Castillo said:As a senior developer and team leader for many years in banking (I interviewed many developers too) my advice is also to learn C# Asp.Net and SQL (SQL server / NoSQL MongoDB etc), along with JQuery / Ajax etc. A lot of these technologies go hand in hand when doing application development. The Microsoft and other certifications are no substitute for experience, but as a junior dev they give you a broad understanding of the capabilities of the product and show that you are keen to learn - they certainly helped me get into banking. At least, do a SQL server certification as the knowledge is very useful. You wouldn’t believe the number of developers we interviewed in a investment bank who wrote on their Resume that they were experienced developers with 5-10 years but did not even know what a database Index is or why it is used.
Banking is not a good industry for an entry level dev whose self-taught without a CS degree. In the US, they typically only hire engineers that went through a traditional CS program, or have many years of experience. Nobody whose trying to learn coding on their own is going to pickup C# before JavaScript or Python. Jquery lol.
Microsoft devs in the US are a dime a dozen and the only way they stand out is by learning a frontend framework like React or Angular. I'd say focus on startups for your first job, the work is more exciting and interesting than at a big corp, and they're more likely to hire entry level.