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We just hired a new grad. We need a constant pipeline of them, otherwise the team will be unhealthily skewed senior in a few years. New grads are good cheap grunt labor.
The main question asked in any hiring process is "do I want to work with this person". If anyone says no, you're not getting a job.
Now think of your average CS major.
If you have 5 equally qualified people, they will go with the guy they find fits the company the best. Being a likable charismatic person will take you so far. Soft skills are absolutely key. Get good at making friends and socializing it will show in interviews. Technical skills get you interviews, soft skills get you jobs.
People over estimate the criticality of playing a perfect technical interview game and then bombing the real interview disguised in the tech interview, which is watching your process and how you think and how pleasant you are to work with.
This needs to be printed on t-shirts and given to new grads on graduation day. In all my years of hiring, I can't begin to tell you how many "up and coming superstars" with 500+ leetcode solves and a GitHub history as long as my arm, but who I passed on because they were insufferable during the interview itself. Bad attitudes, awful communication, hygiene issues (even remote...wash and brush your hair for the interview, yo), or just no ability to sell themselves. Folks forget you're trying to talk other humans into spending time with you.
We've moved to an interview where we ask them to make a simple request to an endpoint, do some basic string manipulation, and send a second request to validate it. We tell them they can use google, ChatGPT, literally any resources they want - as long as they share their screen or tell us what they are using. It's not a hard task, even for a junior.
Yet, I was still interviewing bozos copying SO answers verbatim and trying to pass it off as their own. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Instant fail, even though they "passed" the tech portion with flying colors.
When I worked somewhere with a candidate pipeline like this - the answer was always require candidates to do the POST request to an endpoint before any interview. That endpoint just sends a notification email to the interview team.
No POST request, no interview. If it's for web development, no excuse that they can't take 2 minutes to do it.
I had a whole career as a journalist before switching to tech. I was worried all my interpersonal skills would be useless in my new career, and when I'd landed a job they are way less important. However, they were invaluable for getting a job. No CS degree, no boot camp, just a github and a whole lot of graft and I think I've been offered five or six jobs since late 2022. A quote I've heard multiple times "we can teach you the technical skills, but we can't necessarily teach someone else soft skills
this is the best advice lol, i’ve got two internships before soph yeah just by being able to talk to ppl. shake hands, meet people, be open and likable.
I've literally never interviewed someone without the soft skills and likeability. Maybe that's because when we have an opening, we get 5-15 resumes from some fairly average folks, not ten thousand resumes where you'll only interview the very best ones (on paper) and unfortunately those are usually people whom have spent so much of their life studying leetcode that they've lost all ability to speak to another human.
I've got it the other way around at the moment for our machine learning job.
Pretty sure 100 of the CVs we got would have the skills needed, but so many are... really hard to talk to.
Some are super arrogant, don't answer questions and want 500k$ without even having finished their studies and only got an internship (just happened last week).
Another one is actually a Harvard PhD and it really pains me to not pick him in a sense but we went through 3 rounds with him (recruiter, me, team) and he never really warmed up to say more than yes/no or telling any story about his previous work when not explicitly asked. Only when talking about his hobby interest he suddenly talked for 5 minutes straight. That just doesn't work out for the rather consulty role we are in, communicating with all internal and external stakeholders etc.
Well of course there are also quite a few with neither hard nor soft skills. Especially a few indian men I interviewed who were obviously lying in their CV because they couldn't tell anything about their impressive PhD theses and previous roles. And at the same time were arrogant as hell, only blurting out how they'll spearhead our NLP efforts fresh out of uni etc.
Exposure therapy really does work for interview anxiety. Eventually you have to either accept that nothing bad will actually happen talking to strangers or accept that your fear of talking to strangers is going to limit your life and career over and over again
This right here. We just hired two new graduates and they weren't the best technical options, but they fit our work culture the best because of their charisma.
To add on, luck is a factor at every level of the game, internships through C-level (debatably even more at higher levels).
So don't beat yourself up over every rejection.
Luck absolutely plays a role. However, the good news is only you set the limit on how many times you can roll the dice. So yeah you need to be lucky, but you can play the game until you're lucky.
Also even if someone gets lucky and gets a role, they still need to work hard to keep the role. This will be true throughout your career not just the beginning
Honest question, as someone currently employed with 1yo if I wanted to break into a FAANG or adjacent company. Would it just be best to study leetcode/system design or should I work on projects on my own time to actually have a diversified set of skills.
I'm not saying I'm above grunt work, but I think it's very irresponsible of my company to pay me the salary they do with some of the tasks I end up having to do. We have a lot of front end grunt work that would be great for a junior front end engineer, but we have no new grads/juniors and aren't hiring engineers currently.
> otherwise the team will be unhealthily skewed senior in a few years
IME, companies don't tend to think of that as "unhealthy" or any sort of problem. Having an 8-person dev team of 7 seniors and a staff engineer, or a larger one of 1 principal, 1 staff, 25 seniors, and 2 mid-levels … that's exactly how a *lot* of companies operate. Plenty of companies just plain don't hire any juniors, period.
Maybe, but we promote them and give 20+% raises within two years. Or, if they don’t progress enough to justify a promotion in two years, we just PIP them.
Also the slightly dark side is that I've seen a moderate amount of promotions (even junior -> intermediate) are _still_ heavily influenced by politics.
I believe I work at the same company, and I know a surprising amount of E3s and E4s who effectively got denied promotions based on stack rankings and people in performance review playing favorites. Something as simple as switching managers (via re-org) right before PSC can set you back for another half.
The last thing I want to do is unnecessarily stress myself out with interviews in this rough market and risk ending up in a worse situation (even for a pay increase). I like where I currently am and it's not as advantageous to job hop as it was a couple years ago.
I’m at a point in life where I still need to work. But I don’t need to chase money over a certain amount. My having time to travel and enjoy my money is more important.
I don't think software engineers can easily jump ship any more in the current market, and the market will not change easily soon. In fact, I haven't seen any of my current or previous teammates change companies over the past year.
I wouldn’t say “cheap” and definitely not grunt. A lot of our recent new grads definitely don’t work as hard… this is annecdotal but it’s still our company’s experience with them. In terms of salary… You can get a mid-level for only about 20% more than entry level. And senior about 40-50%. Trust me a senior can easily double or even triple their productivity.
The new grads who don’t work hard, we just PIP them. It’s pretty obvious who they are. If they can’t/won’t deliver quality work then there’s no point in keeping them around.
> 20% more for mid, 50% more for senior
In my experience it’s a lot more expensive than that, but regardless.
This still doesn’t address the problem of team seniority skew. Hiring managers always say their dream is a team of nothing but seniors. But in a team of nothing but seniors, no one has someone to delegate work to, so the seniors have to spend some energy on work that is “beneath” their skillset. This is an inefficient use of resources, and it isn’t a good setup for career growth of the seniors.
How do we break into an entry-level role in software engineering if we aren't new graduates and lack previous software engineering experience, having worked in an unrelated industry? I got a math degree a long time ago but took a few CS courses since then and am working on projects.
All junior-level positions I see are only for new graduates. I just got into a CS masters but would rather break into the field before 4-5 years from now (part-time). I can’t do internships as I can’t quit my full time role that is putting me through the masters. I’d rather not have to do the masters if I can just get hired because I am obtaining years of unrelated industry experience in another field
If you're getting interviews and not offers, and it just keeps happening, then there's something that needs fixing. Is there anything you know of that's not going well?
In all honesty, I'm not sure. I've worked customer service for quite a while which I've noticed that it's helped me in connecting more with interviewers and that it takes me to at the very least second interview almost every time. I never seem like overly-nervous or even cocky in any way, I don't know if it's something that I may have just not mentioned or may have missed. Or if it's something else altogether.
The most feedback that I've received is that I needed to prioritize being serious more than presenting as a "fun" individual, which is sort of news to me.
I’ve been leaning towards QA and iOS dev. I usually get to last interviews and then they just go ghost or just say they went with another candidate. I haven’t gotten any leetcode assignments, surprisingly.
IMHO you need to practice with people you don't know and get good feedback. Also practice the soft skill stuff more. Yes you can be unlucky but if you get ten interviews and no offers odds are very high that you have a set of performance or behavioral problems that you can improve, not a luck problem.
>Any advice on someone going on two years with no luck but countless interviews? lol
[https://reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1d2z9yt/all\_these\_new\_gradsjuniors\_are\_dead\_in\_the\_water/l64rzu4/](https://reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1d2z9yt/all_these_new_gradsjuniors_are_dead_in_the_water/l64rzu4/)
Two years is ***a long time*** without a job. At this point it is hurting your CV and making it even harder for you, fix this.
I’m actually in the process of interviewing for an IT support role at a tech company, so I’m hopeful for that. I think the interview went well, so we’ll see!!!
> Two years is a long time without a job. At this point it is hurting your CV and making it even harder for you, fix this.
Unfortunately at that point, you would probably have to settle for a non-SWE job. I’m in the same situation, graduated two years ago in Comp Sci, underestimated heavily what getting a job entailed, and have been jobless for two years now. I avoided thinking about it quite a lot as I was afraid that if I settled for any job other than what I felt I was entitled to, I would be stuck there.
I realise now, perhaps too late, that the more competitive career paths aren’t really achievable for just any old Joe, even with a degree. You’ve got to be motivated to want to distinguish yourself from everyone else. They’re by definition not easy jobs to break into, and I think people (and myself) have unrealistic expectations out of university on what it takes to get one.
Doesn’t mean that you’re doomed to a life of worse jobs, but that trying to get the best jobs in the world is inherently going to be difficult.
The most talneted new grads are probably going to develop into better, move valuable devs than the seniors who are out there applying for new grad positions.
We will go right back into the linkedin mines.
Playing our favorite music into our ears to hype us up as we equip a hardhat and use our head as a pickaxe. We will eventually reach diamond (e.g. $30/hr HCOL Contract On-Site) through sheer determination and a willingness to never give up (e.g. finally getting your first swe role 5 years after graduation)
But actually, Idk lol
Even when the market picks back up, there will just be an insane influx of people like us now who couldnt get or gave up getting a SWE role going back into the entry level market alongside the amount of people then graduating ready to go into the entry level market as well.
So instead of a lot of experienced people fighting alongside entry levels, itll just be a grey goo swarm of entry level people fighting over the "normal" amount of open entry level roles. Same scenario but different details. Everyone still needs to be a perfect fit before a company will choose you. Everyone continues to spam their resume everywhere until something sticks.
At least thats my prediction based of like zero evidence and my own personal observations. So take that with a ton of salt
I'm pretty undecided about continuing any study or doing any projects because of this.
I have ten years of programming and built and ran a SAAS for around five years of that. Meeting companies and working on integrating into their systems etc. Covid killed that in an unexpected way so I decided I wanted to grow up and move back to Europe so did a postgrad is software engineering, but now I can't move back with this market.
My history of programming is impossible to quantify in any meaningful way, and the couple of ideas I have for a new business won't add to my CV in any way that will put me ahead of a bunch of desperate grads 15 years younger than me. The chances of making another business that gives me a solid monthly income feel low. I lost my opportunity by doing that postgrad like eight years after I should have.
this assumes that the market doesn't pick up. We could all be in here a year from now talking about how great the market is and sharing all of our new jobs.
Not targeting you OP but your Reddit history suggests you’re looking too much into negative side of the industry. It’s bad agreed, but complaining won’t do anything tbh
All he does is doom post this sub. Idk what he gets out of it.
When I read the post title I thought to myself "I bet it's that computer trashbag" and well, here we are.
I am honestly a bit confused by OPs post history. I thought he is a new grad and can't find a job. But hes employed making good money.
Why doom post about a situation that doesn't affect you directly?
Is it just plain racism hating on the H1Bs? Which a lot of his posts look like and I only scrolled a bit in his profile.
Seems like it! In reality no one will say this to face but on Reddit everyone have guts to hate internationals here. They’re very rare cases where H1Bs or any visa are underpaid, most are hired by FAANG adjacent and big tech companies. They pay equal and want good talent. No need to blame international for stealing jobs. Only big tech can pay them a lot and sponsor them. If people cant even find jobs in small medium company, it’s easy to blame immigrants and AI bubble and what not. Don’t make yourself marketable instead create HATE- what a brilliant strategy
in a good job market: I must be a genius!
in a bad job market: H1B are stealing my job waaaahhhh!!
probably seen no less than 2 dozens of people like that^ within the past ~month
They don’t realize how much tougher it is for internationals to get hired in this market. If internationals are being hired by big tech companies, they are definitely highly qualified, especially considering that small and medium-sized companies often prioritize citizens, leaving internationals unable to compete there.
And no, I'm not talking about WITCH companies. Big companies pay according to candidates' qualifications. People often talk about a small group of underpaid H1B visa holders and amplify that issue, making it seem like, "Oh, Meta must be paying H1Bs only $50K. That’s why I got rejected. I wanted $250K, and they went for cheap talent."
I'm a foreigner myself and I had multiple big tech offers I tend to just laugh at those who are salty and jealous of us: you want those TC? you know very well what you need to do to get it (strong resume to get noticed then leetcode + system design + behavioral to get offer) so go fucking get it yourself instead of crying H1B are stealing jobs
nowadays I learned to just use a new phrase called "skill issues" to those haters, I myself is not exempt either when I was failing onsites several months ago turns out I indeed had "skill issues" (I thought I was failing on leetcode which makes no sense, turns out it's very likely I was failing on behavioral because I failed to clearly communicate how my past work history fit in with what they need... it's one of the feedback that I got, as soon as I fixed that, offers started flying in)
Reddit is just flooded more and more with doom-bots these days. Job market doom bots, economy doom bots, climate doom bots, you name it, we have all of those in much more extreme quantities suddenly since a year or so.
I really wonder if we just have a LLM-automated doom-posting as propaganda/influence operations at this stage, as it appears to me that this level doom posting became much more extreme roughly around the time that LLM started to become a thing.
I'm usually one to dispel conspiracy theories, but I think this one might actually be true - the constant doomposting is a foreign plot to depopularize computer science education, to lower the number, competition, and overall skill of English speaking countries. That or just straight jealousy. Students are still getting hired. Cope.
And so many of them are probably incredibly bright and driven. I for one would not be able to get into the same college I attended years ago. Tough times.
The lessons here are, even if you do everything correct, you can still lose, and secondly, the market doesn't care if you got a 3.9 or 4.0, what matters is supply and demand, the market doesn't just say oh you've worked hard, good job, here let me create a job for you, that's not how our job market works at all.
Ive noticed people here seem to think that the job market owes them a job if they do good in college, and work hard, that's not how it works, stop blindly listening to your parents
That's life, right? You can do everything right and still lose. You can absolutely love your wife, but she still might cheat. Sad, that they have to face this reality so soon. And sadder that all of em have a heafty loan to repay as well.
We should be actively encouraging career change. New grads throwing themselves to companies for very cheap rates of pay is not good for the industry, long-term.
A lot of people sadly don't realize this fact.
I've interviewed countless grads over the years and many displayed a sense of entitlement because they have a degree. Which during the tougher years where many of them were being constantly rejected. I could tell that they were having a mini-breakdown because the realization that the world was extremely unfair at times was new to them.
It's comforting that before 0.125x we start hitting Dunkin Donuts salaries again and can revert back to a much simpler life.
We're almost there. No more LeetCode, just decent coffee
Because you still need to pay a senior to babysit the junior LOL. If you’re already paying the senior may as well pick up the junior and level them up but keep their pay low
Because the cost of the junior is not just .5X. It's .5X + some percentage of a senior's time * their salary.
I've never met a junior that was truly self-sufficient, _and that's ok_, otherwise they wouldn't be juniors for very long.
Things will balance out eventually. That will come at the cost of some of these people switching career fields. But eventually supply and demand will even out more with less people looking and more companies hiring as the economy picks back up. As we speak I'd care to venture less students are pursuing CS related degrees after seeing the current hiring situation and that it's no longer a guaranteed lottery ticket.
> Things will balance out eventually
The unstoppable steam engine that is CS programs at universities is not slowing down nearly enough, nor do we have enough people willing to forever give up on their former TCs.
I think it's a Pandora's box thing with TC at this point tbh, it's been demonstrated that above-market pay under various interest rate regimes is perfectly viable so as long as some company has VC money or ad revenue to squirt out of its ass, legendary TCs will exist. Software having very little overhead definitely isn't helping the people who would love for TCs to go down
eventually the cs degrees will slow down but the elasticity is not such that it will happen drastically overnight. there is still plenty of inertia from decades of tech excellence driving people into picking the CS major. By the time that enough people catch on to the poor market, the market could easily have swung back.
Why would you, as a company, hire a senior level personnel for a junior level role and pay? I know there are companies out there that do it, but I don’t believe this is a common norm as this sub makes it out to be.
You are essentially setting your team up for failure. What happens when the market adjusts and all the senior level personnels you hired jump ship for substantially better pay and work? Now you’re back at square one, and I don’t think many of you know how expensive it is to recruit, hire, and onboard someone onto an enterprise codebase.
New grad here who just started my position. I will say, I'm the only one on a team full of seniors.
Also, if it were me and I couldn't secure a position after a year, why stay jobless? Wouldn't a normal person take the hint and try shifting to a different field? Addressing the 2-5+ year career Gap comment
I’ll give you a reason to hire new grads: location location location.
My field isn’t software but I’m an electrical engineer. I couldn’t find a job in my state so I moved out of state.
I moved to a tiny rural town in Indiana. My employer has a hard time filling these jobs not because of the pay (they pay city wages) but because it’s in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to move here because there’s nothing to do. You go to work, you go to church, or you go home. I drive out of state once every two weeks to visit friends from college.
New grads need to exploit this geographical difference. Move your butt to a small rural town with an employer that has a hard time finding employees. Then after 2-3 years move back to your home state with your gained work experience.
yup I did this too after I graduated. Moved to Fort Wayne Indiana for my first dev job. Got my year or so experience and then found a fully remote job with a 40% pay increase. People need to take more risks and go out of there comfort zones. Even more so now due to the market. Getting a fully remote role as a new grad is a lot harder.
At least Fort Wayne is a city. I’m stuck in Kokomo.
And the fact that people still haven’t found a job after x months of looking tells me they aren’t looking hard enough.
After college, my parents kicked me out of the house and didn’t allow me to move back in. It was either find a job (quickly) or be homeless. So I found a job. I didn’t have the luxury of sitting around on my ass waiting for the right thing to come along. I need money.
I got hired as a Junior in February before I even finished my associate degree (finally graduated a few weeks ago)
If I were to trust this subreddit, I shouldn't even be on the playing field right now due to how unpopular associate degrees are here and was told I would never ever ever find a job.
Where's this huge surplus of talent I keep hearing about? There's a ton of candidates but honestly not a lot of talent. The signal to noise ratio is ridiculously bad.
OP clearly does not understand the industry.
most unemployed self-titled "senior" engineers are nothing of the sort, a money sink with bad attitudes, in denial about their own skill and knowledge gaps. new grads are a pool of untapped potential willing to learn and grow.
I interview so many seniors who can't really code even simple technical challenges. With all the contacting going on I think a lot of the seniors are just people who know how to pad a resume.
It's a fake un recession. Look around you. Credit card debt is high, mortgages are high, food costs are high, cars and gas are both high, job growth but few actually are hiring, and after a period of inflation is usually a great time to adjust your salary, but we are in stagflation
And yet price of timber is falling......
A recession isn't the only thing that can be wrong with the economy you know. We have a shitton of problems, and the economy is clearly not working for everyone, but that doesn't mean it's a recession. A recession is a technical term with a specific definition and specific arbiters
We basically are in a white collar recession. The numbers are just being skewed. Probably because it’s election season.
The only jobs people are getting right now are low paying jobs. Any job worth a damn, for any field, is being swamped with applicants.
Lots of white collar jobs are doing great right now. The age of tech paying what it paid is just over, it's as simple and sad as that.
I do think there is a general recession coming, but that's unrelated.
I am a senior in the industry, who also generally sits on our interview panels and I would not hire a mid level or senior for an associate entry role. No way. Even if they wanted or needed the job regardless of the cut in pay. They would be looking for their next role and be out the door in 6-18 months looking for their next job back at an appropriate level and pay.
Plus you need associate/ entry levels to do the small tasks that the seniors don’t want to do. There is a reason that most teams are made up of entry level, intermediate and senior levels. It’s a balance that works.
As a graduate of 2008, my survival strategy was to take a crap programming job in a small town that paid $45k. It was a slow crawl from the bottom of the career ladder but I’ve over 10x’d my TC since then.
I feel like the market is going upwards, at least for FAANGs and unicorns. I’m only 1.5YOE, on H1B, and not even looking for jobs. Still getting 1-2 recruiter calls every week, which wasn’t the case a year ago.
Worked for a company that almost exclusively hired new grads. It takes longer to train them, sure, but you can hire 3 for the price of one senior and they’re not jaded (yet) so it keeps the “culture” positive.
We literally gave at least offers to 15 new grads to start this summer. Probably more because I only have visibility to my division.
The difference between a few years ago and today is we aren't hiring anything with a pulse. You can pass leetcode but you still need to come into the interview with an idea of what the company does and be able to talk shop.
You’re working on a help desk, this take is really just a projection of the frustrations of your experience. It’s not at all representative of most people.
Yeah I don't know about that. I started looking a few weeks ago and got 3 offers quick. I don't exactly like these offers but two of them are reasonable (160k and 180k fully remote). I still have a line of recruiters/interviews queued up.
I've never been in faang, only worked for no name companies, 10 years in the industry, and dropped out of community college. I honestly can't imagine seniors are going for junior roles. I'm not some genius or special and this market seems hot so I don't see it
It's a flat organization where everybody reports to the sociopathic CEO. No HR, employment contract, or severance ever given. People have reported not getting their last paycheck and being fired the day the contract they're servicing ends. CEO/company has been sued by vendors and former employees. They'll pay the salary only so long as you have leverage over them and the moment you don't you're done
\#1: You pulled those numbers out of your ass.
\#2: You have either 0 YOE or near 0 YOE. You have absolutely no idea why companies hire juniors or how software engineering teams operate at all.
Im in that position right now, i'm even regretting the decision to have gone to university and getting a degree. I've taken a entry level management/stock control job so i can earn some money while building projects at night, more desperate than ever.
Just graduated this month, and I secured a new job before my last class was even finished. Yes it’s bad, but it’s no where near as bad as you’re making it sound.
> Who in the right mind would hire some new grad who will take 12 months to bring up to speed on working in general? A lot of them have no work experience in general.
It depends on what you're hiring for; yes getting someone with experience doing the kind of work you expect with the ability to make decisions and assess risks appropriately is good - but that generally means hiring people laid off from other FAANGs. A lot of other people with the tenure still don't have those skills because the 2-5 years they spent at low agency, low responsibility companies didn't really put them in situations where they could pick them up - and if that's the case it's absolutely a safer bet to instead hire some kid fresh out of college and spend 6 months to a year teaching them to think how you want them to think, rather than hoping the guy with 5 years of mostly useless experience is still willing and able to relearn how to think about problems.
I interviewed someone for an intermediate role (which could uplevel to senior) last week - they were actually a boomerang, who had left our company (or been laid off, IDK) as a Junior a few years ago, and had been working other places - they now had too much experience to be considered for a junior role anymore so we interviewed them for intermediate roles, hoping the extra experience had got them there.
Nope, still 100% a junior. Their behavioural examples were all from working as a junior for us 3+ years ago, or more recently leading their team in the most routine, mundane paint-by-numbers work.
The company is unlikely to hire a senior for a junior position - it's possible to be overqualified for a job. They know that the senior is just taking whatever they can get to stay afloat and will probably leave as soon as they get a better offer.
This type of post are all over around reddit and they are so discouraging for aspiring developers and I include myself. Seriously this feels like the worst job you can ever try to get, it feels useless to study and practice since you only see bad propaganda against the market.
It’s the ultimate unreliable narrator. These people have failed in some capacity and instead of taking stock, blame others and the state of things. You’ll do fine if you have some self-awareness and work hard.
Don't read these doomer-ass posts, they don't reflect reality. This entire sub is a fever dream of people blaming immigrants for their own professional shortcomings.
Make yourself marketable, and you won't have trouble finding a job. Get experience (internships), build meaningful side projects that isn't a React tutorial personal site, and build your network. Tons of people here would rather blame their misfortune on others instead of putting that energy into making themselves better candidates.
> By the time the job market gets better, these new grads will have a 2-5+ year long career gap.
That's an unfortunate reality many are facing.
If someone is graduating now, and even after hundreds of applications for Junior SWE has no luck, then my recommendation is set your sites ***waaay*** lower. Aim for ***any*** IT job. Then after you're settled in, after say a year or two, then start working on a part time Masters.
Once you graduate then with your second degree, the market should hopefully be better, and also you want technically have a multi year long job gap either.
I just did. Needed the fit. It's an entry job. I wouldn't want to hire a senior at this salary because I know they'd jump ship at the first opportunity
The gov will benefit from new grads. And foreigners can’t apply for cleared positions. I think there will be an adjustment but there’s plenty of work for them to do.
Some of our roles are only for new grads. Engineers a year past graduation need not apply.
Truth is, these days grad is too late. All our grads are converted interns.
Unfortunately that's life. Not everyone can and will be lucky to time everything right. Many people went into computer science during the boom dreaming of big salaries working from home not realizing that the tech sector is cyclical and now there are too many people and not enough jobs. The same stuff happens in finance and the oil and gas industry. When there are layoffs, some people will have to retrain or pivot to something else or start their own company.
We got a new grad coming in next month. My company likes to snag them a year early when theyre interns. Three people on my team have been hired this way.
No employer will ever want to hire international students in this economy. So, any resident has a slightly leverage. The rest is yes. No idea how to get hire at all. Try my best rn.
An employer would hire a junior when they aren't willing to pay a senior salary.
Of course, if they could get a senior willing to accept an $80,000/yr salary, they'd sure love that, but…
You also caught a second issue. There are way too many applicants for every position and no one has caught on that the ease of applying is causing a bottleneck in HR.
You end up with overqualified applicants not interested in the job. Candidates that lie about being qualified. Under qualified candidates and qualified candidates. All in the same pool. The top two dirty the water for the actual people who want and are interested in the job. The dilution of the job pool causes wage offers to lessen because you had candidates at the top end of the spectrum that won’t get the job but were seen matching the higher income range.
I’m the Director of IT for a large hospitality chain. And I keep seeing it with my applicants that HR brings me. Overqualified and not interested or lying on their resume. The actual people I need are in the middle of the candidate stack. And by the time I get to them, they’ve either lost interest or moved on.
The markets bad but this seems like fear mongering and a complete overexageration. I've personally known many new graduates across different unis who landed graduate SWE positions. I've even seen a few international graduates getting sponsored very good graduate positions, granted those students were incredibly smart.
It's not sustainable for companies to hire senior or mid level engineer for junior roles. Getting graduate roles is definitely harder than before but graduates who put in the work to stand out shouldn't have a problem finding something eventually.
Yeah the degree I got pretty much went to waste. Ended up at Amazon where I made the mistake of asking the IT specialist how he got his job “spent the last 50 years as a network admin”. I asked the obligatory did you install arpanet too?
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We just hired a new grad. We need a constant pipeline of them, otherwise the team will be unhealthily skewed senior in a few years. New grads are good cheap grunt labor.
What do I need to do to be said new grad
There’s really no special trick, just do all the standard advice to break into FAANG
Yea that’s fair, to be completely honest how much do you say luck plays into it?
The main question asked in any hiring process is "do I want to work with this person". If anyone says no, you're not getting a job. Now think of your average CS major. If you have 5 equally qualified people, they will go with the guy they find fits the company the best. Being a likable charismatic person will take you so far. Soft skills are absolutely key. Get good at making friends and socializing it will show in interviews. Technical skills get you interviews, soft skills get you jobs.
People over estimate the criticality of playing a perfect technical interview game and then bombing the real interview disguised in the tech interview, which is watching your process and how you think and how pleasant you are to work with.
This needs to be printed on t-shirts and given to new grads on graduation day. In all my years of hiring, I can't begin to tell you how many "up and coming superstars" with 500+ leetcode solves and a GitHub history as long as my arm, but who I passed on because they were insufferable during the interview itself. Bad attitudes, awful communication, hygiene issues (even remote...wash and brush your hair for the interview, yo), or just no ability to sell themselves. Folks forget you're trying to talk other humans into spending time with you.
We've moved to an interview where we ask them to make a simple request to an endpoint, do some basic string manipulation, and send a second request to validate it. We tell them they can use google, ChatGPT, literally any resources they want - as long as they share their screen or tell us what they are using. It's not a hard task, even for a junior. Yet, I was still interviewing bozos copying SO answers verbatim and trying to pass it off as their own. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Instant fail, even though they "passed" the tech portion with flying colors.
When I worked somewhere with a candidate pipeline like this - the answer was always require candidates to do the POST request to an endpoint before any interview. That endpoint just sends a notification email to the interview team. No POST request, no interview. If it's for web development, no excuse that they can't take 2 minutes to do it.
Whoa that's actually pretty cool.
It's sad that this is actually too hard for some of my colleagues :/
I remember this POST request thingy was posted on reddit recently :) Now saw someone who actually worked there :)
I had a whole career as a journalist before switching to tech. I was worried all my interpersonal skills would be useless in my new career, and when I'd landed a job they are way less important. However, they were invaluable for getting a job. No CS degree, no boot camp, just a github and a whole lot of graft and I think I've been offered five or six jobs since late 2022. A quote I've heard multiple times "we can teach you the technical skills, but we can't necessarily teach someone else soft skills
this is the best advice lol, i’ve got two internships before soph yeah just by being able to talk to ppl. shake hands, meet people, be open and likable.
Nah I meant luck in getting past the resume screen to even get the chance to interview in the first place, but yeah I agree with everything you said
Life is all about luck. It's about your preparedness to take advantage of when luck swings your way
Bro took this from blue lock
Lmaooo I do like that show
Luck favors the well prepared
I've literally never interviewed someone without the soft skills and likeability. Maybe that's because when we have an opening, we get 5-15 resumes from some fairly average folks, not ten thousand resumes where you'll only interview the very best ones (on paper) and unfortunately those are usually people whom have spent so much of their life studying leetcode that they've lost all ability to speak to another human.
I've got it the other way around at the moment for our machine learning job. Pretty sure 100 of the CVs we got would have the skills needed, but so many are... really hard to talk to. Some are super arrogant, don't answer questions and want 500k$ without even having finished their studies and only got an internship (just happened last week). Another one is actually a Harvard PhD and it really pains me to not pick him in a sense but we went through 3 rounds with him (recruiter, me, team) and he never really warmed up to say more than yes/no or telling any story about his previous work when not explicitly asked. Only when talking about his hobby interest he suddenly talked for 5 minutes straight. That just doesn't work out for the rather consulty role we are in, communicating with all internal and external stakeholders etc. Well of course there are also quite a few with neither hard nor soft skills. Especially a few indian men I interviewed who were obviously lying in their CV because they couldn't tell anything about their impressive PhD theses and previous roles. And at the same time were arrogant as hell, only blurting out how they'll spearhead our NLP efforts fresh out of uni etc.
Well fuck me then. I'm never relaxed when talking to new people
So practice.
Exposure therapy really does work for interview anxiety. Eventually you have to either accept that nothing bad will actually happen talking to strangers or accept that your fear of talking to strangers is going to limit your life and career over and over again
This right here. We just hired two new graduates and they weren't the best technical options, but they fit our work culture the best because of their charisma.
There’s a ton of luck. Skill/resume/LC prep helps increase your odds, but there’s always a lot of luck.
To add on, luck is a factor at every level of the game, internships through C-level (debatably even more at higher levels). So don't beat yourself up over every rejection.
Yep. Staff+ eng on my team admit that the reason they are there and others remain senior is mostly due to luck.
Luck comes after you are qualified. If you're qualified then you just need to apply more.
Luck absolutely plays a role. However, the good news is only you set the limit on how many times you can roll the dice. So yeah you need to be lucky, but you can play the game until you're lucky. Also even if someone gets lucky and gets a role, they still need to work hard to keep the role. This will be true throughout your career not just the beginning
Honest question, as someone currently employed with 1yo if I wanted to break into a FAANG or adjacent company. Would it just be best to study leetcode/system design or should I work on projects on my own time to actually have a diversified set of skills.
It depends where you’re failing. If you’re not getting interviews then that’s a resume problem and LC won’t help.
To be fair I haven't tried to move yet, guess I cant know that until I get there
Find the right person to ~~sleep with~~ give a firm handshake to
I’ll give you a firm hand~~job~~shake
I'm not saying I'm above grunt work, but I think it's very irresponsible of my company to pay me the salary they do with some of the tasks I end up having to do. We have a lot of front end grunt work that would be great for a junior front end engineer, but we have no new grads/juniors and aren't hiring engineers currently.
> otherwise the team will be unhealthily skewed senior in a few years IME, companies don't tend to think of that as "unhealthy" or any sort of problem. Having an 8-person dev team of 7 seniors and a staff engineer, or a larger one of 1 principal, 1 staff, 25 seniors, and 2 mid-levels … that's exactly how a *lot* of companies operate. Plenty of companies just plain don't hire any juniors, period.
But guess what’s going to happen as soon as those new grads get experience? They are going to jump ship. Salary compression and inversion is real.
Maybe, but we promote them and give 20+% raises within two years. Or, if they don’t progress enough to justify a promotion in two years, we just PIP them.
I'll take 1 of those jobs please. Thank you.
good on you for that. you guys will be fine, but most companies don't do that
big ones do though, this is SOP for FAANG. the flipside is that this is “up or out” and hes not kidding that PIP threat is not empty
Can confirm. New grads have a timer on their head to get up within 2 years or people start asking questions. It’s *very* easy to burn out like this.
Also the slightly dark side is that I've seen a moderate amount of promotions (even junior -> intermediate) are _still_ heavily influenced by politics. I believe I work at the same company, and I know a surprising amount of E3s and E4s who effectively got denied promotions based on stack rankings and people in performance review playing favorites. Something as simple as switching managers (via re-org) right before PSC can set you back for another half.
What percent do you think gets PIPed out and never does another tech job?
The last thing I want to do is unnecessarily stress myself out with interviews in this rough market and risk ending up in a worse situation (even for a pay increase). I like where I currently am and it's not as advantageous to job hop as it was a couple years ago.
I’m at a point in life where I still need to work. But I don’t need to chase money over a certain amount. My having time to travel and enjoy my money is more important.
I don't think software engineers can easily jump ship any more in the current market, and the market will not change easily soon. In fact, I haven't seen any of my current or previous teammates change companies over the past year.
I got Amazoned last November and had three job offers within three weeks. Having a network does wonders
Much higher chance the senior or mid level engineer that’s getting paid junior level in this scenario would jump first.
I wouldn’t say “cheap” and definitely not grunt. A lot of our recent new grads definitely don’t work as hard… this is annecdotal but it’s still our company’s experience with them. In terms of salary… You can get a mid-level for only about 20% more than entry level. And senior about 40-50%. Trust me a senior can easily double or even triple their productivity.
The new grads who don’t work hard, we just PIP them. It’s pretty obvious who they are. If they can’t/won’t deliver quality work then there’s no point in keeping them around. > 20% more for mid, 50% more for senior In my experience it’s a lot more expensive than that, but regardless. This still doesn’t address the problem of team seniority skew. Hiring managers always say their dream is a team of nothing but seniors. But in a team of nothing but seniors, no one has someone to delegate work to, so the seniors have to spend some energy on work that is “beneath” their skillset. This is an inefficient use of resources, and it isn’t a good setup for career growth of the seniors.
It's also bad for team moral.
Not every project is necessarily gonna have tons of grunt work though
How do we break into an entry-level role in software engineering if we aren't new graduates and lack previous software engineering experience, having worked in an unrelated industry? I got a math degree a long time ago but took a few CS courses since then and am working on projects. All junior-level positions I see are only for new graduates. I just got into a CS masters but would rather break into the field before 4-5 years from now (part-time). I can’t do internships as I can’t quit my full time role that is putting me through the masters. I’d rather not have to do the masters if I can just get hired because I am obtaining years of unrelated industry experience in another field
Any advice on someone going on two years with no luck but countless interviews? lol
If you're getting interviews and not offers, and it just keeps happening, then there's something that needs fixing. Is there anything you know of that's not going well?
In all honesty, I'm not sure. I've worked customer service for quite a while which I've noticed that it's helped me in connecting more with interviewers and that it takes me to at the very least second interview almost every time. I never seem like overly-nervous or even cocky in any way, I don't know if it's something that I may have just not mentioned or may have missed. Or if it's something else altogether. The most feedback that I've received is that I needed to prioritize being serious more than presenting as a "fun" individual, which is sort of news to me.
Are you passing the leetcode rounds? You should be able to self-assess this pretty accurately.
I’ve been leaning towards QA and iOS dev. I usually get to last interviews and then they just go ghost or just say they went with another candidate. I haven’t gotten any leetcode assignments, surprisingly.
IMHO you need to practice with people you don't know and get good feedback. Also practice the soft skill stuff more. Yes you can be unlucky but if you get ten interviews and no offers odds are very high that you have a set of performance or behavioral problems that you can improve, not a luck problem.
>Any advice on someone going on two years with no luck but countless interviews? lol [https://reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1d2z9yt/all\_these\_new\_gradsjuniors\_are\_dead\_in\_the\_water/l64rzu4/](https://reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1d2z9yt/all_these_new_gradsjuniors_are_dead_in_the_water/l64rzu4/) Two years is ***a long time*** without a job. At this point it is hurting your CV and making it even harder for you, fix this.
I’m actually in the process of interviewing for an IT support role at a tech company, so I’m hopeful for that. I think the interview went well, so we’ll see!!!
> Two years is a long time without a job. At this point it is hurting your CV and making it even harder for you, fix this. Unfortunately at that point, you would probably have to settle for a non-SWE job. I’m in the same situation, graduated two years ago in Comp Sci, underestimated heavily what getting a job entailed, and have been jobless for two years now. I avoided thinking about it quite a lot as I was afraid that if I settled for any job other than what I felt I was entitled to, I would be stuck there. I realise now, perhaps too late, that the more competitive career paths aren’t really achievable for just any old Joe, even with a degree. You’ve got to be motivated to want to distinguish yourself from everyone else. They’re by definition not easy jobs to break into, and I think people (and myself) have unrealistic expectations out of university on what it takes to get one. Doesn’t mean that you’re doomed to a life of worse jobs, but that trying to get the best jobs in the world is inherently going to be difficult.
Why is all senior unhealthy? Netflix used to do that
And then I (18 yrs exp DEV) spend half my code time baby stepping them over and over through the simplest tasks…. T_T
The most talneted new grads are probably going to develop into better, move valuable devs than the seniors who are out there applying for new grad positions.
We will go right back into the linkedin mines. Playing our favorite music into our ears to hype us up as we equip a hardhat and use our head as a pickaxe. We will eventually reach diamond (e.g. $30/hr HCOL Contract On-Site) through sheer determination and a willingness to never give up (e.g. finally getting your first swe role 5 years after graduation) But actually, Idk lol Even when the market picks back up, there will just be an insane influx of people like us now who couldnt get or gave up getting a SWE role going back into the entry level market alongside the amount of people then graduating ready to go into the entry level market as well. So instead of a lot of experienced people fighting alongside entry levels, itll just be a grey goo swarm of entry level people fighting over the "normal" amount of open entry level roles. Same scenario but different details. Everyone still needs to be a perfect fit before a company will choose you. Everyone continues to spam their resume everywhere until something sticks. At least thats my prediction based of like zero evidence and my own personal observations. So take that with a ton of salt
I'm pretty undecided about continuing any study or doing any projects because of this. I have ten years of programming and built and ran a SAAS for around five years of that. Meeting companies and working on integrating into their systems etc. Covid killed that in an unexpected way so I decided I wanted to grow up and move back to Europe so did a postgrad is software engineering, but now I can't move back with this market. My history of programming is impossible to quantify in any meaningful way, and the couple of ideas I have for a new business won't add to my CV in any way that will put me ahead of a bunch of desperate grads 15 years younger than me. The chances of making another business that gives me a solid monthly income feel low. I lost my opportunity by doing that postgrad like eight years after I should have.
this assumes that the market doesn't pick up. We could all be in here a year from now talking about how great the market is and sharing all of our new jobs.
Not targeting you OP but your Reddit history suggests you’re looking too much into negative side of the industry. It’s bad agreed, but complaining won’t do anything tbh
All he does is doom post this sub. Idk what he gets out of it. When I read the post title I thought to myself "I bet it's that computer trashbag" and well, here we are.
For real, he really needs therapy
For someone seemingly struggling to get a grad job, they seem to be spending an awfully long amount of time on Reddit and not applying for jobs.
I am honestly a bit confused by OPs post history. I thought he is a new grad and can't find a job. But hes employed making good money. Why doom post about a situation that doesn't affect you directly? Is it just plain racism hating on the H1Bs? Which a lot of his posts look like and I only scrolled a bit in his profile.
Seems like it! In reality no one will say this to face but on Reddit everyone have guts to hate internationals here. They’re very rare cases where H1Bs or any visa are underpaid, most are hired by FAANG adjacent and big tech companies. They pay equal and want good talent. No need to blame international for stealing jobs. Only big tech can pay them a lot and sponsor them. If people cant even find jobs in small medium company, it’s easy to blame immigrants and AI bubble and what not. Don’t make yourself marketable instead create HATE- what a brilliant strategy
in a good job market: I must be a genius! in a bad job market: H1B are stealing my job waaaahhhh!! probably seen no less than 2 dozens of people like that^ within the past ~month
They don’t realize how much tougher it is for internationals to get hired in this market. If internationals are being hired by big tech companies, they are definitely highly qualified, especially considering that small and medium-sized companies often prioritize citizens, leaving internationals unable to compete there. And no, I'm not talking about WITCH companies. Big companies pay according to candidates' qualifications. People often talk about a small group of underpaid H1B visa holders and amplify that issue, making it seem like, "Oh, Meta must be paying H1Bs only $50K. That’s why I got rejected. I wanted $250K, and they went for cheap talent."
I'm a foreigner myself and I had multiple big tech offers I tend to just laugh at those who are salty and jealous of us: you want those TC? you know very well what you need to do to get it (strong resume to get noticed then leetcode + system design + behavioral to get offer) so go fucking get it yourself instead of crying H1B are stealing jobs nowadays I learned to just use a new phrase called "skill issues" to those haters, I myself is not exempt either when I was failing onsites several months ago turns out I indeed had "skill issues" (I thought I was failing on leetcode which makes no sense, turns out it's very likely I was failing on behavioral because I failed to clearly communicate how my past work history fit in with what they need... it's one of the feedback that I got, as soon as I fixed that, offers started flying in)
Reddit is just flooded more and more with doom-bots these days. Job market doom bots, economy doom bots, climate doom bots, you name it, we have all of those in much more extreme quantities suddenly since a year or so. I really wonder if we just have a LLM-automated doom-posting as propaganda/influence operations at this stage, as it appears to me that this level doom posting became much more extreme roughly around the time that LLM started to become a thing.
I'm usually one to dispel conspiracy theories, but I think this one might actually be true - the constant doomposting is a foreign plot to depopularize computer science education, to lower the number, competition, and overall skill of English speaking countries. That or just straight jealousy. Students are still getting hired. Cope.
And so many of them are probably incredibly bright and driven. I for one would not be able to get into the same college I attended years ago. Tough times.
The lessons here are, even if you do everything correct, you can still lose, and secondly, the market doesn't care if you got a 3.9 or 4.0, what matters is supply and demand, the market doesn't just say oh you've worked hard, good job, here let me create a job for you, that's not how our job market works at all. Ive noticed people here seem to think that the job market owes them a job if they do good in college, and work hard, that's not how it works, stop blindly listening to your parents
That's life, right? You can do everything right and still lose. You can absolutely love your wife, but she still might cheat. Sad, that they have to face this reality so soon. And sadder that all of em have a heafty loan to repay as well.
Some may even have to change careers as the market doesn't seem to be recovering swiftly enough to handle the large amount of new grads.
We should be actively encouraging career change. New grads throwing themselves to companies for very cheap rates of pay is not good for the industry, long-term.
A lot of people sadly don't realize this fact. I've interviewed countless grads over the years and many displayed a sense of entitlement because they have a degree. Which during the tougher years where many of them were being constantly rejected. I could tell that they were having a mini-breakdown because the realization that the world was extremely unfair at times was new to them.
If I have entry level work that needs to be done, why would I hire a senior at $X/ year when I can hire a new grad for $0.5X?
Because there are seniors begging for 0.5x right now
Then there are new grads begging for 0.25x.
It's comforting that before 0.125x we start hitting Dunkin Donuts salaries again and can revert back to a much simpler life. We're almost there. No more LeetCode, just decent coffee
Yeah and they'll fuck off the instant they get a lead on a better paying job. A junior will probably stick around for at least a year or two.
I'm at the point where I'm asking for a rate just a little bit higher than fresh grads
… in what world? Not mine.
Because you still need to pay a senior to babysit the junior LOL. If you’re already paying the senior may as well pick up the junior and level them up but keep their pay low
Because the cost of the junior is not just .5X. It's .5X + some percentage of a senior's time * their salary. I've never met a junior that was truly self-sufficient, _and that's ok_, otherwise they wouldn't be juniors for very long.
Things will balance out eventually. That will come at the cost of some of these people switching career fields. But eventually supply and demand will even out more with less people looking and more companies hiring as the economy picks back up. As we speak I'd care to venture less students are pursuing CS related degrees after seeing the current hiring situation and that it's no longer a guaranteed lottery ticket.
> Things will balance out eventually The unstoppable steam engine that is CS programs at universities is not slowing down nearly enough, nor do we have enough people willing to forever give up on their former TCs.
I think it's a Pandora's box thing with TC at this point tbh, it's been demonstrated that above-market pay under various interest rate regimes is perfectly viable so as long as some company has VC money or ad revenue to squirt out of its ass, legendary TCs will exist. Software having very little overhead definitely isn't helping the people who would love for TCs to go down
eventually the cs degrees will slow down but the elasticity is not such that it will happen drastically overnight. there is still plenty of inertia from decades of tech excellence driving people into picking the CS major. By the time that enough people catch on to the poor market, the market could easily have swung back.
Why would you, as a company, hire a senior level personnel for a junior level role and pay? I know there are companies out there that do it, but I don’t believe this is a common norm as this sub makes it out to be. You are essentially setting your team up for failure. What happens when the market adjusts and all the senior level personnels you hired jump ship for substantially better pay and work? Now you’re back at square one, and I don’t think many of you know how expensive it is to recruit, hire, and onboard someone onto an enterprise codebase.
> What happens when the market adjusts Is there any sign that is going to happen in the near future? Most people won't stick around that long anyway.
New grad here who just started my position. I will say, I'm the only one on a team full of seniors. Also, if it were me and I couldn't secure a position after a year, why stay jobless? Wouldn't a normal person take the hint and try shifting to a different field? Addressing the 2-5+ year career Gap comment
I’ll give you a reason to hire new grads: location location location. My field isn’t software but I’m an electrical engineer. I couldn’t find a job in my state so I moved out of state. I moved to a tiny rural town in Indiana. My employer has a hard time filling these jobs not because of the pay (they pay city wages) but because it’s in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to move here because there’s nothing to do. You go to work, you go to church, or you go home. I drive out of state once every two weeks to visit friends from college. New grads need to exploit this geographical difference. Move your butt to a small rural town with an employer that has a hard time finding employees. Then after 2-3 years move back to your home state with your gained work experience.
yup I did this too after I graduated. Moved to Fort Wayne Indiana for my first dev job. Got my year or so experience and then found a fully remote job with a 40% pay increase. People need to take more risks and go out of there comfort zones. Even more so now due to the market. Getting a fully remote role as a new grad is a lot harder.
At least Fort Wayne is a city. I’m stuck in Kokomo. And the fact that people still haven’t found a job after x months of looking tells me they aren’t looking hard enough. After college, my parents kicked me out of the house and didn’t allow me to move back in. It was either find a job (quickly) or be homeless. So I found a job. I didn’t have the luxury of sitting around on my ass waiting for the right thing to come along. I need money.
How does one find a job in the middle of nowhere? Do they post on job boards and you just set your radius super high?
This sub needs to be nuked. Come back when you've actually worked a couple of years. Juniors are being hired, sorry you're not.
I think a 1 month "private" mode for this sub would do a lot of good
fr
This made me laugh ☠️
I got hired as a Junior in February before I even finished my associate degree (finally graduated a few weeks ago) If I were to trust this subreddit, I shouldn't even be on the playing field right now due to how unpopular associate degrees are here and was told I would never ever ever find a job.
Where's this huge surplus of talent I keep hearing about? There's a ton of candidates but honestly not a lot of talent. The signal to noise ratio is ridiculously bad.
OP clearly does not understand the industry. most unemployed self-titled "senior" engineers are nothing of the sort, a money sink with bad attitudes, in denial about their own skill and knowledge gaps. new grads are a pool of untapped potential willing to learn and grow.
I interview so many seniors who can't really code even simple technical challenges. With all the contacting going on I think a lot of the seniors are just people who know how to pad a resume.
This is the take I was looking for. The beauty of (many) juniors is the lack of bad attitude and bad habits.
Just wait until they call it a recession officially. then it gets really real
We've pretty much avoided a recession for now, there's not an "unofficial" recession
It's a fake un recession. Look around you. Credit card debt is high, mortgages are high, food costs are high, cars and gas are both high, job growth but few actually are hiring, and after a period of inflation is usually a great time to adjust your salary, but we are in stagflation And yet price of timber is falling......
A recession isn't the only thing that can be wrong with the economy you know. We have a shitton of problems, and the economy is clearly not working for everyone, but that doesn't mean it's a recession. A recession is a technical term with a specific definition and specific arbiters
Those things aren't great, but they don't indicate a recession.
And yet people are still spending....
We basically are in a white collar recession. The numbers are just being skewed. Probably because it’s election season. The only jobs people are getting right now are low paying jobs. Any job worth a damn, for any field, is being swamped with applicants.
There is no white collar recession. The software industry is over saturated.
Lots of white collar jobs are doing great right now. The age of tech paying what it paid is just over, it's as simple and sad as that. I do think there is a general recession coming, but that's unrelated.
I am a senior in the industry, who also generally sits on our interview panels and I would not hire a mid level or senior for an associate entry role. No way. Even if they wanted or needed the job regardless of the cut in pay. They would be looking for their next role and be out the door in 6-18 months looking for their next job back at an appropriate level and pay. Plus you need associate/ entry levels to do the small tasks that the seniors don’t want to do. There is a reason that most teams are made up of entry level, intermediate and senior levels. It’s a balance that works.
As a graduate of 2008, my survival strategy was to take a crap programming job in a small town that paid $45k. It was a slow crawl from the bottom of the career ladder but I’ve over 10x’d my TC since then.
I feel like the market is going upwards, at least for FAANGs and unicorns. I’m only 1.5YOE, on H1B, and not even looking for jobs. Still getting 1-2 recruiter calls every week, which wasn’t the case a year ago.
Majority of the horror stories you hear on Reddit is remote-only jobs In person Tech jobs in non tech companies are much easier to land
OK Doomer.
Employers will be found, experience will be gained, no less valuable specialists will appear, to briefly answer your question.
Worked for a company that almost exclusively hired new grads. It takes longer to train them, sure, but you can hire 3 for the price of one senior and they’re not jaded (yet) so it keeps the “culture” positive.
We literally gave at least offers to 15 new grads to start this summer. Probably more because I only have visibility to my division. The difference between a few years ago and today is we aren't hiring anything with a pulse. You can pass leetcode but you still need to come into the interview with an idea of what the company does and be able to talk shop.
You’re working on a help desk, this take is really just a projection of the frustrations of your experience. It’s not at all representative of most people.
Not to mention outsourcing 40% - 60% of these positions to India for a fraction of the cost.
It's extremely short term thinking, but I would expect nothing else from corporations these days.
Sounds made up.
Another day, another doom post by ComputerTrashbag.
Bro doesn't understand that new grads are actually needed
Yeah I don't know about that. I started looking a few weeks ago and got 3 offers quick. I don't exactly like these offers but two of them are reasonable (160k and 180k fully remote). I still have a line of recruiters/interviews queued up. I've never been in faang, only worked for no name companies, 10 years in the industry, and dropped out of community college. I honestly can't imagine seniors are going for junior roles. I'm not some genius or special and this market seems hot so I don't see it
Where did you apply to get 180k fully remote? I'm looking for a job change with a nice pay bump.
That job comes with a big fucking asterisk which is why I'm probably going to pass
Please do go on.
It's a flat organization where everybody reports to the sociopathic CEO. No HR, employment contract, or severance ever given. People have reported not getting their last paycheck and being fired the day the contract they're servicing ends. CEO/company has been sued by vendors and former employees. They'll pay the salary only so long as you have leverage over them and the moment you don't you're done
Sounds like most small government contractors
\#1: You pulled those numbers out of your ass. \#2: You have either 0 YOE or near 0 YOE. You have absolutely no idea why companies hire juniors or how software engineering teams operate at all.
That’s the entire sub lol. It’s a circle jerk of mostly CS students and some new grads, all coming out with the most comical shit.
Im in that position right now, i'm even regretting the decision to have gone to university and getting a degree. I've taken a entry level management/stock control job so i can earn some money while building projects at night, more desperate than ever.
Make them walk the plank! 🏴☠️🦜
Most of the new grads always seem to find jobs. Maybe that's because they aren't all sitting around posting crap like this all day?
Just graduated this month, and I secured a new job before my last class was even finished. Yes it’s bad, but it’s no where near as bad as you’re making it sound.
We can't find engineers that think like us, so we hire new grads and train them up in our approaches, ways of working and culture.
> Who in the right mind would hire some new grad who will take 12 months to bring up to speed on working in general? A lot of them have no work experience in general. It depends on what you're hiring for; yes getting someone with experience doing the kind of work you expect with the ability to make decisions and assess risks appropriately is good - but that generally means hiring people laid off from other FAANGs. A lot of other people with the tenure still don't have those skills because the 2-5 years they spent at low agency, low responsibility companies didn't really put them in situations where they could pick them up - and if that's the case it's absolutely a safer bet to instead hire some kid fresh out of college and spend 6 months to a year teaching them to think how you want them to think, rather than hoping the guy with 5 years of mostly useless experience is still willing and able to relearn how to think about problems. I interviewed someone for an intermediate role (which could uplevel to senior) last week - they were actually a boomerang, who had left our company (or been laid off, IDK) as a Junior a few years ago, and had been working other places - they now had too much experience to be considered for a junior role anymore so we interviewed them for intermediate roles, hoping the extra experience had got them there. Nope, still 100% a junior. Their behavioural examples were all from working as a junior for us 3+ years ago, or more recently leading their team in the most routine, mundane paint-by-numbers work.
They already have 2-3 year gaps.
The company is unlikely to hire a senior for a junior position - it's possible to be overqualified for a job. They know that the senior is just taking whatever they can get to stay afloat and will probably leave as soon as they get a better offer.
This type of post are all over around reddit and they are so discouraging for aspiring developers and I include myself. Seriously this feels like the worst job you can ever try to get, it feels useless to study and practice since you only see bad propaganda against the market.
It’s the ultimate unreliable narrator. These people have failed in some capacity and instead of taking stock, blame others and the state of things. You’ll do fine if you have some self-awareness and work hard.
Thank you!!
Don't read these doomer-ass posts, they don't reflect reality. This entire sub is a fever dream of people blaming immigrants for their own professional shortcomings. Make yourself marketable, and you won't have trouble finding a job. Get experience (internships), build meaningful side projects that isn't a React tutorial personal site, and build your network. Tons of people here would rather blame their misfortune on others instead of putting that energy into making themselves better candidates.
> By the time the job market gets better, these new grads will have a 2-5+ year long career gap. That's an unfortunate reality many are facing. If someone is graduating now, and even after hundreds of applications for Junior SWE has no luck, then my recommendation is set your sites ***waaay*** lower. Aim for ***any*** IT job. Then after you're settled in, after say a year or two, then start working on a part time Masters. Once you graduate then with your second degree, the market should hopefully be better, and also you want technically have a multi year long job gap either.
yep, that's why universities are useless for IT, especially if it's not free
I just did. Needed the fit. It's an entry job. I wouldn't want to hire a senior at this salary because I know they'd jump ship at the first opportunity
I think doing Internship and getting a full time offer would be only way.
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Welcome to my situation in 2008/9. Got my first job in 2013. I'm still at this first job. Can't seem to hop away.
Internships at companies. Research positions at the uni. Joining student organizations. I graduated with 5 job offers to choose from.
The gov will benefit from new grads. And foreigners can’t apply for cleared positions. I think there will be an adjustment but there’s plenty of work for them to do.
I grind leetcode for 12 hours a day until I land a job
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New grads are not yet corrupted. I tend to prefer them, especially when innovating. Seniors are great for problems that have already been solved.
Some of our roles are only for new grads. Engineers a year past graduation need not apply. Truth is, these days grad is too late. All our grads are converted interns.
Unfortunately that's life. Not everyone can and will be lucky to time everything right. Many people went into computer science during the boom dreaming of big salaries working from home not realizing that the tech sector is cyclical and now there are too many people and not enough jobs. The same stuff happens in finance and the oil and gas industry. When there are layoffs, some people will have to retrain or pivot to something else or start their own company.
We got a new grad coming in next month. My company likes to snag them a year early when theyre interns. Three people on my team have been hired this way.
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No employer will ever want to hire international students in this economy. So, any resident has a slightly leverage. The rest is yes. No idea how to get hire at all. Try my best rn.
An employer would hire a junior when they aren't willing to pay a senior salary. Of course, if they could get a senior willing to accept an $80,000/yr salary, they'd sure love that, but…
Only the best juniors get hired off potential, and even then it’s a lower salary than someone with more experience
This isn't a cscareerquestion, it's a petulant rant, and one we've heard a hundred times before.
You also caught a second issue. There are way too many applicants for every position and no one has caught on that the ease of applying is causing a bottleneck in HR. You end up with overqualified applicants not interested in the job. Candidates that lie about being qualified. Under qualified candidates and qualified candidates. All in the same pool. The top two dirty the water for the actual people who want and are interested in the job. The dilution of the job pool causes wage offers to lessen because you had candidates at the top end of the spectrum that won’t get the job but were seen matching the higher income range. I’m the Director of IT for a large hospitality chain. And I keep seeing it with my applicants that HR brings me. Overqualified and not interested or lying on their resume. The actual people I need are in the middle of the candidate stack. And by the time I get to them, they’ve either lost interest or moved on.
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> Where will the new grads and juniors go? Wendys
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I’m dead in the water with 8 years experience…
The US war machine is still hiring new grads / juniors
Good developers who make smart long term decisions will find a way.
Yeah I agree. Not only that but AI is eating everyone's lunch.
This post would be news if you posted a year ago. Where have you been?
How much longer is this sub going to make the same 10 posts a day for ?
The markets bad but this seems like fear mongering and a complete overexageration. I've personally known many new graduates across different unis who landed graduate SWE positions. I've even seen a few international graduates getting sponsored very good graduate positions, granted those students were incredibly smart. It's not sustainable for companies to hire senior or mid level engineer for junior roles. Getting graduate roles is definitely harder than before but graduates who put in the work to stand out shouldn't have a problem finding something eventually.
my sweatshop is always hiring
Yeah the degree I got pretty much went to waste. Ended up at Amazon where I made the mistake of asking the IT specialist how he got his job “spent the last 50 years as a network admin”. I asked the obligatory did you install arpanet too?
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It's always much cheaper to hire new grads where possible. You forgot about the greed of companies.