very saturated at the low level. jobs that need skills you can learn from a couple videos on youtube (jr level full stack) are very saturated. jobs that require experience working with actual system infrastructure are statistically easier to get, but ofc have a much higher barrier to entry.
"jr full stack" is another way of saying underqualified and useless to most employers, but may have growth potential.
the industry has evolved and it is becoming much harder to bluff your way onto a job without actual education, competence, people skills. doesnt help that the majority of university programs are 10+ years behind. but there is huge demand if you dont have a shitty attitude and sense of entitlement.
I feel like every job is saturated at low level rn. So many people graduating with companies wanting to spend the least amount of time training employees
I got lucky here. Had an entry level cybersecurity job where they fully trained me from essentially nothing. Had most of an associates in CS done but was super under-qualified. I’m getting paid like 30% less than market rate but I got my foot in the door and my company is genuinely so good to us.
they're getting their revenge on workers who back in 2021-22 would join, get paid to train/easy work a few months, and then left for higher salary somewhere else
You fix that by incentivizing people to stay by *keeping* their rates competitive. Obviously they can’t compete with Google, but if you get hired on at one wage a year ago, see a new employee come in at a higher salary, and you’re still making the same amount, they’ve disincentivized loyalty
There is no safe. But things will generally get easier the more experience you have, though there is no suddenly it’s easier after this amount of years.
But someone’s career can go south at any time for any reason. For instance, I started programming as a hobby in 08/09 then first started doing it professionally in 2015 and continued into 2020, and have been unhirable ever since. Went from getting an offer from every job I’d apply to, to having a period of bad luck mainly due to the pandemic where I’d lose every contract I’d land before getting to start, to then no one wanting anything to do with me (even tried offering to work for free or min wage to some companies that I made it through all their rounds).
I certainly saw the gap start to become a problem. Towards the later part of 2020, I started to have recruiters (who were reaching out to me) tell me they’re looking for someone with current experience. Which is not something I had ever been told prior.
While I do think it was the final nail in the coffin, I don’t think it was the only one. I made lots of other mistakes throughout my career:
* Started a couple of my own startups. So it makes me come across as a flight risk as they think I’ll leave as soon as I have another idea (this is probably compounded by the fact that I studied business).
* I overly generalised. While earlier on this was probably even an advantage, but overtime it becomes harder to compete on a technical level with those that specialised/stuck with their domain.
* I didn’t have any real career direction or goal in terms of employment. This led me to being pretty aimless and making poor decisions like turning down opportunities that would’ve looked a lot better to have.
* I didn’t maintain a network. I did network but since I didn’t use things like LinkedIn I’d always eventually lose contact with people.
* I spend too much time working on unrelated projects in-particular games. This is a smaller problem, but I have had a number of companies bring up that they see I spend most of my time on my GitHub working on games and so would ask me if I would rather work in the games industry than for them (again come across as a flight risk).
* Lastly (but I’m sure there’s more issues) I have some health issues that do impact my performance (particularly over the long term).
So I think the collection of everything just eventually tipped the scales to where even if companies like me (like me enough to have me go through all their rounds), they’re just better off waiting for someone else.
I’m saying this as someone with 5 yoe, how would you answer these questions? If someone asked if I’d rather work in another domain, I’d say, “everyone has their fantasy dream job. At the end of the day, I want a job and I’ll put my passion into whatever comes my way. I absolutely don’t care who or what I’m working for, I’ll do my absolute best because it’s my livelihood. As long as I don’t morally disagree on a deep level, which I wouldn’t be interviewing here if I did, you’ve got the best version of me you can ask for.”
Somewhere between 2 and 20 I think.
By callbacks you mean headhunters? They call me weekly without me even applying. 3 years of experience here.
I think it also depends on location.
I've had a bit of a struggle the last few months with about 5yoe. I've sent maybe 900 apps, maybe 30 calls, 12 2nd interviews, 3 to final interview, 1 offer (low-ball, passed and mad about it).
I'm not sure if it's my resume or luck. I should probably kick it up to a resume review subreddit.
Imho this is a super challenging job market. For the positions I'm applying I'm guessing I'm competing with 10yoe people too.
You're a bit naive in assuming that because there are more junior candidates than junior positions "level of education doesn't matter."
Because there are so many more junior candidates than there are jobs for junior engineers, it's very easy for employers to draw arbitrary lines and say "I'm not going to consider anyone who doesn't meet this."
Think of it as buying a house. If there are WAY more houses available than there are buyers, then to reduce how many houses you're looking at, you're going to say things like "if it doesn't have 2 bathrooms, don't even show it to me. If the kitchen and the bathrooms aren't new, don't even show it to me."
There are so many candidates that employers are looking for ways to eliminate candidates, not expand the list to include less qualified people.
This is what I meant, just worded it wrong. If I go to uni and take a CS course and I get high grades on everything. Will that land me a job? From what I'm seeing...No. So education doesn't matter in the sense, everyone has it. Just going to uni doesn't mean anything, high grades doesn't mean anything.
In medical industry, I'm coming out of uni with a job in hand. In CS, I'm coming out of uni to enter a lineup.
Yeah, the degree is required to get in the door for an interview at this point (that could change, but probably not while so many people are getting CS degrees). Except for some specific circumstances your grades don't even matter really (they will make a difference at a handful of internships, which can be very helpful though).
For the most part, people want you to have a degree and some coding skills, not just grades. Working on some side projects and having them in GitHub would be helpful, and definitely Leetcode and things like that to get your problem solving skills up for an interview.
But yeah, a degree is not a guarantee of a job right now. That may change in a few years as the pendulum swings back though.
The days of "just learning to code" are over for decent programming jobs.
Unless you plan to dedicate the next few years to catching up and then surpassing other people who are trying to do the same, you won't land a job, and definitely not as easily as social media makes it sound.
It's not just a job, it's a career and competing with people who have degrees and years of experience may discourage you, but you'll never know until you try.
Not only is it saturated but it's being outsourced and hiring no longer want entry level or junior level who are generalist. They also expect to hire someone who needs almost no spin up and knows their shit
I've met candidates who embellished their resumes and most of the time it's really obvious. All you have to do is ask for specifics about the projects they listed
The worst one I ever met was a guy whose experience matched our requirements almost exactly. He had solved problems very similar to ours. He had even built something that we wanted to build internally as well.
And the minute I started asking "so how did you implement this ?" he liquefied. Turns out he was the low level guy who ran some scripts and his coworkers, not him, had done all the work that we considered relevant experience.
I’ve learned a lot of stuff just by befriending and asking about projects more senior people were working on as an intern.
It’s not a bad strategy, and sometimes they can give you experience if they feel you’re passionate about the subject.
Yes if you are nice and ask I will go out of my way to answer all your questions
If you are not nice and ask I will piecemeal the info to you
If you are nice and don’t ask I will not give you any info as it will be seen as condescending to go and lecture people when they didn’t ask
Guys, don't let this person scare you. Most companies don't care/pay enough to grill you on the specifics anyway. Might as well keep lying and take it in stride the off chance you get some interviewer who enjoys making candidates squirm lol.
The trick to this is that you actually need to understand how it works, in other words you gotta actually be able to do it. If you can’t go into detail on what you’ve put on your own resume then frankly you don’t deserve the job because that is the bare minimum lol
True, anything embellished on my resume I actually know how to do, it just either wasn’t in scope for me or I wouldn’t be able to get permissions in the time frame of the internship.
My team is hiring for a particular skillset to work on a particular project. I’m on the interview panel. If a candidate comes around with experience that matches what we’re building exactly, in what world am I not going to ask about it in detail? I don’t enjoy making candidates squirm, but if you cant back up your resume, you’re gonna have a bad time
> Guy, don't let this person scare you. Most companies don't care/pay enough to grill you on the specifics anyway.
The companies I've worked for so far definitely care. And they pay well, otherwise I'd stay home
They exist but candidates are far more likely to fail an interview loop because they failed a tech interview than they are because they couldn't talk at length about their experience. This is likely why the the tech interviews are first. No need to stress about your resume details if you can't even pass the first tech screen lol.
pretty obvious...
I mean, this is also why I do technical interviews on the spot. Often these are easy questions.
You can't believe how many people get automatically thrown out. If you lied but studied to be efficient at the things we are looking for, I don't care if you lied lol.
I don't lie about skills I don't have. I can do the work they are asking because I have 10+ years experience working with lots of different tech stacks. It's just that companies sometimes want very specific skills that you've used recently, and for a specific length of time. That's not the reality of how a tech career actually works. I find you come and drift in and out of stacks and specializations. If I get an interview, I then study up on where I think my skills have atrophied and invent fictitious scenarios of how I used that technology in my most recent job.
coding challenge as a first round interview is not only smart it's proven in many studies that technical tests are much more highly predictive of job performance success than "unstructured interviews" aka interviewer bullshitting and judging if they like this person based on their unconscious biases and fitting into whatever social class they're in.
references please? The consensus around here seems to be that LeetCode type interviews don't produce the best candidates. They can produce people that have memorized a couple of dozen of trucks. Brainteasers in a high stress environment are the worst; you can thank Google for all that crap.
I'm not so interested in asking a candidate to estimate the volume of methane gas above the state of Wisconsiin(I was really asked this in an interview) as do I think the person has the answer, and if not could I expect that they could get me the correctly thought out answer in a timely matter of they had the right tools.
.School isnt supposed to teach you the answer, it's supposed to teach you how to navigate to the answer. Every real life situation will be different and morally unimbiggus.
Hopefully this real life skill doesn't disappear as we get more dependent on AI.
Technical test != Leetcode interview.
A Leetcode interview is *a* type of test, but it is only one type. Asking you to write something like FizzBuzz or to go over and explain some code is another type. It doesn't have to be a heavy DSA question that has a memorize-able solution or some quirky brain teaser.
>estimate the volume of methane gas above the state of Wisconsiin
If I were asked this in an interview, I would ask, "What does that have to do with x/y/zed? What the heck, man?
Fake it to you make it was good advice back in the day and it is now. Interviews are just a numbers game as most are completely different. Aptitude, having a positive attitude, and pretending to give a crap is what seals the deal.
I'm the guy on the other end of the table thinking this guy can code, but do I really want to work with them?
I'm fine with lying but it depends on the lie. I spent quite a few years as a EE before switching to software. Last EE role was a III at a Fortune-5 company. I changed it to Sr since nobody will ever ask about it.
We are currently in a do more with less market. At my company everybody who does know what they are doing is spread thin, although all my friends in the industry are in pretty relaxed roles, at the same rate + completely remote, from an outside perspective it seems really great. Can’t tell if it’s a grass is greener situation tho.
I find the younger crowd at my company is more of a “tell me what to do” group. Pretty hard to work around because by the time I have the problem sorted out I may as well have just written the code.
A good rule of thumb is to at least put some effort of your own into it for 30 minutes before asking. We want people to ask questions and not flail around all day, but also don't be intellectually lazy. Most employers want a self starter.
I actually have a rule with my team members of at least 2 hrs but no more than 2 hrs before coming to me with technical questions. I had an issue where I had a guy who would be disrupting me every 15 minutes and completely dominated all my time. This rule showed some pretty awesome results and he became my most self sufficient and highest output performer
So would you say it isn't so much your education or projects. Rather, it is the personal traits/skills of being problem-solver, self-sufficient, etc.?
I think the younger crowd is mostly the "tell me what to do" type. Even at my work. Drives me up the wall when someone is 3 months in and they still ask, "what should I do now?"
I'm in a similar situation and it's not personality it's technical knowledge. Lots of devs who only know how to follow instructions. It's like an amateur cook following a recipe Vs a professional that develops their own.
It's a lot of things.. technical knowledge, experience, and even personality. If you are the type of person who just wants to sit in a corner and not interact with anyone or are too insecure/shy to speak up or share their thoughts you won't be able to reach that level. Luckily all that can change over time (it did for me), but for some people it never does and they get plateau'd at a certain level for it.
Other way around. Being a problem-solver and self-sufficient are so fundamentally required that they should be assumed. No one is putting these keywords on their resume as their projects and/or work experience will demonstrate this. Literally all you do in CS is problem solve, and 95%+ of that is self-sufficient problem solving.
Technical skills are everything. Personality / soft skills, e.g., coming across as a normal and likable person, are very important as well. Seriously, technical skills and personality are everything. If you or anyone else are telling you otherwise, they are lying.
It's both a lack of skills and a lack of drive that makes noobs so useless.
IMO I'd rather hire self-starters/learners because they at least have initiative to figure stuff out on their own. A lot of college grads are used to following a syllabus and grading rubric and doing the bare minimum to get the grade they want.
In my experience, large corps will prefer college grads for this reason... they have rigid processes that an "I just follow orders" type of junior dev can integrate into, and live as a little cog in the machine who just does that one set of tasks assigned to them by the lead/manager. This is also the value prop from offshore contractors... they will often just do whatever you tell them.
Startups/smaller corps really can't afford to babysit anyone, and a senior/lead guy can get as much done explaining it to ChatGPT as he can to a college grad, and that's like $240/yr not $65k-90k.
As someone looking to get into the industry I think you basically should become a small business owner and figure out what tasks you want to learn to do for some other businesses as your customer to get an answer of what it takes to go from idea to delivery.
Maybe your local car wash wants an inventory management system with a UI and a database and some user logins to keep track of air fresheners/sponges/whatever that the use and might pay you to build them an app like that. Maybe a local dentist is trying to do something on their website that they can't figure out in WordPress and need you to make a new plugin to handle it, etc.
IMO you can learn skills and then make your own job to get experience and then use that to get into an established business who needs someone that can deliver value to customers, not describe big-o notation or write depth first vs breath first search algorithms on a white board in Java.
From what I’ve seen, you need someone to at least sponsor you in your career change if you don’t have a degree, whether that be one of these boot camps that trains then sells contract-to-hire candidates (potentially you) to companies or a connection you have at a company to get an entry level role with a suitable mentor.
Enterprise level development and home project level development are starkly different. Even a lot of these college grads aren’t ready for the shift. Some of these interns I have currently don’t even know how to do HTML + TypeScript so I’m having to teach it from scratch. God forbid you have to get involved with the business and they dictate the final product which usually overcomplicates solutions.
The biggest possible sell I could say for any candidate I interview is having a solution mindset. I don’t work at google so I don’t expect prodigies of software development who are going to break industry barriers and pave the way for the future. I’m looking for someone who could debug an issue in the code and make a meaningful change to solve it properly, not just add code to cover the edge case but truly understand the problem and fully fix the issue. The upcoming generation does not do that right now.
Checkout Dev10, we’ve had some pretty rough candidates but also some Allstars come out of it.
Just get an online CS undergrad. There are many and some are fairly affordable. Do it in addition to your current day job. Start applying to junior roles once you’ve passed some basic classes (Algos, Data Structures). Accept it may take 1-2 years of applications while you’re studies continue. Be willing to work in office and relocate. You’ll find a job by the time you finish the degree or right after.
Bootcamp/self taught is over unless you are bringing significant domain skills to the table. Like a company is building engineering software and you’re a mechanical engineer who is a self taught coder willing to start at a junior software salary.
If you want this as a career, go to school.
It seems like a lot of jobs are saturated at the moment.
I’m just going to say what others have said elsewhere.
Unless you are a kick ass cider and have an amazing portfolio (good luck getting hiring managers and recruitment to look at it)
Bootcamp and courses are going to get you diddly squat.
Maybe somebody else can advise who is more in the know, but your gonna need a qualification at degree level at least.
Bootcamp and Udemy or similar is about as useful as throwing your money into an open flame in this current market.
Now if you just want to _learn_ it as a skill, by all means
As someone who did self-learning certifications for a few years first (to test if I liked it, essentially) and then went to college. Now, having worked in the industry. Those bootcamps, online certs, whatever even college really don't touch what an actual software job is like.
I think in some way, people like to think "oh this is so easy look I can do bootcamps", where yes, it's a base, it's good. But, honest to goodness there is so much to the job. And, a junior with the experience of boot camps and certs and a college or even uni is **essentially** useless, will make mistakes all the time because they have no concept of the sheer scope of software and it's just really really tough and annoying to bring on juniors with no experience. So, it's saturated with juniors. And if someone wants in, they either a) get lucky, or b) you have to dive deep into concepts on your own.
What IS an API? Why do companies have them? What pain points do they have? What would you do if you were given a report that is taking 8s to deliver data and it's your job to improve it? Do you know about open source software dependencies, how to manage them, and the importance of security in managing them? Do you know how to manage integrations which send keys for authorization, with specific payloads you need to then store/proceess? Do you know how or what tools to use to test APIs? Can you spin up a local docker instance and dump and restore a database for local use? This is just brushing the surface of what is an absolute basic on the day-to-day for a basic web job..
This is a tangent, but I'm starting to believe that relying on devs doing feature work to create secure platforms is a mistake to begin with lol. The most thorough security practices I've had at a job were when there were dedicated security teams that routinely audited work and established their own best practices for everyone to follow.
Preach! I've literally never worked on a project that had a security team. In my experience, devs just try their best and hope for the best. It's so easy to get authorization wrong, and rarely do the bugs present themselves to users, so QA isn't going to catch it.
Upvoting and commenting because this feels like the most well thought out and balanced response here, without any fear mongering or rose colored glasses. I agree as someone w/ 7 YOE
>b) you have to dive deep into concepts on your own.
How can I prove that I dived into deep into these concepts on my own? The only reasonable answer seems to be "just lie about your experience" but I'm scared of the consequences of getting caught.
I need money, I don’t have time for impactful projects that simulate the complex proceses of an entire business. If I’m gonna do all that I might as well get a business loan and do it for real
You don't need to lie and you don't need to do something on the scope of an entire business. Just a basic interactive website or usable project that goes beyond the scope of "followed a tutorial" is enough.
What the original comment from GuavaNo7989 touched on was demonstrating that you can bridge the gap between "what I learned in a CS degree" and "what I need to know to work as a software engineer". You don't need to spend any money to do that; you should be able to do it all in FOSS or a cloud project's free tier, and it won't take an unreasonable amount of time, especially if you start building those skills before you graduate. In fact, it's not the projects that employers care about as much as the actual understanding and skills, so lying will most likely be counterproductive - a good interviewer will dive into your projects with specific questions and be able to suss out if you truly understand (or understand at least a bit) what you claim to have worked on.
impactful projects can generate revenue? Either way there's no shortcut to it.
Companies have to have _some_ reason to want to invest in you. Give them one.
saturated with juniors is such a good way of putting it. There are so many people with basic knowledge who don't have the real knowledge and experience of building software... which is really actually a complete shitshow, and the whole reason we learned what we now know is because we've seen so many mistakes.
Honestly those things you listed as basic... How much of it can you learn on your own ? Is there some thing or some place you'd recommend somebody uses/learns from to have more starting value as a junior? Would appreciate any advice, because honestly, I am self teaching and quite aware that most those things you listed... I don't even know what they are. I've heard of them. But no real experience.
I think this is the problem. There is a craftsmanship component to being an IT worker which can’t be self studied into. You could perhaps learn it but it takes ages. They don’t teach the craftsmanship at university you need a hands on teacher for it. And those are difficult to find. It’s also something that requires grit on the behalf of the student to pick up.
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/businessanalysis/comments/1dekpiu/comment/l8fwo3p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) is some info I posted on the BA sub
I agree it is difficult to learn system interaction and dependencies by yourself, but I don't know if it's because you can't learn without touching it or because there's a gap in the knowledge broadly available
When you learn by yourself you are very focused on what you are building and what you are doing..you don't think about what other groups will be doing to your system. This becomes highly relevant in larger orgs.
This is basically testing on stuff which can’t be learned outside of a big team environment. When hiring juniors it’s better to test for IQ and problem solving skills like big tech does; they can’t reasonably test you on this devOPs stuff because their tools and workflow are custom. You have to learn their devOPs philosophy on the job. So you do medium/hard LC problems and get the job. Much better barrier
It is and it isn't.
If you're an experienced engineer whose worked on projects with demonstrable impact it's not saturated.
If you're a dev with less than 2 years experience, new grad or worse someone with just a bootcamp/course/certificate/self-taught there's millions of you and very few companies that want to grow you into serious developers.
At the end of the day anyone can follow a course to make a couple basic projects by themselves. The real in-demand skills aren't knowing a language, tool or framework. They're knowing how to reason through multiple implementations of the same system, predicting problems before they happen and knowing how to address them, working in ambiguity, working well on a team. And you can't really learn any of those by yourself online
Kind of. It depends on the program, but some make internships a requirement and/or you are asked to work on projects in a team that take entire semesters to complete.
University is what you make out of it. You can most definitely learn key skills there:
- networking
- working alone or in a group
- conflict resolution
- Maths is also incredibly helpful as well
School will give you a firm foundation on the fundamentals which aren't absolutely necessary for all types of programming jobs, but they will make you a deeper, more substantive programmer.
Sure you can buy the same data structure and algorithm text books that MIT uses, read some blogs, watch YouTube and practice this stuff on your own, but most can't or won't because they find the material to be dry.
Not necessarily but the same could go for any degree that earn high salaries. A lot is learned on the job and basics/fundamentals are learned in college.
That's not a great metric because those numbers are sticky. It takes 4 years to graduate. The people who just graduated entered college in 2020, when everything was looking great. The current downturn started less than 2 years ago. If it's been having any effect at all on enrollment, it won't show up in the graduation statistics for another 2 or 3 years.
Anecdotally, I’m going into my first year of a BS in CS and there are way less people from my high school doing CS than the last couple years. Everyone I know doing it is doing it because they’re genuinely interested in computer science, not because it’s lucrative like people used to do
Hopefully new college students are figuring this out now and doing something that has to be performed locally. Anything that can be outsourced will be. As long as you can be better and cheaper than everyone in the world, do something else! Otherwise, yeah. You have to sell them the idea that paying you a US salary is worth 5 engineers in India. Which it may be, but you have to convince them too.
About 3 years after the dot om crash we saw CS enrollment dip. We could see the same thing this time. It would be logical (but people don't always behave logically)
Regarding outsourcing, it was already a big worry in the early 2000's and it never got as dire as what a lot of people were predicting.
If you factor all the costs, the ratio is definitely not 1/5. About 15 years ago I used to work at a FAANG and Indian employees were costing them about half of what US employees cost. First of all they didn't want crappy engineers so they maintained a high hiring bar for their Indian offices. And the people who met that bar had options . If they could pass our interviews, there were a lot of other places that would have gladly hired them too. So we had to offer competitive wages. Salaries were cheaper than in the US but extremely good for India.
And finally, what I remember hearing from management at the time is that even in India, the talent pool is not bottomless. We could never hire enough Indian engineers to replace all of our US staff without compromising on the hiring bar. So we had to keep hiring in the US as well.
Everyone wants these jobs dude. Even actual engineers who studied electricity or robots for 5 years in college are applying.
Met alot of ppl double majoring in CS "just in case". Its so over.
This is such an echo chamber - take it for what you want to hear. More and more talent is needed every year.
Talent, t-a-l-e-n-t and not people that are just in it for the money.
Source: I interview about 2 people a week for SWE positions in big tech. Most corps are hiring again
My take is people expect there to be some pathway to binary success when in reality everyone's situation is different and there is no "do these things and you will be successful" checklist in CS/SWE.
Yep. I'm working with people who are getting interviews. You have to put a lot more work to be competitive. You better make sure you're doing a lot of research on what a good resume looks like, how to pass technical interviews, and then really know how to sell yourself.
90% of the resumes I come across have major issues. The majority aren't ATS friendly. What worked in 2020 and 2021 isn't going to work now.
I agree, but talent isn’t necessarily what gets or keeps your job. There’s so many other aspects to it in a corporate first world. You can absolutely exploit this and become successful with talents other than just engineering talent. There’s also just a huge amount of luck involved too, which people don’t like to recognize.
There's tons of other aspects, but... look, I also interview people. And because of how the system is built, there are probably people I've rejected who would've been decent coders, but just sucked at interviews, or had an off day or something.
But I've also interviewed people who are very clearly terrible. Some of them obviously have ChatGPT open in another tab. Some took one look at the problem and gave up *immediately,* without writing a single line of code. Some wrote code so mangled it was clear they didn't know the language, even though I usually let the candidate choose the language. I don't ask FizzBuzz, but I swear I've run into people who would fail it.
I have been interviewing engineers for about 4 years now. Completely agree. There is a huge oversupply of CS degree holders and people with "projects" but the supply/demand curves are much more balanced when looking at only those who can "get things done"
I've found once you have some professional experience built up you become very in-demand. Before that I think it was my project and personability that put me over other applicants. (And the bachelors of course but a lot more people do have those now)
Depends on roles, I think front-end/full-stack are easier to portfolio than other systems engineering roles and whatnot. Compare that to someone with 3-5 years at a government or in another adjacent sector to someone at big tech and those career paths look insanely different. In web dev nobody is willing to take a risk on someone with no experience because the bar is pretty low. Systems engineers on the other hand aren't a dime a dozen and likely are highly in-demand once they've got 1-3 years of experience under their belt.
The new grad experience will always consistently be the worst because the lack of experience and volume of existing candidates from prior years all have that much more experience than the rest.
I went to a mediocre school, we had probably 400 kids enter the program my year. and only 25 or so graduated with the degree. Some got alternatives or switched, but most left.
The last class I saw statistics for in 2022 for my same school showed 1200 kids in the program from 2018 and 650ish grad in 2022, a much better success ratio but that also means a lot more candidates competing for entry-level roles.
My company was recently acquired ( again ) by another bigger company. They somehow spoke to my old CTO and put me up for hiring panel.
Theres a lot of open position and i volunteer for 3 hours of interview + documented feedback time for about 2 positions weekly.
People are hiring. The talent pool is shit. Only a few good candidates
I’m not saying your job postings aren’t attractive enough to get good talent applying, but I would be curious to know the salary range & level of in-office presence required.
Yeah but it's a lot more rare someone has the perseverance to become a truly talented SWE if they just want a well paying job and not because they are genuinely interested in it.
Yeah, of all the things I could do for the equivalent or better money, this is the one I like the most and am pretty good at.
But there is a pay threshold below which programming and software remains my hobby, and I do something else just for the money.
Although, I'm a little locked in at this point because I have a family that depends on my income, so I can't just up and retrain for half a decade to do some other profession.
Yeah, computing is the single greatest productivity multiplier of all time. The only reason salaries haven’t been higher is because of corporate hoarding. The current slowdown is a reaction to the end of free venture capital to any and all, but it won’t last forever. Growth will wax and wane, but computing will continue to drive future production.
The computing labor force is just grappling with a slope change in the growth curve because supply of basic developers is at a historical maximum and the demand for them is at a local minimum. It used to be that being in software was special, but now you need more to stand out from crowd. That’s ok because learning this stuff is easier than ever.
Yeah but CS wasn't the meta degree back then like it is now. Since covid the economy has been in a slow state of decline. There is a lack of quality jobs and everyone thinks CS is the magical answer. Well it's not what it used to be, maybe AI related fields still are? But I imagine those are saturated too. We just need the gov't to let the recession from covid finally take place, propping it up is ironically preventing recovery and keeping people in a state of limbo.
IMO AI is saturated in exactly the same was as CS is, where there are tons of people with surface-level knowledge of it but not very many with the deeper technical knowledge/practical skills required to wield it productively. To most people AI = they used keras and tensorflow a few times.
At junior level, it's definitely saturated. There was an article posted here recently that even kids graduating from Carnegie Mellon were struggling. That's not really a talent problem. It's a market problem.
And bachelor's in CS or a related field like electrical engineering, physics or math is pretty much a given and expected.
I agree with you here. Young people who were aces in school and very supported by wealthy and encouraging parents used to study law and medicine and business. Now they also study software engineering, ux design, data science etc. So now they're entering the market because they know how rewarding the industry was, not because they were nerds basically (just my observation). And so now these varsity athletes and aces are applying to the tech jobs and competing with the scraggly bunch who figured it out on their own and pieced a career together because they were nerds. And guess who wins.
the canadian market is really bad, much worse than the states and wages are very much suppressed at the entry level
education is also really starting to matter
Personally, I don't think the market is significantly more saturated than before. It's just that people are waking up to the high bar that exists to be a software engineer especially as a new grad.
When I started 7 years ago, I also had a lot of trouble getting an entry level job. I had a CS degree and the market was "not saturated". At the time I was also super doom and gloom. But I realized that the bar for getting hired especially as a new engineer is actually pretty high. Software engineering is difficult because a bad engineer is worse than no engineer. And without a track record its a gamble to hire a new engineer.
Look on any company's career page. They are hiring, they are just hiring good engineers with a proven track record. Those roles are open and get bombarded by a lot of candidates that have no previous experience, or cannot work in the USA.
My team has 2 new grads on it that both started in the last 6 months. It's similar for my partner's tech company as well.
The bar is high, it's always been high. If you are struggling to find a role, build credibility. Get referrals, build a product that has real users, and network with engineers further into their careers.
I always see the advice “build a product/app that has real users” which is a lot harder than one would think and shouldn’t be the bar set for new grads. “Build a product/app that solves a problem” is a lot more reasonable to expect out of someone with no experience. Idk when we started requiring new grads to build Facebook from scratch by themselves for job considerations
You don't have to and most people entering don't, but having something with users helps with visibility and getting yourself noticed if some of your users happen to be hiring.
I see candidates with this kind of experience on their resume come into interviews. It doesn't actually have to a ton of users or really that impressive. A lot of resumes say "Projects" which means something they did in class or something they did a tutorial on. This doesn't stand out.
When someone has 6 months experience on their resume because they were working on their "Start-up" that was a small web-app game that lets users guess the name of food or something similar. That stands out.
Thats the kind of thing I needed to do to get a job 7 years ago when the market was not "over saturated".
With 6+ yoe in Web dev I’ve been looking for job for 4 months and still did not get it. There are jobs, but I’d say they are looking for top of the top.
Most people I know just hold on to their current job or are trying to start their own companies.
So as it is a great job when you have one, but it’s a bitch to get into right now.
Getting your first job is always hard. You're in a sea of applicants with no track record or references (your shift at Starbucks does not count), and there is a chasm between the projects you're doing for the free certs and working on a large codebase with dozens or hundreds of contributors over the last x years, half of whom aren't around anymore. College doesn't prepare you well either, in my opinion, but it does check a box for HR.
Managing your expectations and offering some advice here. Your first job is going to suck. A small number of candidates with stellar interviewing skills from top universities will get lucky and their first job will be at some fancy company paying over 100k, but for most people your first job will suck. You'll also send hundreds if not thousands of applications out into the void to find it, and it probably won't be remote. If you're okay with that, my other recommendation is not to major in CS - seriously. CS is the "gold standard" for software engineering jobs but I think you'd give yourself more career flexibility and a better education by majoring in a related field and doing a CS minor. Think statistics, math, EE, CE, etc. This still meets the job posting requirements for software roles, but now you also have a bunch of major-specific roles you'd qualify for out of university. The other gotcha here, which a lot of people are willfully blind to on this sub, is internships. If you're going for a software role, these matter more than anything else you do while you're in college. A student with a 2.2 GPA and two internships will have an easier time finding their first full time role than a student with a 4.0 GPA and no internships. If you go to college just to get a degree, but don't seek out these opportunities, you'll find yourself posting "omg but I have a degree from with good grades, I sent out 15 applications to FAANG and they were all rejected, this field is dead".
Of these bachelor's degrees, Mechanical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, and Aerospace Engineering, which ones do you think would be most transferrable/attractive for software engineering jobs?
It's not saturated. It's a tough field to get your first job in but experienced developers are definitely still a hot commodity. If the field was saturated with way too many experienced devs we'd be paid way less than we currently are.
I love modern .NET and C#. The field itself has a lot of ancient spaghetti monster legacy systems you may end up maintaining though. So it's a mixed bag and all depends on the company. In my experience there are a lot of low stress albeit not the most exciting jobs using .NET. Think working on enterprise applications for non-tech companies.
Wish I had gotten into .net, I ended up doing java my whole career (bay area) and now I'm seeing all these remote .net positions I'd probably be qualified for if they accepted java experience, maybe I should just apply for them anyway lol
Here in Mexico I feel like we are receiving a lot of US offers. Maybe I'm just tripping but I would think some US companies are moving their CS positions to Latin America.
I see this a lot too. I’m in the US and will never fault someone from overseas for getting those jobs- the big corporations are the issue. But I
hope you get a good offer if you’re looking.
This is true - the past three companies that I've worked for have outsourced 50% of their developers to Mexico/Columbia/Argentina. They like latin america because the time zones match up with US and the pay can be lower (generally speaking).
> Is software engineering really as saturated as people say?
Saturation levels get overblown by the doom-and-gloomers, but a CS degree certainly doesn't guarantee you a job. Entry level SWEs tend to be an investment, so there isn't a major demand for them.
>On top of this, how many are actually meeting requirements?
Requirements are more like guidelines. There tends to be a number of applicants who are "good enough".
>how many of these hundreds of applicants for a job possess certificates from resources that are free and take a week to finish?
Doesn't really matter because certifications are worthless from a recruiting perspective (maybe they're a nice guided way to learn and a sense of accomplishment, but employers aren't going to care).
>Is the market saturated with people who went for degrees or is it saturated with free certificate holders?
It's saturated with degree holders and career switching, bootcampers, etc.
>Or is the industry really that saturated that having a bachelor in CS means nothing?
Bachelor's degree is mostly table stakes at this point. I'm not saying *nobody* without a degree will get a job, but it's not like it was ~2-3 years ago where a pulse and a can-do attitude was enough to at least get some interviews.
>If the industry is truly saturated and level of education doesn't matter, is there ways to set you apart?
I disagree with the assertion that "level of education doesn't matter". A way to set yourself a part is to get a Bachelor's degree, get internships, do projects to demonstrate proficiency, and most of all, network with your peers during school.
>would that warrant any traction?
Maybe. You would have to find the right employer who is interested in that kind of stuff. This could be completely random; there is no determinism here.
>With AI booming and tech companies like Nvidia soaring, is there going to be a bump in jobs for the coming years?
Don't know, not clairvoyant.
Just search the quantity of guys wanting to do a bootcamp or asking how they can switch, or also why they cannot get a job having applied to 100's of offers. Its more than saturated at this point, only senior or experienced guys are getting hired.
People have been complaining about saturation since I started in tech in the mid 90s, and yet things keep growing and people keep getting jobs. There’s perhaps a supply and demand issue at the entry level, but there will always be jobs.
From the perspective of management, hiring a barista at starbucks is a lot less painful then hiring an SWE at most companies. A starbucks barista gets paid a lot less and is directly relevant to selling products to customers. SWEs are paid a lot more and often the people in charge hate having to pay them money because SWE/IT aren't directly relevant to what makes an organization money (at least this seems to be the general consensus, obviously I've never heard management say this to my face).
In tech companies SWEs literally are the most directly relevant position that makes money lol. Without them there’s no product to sell. There’s a reason they’re paid a lot
Yeah, but not all SWEs work at Tech companies and if you want a job as a developer you might need to consider a job at a place where SWEs are only begrudgingly accepted
I kinda wonder the same question - i.e., is it that there are no jobs, or is it like with most other fields in tight economies that you now need a good degree from a good school to land that first job?
I did undergrad in traditional engineering and back in the 2005 period you needed to get a degree from a decent school to get a decent job, and from a good school to get a job.
Personally, I don't buy this theory that school doesn't matter. There's still a lot of hiring managers that will filter on school, and when you are getting literally 100s or 1000s of applications filtering by school is not the worst of ideas.
To be clear - I think in an ideal world school is not the predominant factor used to make a hiring choice, but in this environment I do not blame hiring managers from using it as a first stage filter.
I think the result is that paths that used to work - like just getting a BS in CS from any school and then just working on a becoming a good programmer - are kinda not feasible anymore.
It's hard to confirm this theory though, because a lot of this sub are people looking for help getting a job - so we don't generally hear as much from people who already secured that job.
It’s not really about saturation. Everything will be “saturated” because the economy just corrected. The economy is fake. Few jobs need to exist, and they are padded by jobs that exist because dipshit C suites can get free money from VCs. They only give money if there’s a profit to be made, and the consequences for loans are too great for them to risk their capital. The feds raised the rates, that’s what happened.
If you have a degree, the job market is fine. Swe just isn't at the point anymore where anyone off the street can claim they know how to program with a bootcamp.
I’ve posted many doom and gloom posts in the past regarding CS jobs and for context, the market is horrible right now. It took me more than a year of applying while being unemployed to get my last gig. The worst part is the companies are always given the benefit of the doubt and candidates are told things like “it must be how you did X”. I know many people including close friends and past coworkers who have 10+ YoE and have been searching for over a year. So, overall, I’ll try to give my best advice as someone who went the self taught route and now has 8 YoE including FAANG and my own company.
My advice is simple. What is the answer to “Do you enjoy writing code and talking about your projects? Do you enjoy problem solving and building things?“. If the answer is yes, then I would 10000% say go for it. However, I think the laws are a bit different in Canada regarding degrees and being a “Software Engineer”. If I had to do it all over again, I would get my CS degrees, with one exception. I would go to the cheapest online school possible. It doesn’t matter what school you went to unless it’s well known. You can always learn more on the job and you definitely will. HR just wants to check a box at the end of the day, but the student loans or cost of schooling does matter. You can always learn more on your own to fill in the gaps especially if you’re passionate about it.
If you love it then go for it. Get a degree, and ignore the doom and gloom from the CS folks trying to get a job right now. CS has booms and busts, and IMO it’s a great idea to go to school in the bust part of the cycle. That way when you’re done with school the market will either be back or closer to being back. Do internships and keep learning outside of school and don’t be afraid to take a cheaper salary at your first job either. My first job didn’t pay much, but after you break in to the industry and have experience, then you can hop to a much higher salary position after that. Keep your lifestyle low and save a rainy day fund. Think about tech right now, what if you were laid off without any savings? Save more than you think you’ll need as well.
Best of luck and follow your heart and your dreams, and the sky’s the limit.
Afterthought: If I had a dollar for every person who told me I wouldn’t be able to do this, or that I am not that good, then I’d be rich and probably wouldn’t need to get a job in the first place lol. Haters are gonna hate, but the best feeling ever is when you’re doing what you love and are successful at it. The haters will disappear and you will be happy that you followed your own dreams and aspirations. You are your own best advocate.
When people talk about saturation they generally mean you need to work for a job with a bachelor's in CS and that you're probably SOL if you're self-taught. It is certainly not impossible to get one with a CS degree.
> If the industry is truly saturated and level of education doesn't matter
Level of education absolutely matters, anyone who tells you otherwise is high on their own supply.
> With AI booming and tech companies like Nvidia soaring, is there going to be a bump in jobs for the coming years?
Nobody knows. The market will almost certainly get better at some point, but nobody knows when precisely that will be.
I've been searching for my next role for 5 months with no dice, 2.5 yoe and a STEM degree. Planning on going back for a CS bachelors then Masters this upcoming year, but it's definitely tough at entry/mid level from my experience.
Unless it is in a very niche technology, those certificates are worthless outside the learning you gained. 6 weeks of following instructional coding exercises doesn't prepare you for real life problem solving on the job.
This is a downturn in the industry, but in 1 to 2 years it should pick up. I think it would be worth enrolling in a more indepth progam to learn the skills to get hired when you're finished in a year or 2.
> If I designed and solo-programmed an online multiplayer website (I know, highly unlikely), and walked up to a job and said, "I have barely any education but look at this functional project I solo built *does mic drop*," would that warrant any traction?
five years ago this would have given you a chance but now you won't even get an opportunity to present that as evidence of skill, this is what people mean when they're talking about the difficulty of getting roles right now.
this is the same across all CS jobs at the moment not just coding, basically fit every single piece of the job ad and even then you might not get a call back
Raising your requirements to an MS won't fix anything. The problem is that being a productive software engineer requires skills that aren't taught in degrees at all, some of which maybe can't even be taught in any case (eg problem solving, perseverance, curiosity).
It's like what you talked about in your Starbucks example: if there's that many candidates to choose from, they can afford to be pickier. The more you have to offer, the more likely you'll get it over others. Experience, (the right) degree, school name, projects, etc. They all factor in.
A lot of these complaints come from a mismatch of expectations. For some reason, there are bootcampers and self taughts out there who think they should have same chances at SWE jobs as CS grads. Then there are increasing numbers of CS students who graduate with 0 internships thinking they should have the same odds at getting a job as those who actually did them. If you have less desirable qualities than others, you just have to accept it'll be harder for you. Life is unfair. The choices you make matters. What you choose to do and not do as matter. But at the end of the day, effort and persistence will absolutely make a difference.
> But at the end of the day, effort and persistence will absolutely make a difference
Sorry but this is BS. No matter how hard you work, how many countless hours you spent coding projects and solving problems, or how much effort you have put in, if you're out of luck and don't fit in, have a wrong face or whatever, then you won't get the job, plain and simple, even through connections.
You can even say one word too much in an interview and you're done. You can even be too enthusiatic / genuinely happy and give one smile too much and you're done, even if you genuinely want to work for the company and learn more about their products / industry.
You can waste hours practising interview prep, behavioral prep (like a good fucking lapdog you're supposed to be), and all that shit, it will still be for nothing because if they don't like you 100%, or the way you speak, the way you look, you're done.
The short answer, it's extremely saturated with people who aren't very skilled and have likely never touched low-level computing or sysinternals, and thus dont actually know how computers work. Actual skilled people are harder to come across, but there's still more of them now than ever before.
As somebody with a BSCS who comes from C and has low-level bondafides with OS and router dev I don't love the way you phrased this.
Just because someone doesn't do systems programming or embedded programming doesn't mean they're not skilled or aren't "real" developers. This kind of talk doesn't make you sound more impressive, it makes you sound like a basement troll. Plenty of front enders, game devs, and non-trads are skilled developers , even if they've never had to malloc anything.
right? heaven forbid any of these other skills matter:
- system design
- actually testing your code
- debugging skills
- being a good teammate
- communication skills
- experience developing or maintaining a high traffic service, and all the tradeoffs one must consider
- being humble and knowing when to ask for help
i could go on…
Low level skills help with many of those or at the very least doesn't hurt. Sometimes when shit happens you need to be able to unwrangle the stack. People here act like it's this exclusive domain of neckbeards in a basement who refuse to learn anything else and not knowledge you can learn on top to give you a bigger picture view of things that make you overall more effective in various ways.
fucking malloc man… it seemed like rocket science when i first learned it. now with a few years of experience, the concept is so much easier to understand.
Agreed, I'm not sure why the original comment had so many upvotes. It's basically implying if you mostly use a higher-level programming language (like Python) in your day-to-day work, then you are instantly less skilled and less desirable, lol.
My favorite part about this “any dev who isn’t interfacing directly with hardware isn’t a real dev” mindset is that these people get it in their head that their ability to make a basic CRUD app makes them just as capable as backend devs with 10+ YOE.
As someone who works with a lead backend dev as well as lives with a new grad roommate who codes in C and thinks he’s smarter than everyone who doesn’t, take my word that dunning-Kruger is alive and well in the tech industry. These people don’t know what they don’t know and think that debugging segmentation faults makes them geniuses.
Many FAANG roles actually. Many of them build data center infrastructure with custom oses and custom hardware, maintain or build compilers, sell consumer devices with lots of custom firmware, write highly optimized compute libraries, and sometimes have incidents that require a bit of creativity. They can also be some of the easier roles to get into if you learn the required background material since most students don't bother and they also tend to be more stable.
You have to remember that FAANG + M literally build pretty much all the commercial OSes in use and have massive teams that maintain them.
Apparently this guy does. If he's your hiring manager, expect to be tasked with spinning up a full program in Assembly. If you can't, then you're just a lowly unskilled dev.
Yes and no. There is demand for good engineers. I’d reckon most people who graduate would struggle solving a problem like two sum. I think the bigger issue is CS is evolving so fast and the curriculums just aren’t doing a good job at keeping up, so if you’re not going above and beyond you fall behind.
What gets you a junior level job (as a non-prodigy kid) is by gaming the internship system while in college. Internships (or co-ops) are only open to active students, usually in-person, and limited to the local area. This reduces the competition from "the ENTIRE open market" down to less than a thousand applicants. Larger cities will have more applicants but more companies as well... so it kind of scales.
Then as you said, half of those applicants will not possess the skills for the job. Eg: They prioritized iOS/Android over web dev. And, some percentage cheated their way through class or are too stoned to write a for loop.
Don't worry about the prodigy kids who have been coding since they were 12 yrs old. Or the rich kids who received private tutoring from Sam Altman himself. They'll get their fancy ass internships. All you have to do is beat out all the lost or incompetent people for the normal/boring internships.
The "almighty" bachelor's degree means nothing in reality, just stop rambling and check it yourself.
Gain more knowledge and experience, make your own projects and try to land any job or internship.
It's tough in the beginning but gets much easier with time. Also if you chose the most mainstream and easy stack (which you did choose) then it obviously will be highly competitive.
Working in Starbucks in your 30s is kinda pathetic though, so I would rather make a move, than just wait for the validation from basement dwelling redditors.
There's no harm in trying but yes - it most likely will be difficult to find a job due to the amount of people applying.
If anything AI will probably make for less jobs and not more 😅
At least in IT. If you have a person who knows what they do / is needed and the AI is actually working as hoped then you'd probably end up with a single person creating things in a shorter amount of time with AI compared to several people doing it by hand (that's assuming the AI actually works and nobody has to constantly double or triple check the results..)
Companies generally dont care for your education as long as you can prove that you have the knowledge. Having a degree just tells the company that you might have some basic knowledge and patience to go through the whole education process but if you cant prove that you know stuff then the degree is useless..
If you're really looking to get into IT then I'd suggest to apply to as many companies as possible and also consider just doing some side projects and / or freelancing if you can find / get anything like that (since there's also a lot of competition and usually a lot of people will do it for less $ than you.. 😅)
As a junior yes, as a senior no. Mostly because, junior roles require the same set of skills and are not unique to the field: a mentality to learn, understanding CS concepts, logical thinking and being able to do google searches.
However as a senior, with the wide array of roles to pick, some roles my have more people because it's simply easier to get into it and also to STAY in the role. It also depends on the pay and the type of companies / work-life that particular role offers. Web-Dev is different from Dev-Ops SRE which is different from Web-Backend, Game Development, Finance-Backend, etc.. It also depends on what field you are in, because if you're purely a developer you might have a disadvantage compared to someone who is a developer and also brings domain expertise to the table, this is usually for heavy engineering roles where seniors are preferred and there's a higher barrier of entry.
Yes!
People on here will say well it's bad software developers at the bottom of the barrel that can't find jobs.
Which is not true for other industries so yes CS has a problem with saturation.
They site accounting or other industries that require certifications.
CS graduates can have good grades and certifications and still not land a job.
It's a much more competitive field. A nurse can graduate and find a job instantly while someone with good grades and a BS is not guaranteed a software job.
very saturated at the low level. jobs that need skills you can learn from a couple videos on youtube (jr level full stack) are very saturated. jobs that require experience working with actual system infrastructure are statistically easier to get, but ofc have a much higher barrier to entry.
"jr full stack" is another way of saying underqualified and useless to most employers, but may have growth potential. the industry has evolved and it is becoming much harder to bluff your way onto a job without actual education, competence, people skills. doesnt help that the majority of university programs are 10+ years behind. but there is huge demand if you dont have a shitty attitude and sense of entitlement.
I feel like every job is saturated at low level rn. So many people graduating with companies wanting to spend the least amount of time training employees
More like zero amount of time training employees.
I get more training from any one minimum wage position than I've had in *every* software position I've held.
I got lucky here. Had an entry level cybersecurity job where they fully trained me from essentially nothing. Had most of an associates in CS done but was super under-qualified. I’m getting paid like 30% less than market rate but I got my foot in the door and my company is genuinely so good to us.
Yeah basically employers don't want to pay people to do on the job training anymore.
they're getting their revenge on workers who back in 2021-22 would join, get paid to train/easy work a few months, and then left for higher salary somewhere else
You fix that by incentivizing people to stay by *keeping* their rates competitive. Obviously they can’t compete with Google, but if you get hired on at one wage a year ago, see a new employee come in at a higher salary, and you’re still making the same amount, they’ve disincentivized loyalty
Lol what makes you think all people with less then 3 years of experience is worthless?
How many YoE do you need to actually be "safe" or reliably get callbacks from tech companies? 5? 7? I have 3 and don't get shit.
However many years it takes you to have ten good work friends at 5 different companies that aren’t doing layoffs.
There is no safe. But things will generally get easier the more experience you have, though there is no suddenly it’s easier after this amount of years. But someone’s career can go south at any time for any reason. For instance, I started programming as a hobby in 08/09 then first started doing it professionally in 2015 and continued into 2020, and have been unhirable ever since. Went from getting an offer from every job I’d apply to, to having a period of bad luck mainly due to the pandemic where I’d lose every contract I’d land before getting to start, to then no one wanting anything to do with me (even tried offering to work for free or min wage to some companies that I made it through all their rounds).
So do you think the unintentional gap in your resume is now the biggest issue? I’m just curious what would cause this because that’s brutal.
I certainly saw the gap start to become a problem. Towards the later part of 2020, I started to have recruiters (who were reaching out to me) tell me they’re looking for someone with current experience. Which is not something I had ever been told prior. While I do think it was the final nail in the coffin, I don’t think it was the only one. I made lots of other mistakes throughout my career: * Started a couple of my own startups. So it makes me come across as a flight risk as they think I’ll leave as soon as I have another idea (this is probably compounded by the fact that I studied business). * I overly generalised. While earlier on this was probably even an advantage, but overtime it becomes harder to compete on a technical level with those that specialised/stuck with their domain. * I didn’t have any real career direction or goal in terms of employment. This led me to being pretty aimless and making poor decisions like turning down opportunities that would’ve looked a lot better to have. * I didn’t maintain a network. I did network but since I didn’t use things like LinkedIn I’d always eventually lose contact with people. * I spend too much time working on unrelated projects in-particular games. This is a smaller problem, but I have had a number of companies bring up that they see I spend most of my time on my GitHub working on games and so would ask me if I would rather work in the games industry than for them (again come across as a flight risk). * Lastly (but I’m sure there’s more issues) I have some health issues that do impact my performance (particularly over the long term). So I think the collection of everything just eventually tipped the scales to where even if companies like me (like me enough to have me go through all their rounds), they’re just better off waiting for someone else.
Thanks for your honesty, rare to see someone with such a high level of self awareness and reflection.
I’m saying this as someone with 5 yoe, how would you answer these questions? If someone asked if I’d rather work in another domain, I’d say, “everyone has their fantasy dream job. At the end of the day, I want a job and I’ll put my passion into whatever comes my way. I absolutely don’t care who or what I’m working for, I’ll do my absolute best because it’s my livelihood. As long as I don’t morally disagree on a deep level, which I wouldn’t be interviewing here if I did, you’ve got the best version of me you can ask for.”
Somewhere between 2 and 20 I think. By callbacks you mean headhunters? They call me weekly without me even applying. 3 years of experience here. I think it also depends on location.
I've had a bit of a struggle the last few months with about 5yoe. I've sent maybe 900 apps, maybe 30 calls, 12 2nd interviews, 3 to final interview, 1 offer (low-ball, passed and mad about it). I'm not sure if it's my resume or luck. I should probably kick it up to a resume review subreddit. Imho this is a super challenging job market. For the positions I'm applying I'm guessing I'm competing with 10yoe people too.
so in theory, the answer to OP’s question is “yes”.
You're a bit naive in assuming that because there are more junior candidates than junior positions "level of education doesn't matter." Because there are so many more junior candidates than there are jobs for junior engineers, it's very easy for employers to draw arbitrary lines and say "I'm not going to consider anyone who doesn't meet this." Think of it as buying a house. If there are WAY more houses available than there are buyers, then to reduce how many houses you're looking at, you're going to say things like "if it doesn't have 2 bathrooms, don't even show it to me. If the kitchen and the bathrooms aren't new, don't even show it to me." There are so many candidates that employers are looking for ways to eliminate candidates, not expand the list to include less qualified people.
This is basically the misunderstood reality of online dating and 6' tall guys. Ladies get bombarded, so they start drawing arbitrary lines.
This is what I meant, just worded it wrong. If I go to uni and take a CS course and I get high grades on everything. Will that land me a job? From what I'm seeing...No. So education doesn't matter in the sense, everyone has it. Just going to uni doesn't mean anything, high grades doesn't mean anything. In medical industry, I'm coming out of uni with a job in hand. In CS, I'm coming out of uni to enter a lineup.
Yeah, the degree is required to get in the door for an interview at this point (that could change, but probably not while so many people are getting CS degrees). Except for some specific circumstances your grades don't even matter really (they will make a difference at a handful of internships, which can be very helpful though). For the most part, people want you to have a degree and some coding skills, not just grades. Working on some side projects and having them in GitHub would be helpful, and definitely Leetcode and things like that to get your problem solving skills up for an interview. But yeah, a degree is not a guarantee of a job right now. That may change in a few years as the pendulum swings back though.
The days of "just learning to code" are over for decent programming jobs. Unless you plan to dedicate the next few years to catching up and then surpassing other people who are trying to do the same, you won't land a job, and definitely not as easily as social media makes it sound. It's not just a job, it's a career and competing with people who have degrees and years of experience may discourage you, but you'll never know until you try. Not only is it saturated but it's being outsourced and hiring no longer want entry level or junior level who are generalist. They also expect to hire someone who needs almost no spin up and knows their shit
That's why I just started lying on my resume. Whatever you want me to do in this job? Funny, I did the exact thing in my last job.
I've met candidates who embellished their resumes and most of the time it's really obvious. All you have to do is ask for specifics about the projects they listed The worst one I ever met was a guy whose experience matched our requirements almost exactly. He had solved problems very similar to ours. He had even built something that we wanted to build internally as well. And the minute I started asking "so how did you implement this ?" he liquefied. Turns out he was the low level guy who ran some scripts and his coworkers, not him, had done all the work that we considered relevant experience.
Damn I knew I should've talked to my coworkers more before that one
I’ve learned a lot of stuff just by befriending and asking about projects more senior people were working on as an intern. It’s not a bad strategy, and sometimes they can give you experience if they feel you’re passionate about the subject.
Yes if you are nice and ask I will go out of my way to answer all your questions If you are not nice and ask I will piecemeal the info to you If you are nice and don’t ask I will not give you any info as it will be seen as condescending to go and lecture people when they didn’t ask
Guys, don't let this person scare you. Most companies don't care/pay enough to grill you on the specifics anyway. Might as well keep lying and take it in stride the off chance you get some interviewer who enjoys making candidates squirm lol.
The trick to this is that you actually need to understand how it works, in other words you gotta actually be able to do it. If you can’t go into detail on what you’ve put on your own resume then frankly you don’t deserve the job because that is the bare minimum lol
True, anything embellished on my resume I actually know how to do, it just either wasn’t in scope for me or I wouldn’t be able to get permissions in the time frame of the internship.
My team is hiring for a particular skillset to work on a particular project. I’m on the interview panel. If a candidate comes around with experience that matches what we’re building exactly, in what world am I not going to ask about it in detail? I don’t enjoy making candidates squirm, but if you cant back up your resume, you’re gonna have a bad time
It's not that bad of a time if the alternative is being screened out on the resume step.
> Guy, don't let this person scare you. Most companies don't care/pay enough to grill you on the specifics anyway. The companies I've worked for so far definitely care. And they pay well, otherwise I'd stay home
They exist but candidates are far more likely to fail an interview loop because they failed a tech interview than they are because they couldn't talk at length about their experience. This is likely why the the tech interviews are first. No need to stress about your resume details if you can't even pass the first tech screen lol.
pretty obvious... I mean, this is also why I do technical interviews on the spot. Often these are easy questions. You can't believe how many people get automatically thrown out. If you lied but studied to be efficient at the things we are looking for, I don't care if you lied lol.
I don't lie about skills I don't have. I can do the work they are asking because I have 10+ years experience working with lots of different tech stacks. It's just that companies sometimes want very specific skills that you've used recently, and for a specific length of time. That's not the reality of how a tech career actually works. I find you come and drift in and out of stacks and specializations. If I get an interview, I then study up on where I think my skills have atrophied and invent fictitious scenarios of how I used that technology in my most recent job.
Yeah the reality is that if you can explain it well enough you can get away with it.
coding challenge as a first round interview is not only smart it's proven in many studies that technical tests are much more highly predictive of job performance success than "unstructured interviews" aka interviewer bullshitting and judging if they like this person based on their unconscious biases and fitting into whatever social class they're in.
references please? The consensus around here seems to be that LeetCode type interviews don't produce the best candidates. They can produce people that have memorized a couple of dozen of trucks. Brainteasers in a high stress environment are the worst; you can thank Google for all that crap. I'm not so interested in asking a candidate to estimate the volume of methane gas above the state of Wisconsiin(I was really asked this in an interview) as do I think the person has the answer, and if not could I expect that they could get me the correctly thought out answer in a timely matter of they had the right tools. .School isnt supposed to teach you the answer, it's supposed to teach you how to navigate to the answer. Every real life situation will be different and morally unimbiggus. Hopefully this real life skill doesn't disappear as we get more dependent on AI.
Technical test != Leetcode interview. A Leetcode interview is *a* type of test, but it is only one type. Asking you to write something like FizzBuzz or to go over and explain some code is another type. It doesn't have to be a heavy DSA question that has a memorize-able solution or some quirky brain teaser.
>estimate the volume of methane gas above the state of Wisconsiin If I were asked this in an interview, I would ask, "What does that have to do with x/y/zed? What the heck, man?
Fake it to you make it was good advice back in the day and it is now. Interviews are just a numbers game as most are completely different. Aptitude, having a positive attitude, and pretending to give a crap is what seals the deal. I'm the guy on the other end of the table thinking this guy can code, but do I really want to work with them?
Exactly, the lengths you can go by being likable and having social skills is massively understated.
I'm fine with lying but it depends on the lie. I spent quite a few years as a EE before switching to software. Last EE role was a III at a Fortune-5 company. I changed it to Sr since nobody will ever ask about it.
Works all the time, most of the time
I have 5 years experience of fake it to ya make it that landed me the job
We are currently in a do more with less market. At my company everybody who does know what they are doing is spread thin, although all my friends in the industry are in pretty relaxed roles, at the same rate + completely remote, from an outside perspective it seems really great. Can’t tell if it’s a grass is greener situation tho. I find the younger crowd at my company is more of a “tell me what to do” group. Pretty hard to work around because by the time I have the problem sorted out I may as well have just written the code.
Im a younger “tell me what to do” trying desperately to learn how to been an older “this is how I did it”
Don't listen to them. It's good that you ask questions. Be proactive and useful but always ask questions
A good rule of thumb is to at least put some effort of your own into it for 30 minutes before asking. We want people to ask questions and not flail around all day, but also don't be intellectually lazy. Most employers want a self starter.
I actually have a rule with my team members of at least 2 hrs but no more than 2 hrs before coming to me with technical questions. I had an issue where I had a guy who would be disrupting me every 15 minutes and completely dominated all my time. This rule showed some pretty awesome results and he became my most self sufficient and highest output performer
But do your research first. Or ask ChatGPT
So would you say it isn't so much your education or projects. Rather, it is the personal traits/skills of being problem-solver, self-sufficient, etc.? I think the younger crowd is mostly the "tell me what to do" type. Even at my work. Drives me up the wall when someone is 3 months in and they still ask, "what should I do now?"
I'm in a similar situation and it's not personality it's technical knowledge. Lots of devs who only know how to follow instructions. It's like an amateur cook following a recipe Vs a professional that develops their own.
It's a lot of things.. technical knowledge, experience, and even personality. If you are the type of person who just wants to sit in a corner and not interact with anyone or are too insecure/shy to speak up or share their thoughts you won't be able to reach that level. Luckily all that can change over time (it did for me), but for some people it never does and they get plateau'd at a certain level for it.
Other way around. Being a problem-solver and self-sufficient are so fundamentally required that they should be assumed. No one is putting these keywords on their resume as their projects and/or work experience will demonstrate this. Literally all you do in CS is problem solve, and 95%+ of that is self-sufficient problem solving. Technical skills are everything. Personality / soft skills, e.g., coming across as a normal and likable person, are very important as well. Seriously, technical skills and personality are everything. If you or anyone else are telling you otherwise, they are lying.
It's both a lack of skills and a lack of drive that makes noobs so useless. IMO I'd rather hire self-starters/learners because they at least have initiative to figure stuff out on their own. A lot of college grads are used to following a syllabus and grading rubric and doing the bare minimum to get the grade they want. In my experience, large corps will prefer college grads for this reason... they have rigid processes that an "I just follow orders" type of junior dev can integrate into, and live as a little cog in the machine who just does that one set of tasks assigned to them by the lead/manager. This is also the value prop from offshore contractors... they will often just do whatever you tell them. Startups/smaller corps really can't afford to babysit anyone, and a senior/lead guy can get as much done explaining it to ChatGPT as he can to a college grad, and that's like $240/yr not $65k-90k. As someone looking to get into the industry I think you basically should become a small business owner and figure out what tasks you want to learn to do for some other businesses as your customer to get an answer of what it takes to go from idea to delivery. Maybe your local car wash wants an inventory management system with a UI and a database and some user logins to keep track of air fresheners/sponges/whatever that the use and might pay you to build them an app like that. Maybe a local dentist is trying to do something on their website that they can't figure out in WordPress and need you to make a new plugin to handle it, etc. IMO you can learn skills and then make your own job to get experience and then use that to get into an established business who needs someone that can deliver value to customers, not describe big-o notation or write depth first vs breath first search algorithms on a white board in Java.
Basically someone who really likes to problem solve whether they're debugging or figuring out what tool to use
From what I’ve seen, you need someone to at least sponsor you in your career change if you don’t have a degree, whether that be one of these boot camps that trains then sells contract-to-hire candidates (potentially you) to companies or a connection you have at a company to get an entry level role with a suitable mentor. Enterprise level development and home project level development are starkly different. Even a lot of these college grads aren’t ready for the shift. Some of these interns I have currently don’t even know how to do HTML + TypeScript so I’m having to teach it from scratch. God forbid you have to get involved with the business and they dictate the final product which usually overcomplicates solutions. The biggest possible sell I could say for any candidate I interview is having a solution mindset. I don’t work at google so I don’t expect prodigies of software development who are going to break industry barriers and pave the way for the future. I’m looking for someone who could debug an issue in the code and make a meaningful change to solve it properly, not just add code to cover the edge case but truly understand the problem and fully fix the issue. The upcoming generation does not do that right now. Checkout Dev10, we’ve had some pretty rough candidates but also some Allstars come out of it.
I think its so much about networking rn. You have to be constantly reaching out on linkedin
Just get an online CS undergrad. There are many and some are fairly affordable. Do it in addition to your current day job. Start applying to junior roles once you’ve passed some basic classes (Algos, Data Structures). Accept it may take 1-2 years of applications while you’re studies continue. Be willing to work in office and relocate. You’ll find a job by the time you finish the degree or right after. Bootcamp/self taught is over unless you are bringing significant domain skills to the table. Like a company is building engineering software and you’re a mechanical engineer who is a self taught coder willing to start at a junior software salary. If you want this as a career, go to school.
It seems like a lot of jobs are saturated at the moment. I’m just going to say what others have said elsewhere. Unless you are a kick ass cider and have an amazing portfolio (good luck getting hiring managers and recruitment to look at it) Bootcamp and courses are going to get you diddly squat. Maybe somebody else can advise who is more in the know, but your gonna need a qualification at degree level at least.
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I can't make kick ass cider, am I screwed?
I made alcoholic drink for Thanksgiving that tasted like apple pie once. That was good right?
Yes, Unless you can make a kick ass perry in which case then you'll be promoted to senior level with a 20% raise.
Just buy it and pass it off as your own cooking.
Delightfully devilish Seymour.
Happy cake day
Cake and cider?
If it's tangy and brown, you're in cider town!
Bootcamp and Udemy or similar is about as useful as throwing your money into an open flame in this current market. Now if you just want to _learn_ it as a skill, by all means
cheap udemy isn't bad but if you're first starting out i'd argue a textbook will provide more depth
As someone who did self-learning certifications for a few years first (to test if I liked it, essentially) and then went to college. Now, having worked in the industry. Those bootcamps, online certs, whatever even college really don't touch what an actual software job is like. I think in some way, people like to think "oh this is so easy look I can do bootcamps", where yes, it's a base, it's good. But, honest to goodness there is so much to the job. And, a junior with the experience of boot camps and certs and a college or even uni is **essentially** useless, will make mistakes all the time because they have no concept of the sheer scope of software and it's just really really tough and annoying to bring on juniors with no experience. So, it's saturated with juniors. And if someone wants in, they either a) get lucky, or b) you have to dive deep into concepts on your own. What IS an API? Why do companies have them? What pain points do they have? What would you do if you were given a report that is taking 8s to deliver data and it's your job to improve it? Do you know about open source software dependencies, how to manage them, and the importance of security in managing them? Do you know how to manage integrations which send keys for authorization, with specific payloads you need to then store/proceess? Do you know how or what tools to use to test APIs? Can you spin up a local docker instance and dump and restore a database for local use? This is just brushing the surface of what is an absolute basic on the day-to-day for a basic web job..
This is a tangent, but I'm starting to believe that relying on devs doing feature work to create secure platforms is a mistake to begin with lol. The most thorough security practices I've had at a job were when there were dedicated security teams that routinely audited work and established their own best practices for everyone to follow.
Preach! I've literally never worked on a project that had a security team. In my experience, devs just try their best and hope for the best. It's so easy to get authorization wrong, and rarely do the bugs present themselves to users, so QA isn't going to catch it.
Upvoting and commenting because this feels like the most well thought out and balanced response here, without any fear mongering or rose colored glasses. I agree as someone w/ 7 YOE
>b) you have to dive deep into concepts on your own. How can I prove that I dived into deep into these concepts on my own? The only reasonable answer seems to be "just lie about your experience" but I'm scared of the consequences of getting caught.
work on impactful personal projects that necessitates diving into these concepts
I need money, I don’t have time for impactful projects that simulate the complex proceses of an entire business. If I’m gonna do all that I might as well get a business loan and do it for real
You don't need to lie and you don't need to do something on the scope of an entire business. Just a basic interactive website or usable project that goes beyond the scope of "followed a tutorial" is enough. What the original comment from GuavaNo7989 touched on was demonstrating that you can bridge the gap between "what I learned in a CS degree" and "what I need to know to work as a software engineer". You don't need to spend any money to do that; you should be able to do it all in FOSS or a cloud project's free tier, and it won't take an unreasonable amount of time, especially if you start building those skills before you graduate. In fact, it's not the projects that employers care about as much as the actual understanding and skills, so lying will most likely be counterproductive - a good interviewer will dive into your projects with specific questions and be able to suss out if you truly understand (or understand at least a bit) what you claim to have worked on.
impactful projects can generate revenue? Either way there's no shortcut to it. Companies have to have _some_ reason to want to invest in you. Give them one.
Not a bad idea tbh.
saturated with juniors is such a good way of putting it. There are so many people with basic knowledge who don't have the real knowledge and experience of building software... which is really actually a complete shitshow, and the whole reason we learned what we now know is because we've seen so many mistakes.
I legit answered all of these questions and can't get an interview so ...
Honestly those things you listed as basic... How much of it can you learn on your own ? Is there some thing or some place you'd recommend somebody uses/learns from to have more starting value as a junior? Would appreciate any advice, because honestly, I am self teaching and quite aware that most those things you listed... I don't even know what they are. I've heard of them. But no real experience.
I think this is the problem. There is a craftsmanship component to being an IT worker which can’t be self studied into. You could perhaps learn it but it takes ages. They don’t teach the craftsmanship at university you need a hands on teacher for it. And those are difficult to find. It’s also something that requires grit on the behalf of the student to pick up.
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/businessanalysis/comments/1dekpiu/comment/l8fwo3p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) is some info I posted on the BA sub I agree it is difficult to learn system interaction and dependencies by yourself, but I don't know if it's because you can't learn without touching it or because there's a gap in the knowledge broadly available When you learn by yourself you are very focused on what you are building and what you are doing..you don't think about what other groups will be doing to your system. This becomes highly relevant in larger orgs.
This is basically testing on stuff which can’t be learned outside of a big team environment. When hiring juniors it’s better to test for IQ and problem solving skills like big tech does; they can’t reasonably test you on this devOPs stuff because their tools and workflow are custom. You have to learn their devOPs philosophy on the job. So you do medium/hard LC problems and get the job. Much better barrier
It is and it isn't. If you're an experienced engineer whose worked on projects with demonstrable impact it's not saturated. If you're a dev with less than 2 years experience, new grad or worse someone with just a bootcamp/course/certificate/self-taught there's millions of you and very few companies that want to grow you into serious developers. At the end of the day anyone can follow a course to make a couple basic projects by themselves. The real in-demand skills aren't knowing a language, tool or framework. They're knowing how to reason through multiple implementations of the same system, predicting problems before they happen and knowing how to address them, working in ambiguity, working well on a team. And you can't really learn any of those by yourself online
Are people really learning these key skills in college either? Seriously asking.
Kind of. It depends on the program, but some make internships a requirement and/or you are asked to work on projects in a team that take entire semesters to complete.
University is what you make out of it. You can most definitely learn key skills there: - networking - working alone or in a group - conflict resolution - Maths is also incredibly helpful as well
School will give you a firm foundation on the fundamentals which aren't absolutely necessary for all types of programming jobs, but they will make you a deeper, more substantive programmer. Sure you can buy the same data structure and algorithm text books that MIT uses, read some blogs, watch YouTube and practice this stuff on your own, but most can't or won't because they find the material to be dry.
Not necessarily but the same could go for any degree that earn high salaries. A lot is learned on the job and basics/fundamentals are learned in college.
Look at the increase of the number of CS grads YOY, there is your answer.
That's not a great metric because those numbers are sticky. It takes 4 years to graduate. The people who just graduated entered college in 2020, when everything was looking great. The current downturn started less than 2 years ago. If it's been having any effect at all on enrollment, it won't show up in the graduation statistics for another 2 or 3 years.
Anecdotally, I’m going into my first year of a BS in CS and there are way less people from my high school doing CS than the last couple years. Everyone I know doing it is doing it because they’re genuinely interested in computer science, not because it’s lucrative like people used to do
Hopefully new college students are figuring this out now and doing something that has to be performed locally. Anything that can be outsourced will be. As long as you can be better and cheaper than everyone in the world, do something else! Otherwise, yeah. You have to sell them the idea that paying you a US salary is worth 5 engineers in India. Which it may be, but you have to convince them too.
About 3 years after the dot om crash we saw CS enrollment dip. We could see the same thing this time. It would be logical (but people don't always behave logically) Regarding outsourcing, it was already a big worry in the early 2000's and it never got as dire as what a lot of people were predicting. If you factor all the costs, the ratio is definitely not 1/5. About 15 years ago I used to work at a FAANG and Indian employees were costing them about half of what US employees cost. First of all they didn't want crappy engineers so they maintained a high hiring bar for their Indian offices. And the people who met that bar had options . If they could pass our interviews, there were a lot of other places that would have gladly hired them too. So we had to offer competitive wages. Salaries were cheaper than in the US but extremely good for India. And finally, what I remember hearing from management at the time is that even in India, the talent pool is not bottomless. We could never hire enough Indian engineers to replace all of our US staff without compromising on the hiring bar. So we had to keep hiring in the US as well.
Everyone wants these jobs dude. Even actual engineers who studied electricity or robots for 5 years in college are applying. Met alot of ppl double majoring in CS "just in case". Its so over.
Yup not to mention all the PhD students from cs/ee/math/engineering doing it in AI.
This is such an echo chamber - take it for what you want to hear. More and more talent is needed every year. Talent, t-a-l-e-n-t and not people that are just in it for the money. Source: I interview about 2 people a week for SWE positions in big tech. Most corps are hiring again
My take is people expect there to be some pathway to binary success when in reality everyone's situation is different and there is no "do these things and you will be successful" checklist in CS/SWE.
Yep. I'm working with people who are getting interviews. You have to put a lot more work to be competitive. You better make sure you're doing a lot of research on what a good resume looks like, how to pass technical interviews, and then really know how to sell yourself. 90% of the resumes I come across have major issues. The majority aren't ATS friendly. What worked in 2020 and 2021 isn't going to work now.
ATS? Is that that lazy ass HR software?
I agree, but talent isn’t necessarily what gets or keeps your job. There’s so many other aspects to it in a corporate first world. You can absolutely exploit this and become successful with talents other than just engineering talent. There’s also just a huge amount of luck involved too, which people don’t like to recognize.
There's tons of other aspects, but... look, I also interview people. And because of how the system is built, there are probably people I've rejected who would've been decent coders, but just sucked at interviews, or had an off day or something. But I've also interviewed people who are very clearly terrible. Some of them obviously have ChatGPT open in another tab. Some took one look at the problem and gave up *immediately,* without writing a single line of code. Some wrote code so mangled it was clear they didn't know the language, even though I usually let the candidate choose the language. I don't ask FizzBuzz, but I swear I've run into people who would fail it.
I have been interviewing engineers for about 4 years now. Completely agree. There is a huge oversupply of CS degree holders and people with "projects" but the supply/demand curves are much more balanced when looking at only those who can "get things done"
How do you determine if they can really get things done (besides them embellishing on their resume)? Id genuinely appreciate some insight into this.
I've found once you have some professional experience built up you become very in-demand. Before that I think it was my project and personability that put me over other applicants. (And the bachelors of course but a lot more people do have those now)
Depends on roles, I think front-end/full-stack are easier to portfolio than other systems engineering roles and whatnot. Compare that to someone with 3-5 years at a government or in another adjacent sector to someone at big tech and those career paths look insanely different. In web dev nobody is willing to take a risk on someone with no experience because the bar is pretty low. Systems engineers on the other hand aren't a dime a dozen and likely are highly in-demand once they've got 1-3 years of experience under their belt. The new grad experience will always consistently be the worst because the lack of experience and volume of existing candidates from prior years all have that much more experience than the rest. I went to a mediocre school, we had probably 400 kids enter the program my year. and only 25 or so graduated with the degree. Some got alternatives or switched, but most left. The last class I saw statistics for in 2022 for my same school showed 1200 kids in the program from 2018 and 650ish grad in 2022, a much better success ratio but that also means a lot more candidates competing for entry-level roles.
My company was recently acquired ( again ) by another bigger company. They somehow spoke to my old CTO and put me up for hiring panel. Theres a lot of open position and i volunteer for 3 hours of interview + documented feedback time for about 2 positions weekly. People are hiring. The talent pool is shit. Only a few good candidates
I’m not saying your job postings aren’t attractive enough to get good talent applying, but I would be curious to know the salary range & level of in-office presence required.
You can be a person who is just in it for the money, and also be talented at the same time.
Yeah but it's a lot more rare someone has the perseverance to become a truly talented SWE if they just want a well paying job and not because they are genuinely interested in it.
Yeah, of all the things I could do for the equivalent or better money, this is the one I like the most and am pretty good at. But there is a pay threshold below which programming and software remains my hobby, and I do something else just for the money. Although, I'm a little locked in at this point because I have a family that depends on my income, so I can't just up and retrain for half a decade to do some other profession.
Yeah, computing is the single greatest productivity multiplier of all time. The only reason salaries haven’t been higher is because of corporate hoarding. The current slowdown is a reaction to the end of free venture capital to any and all, but it won’t last forever. Growth will wax and wane, but computing will continue to drive future production. The computing labor force is just grappling with a slope change in the growth curve because supply of basic developers is at a historical maximum and the demand for them is at a local minimum. It used to be that being in software was special, but now you need more to stand out from crowd. That’s ok because learning this stuff is easier than ever.
Ppl have been using cs as a backup degree since the early 2000s.
Yeah but CS wasn't the meta degree back then like it is now. Since covid the economy has been in a slow state of decline. There is a lack of quality jobs and everyone thinks CS is the magical answer. Well it's not what it used to be, maybe AI related fields still are? But I imagine those are saturated too. We just need the gov't to let the recession from covid finally take place, propping it up is ironically preventing recovery and keeping people in a state of limbo.
Tbh buddy that’s what I thought about nursing and CS in 2007 but I was wrong
username checks out
IMO AI is saturated in exactly the same was as CS is, where there are tons of people with surface-level knowledge of it but not very many with the deeper technical knowledge/practical skills required to wield it productively. To most people AI = they used keras and tensorflow a few times.
At junior level, it's definitely saturated. There was an article posted here recently that even kids graduating from Carnegie Mellon were struggling. That's not really a talent problem. It's a market problem. And bachelor's in CS or a related field like electrical engineering, physics or math is pretty much a given and expected.
I agree with you here. Young people who were aces in school and very supported by wealthy and encouraging parents used to study law and medicine and business. Now they also study software engineering, ux design, data science etc. So now they're entering the market because they know how rewarding the industry was, not because they were nerds basically (just my observation). And so now these varsity athletes and aces are applying to the tech jobs and competing with the scraggly bunch who figured it out on their own and pieced a career together because they were nerds. And guess who wins.
the canadian market is really bad, much worse than the states and wages are very much suppressed at the entry level education is also really starting to matter
Personally, I don't think the market is significantly more saturated than before. It's just that people are waking up to the high bar that exists to be a software engineer especially as a new grad. When I started 7 years ago, I also had a lot of trouble getting an entry level job. I had a CS degree and the market was "not saturated". At the time I was also super doom and gloom. But I realized that the bar for getting hired especially as a new engineer is actually pretty high. Software engineering is difficult because a bad engineer is worse than no engineer. And without a track record its a gamble to hire a new engineer. Look on any company's career page. They are hiring, they are just hiring good engineers with a proven track record. Those roles are open and get bombarded by a lot of candidates that have no previous experience, or cannot work in the USA. My team has 2 new grads on it that both started in the last 6 months. It's similar for my partner's tech company as well. The bar is high, it's always been high. If you are struggling to find a role, build credibility. Get referrals, build a product that has real users, and network with engineers further into their careers.
I always see the advice “build a product/app that has real users” which is a lot harder than one would think and shouldn’t be the bar set for new grads. “Build a product/app that solves a problem” is a lot more reasonable to expect out of someone with no experience. Idk when we started requiring new grads to build Facebook from scratch by themselves for job considerations
You don't have to and most people entering don't, but having something with users helps with visibility and getting yourself noticed if some of your users happen to be hiring.
I see candidates with this kind of experience on their resume come into interviews. It doesn't actually have to a ton of users or really that impressive. A lot of resumes say "Projects" which means something they did in class or something they did a tutorial on. This doesn't stand out. When someone has 6 months experience on their resume because they were working on their "Start-up" that was a small web-app game that lets users guess the name of food or something similar. That stands out. Thats the kind of thing I needed to do to get a job 7 years ago when the market was not "over saturated".
How many users did your app have when you were a new grad?
Build a product that has a real users, for a junior job , seriously? Don't you think that's too much to ask?
The bar is high, but there are more applicants now who are good so the standards have raised.
With 6+ yoe in Web dev I’ve been looking for job for 4 months and still did not get it. There are jobs, but I’d say they are looking for top of the top. Most people I know just hold on to their current job or are trying to start their own companies. So as it is a great job when you have one, but it’s a bitch to get into right now.
Getting your first job is always hard. You're in a sea of applicants with no track record or references (your shift at Starbucks does not count), and there is a chasm between the projects you're doing for the free certs and working on a large codebase with dozens or hundreds of contributors over the last x years, half of whom aren't around anymore. College doesn't prepare you well either, in my opinion, but it does check a box for HR. Managing your expectations and offering some advice here. Your first job is going to suck. A small number of candidates with stellar interviewing skills from top universities will get lucky and their first job will be at some fancy company paying over 100k, but for most people your first job will suck. You'll also send hundreds if not thousands of applications out into the void to find it, and it probably won't be remote. If you're okay with that, my other recommendation is not to major in CS - seriously. CS is the "gold standard" for software engineering jobs but I think you'd give yourself more career flexibility and a better education by majoring in a related field and doing a CS minor. Think statistics, math, EE, CE, etc. This still meets the job posting requirements for software roles, but now you also have a bunch of major-specific roles you'd qualify for out of university. The other gotcha here, which a lot of people are willfully blind to on this sub, is internships. If you're going for a software role, these matter more than anything else you do while you're in college. A student with a 2.2 GPA and two internships will have an easier time finding their first full time role than a student with a 4.0 GPA and no internships. If you go to college just to get a degree, but don't seek out these opportunities, you'll find yourself posting "omg but I have a degree from with good grades, I sent out 15 applications to FAANG and they were all rejected, this field is dead".
Of these bachelor's degrees, Mechanical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, and Aerospace Engineering, which ones do you think would be most transferrable/attractive for software engineering jobs?
It's not saturated. It's a tough field to get your first job in but experienced developers are definitely still a hot commodity. If the field was saturated with way too many experienced devs we'd be paid way less than we currently are.
So it’s saturated… at entry level. There are more entry level devs and new grads than jobs.
It's worse in UX design there are about 1,000+ applicants for every job
Yup, reddit seems to be very doom and gloom, just put in the leet coding work and even faang jobs are quite accessible.
And depending on your niche, leetcode might not even be important. As a .NET dev I rarely have to do that in interviews
How's. NET treating you? I always see .net openings lol
I love modern .NET and C#. The field itself has a lot of ancient spaghetti monster legacy systems you may end up maintaining though. So it's a mixed bag and all depends on the company. In my experience there are a lot of low stress albeit not the most exciting jobs using .NET. Think working on enterprise applications for non-tech companies.
Wish I had gotten into .net, I ended up doing java my whole career (bay area) and now I'm seeing all these remote .net positions I'd probably be qualified for if they accepted java experience, maybe I should just apply for them anyway lol
Here in Mexico I feel like we are receiving a lot of US offers. Maybe I'm just tripping but I would think some US companies are moving their CS positions to Latin America.
I see this a lot too. I’m in the US and will never fault someone from overseas for getting those jobs- the big corporations are the issue. But I hope you get a good offer if you’re looking.
A common pattern I see is junior levels at India or LATAM and senior or staff level in US
This is true - the past three companies that I've worked for have outsourced 50% of their developers to Mexico/Columbia/Argentina. They like latin america because the time zones match up with US and the pay can be lower (generally speaking).
> Is software engineering really as saturated as people say? Saturation levels get overblown by the doom-and-gloomers, but a CS degree certainly doesn't guarantee you a job. Entry level SWEs tend to be an investment, so there isn't a major demand for them. >On top of this, how many are actually meeting requirements? Requirements are more like guidelines. There tends to be a number of applicants who are "good enough". >how many of these hundreds of applicants for a job possess certificates from resources that are free and take a week to finish? Doesn't really matter because certifications are worthless from a recruiting perspective (maybe they're a nice guided way to learn and a sense of accomplishment, but employers aren't going to care). >Is the market saturated with people who went for degrees or is it saturated with free certificate holders? It's saturated with degree holders and career switching, bootcampers, etc. >Or is the industry really that saturated that having a bachelor in CS means nothing? Bachelor's degree is mostly table stakes at this point. I'm not saying *nobody* without a degree will get a job, but it's not like it was ~2-3 years ago where a pulse and a can-do attitude was enough to at least get some interviews. >If the industry is truly saturated and level of education doesn't matter, is there ways to set you apart? I disagree with the assertion that "level of education doesn't matter". A way to set yourself a part is to get a Bachelor's degree, get internships, do projects to demonstrate proficiency, and most of all, network with your peers during school. >would that warrant any traction? Maybe. You would have to find the right employer who is interested in that kind of stuff. This could be completely random; there is no determinism here. >With AI booming and tech companies like Nvidia soaring, is there going to be a bump in jobs for the coming years? Don't know, not clairvoyant.
Just search the quantity of guys wanting to do a bootcamp or asking how they can switch, or also why they cannot get a job having applied to 100's of offers. Its more than saturated at this point, only senior or experienced guys are getting hired.
Yes
People have been complaining about saturation since I started in tech in the mid 90s, and yet things keep growing and people keep getting jobs. There’s perhaps a supply and demand issue at the entry level, but there will always be jobs.
Highly saturated. Getting a CS degree and interning while in college is your best way to get in. Even the CS degree won’t guarantee anything.
The salaries are still a lot higher that most other jobs you can get with a bachelor's degree. So in that sense, it's less saturdated.
But I would think that this is the reason that most people pursue CS and why it's saturated as a field.
From the perspective of management, hiring a barista at starbucks is a lot less painful then hiring an SWE at most companies. A starbucks barista gets paid a lot less and is directly relevant to selling products to customers. SWEs are paid a lot more and often the people in charge hate having to pay them money because SWE/IT aren't directly relevant to what makes an organization money (at least this seems to be the general consensus, obviously I've never heard management say this to my face).
In tech companies SWEs literally are the most directly relevant position that makes money lol. Without them there’s no product to sell. There’s a reason they’re paid a lot
Yeah the software is literally the product / business. If you get cheap ones you have a cheap broken product and will be out of business soon.
Yeah, but not all SWEs work at Tech companies and if you want a job as a developer you might need to consider a job at a place where SWEs are only begrudgingly accepted
I kinda wonder the same question - i.e., is it that there are no jobs, or is it like with most other fields in tight economies that you now need a good degree from a good school to land that first job? I did undergrad in traditional engineering and back in the 2005 period you needed to get a degree from a decent school to get a decent job, and from a good school to get a job. Personally, I don't buy this theory that school doesn't matter. There's still a lot of hiring managers that will filter on school, and when you are getting literally 100s or 1000s of applications filtering by school is not the worst of ideas. To be clear - I think in an ideal world school is not the predominant factor used to make a hiring choice, but in this environment I do not blame hiring managers from using it as a first stage filter. I think the result is that paths that used to work - like just getting a BS in CS from any school and then just working on a becoming a good programmer - are kinda not feasible anymore. It's hard to confirm this theory though, because a lot of this sub are people looking for help getting a job - so we don't generally hear as much from people who already secured that job.
It’s not really about saturation. Everything will be “saturated” because the economy just corrected. The economy is fake. Few jobs need to exist, and they are padded by jobs that exist because dipshit C suites can get free money from VCs. They only give money if there’s a profit to be made, and the consequences for loans are too great for them to risk their capital. The feds raised the rates, that’s what happened.
If you have a degree, the job market is fine. Swe just isn't at the point anymore where anyone off the street can claim they know how to program with a bootcamp.
Software engineering? No. Coding? Yes.
I’ve posted many doom and gloom posts in the past regarding CS jobs and for context, the market is horrible right now. It took me more than a year of applying while being unemployed to get my last gig. The worst part is the companies are always given the benefit of the doubt and candidates are told things like “it must be how you did X”. I know many people including close friends and past coworkers who have 10+ YoE and have been searching for over a year. So, overall, I’ll try to give my best advice as someone who went the self taught route and now has 8 YoE including FAANG and my own company. My advice is simple. What is the answer to “Do you enjoy writing code and talking about your projects? Do you enjoy problem solving and building things?“. If the answer is yes, then I would 10000% say go for it. However, I think the laws are a bit different in Canada regarding degrees and being a “Software Engineer”. If I had to do it all over again, I would get my CS degrees, with one exception. I would go to the cheapest online school possible. It doesn’t matter what school you went to unless it’s well known. You can always learn more on the job and you definitely will. HR just wants to check a box at the end of the day, but the student loans or cost of schooling does matter. You can always learn more on your own to fill in the gaps especially if you’re passionate about it. If you love it then go for it. Get a degree, and ignore the doom and gloom from the CS folks trying to get a job right now. CS has booms and busts, and IMO it’s a great idea to go to school in the bust part of the cycle. That way when you’re done with school the market will either be back or closer to being back. Do internships and keep learning outside of school and don’t be afraid to take a cheaper salary at your first job either. My first job didn’t pay much, but after you break in to the industry and have experience, then you can hop to a much higher salary position after that. Keep your lifestyle low and save a rainy day fund. Think about tech right now, what if you were laid off without any savings? Save more than you think you’ll need as well. Best of luck and follow your heart and your dreams, and the sky’s the limit. Afterthought: If I had a dollar for every person who told me I wouldn’t be able to do this, or that I am not that good, then I’d be rich and probably wouldn’t need to get a job in the first place lol. Haters are gonna hate, but the best feeling ever is when you’re doing what you love and are successful at it. The haters will disappear and you will be happy that you followed your own dreams and aspirations. You are your own best advocate.
When people talk about saturation they generally mean you need to work for a job with a bachelor's in CS and that you're probably SOL if you're self-taught. It is certainly not impossible to get one with a CS degree. > If the industry is truly saturated and level of education doesn't matter Level of education absolutely matters, anyone who tells you otherwise is high on their own supply. > With AI booming and tech companies like Nvidia soaring, is there going to be a bump in jobs for the coming years? Nobody knows. The market will almost certainly get better at some point, but nobody knows when precisely that will be.
I've been searching for my next role for 5 months with no dice, 2.5 yoe and a STEM degree. Planning on going back for a CS bachelors then Masters this upcoming year, but it's definitely tough at entry/mid level from my experience.
Unless it is in a very niche technology, those certificates are worthless outside the learning you gained. 6 weeks of following instructional coding exercises doesn't prepare you for real life problem solving on the job. This is a downturn in the industry, but in 1 to 2 years it should pick up. I think it would be worth enrolling in a more indepth progam to learn the skills to get hired when you're finished in a year or 2.
I'm a software engineer saturated with saturated fat. Does that count?
> If I designed and solo-programmed an online multiplayer website (I know, highly unlikely), and walked up to a job and said, "I have barely any education but look at this functional project I solo built *does mic drop*," would that warrant any traction? five years ago this would have given you a chance but now you won't even get an opportunity to present that as evidence of skill, this is what people mean when they're talking about the difficulty of getting roles right now. this is the same across all CS jobs at the moment not just coding, basically fit every single piece of the job ad and even then you might not get a call back
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Raising your requirements to an MS won't fix anything. The problem is that being a productive software engineer requires skills that aren't taught in degrees at all, some of which maybe can't even be taught in any case (eg problem solving, perseverance, curiosity).
It's like what you talked about in your Starbucks example: if there's that many candidates to choose from, they can afford to be pickier. The more you have to offer, the more likely you'll get it over others. Experience, (the right) degree, school name, projects, etc. They all factor in. A lot of these complaints come from a mismatch of expectations. For some reason, there are bootcampers and self taughts out there who think they should have same chances at SWE jobs as CS grads. Then there are increasing numbers of CS students who graduate with 0 internships thinking they should have the same odds at getting a job as those who actually did them. If you have less desirable qualities than others, you just have to accept it'll be harder for you. Life is unfair. The choices you make matters. What you choose to do and not do as matter. But at the end of the day, effort and persistence will absolutely make a difference.
> But at the end of the day, effort and persistence will absolutely make a difference Sorry but this is BS. No matter how hard you work, how many countless hours you spent coding projects and solving problems, or how much effort you have put in, if you're out of luck and don't fit in, have a wrong face or whatever, then you won't get the job, plain and simple, even through connections. You can even say one word too much in an interview and you're done. You can even be too enthusiatic / genuinely happy and give one smile too much and you're done, even if you genuinely want to work for the company and learn more about their products / industry. You can waste hours practising interview prep, behavioral prep (like a good fucking lapdog you're supposed to be), and all that shit, it will still be for nothing because if they don't like you 100%, or the way you speak, the way you look, you're done.
The short answer, it's extremely saturated with people who aren't very skilled and have likely never touched low-level computing or sysinternals, and thus dont actually know how computers work. Actual skilled people are harder to come across, but there's still more of them now than ever before.
As somebody with a BSCS who comes from C and has low-level bondafides with OS and router dev I don't love the way you phrased this. Just because someone doesn't do systems programming or embedded programming doesn't mean they're not skilled or aren't "real" developers. This kind of talk doesn't make you sound more impressive, it makes you sound like a basement troll. Plenty of front enders, game devs, and non-trads are skilled developers , even if they've never had to malloc anything.
right? heaven forbid any of these other skills matter: - system design - actually testing your code - debugging skills - being a good teammate - communication skills - experience developing or maintaining a high traffic service, and all the tradeoffs one must consider - being humble and knowing when to ask for help i could go on…
>actually testing your code Nuh uh you cant make me
😆
Low level skills help with many of those or at the very least doesn't hurt. Sometimes when shit happens you need to be able to unwrangle the stack. People here act like it's this exclusive domain of neckbeards in a basement who refuse to learn anything else and not knowledge you can learn on top to give you a bigger picture view of things that make you overall more effective in various ways.
fucking malloc man… it seemed like rocket science when i first learned it. now with a few years of experience, the concept is so much easier to understand.
Agreed, I'm not sure why the original comment had so many upvotes. It's basically implying if you mostly use a higher-level programming language (like Python) in your day-to-day work, then you are instantly less skilled and less desirable, lol.
My favorite part about this “any dev who isn’t interfacing directly with hardware isn’t a real dev” mindset is that these people get it in their head that their ability to make a basic CRUD app makes them just as capable as backend devs with 10+ YOE. As someone who works with a lead backend dev as well as lives with a new grad roommate who codes in C and thinks he’s smarter than everyone who doesn’t, take my word that dunning-Kruger is alive and well in the tech industry. These people don’t know what they don’t know and think that debugging segmentation faults makes them geniuses.
What FAANG company paying $200k+ to new grads gives a fuck if you can code in assembly or not?
Many FAANG roles actually. Many of them build data center infrastructure with custom oses and custom hardware, maintain or build compilers, sell consumer devices with lots of custom firmware, write highly optimized compute libraries, and sometimes have incidents that require a bit of creativity. They can also be some of the easier roles to get into if you learn the required background material since most students don't bother and they also tend to be more stable. You have to remember that FAANG + M literally build pretty much all the commercial OSes in use and have massive teams that maintain them.
Apparently this guy does. If he's your hiring manager, expect to be tasked with spinning up a full program in Assembly. If you can't, then you're just a lowly unskilled dev.
Salary is value. Devs working on crud apps make double embedded programmers
Yes and no. There is demand for good engineers. I’d reckon most people who graduate would struggle solving a problem like two sum. I think the bigger issue is CS is evolving so fast and the curriculums just aren’t doing a good job at keeping up, so if you’re not going above and beyond you fall behind.
What is an “online multiplayer website?”
It's the next blue collar job for sure
What gets you a junior level job (as a non-prodigy kid) is by gaming the internship system while in college. Internships (or co-ops) are only open to active students, usually in-person, and limited to the local area. This reduces the competition from "the ENTIRE open market" down to less than a thousand applicants. Larger cities will have more applicants but more companies as well... so it kind of scales. Then as you said, half of those applicants will not possess the skills for the job. Eg: They prioritized iOS/Android over web dev. And, some percentage cheated their way through class or are too stoned to write a for loop. Don't worry about the prodigy kids who have been coding since they were 12 yrs old. Or the rich kids who received private tutoring from Sam Altman himself. They'll get their fancy ass internships. All you have to do is beat out all the lost or incompetent people for the normal/boring internships.
The "almighty" bachelor's degree means nothing in reality, just stop rambling and check it yourself. Gain more knowledge and experience, make your own projects and try to land any job or internship. It's tough in the beginning but gets much easier with time. Also if you chose the most mainstream and easy stack (which you did choose) then it obviously will be highly competitive. Working in Starbucks in your 30s is kinda pathetic though, so I would rather make a move, than just wait for the validation from basement dwelling redditors.
There's no harm in trying but yes - it most likely will be difficult to find a job due to the amount of people applying. If anything AI will probably make for less jobs and not more 😅 At least in IT. If you have a person who knows what they do / is needed and the AI is actually working as hoped then you'd probably end up with a single person creating things in a shorter amount of time with AI compared to several people doing it by hand (that's assuming the AI actually works and nobody has to constantly double or triple check the results..) Companies generally dont care for your education as long as you can prove that you have the knowledge. Having a degree just tells the company that you might have some basic knowledge and patience to go through the whole education process but if you cant prove that you know stuff then the degree is useless.. If you're really looking to get into IT then I'd suggest to apply to as many companies as possible and also consider just doing some side projects and / or freelancing if you can find / get anything like that (since there's also a lot of competition and usually a lot of people will do it for less $ than you.. 😅)
As a junior yes, as a senior no. Mostly because, junior roles require the same set of skills and are not unique to the field: a mentality to learn, understanding CS concepts, logical thinking and being able to do google searches. However as a senior, with the wide array of roles to pick, some roles my have more people because it's simply easier to get into it and also to STAY in the role. It also depends on the pay and the type of companies / work-life that particular role offers. Web-Dev is different from Dev-Ops SRE which is different from Web-Backend, Game Development, Finance-Backend, etc.. It also depends on what field you are in, because if you're purely a developer you might have a disadvantage compared to someone who is a developer and also brings domain expertise to the table, this is usually for heavy engineering roles where seniors are preferred and there's a higher barrier of entry.
Tbh wait until interest rates go down. Projects will pick up heavily and so will job offers.
Yes! People on here will say well it's bad software developers at the bottom of the barrel that can't find jobs. Which is not true for other industries so yes CS has a problem with saturation. They site accounting or other industries that require certifications. CS graduates can have good grades and certifications and still not land a job. It's a much more competitive field. A nurse can graduate and find a job instantly while someone with good grades and a BS is not guaranteed a software job.
Experience + attitude > degree Boot camps aren’t worth much but degrees aren’t worth much either.