pieces)
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:+1:t4: nice! looks good. Have you heard from them yet?