Wish I had a better answer, but it was pretty much just luck. A bit of accidental networking and good timing.
When I finished uni I had a few interviews for large enterprise-y companies to get into their graduate programs. None of those panned out. Then while I was looking for more things like that, one of my classmates asked if I wanted to interview to be employee #1 at the startup him and a non-technical friend had created.
They didn't have much funding, so it was ~45k (minimum wage or close to it in Australia) to start, as opposed to the grad programs that I think would have been around 55k-60k. But the job was basically building an entire fairly large and complex web app (as well as a bit of desktop and hardware related stuff) between the two of us, who had close to zero real world experience, my friend on the back-end and me on the front-end. So we basically just had all the responsibility, with no experience, and nobody to guide us.
From there I just hopped around a few jobs, looking for small places where I was the senior or second most senior person on the team. I learnt from the first job that the easiest way to learn is to be in a position where you have as much responsibility as possible so failure isn't really an option.
When I finished uni I had a few interviews for large enterprise-y companies to get into their graduate programs. None of those panned out. Then while I was looking for more things like that, one of my classmates asked if I wanted to interview to be employee #1 at the startup him and a non-technical friend had created.
They didn't have much funding, so it was ~45k (minimum wage or close to it in Australia) to start, as opposed to the grad programs that I think would have been around 55k-60k. But the job was basically building an entire fairly large and complex web app (as well as a bit of desktop and hardware related stuff) between the two of us, who had close to zero real world experience, my friend on the back-end and me on the front-end. So we basically just had all the responsibility, with no experience, and nobody to guide us.
From there I just hopped around a few jobs, looking for small places where I was the senior or second most senior person on the team. I learnt from the first job that the easiest way to learn is to be in a position where you have as much responsibility as possible so failure isn't really an option.